Manchán shines light on language and landscape

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Manchán Magan’s father, Michael, was a patient man who was largely content to let his mother-in-law, Sighle, rule the roost in their Georgian house in Dublin, where she inhabited the granny flat.  However, when he arrived into her quarters one evening to recite the Rosary with her and discovered she was sheltering IRA fugitives, he had enough. Michael asserted his authority and cleared them.

Manchán laughs as he recalls how his father, “a perfectionist, who was interested in local history and had bonded with my mother over Georgian architecture”, lost his cool. “But he loved my granny,” adds the writer.

That granny, Sighle Humphreys, wasn’t a woman to be trifled with. An avid republican who was born in 1899, she had taken the anti-Treaty side during Ireland’s Civil War and may have been responsible for killing a pro-Treaty soldier when Free Staters raided her family home in 1922.

Sighle, a niece of the 1916 leader The O’Rahilly who was killed in the Rising, was imprisoned following that event and went on hunger strike. It wouldn’t be her last clash with the authorities.

A passionate Gaeilgeoir and Catholic as well as a lifelong republican, she later went to jail for not paying her TV licence, citing the lack of Irish on RTÉ. It was thanks to her that Manchán learned to speak Irish before he could speak English because Irish was the language at home.

Later, when Manchán was “thirteen or fourteen, she had me writing letters to the IRA hunger strikers”, he says of Sighle’s support for the 1981 hunger strike in Long Kesh prison.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App

Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.

Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.

Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite  HERE.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.