Corkery remembered
The restless energies of Daniel Corkery (1878-1964), author of The Hidden Ireland, friend of Terence MacSwiney, scourge of Sean Ó Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, and champion of the Gael, the Church, the language, and the land, seem a little unfashionable in the Ireland of today. So, too, do the charms of the village of Inchigeelagh, County Cork. But Corkery loved Inchigeelagh and its Ballingeary twin: he found inspiration in the parish, its inhabitants and hills, for many of his forays into imaginative writing.
Still, as if defying the topic’s ‘sell-by’ date, upwards of two hundred people filed through the public rooms of Creedon’s Hotel, in that neglected village, during five days in late July 1996. They heard paens from Patrick Maume (Queen’s University, Belfast), to Corkery’s courage and integrity. They viewed, through the eyes of Nuala Fenton (Crawford Gallery, Cork), an exhibition of Corkery’s water colours, for the first time on display. They witnessed a performance, in Irish, of Corkery’s play An Bonnan Buí. And they examined, with the help of Patrick Walsh (St Malachi’s College, Belfast), contrasts and convergences between the strongly regionalist outlook of Daniel Corkery, and that of John Hewitt, the Ulster poet.
Daytime activities centred on embroidery, landscape painting, and dancing classes (courtesy of Anne McCarthy, Sarah Iremonger, and Eidin O’Shea), save on the fifth day, when Michael Herity (University College, Dublin) led a field trip to the area’s Christian, and pre-Christian, sites. The organisers of the summer school had set out to revive a tradition begun in the 1920s by Daniel Corkery himself. They were surprised, though, by the scale of Corkery’s following among the Anglo-Irish and the Germans. Henceforward, they conclude, the hurdle of Irish language studies will be raised along the course. The 1997 Corkery Summer School will centre on the 175th anniversary of the Battle of Keimaneigh, and on the associated literary output of Maire Buí Ó Laoghaire. Her remains, and those of her companions, lie interred in the old churchyard in Inchigeelagh.