Summer School CASTLECOOTE HOUSE and Events at Roscommon Library Services Castlecoote House Castlecoote, Co
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L EAD K INDLY L IGHT 3rd PIeNTErRNAcTIOy NAL French Summer School CASTLECOOTE HOUSE and Events at Roscommon Library Services Castlecoote house Castlecoote, Co. Roscommon Telephone: + [email protected] www.castlecootehouse.com 13th –15 th July DIRECTIONS Castlecoote House is 5 miles from Roscommon Town and a two-hour drive from Dublin 2011 From Roscommon: take the R366 for 4 miles to Castlecoote, cross the bridge, the gates are directly ahead GUIDED TOURS Guided Tours of the House & Grounds, April to September, Wednesday –Sunday, 2pm to 6pm or by appointment The Percy French Summer School gratefully acknowledges the support of the following for the Summer School 2011 MAJOR SPONSOR S SUPPORTERS Abbey Hotel, Roscommon The Arts Council of Ireland Anne Finnerty, Elphin Castlecoote House Anthony Murray, Monumental Sculptor Department of Education and Skills Bernadette Lowry, Dublin Brendan Kelly Engineering, Fuerty Duffy ’s Supervalu, Ballaghadereen C & F Quadrant, Dublin Excel Industries, Dublin Castlecoote Stores Casey’s Lawnmowers, Fuerty Pascal Finnerty, San Francisco Cavistons Food Emporium, Glasthule Bill Golding, Dublin Cruachan Aí Heritage Centre, Tulsk Brian Munn, New Jersey Davies, Dublin Fr. Austin McKeon, PP Tulsk/Killina Brian O’Connell Architects, Dublin Fr. John Leogue The Quinn Group Gleeson’s Townhouse & Restaurant, Roscommon Roscommon County Library Services Hannons Hotel, Roscommon John Doorly’s, Publican, Roscommon the third Roscommon Integrated Development Company John Early, Property Partners, Roscommon international Update Heating, Dublin John Ward Menswear, Roscommon Jimmy Ward Joinery, Ballymoe Luke‘Ming’ Flanagan TD The ongoing work of the Percy French Summer School McGuiness Pharmacy, Roscommon highlights the urgent need to establish a permanent PERCY Molloys Bakery, Abbeytown Percy French room in Roscommon. It is intended that this Noel Flannagan, Galway will house a collection of memorabilia, documents and O’Carroll Associates Architects, Roscommon artefacts from Percy French’s career, sited in the library FRENCH Patsy McGarry, author/journalist and will become a great tourist attraction. Percy French Hotel, Strokestown Contact www.percyfrench.ie SUMMER Percy French Society, Dublin Special thanks to Sean Freyne, Professor Emeritus Percy French Society, Galway Percy French Society, North Down SCHOOL of Theology of the School of Religions and Theology, Trinity College Dublin, who has been very supportive Percy French Society, Roscommon of the Summer School, a long- time confidant, Roscommon Enterprise Board castlecoote house mentor and friend Roscommon Home Services Roscommon People Senator Terry Leyden and Mary Leyden 13th to 15th July, 2011 Shines Top Oil Time Pieces, Roscommon Timothy’s Londis Supermarket, Abbeytown Castlecoote House Castlecoote, Co. Roscommon Telephone: +353 90 66 63794 [email protected] • www.percyfrench.ie www.castlecootehouse.com AN ROINN DEPARTMENT OF OIDEACHAIS EDUCATION AGUS SCILEANNA AND SKILLS Comhairle Chontae Ros Cómain foreword by dr john scally Finding our future in our past Th e enduring inspiration of Percy French Although he was born just seven years after Black ’47, the deadliest year in the Great Famine, Percy French grew up at a time when the folk memory of the famine was very strong. Many people for example refused to travel long distances without taking some food in their pockets lest they be caught by the hunger like so many of their forefathers. Thinking of The Mountains of Mourne and in particular the line ‘They don’t grow pota- toes’–suggests a deliberate turning back on the past, the past was backward–that was Percy French’s songs in part explore the issues of identity. In many ways this search most reflected in the widespread abandonment of the Irish language after the Famine. for identity is a very personal one. I think Horace Kallen put it best when he said,‘We share a common language but our own peculiar dialect’. People like me who left school in the 1980s witnessed many of our classmates leave the country and we will never forget the lengthy queues outside the American Embassy. In his poem, Song , Seamus Heaney writes that poetry is ‘close to the music of what hap- We thought that those days were behind us once the Celtic Tiger started to roar but in the pens’. Percy French’s ear is exceptionally sensitive to the music all around him. Songwriting last two years they have returned again with a bang–this year 60,000 Irish people will serves two functions in a society: a conserving force identifying the aspects of society that emigrate. The fact that his songs about the pain of emigration have such a contemporary are good and ought to be retained, and a dissenting force highlighting the elements of a resonance is Percy French’s triumph as a songwriter–but our tragedy as a people. society that are destructive and ought to be modified or replaced. Are you right there Michael is the most obvious of Percy French’s songs in that category. I suspect that with his The Ireland of Percy French was an island with serious economic problems. As we survey feel for people today instead of talking about the rail service, he would be satirising the the economic wreckage of today we see so many mistakes made and such obvious ones. health service–not the many great people who work in it –but the dysfunctional system Such a great part of our lives wasted, all of us. And sometimes there is nothing to believe in itself which causes so much suffering to so many. and it appears that the only thing stringing all of us together is the domino of loss. Percy French’s songs reflect the peculiar mix of shadows and light that is life. In the songbook of Percy French the ordinary becomes the locus of extraordinary insight. Apart from his obvious songs like The Emigrant’s Letter and The Emigrant Ship , few com- I have always believed though that Percy French is Ireland’s answer to Jane Austen mentators have addressed the issue of emigration in a more emotionally engaging and with songs like Little Brigid Flynn and The Night Miss Cooney Eloped . In fact his song humanizing way than Percy French in songs The Mountains of Mourne and Come back McBrien’s Heifer by taking us into the world of the dowry effectively rewrites the famous Paddy Reilly . Paddy Reilly although personalised, reflects emigration in Ireland on a smal- opening line of Pride and Prejudice –on the lines of: it is a fact universally acknowledged ler level, its emigrants letter too highlights. that a father of a daughter must provide an ample dowry! Likewise I have often wondered if John Cleese had heard Mick’s Hotel when he wrote Fawlty Towers ! Percy French songs anticipate what the late and great, John O’Donohue wrote in Eternal Echoes ,‘Memory rescues experience from total disappearance . the grooves in the mind Percy French had music in his soul and soul in his music. In our materialistic age anybody hold traces and vestiges of everything that has ever happened to us. Nothing is ever lost or who connects us with our souls is worthy of celebration. He was a man of great gener- forgotten . a ruin is never simply empty. It remains a vivid temple of absence’. ousity–as reflected in the way he donated part of his fees for his performances to the Red PERCY FRENCH SUMMER SCHOOL at CASTLECOOTE HOUSE PERCY FRENCH SUMMER SCHOOL at CASTLECOOTE HOUSE Cross. He knew instinctively that individuals need to surrender their self-interest for the greater good so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. This is a crucial lesson in the Ireland of NAMA –where the focus on the me culture sometime seems to be the number one national pastime. The songwriter cannot simply slavishly follow the path of generations gone by. They must find a new avenue. In certain respects Percy French’s predicament is akin to that of us in Ireland today. We too are at an in-between time in its history, caught between a rich tradition and an as yet unformed new direction. As the old tree of established structures is dying it is not easy to graft anew to the future vine. From a personal point of view Percy like many of us today harbours a certain longing for the more simple past and traditional practices. Sometimes we over-anlayse things. Sometimes we make extremely complicated what is really very simple. The enduring appeal of Percy French is because –he wrote great songs. Reading Gay Byrne’s autobiography it struck me that he was a hard man to impress because he saw it all as a host from Mother Teresa to Sinead O’Connor –and he was talking about the stand out moments of his time on the Late, Late Show. You would expect that there were would be many, but there were only a handful. One was Don McLean– at a time when he was one of the biggest names in the music business after the success of American Pie . Gay asked him what he would sing and when he said The Mountains of Mourne he thought it would be another nice song but nothing more. Yet when Don McLean started singing it was immediately obvious that this was something very special– because of the grip he had on the audience and the emotional power of the song. That was a big compliment from Gay Byrne. It was a great tribute to Don McLean as a singer– but it is in turn a great compliment to Percy French’s talents as a songwriter. To conclude, Percy French’s song-writing distils life’s experiences through his sensitive verses and indeed he could also easily be classified as a philosopher, revolutionary, human- ist, torch bearer of human freedom, conserver in the sense of transmitting the signal of the spirit for the rest of time into the world, a vital link in the cultural memory.