Memories of rural Galway help shape family story

Lifestyle –  Judy Murphy talks to Mullagh-born writer Patrick Deeley whose youthful memoirs are set to prove a bestseller

Patrick Deeley, like many teenage boys, had a fractious relationship with his father. The second child in a family of five, growing up in Foxhall, Mullagh, eight miles from Loughrea, he realised from an early age that he wasn’t a natural at farming or hurley-making, which was how his family made their livelihood.

Words would become Patrick’s tools, but he didn’t know that then. In the meantime, he was frustrated as he struggled to find his place in a family where “industry” reigned.

However, in 1978, Patrick, who had recently qualified as a national teacher and was based in Dublin, spent the summer with his father, Laurence, working at hay and cutting timber. The fallen trees would be used in the workshop beside the family home where Larry ran a renowned carpentry and hurley-making business with his other two sons, Simon and Vincent.

Patrick is forever grateful for that precious interlude, when, as a young adult he got to know his father and to learn that Larry was proud of his oldest son.

“He liked the idea of me having a job in the city and I cherish that I got to spend time with him and the man he was,” Patrick recalls. The last words father and son spoke to each other – although they didn’t realise it at the time – were affectionate, although not excessively so; the Deeleys were not people for showy displays, as Patrick explains in his memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, which has just been published by Doubleday.

Patrick’s father died that September, felled in an accident when he was cutting timber with Simon and Vincent.

For years, Patrick endured a “quiet grief” over Larry’s death. Writing this memoir helped him to process his loss by celebrating his parents and his home place of Mullagh.

“I’d never got to mourn him properly or publicly back in Dublin,” explains Patrick. “I was back teaching in Ballyfermot within days of the funeral.”

He did talk to his brothers who tried to help him with his grief, but they were separated by physical distance. Poetry helped – drawing deeply on his rural childhood, Patrick has since published six collections, winning awards and being published worldwide.

This thoughtful, considered man is hugely aware of the power of words, when used well.

“Words help you retrieve and restore things. They are an act of redress. Poetry allowed me to enrich my imaginative life, to go back on my experiences and try become a little bit immortal.”

Immortality runs through The Hurley Maker’s son, which Patrick describes as a “commemoration of people who deserve to be honoured. Not ordinary people, because nobody is ordinary, but these are not famous people, and they deserve to be remembered”.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.