The original life of the raggy boy

Poet, playwright, songster, screen writer, and some-time RAF bomber - Corkman Patrick Galvin has been keeping himself busy these past 80 years, writes Mary Leland.

It must have seemed like a long way from the black gates that were not oiled so that "You could hear them sighing out loud/ Even in the middle of your sleep", to the years of correspondence with writers such as Ethel Mannin, Tom Driberg, Robert Graves, Kathleen Raine, Pete Seeger, Muriel Spark and Cecil Day-Lewis. A long way - and that was only the beginning of Patrick Galvin's journey through 80 years of a life which was celebrated in Cork last Thursday.

That early journey was the distance between Daingean Industrial School, the theme of Galvin's poem Heart of Grace(and the title of his first published collection) and his editorship of the literary magazine Chanticleer, on which he worked with Gordon Wharton from 1952 to 1954.

Thursday's party in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel commanded a guest-list of 150 people, including Trevor Joyce, Galvin's first publisher in Ireland. It included fellow-Corkman and poet Robert O'Donoghue, whose insistence on a biographical series in the then Cork Examinerled at least to two chapters of Galvin's acclaimed Song for a Raggy Boy. It included singer Nora Hickey, education officer at UCC's Glucksman Gallery and daughter of Ted Hickey, former curator of art at the Ulster Museum. Naturally enough it included Galvin's daughter Grainne and his son Macdara, primed to give Galvin's famous ballad James Connolly, which is to be included in a new CD produced by John Spillane.

The mingling of ages, allegiances, causes and controversies, not to mention the entertainment, is typical of Patrick Galvin, a writer of generous capacities. It is also probably typical of his wife Mary Johnson, who has supported him through toils and triumphs - sometimes both at the same time - while also contributing her share to the cultural life of Cork city through the foundation of the Munster Literature Centre.

Cork is Galvin's birthplace, but for Mary Johnson it's the place she put her foot down, having already moved something like 25 times when the couple got back to Cork. They met in Belfast, where Patrick Galvin took up a Leverhulme Fellowship at the Lyric Theatre, and proceeded to astonish the country with a procession of plays, from And Him Stretched, which was first staged in London in 1962, and followed at the Lyric with Nightfall to Belfast(1973), The Last Burning(1974), and We Do it for Love(1975). In the meantime - there is always a meantime with Patrick Galvin - Cry the Believershad been staged in Dublin in 1963 and two poetry collections, Heart of Graceand Christ in London, had been published in 1957 and 1960.

All this, from a boy born in Margaret Street, educated fitfully and only until 11 at the South Monastery, carried off in his unruly youth for a year's reform, and working where he could before serving with the RAF bomber command in England, the Middle East and Africa.

There's no gap that can't be filled with a Galvin title, a fact which defeats what even his closest friends admit might be the occasional hint of "wishful truths". He has admirers too who may not be his friends at all, or not all the time. The generational welter at his party is evidence of that irreducible persistence of the man, or at least of his work. In a subtle and perhaps unintended way it has permeated the city of Cork like a laureate.

THE BLURB FOR the Linden Press edition of Heart of Gracein 1957 describes Galvin as "Catholic, yet not clerical; Irish, yet not ultra-nationalist; internationalist, yet not irresponsible - his work has an atmosphere all its own". Those were early days and that assessment has been followed by many more scholarly if equally enthusiastic analysts.

In the New and Selected Poetrypublished by Cork University Press in 1996, the editors Robert Welch and Greg Delanty describe him as a poet whose very strong sense of the community, which gave him his voice, is combined with "a broad set of human concerns that range from social idealism through pity for the victims of power . . . " This birthday party, of course, settles the question of his birth-date, given occasionally as 1929, and its participants will have recalled Galvin's songs - especially his New York recordings of Irish Drinking Songs, Love Songsand Street Songsalong with Irish Songs of Resistance.

An enthusiast of his ballad-making feels that Galvin absorbed some Andalusian trace-elements during the year he spent in Spain, while poet Tom McCarthy describes him as a kind of troubadour while being at the same time "the living maestro of Cork". His achievements have been widely recognised and he is a member of Aosdána and winner of the Irish-American Cultural Institute Award for Poetry.

Names and dates are prolific: seven volumes of poetry, eight plays at least, including the operetta My Silver Birdbased on the life of Grace O'Malley, directed by Mary O'Malley with set and costumes design by Patrick Murray (1981); four radio plays and one for BBC Radio 4; a verse play City Child Come Trailing Homebroadcast by RTÉ radio in 1983; plus radio adaptations and at least one screen-play for Boy in the Smokefor BBC2 in 1965. And then the three books gathered in the Raggy Boy Trilogypublished in Dublin in 2002 and furnishing the story of the film Song for a Raggy Boy.

A breathless career, and a breathtaking one too, tinged with that familiar cryptic tone which hangs just on the right side of anarchy - and sometimes on the other side. Asked for a definition of his work his friend Robert O'Donoghue muses on "an attitudinal life" and decides: "He's a Galvin, really, that's all.

"Absolutely a Galvin."