Kenneth Roy Eck’s literary luvvies Jim Swire An…

13.03.12
No. 525

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Daniel O’Donnell

could be just the man

to save poor old Donegal

Bill Heaney

Daniel O’Donnell

Loud weather blowing in from the Atlantic has been accompanied by the icy blast of austerity in the small towns and scattered villages strung along the north-west coast of Donegal.

     Dungloe, the main place of residence and commerce and the largest town in the Rosses Gaeltacht – Irish speaking area – is showing remarkable resilience in the face of the fierce fiscal storm. The financial catastrophe that has crashed down on Europe has left Irish dreams of prosperity in the 21st century dashed on Donegal’s famously rocky shore.
     Businesses which were thriving until recently have gone bust. Many home owners are in negative equity or facing eviction over mortgage arrears and people of all ages are emigrating in search of work. Their bank balances, once as big and blue as the ocean on their doorstep, are awash with red ink. Yet remarkably the business people of Dungloe, many of whom have a trace of Scottish accents and close connections with Scotland to match, refuse to throw up their hands despair.
     They are not placing their hopes of financial survival in their relatively new coalition government or individual politicians like Glasgow-born Pearse Docherty, the Sinn Fein politician they elected last year. Gerry Adams’ economics guru ousted Mary Coughlan, a minister in the shamed Fianna Fail government which brought the republic to the point of bankruptcy.
     Daniel O’Donnell, the country and western singer and line-dancer, is the icon for a major new project on which they are pinning their hopes to pluck them from the financial maelstrom. Say what you like about Daniel and his music, not to mention his dancing, but whatever you say, say nothing derogatory around Dungloe. Daniel is without question Donegal’s favourite son and he could be its saviour.
     Local heroes include James Napper Tandy, a Quaker member of the United Irishmen, a mixed bag of Protestants and Catholics who landed at Rutland Island with a boatload of French militia to take part in the aborted revolution of 1798. There is also Pat ‘The Cope’ Gallagher, the workers’ co-operative pioneer, a wily parliamentarian and politician who brought relative prosperity here in the first half of last century. And Peadar O’Donnell, the socialist writer, trade unionist and liberal literary magazine founder, who fought in the Spanish civil war. All are held in high esteem.
     Napper Tandy – his name is local rhyming slang for brandy – even receives an honourable mention in one of Ireland’s best known folk songs, ‘The Wearing of the Green’:
     I met with Napper Tandy, and he took me by the hand
     And he said, ‘How’s poor old Ireland, and how does she stand?’
     ‘She’s the most distressful country that ever yet was seen
     For they’re hanging men and women for the Wearin’ o’ the Green.’

     However none of these heroes measures up to Daniel, at least not for attracting tourists and their spending money.
     The words of the old folk song are proof, if proof be needed, that times have been hard here in the past, much worse than now. People were starving and subjugated during what is now called the ‘Year of the French’. Rent-racked peasants were driven out of their humble cottages and hanged by England’s post-Cromwell oppressors.

They want to use his huge popularity to turn things around by creating a museum in his honour to attract ‘Daniel tourists’, who were a familiar
sight here until about 10 years ago.

     Sadly, however, the sword of Damocles hangs over the remote rural areas of Ireland’s northernmost county. Statistics for mental illness and the number of depressed people taking their own life here is a matter of increasing concern.
However, in a spirited and ambitious campaign to hold what they have, boost the local economy and possibly even to improve their lot in life, the community are turning t0 the singer, who was born in the nearby village of Kincasslagh and who turned 50 in December.
     They want to use his huge popularity to turn things around by creating a museum in his honour to attract ‘Daniel tourists’, who were a familiar sight here until about 10 years ago when his mother, Julia, was known to serve them cups of tea at her cottage door.
     The museum is scheduled to be opened in May in a new entertainment complex currently and incongruously to be housed in an old bank in Dungloe’s Main Street. It is hoped the museum will attract fans by the bus-load, many of whom are expected to travel over from Scotland on the Stena Superfast ferries from the new Wigtownshire port of Cairnryan. The centre will include a large video room where a documentary about Daniel’s life and times, his family and his childhood will be shown. Another room will display much of the singer’s memorabilia, including the suit he was married in and his wife Majella’s wedding dress.
     Pat Nora Gallagher, who is behind the venture, said that when Daniel and Majella were downsizing from their home on Cruit Island four years ago to a more modest mansion overlooking a lake near the town, Daniel came to him and asked him to look after all the possessions he couldn’t find room for in his new house. Pat Nora (it is local custom to tag your mother’s name to your own to distinguish you from all the other Pats here) said: ‘We also have all Daniel’s gold discs of his major hits and we’re now getting the whole thing together. We are looking forward to the opening’.
     Everyone is excited, including the local Guinness representative. Dressed in black from neck to toe with a beautiful blonde head on her, just like a well-poured pint of her popular product, she was positively bubbling with excitement at the prospect of an upturn in the local economy. So much so that she bought me a pint in Beedi’s Bar, just a few steps along the street from the new museum site.
      ‘Sure isn’t it wonderful to have some good news and to see something positive happening around the place,’ she told Dave Mullis, who owns Beedi’s and who has nothing but praise for Daniel and the museum project. ‘Much better this than to just sit on your hands and do nothing.’
     Daniel and Majella are currently working on a Caribbean cruise ship with their good friend Cliff Richard. Sir Cliff sings a duet with Majella on her recently released second album which is intriguingly titled ‘He Knows, She Knows’. However, really only God knows if the Daniel O’Donnell museum project will take off and bring Donegal respite from the recession. Who can predict if the museum project won’t be yet another hit for Daniel O’Donnell?
Meanwhile, is there a Scottish singer who can bail us out of the financial mess this side of Paddy’s Milestone?

Bill Heaney, a Scottish journalist, travelled to Ireland with Stena Line
on the Superfast 7 ferry from the recently opened port of Cairnryan in Wigtownshire.