In the 1990s a scruffy concoction of artistic types moved to Co Leitrim and created a rural Bohemia. Now it's gone, writes Michael Harding
Perhaps Leitrim died with John McGahern. Or at least the image of Leitrim that resonated through his work. The waterlogged fields where dark fathers marched their hobnailed boots over stony soil and childhood innocence. John's Leitrim was a kind of purgatory: the rosary beads, the bare floorboards, the creaking bed, the spade hitting the stone in a field, the clock observed and the dead hand of his father on every piece of clothing, on every farm implement, on every teapot and oilcloth. The unbearable loneliness of teatime without mother. John excavated Leitrim society with a mix of sociological rigour and understated charm and elegance. His books were an act of remembrance for a particular time and place.
I'm not from Leitrim. I arrived in the early 1990s, with a wave of writers and artists, drawn to that remote spot by the stature of artists such as John. And we in our time created, or invented, or imagined a different Leitrim. A romantic refuge where artists or writers might survive frugally in old cottages that could be bought for £1,000 or rented for less than the electricity bill.
A scruffy concoction of creative types moved into the hills and glens. Refugees from the Civil Service, in hope of finishing a novel. Hippies seeking lay lines that might intersect with the pyramids. Retired academics. Painters. Horticulturists. Sculptors. And Germans. Yes. Lots of Germans, seeking asylum from the rational zoo called Europe. Leitrim became an artistic province. A rural Bohemia. It existed at dinner tables, and often induced hyperbolic conversations about US foreign policy.
We thought our time had come and would go on forever. We didn't realise an even more modern Leitrim was being invented. If we had transformed John's patriarchal nightmare into a soft-focus cottage with candlelight and dinner talk about Picasso, then others, right behind us, had entirely different plans.
The arts in Leitrim were to become the window dressing for speculators who were selling the county as a good investment. A game of land deals, property speculation and massive tax relief was on the way. We hadn't a clue that the cottages we didn't buy for the price of a second-hand car in 1990 would, in five years, be fetching 10 times that amount. We didn't know the architects had already redrawn the sleepy town of Carrick, where it was once difficult to find a shop that sold a fresh carrot, into a garish Kinsale of the north.
Nobody knew the stony wet acres along the river were already earmarked by planners, to be dug out in order to create marinas, where holiday houses would spring up like mushrooms. And all this for tax relief. The artists' Bohemian heaven was being transformed into the investors' tax haven.
Then, one day recently, I was in a new hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon to meet a writer who lives in the hills west of Ballinamore. We talked for an hour without mentioning a single book. He was too absorbed with a building project. He was putting an extension on his mountain retreat. Poles had put the floor in. Russians had put the roof on. The plasterwork was done by a girl from New Zealand whom he used to live with. Only the plumber was Irish. And, needless to say, the plumbing wasn't quite finished. My friend told me he had given one of John's books to the carpenter who was roofing the extension. The carpenter read it. Enjoyed it. But couldn't believe John was writing about Leitrim.
We sipped our Guinness. It's not the same place, he said. Another little sip. McGahern's Leitrim is gone, he mused. And so is ours, I said. Artists came here to get away from distractions. They came for peace and quiet. They came because it was a backwater. A timeless marginal world, poor in material possessions but rich in the things of heaven.
We were staring out of the window at the cranes up the street. The flowing concrete. The bulldozers shifting the banks of the Shannon, which had remained still for centuries. We were staring at modern Leitrim.
There's no doubt that artists in damp cottages with bulging walls, flagstone floors and open fires will soon be marginalised in this Leitrim of jeeps and suits.
After brooding over his pint he spoke again. Maybe I should finish the extension and sell up, he said. I did not disagree. Actually, I said, I'm moving to Mullingar.
After that we drank our pints like condemned men. And there was no point putting into words the unbearable truth dawning on both of us. Romantic Leitrim is dead and gone. It's with McGahern in the grave.
Michael Harding's most recent play, Tearmann is at Siamsa Tíre, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland, Tralee, Co Kerry, from today