Saturday 29 November 2014

Bishop Eamon Casey and John McGahern, son owned and son unowned


The liberal intelligentsia of Ireland follow the practice of remembering their holy dead and pleading for their intercession with the spirit of enlightenment. Professor Brian Farrell, recently deceased enters into the recollection of Henry Farrell by way of posthumous networking.
they've lost
'They've lost', he said to Henry who was his student at the time when it came out about Bishop Eamon Casey and his son Peter by his lover Annie Murphy. The good Bishop fled and the moment is memorialised as the relief of Ireland from the power of the Catholic Church. Personally I see it as a strong wind that blew the chaff away.

What's the position now between Eamon, Annie and Peter? After an initial period of bitterness they are long reconciled.
eamon and peter
The Plain Catholics of Ireland most of whom have an empirical acquaintance with original sin are disinclined to select handy stones.

Another son of that rod of chastisement of Irish life and the sins of the father, namely John McGahern,is hardly mentioned. John P. O'Sullivan who writes for the Sunday Times and blogs as Ardmayle details the rather sad story. He wrote it in 2005 the year before McGahern's death when the unowned son's existence became generally known.
ardmayle

John McGahern was a very fine writer who seems to have replicated in his own life the cold father that he wrote about so well in his Memoir and many stories. So acute and at the same time bafflingly blank.

No comments: