On October 2nd the nation, its people and its land, lost a visionary, a cultural warrior, a man whose connection with land and lore singled him out as someone to believe in, to follow and to trust. Manchán Magan was only 55 when he died from a rare and aggressive form of prostate cancer but he left an incredible, indelible legacy.
The Dubliner spent his youthful summers in the west Kerry Gaeltacht under the influence of his grandmother, the venerable Republican Sighle Humphreys, before spending the later years of his life in an oak wood surrounded by animals in a grass-roofed house near Lough Lene, Co Westmeath.
As a broadcaster Magan made over 70 travel documentaries focusing on issues of world cultures and globalisation and a host of Irish themed programmes and radio shows highlighting the beauty of our language and our natural world. His written and illustrated titles Thirty Two Words for Field, Tree dogs, Banshee Fingers and other Irish words for Nature, Listen To The Land Speak, Irish Words For Nature and Ninety-Nine Words For Rain (And One For Sun) et.al are already classics of their genre and it’s almost impossible to think of a cultural landscape without him in it.
Billy Ó Hanluain contributes this beautiful eulogy to mark his passing.
Colonisation’s deepest incisions are not territorial but reside rather in the collective soul ache that comes from an estrangement from ourselves and a disinheritance from what is our own.
Manchán Magan’s work in a myriad of different forms did so much to tend to those ineffable ancestral wounds. When reckoning with the past, we rightly speak of restorative justice, but I like to think of Manchán as having worked in the field of “restorative aesthetics”.
Like Seán Ó Riada before him, who revived the music of O Carolan and Ruaidri Dall Ó Cahainn and elevated Irish traditional music to the concert hall stage, Manchán worked in the manner of a cultural archaeologist excavating the “seoda”, the treasures of our heritage, and in the process facilitated a profound reencounter with our deeper selves. Ó Riada’s and Magan’s work are acts of unveiling what had become obscured to us, they polished the national looking glass and allowed us see more clearly, what were once merely glimpses, of ourselves at our poetic and musical best.
The breath and range of Manchán’s legacy, which embraces the Irish language, topography, fauna, folk wisdom and spirituality, is an overwhelmingly generous invitation to feel anchored and rooted in the harbour of our shared heritage.
Colonisation’s legacy is one of yearning for wholeness, a healing of the fracture brought about by the linguistic umbilical cord being severed from the mother tongue womb. Manchán’s work is a powerful antidote to those who estimate the value of our native language in purely utilitarian terms. He rightfully presented it to us as an essential conduit to self knowledge and a purveyor of intergenerational wisdom, he showed us that language was not a mere assemblage of words but an intrinsic and unique way of viewing the world around us.
The well being of our country is far too often defined in the soulless terms of accountancy, and is once again being diminished by a rising insular and exclusionary form of nationalism.
Manchán ploughed furrows of common ground between our indigenous culture and those of the Innuit, and many other peoples from around the globe, drawing parallels and commonalities between them just as Ó Riada did when comparing the circularity of Irish traditional music with Indian ragas and other Asian music.
There is not one stitch of division in their work, it is an invitation, and one we should be profoundly grateful to accept.
Manchán blew fresh breath on ancient embers, making them blaze in compelling, contemporary ways.
Ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann.
Words: Billy Ó Hanluain
