Pearse, Connolly, Larkin, De Valera, Collins, Yeats, O’Casey: august company for any man in the political, social and cultural history of the Irish people. Not only was Peadar O’Donnell alive when they were alive but he was actively involved with them in matters of common interest; and he was still alive and active when they were long dead.
Son of a small farmer and migratory seasonal labourer, born in Meenmore, Dungloe, County Donegal on the 22nd February 1893, Peadar will be long remembered in his many roles: teacher, revolutionary soldier, political prisoner, trades-unionist, international socialist, journalist, novelist. But above all he was an Ulsterman — from Dungloe to Donaghadee — and in 1934 he arranged through the Republican Congress for sixty Northern Protestants to attend the Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown, to the embarrassment of some Nationalists.
Peadar didn’t mind if he embarrassed friends or provoked enemies if he believed sincerely in what he was doing. So when an Honorary University Degree was conferred upon President Ronald Reagan on the occasion of his visit to Ireland Peadar sat publicly in Galway to receive degrees returned by holders who considered Reagan unworthy of an Honorary Degree. Has time shown that the man who wrote ‘The Gates Flew Open’ had got the measure of the man who tried to keep ‘The Iran-gate’ tight shut?
Peadar had a long memory and in his 90th year he made a tour of Salvation Army Hostels in Britain for he had never forgotten, and often talked about, the kindness shown him in a Salvation Army Hostel in Glasgow over seventy years before.
How will we remember him? With great pride, for he made the long journey from Dublin to Cushendall nearly twenty years ago to speak to our young Society about a remarkable Glensman, Sean Murray, comrade-in-arms in his guerrilla days and first General Secretary of the Communist Party in Ireland. Though Peadar himself was not a Communist he believed passionately in the right of every political voice to be heard, and he referred to Sean Murray as one of the finest men he had ever known. Some praise. And again we will recall with joy that ‘Night of the Day of the Corncrake’ in 1984 when Peadar presented to his old friend John Hewitt the Gregory Medal in recognition of John’s contribution to literature in Ireland.
For me that was a very special night. Almost thirty-five years before, I had first read a poem by John Hewitt: it was ‘Fame’ and was published in The Bell, the much-lamented literary and political magazine founded by Peadar and Sean O’Faolain in October 1940. My many treasured copies of The Bell will keep his memory green (and orange) for me and mine, and a signed copy of his novel ‘Islanders’ will remind me that in his writings Peadar presented ‘a painfully comprehensive picture of Ireland in one of her most turbulent periods’.
Peadar loved the Glens of Antrim for in our Glens he found and loved people who were kin in spirit and history to the people of his Glens in West Donegal. So let us think of him as John Hewitt saw him in the poem ‘Calling on Peadar O’Donnell at Dungloe’:
‘But halfway up the drive we glimpsed the writer
still working in the garden with his wife;
I shouted and he straightened up to answer,
and in the gloom his fine head glimmered white’.
Jack McCann.