EAMONN MCGRATH:EAMONN MCGRATH, who has died aged 78, was a writer best remembered for the books Honour Thy Father and The Charnel House, comparable in their lyrical narrative and truthful writing to his contemporary, John McGahern.
Nature's rhythms and cycles feature as strongly as any of his characters, harking back to his rural roots and his lifelong admiration for Thomas Hardy, in whose works he found inspiration.
Born in 1929 into a farming community in Taghmon, Co Wexford, the second of three children, he was educated at Good Counsel School in New Ross and at University College Galway, where he graduated in English and Irish. Fellow students included the poet Breandán Ó hEithir.
Soon after graduation he fell ill with tuberculosis and spent nearly three years recovering in a sanatarium in Brownswood, Co Wexford.
The enlightened health policies of Noel Browne during the inter-party government 1948-51 went a long way towards eradicating TB and McGrath recovered fully.
Immediately on regaining his health he took up a teaching post in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, where he met his wife Joan. Here also he encountered the poet Paddy Kavanagh, who was a fixture in the pubs of the town. Kavanagh's poetry had a deep impact on him, rooted as it was in the countryside.
He married Joan in 1959 and in 1963 moved to Clonakilty in west Cork, where he lived for the rest of his life. While teaching there he started writing and in 1970 his first novel, Honour Thy Father, was published by Figgis in Dublin and Herder Herder in New York.
The book was very well received in Ireland and the United States. It is a coming of age story set in rural Wexford of the 1930s and 1940s whose childhood narrator, as one reviewer put it, "transfixes the reader from page one with the vulnerability of Dickens' Pip and the Irish vitality of Muiris Ó Súilleabháin".
McGrath also worked as a supervising examiner for the Department of Education in Leaving Cert English and also set the papers for this exam in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1989 Honour Thy Fatherwas serialised for Booktimeon RTÉ Radio and this renewed interest in his work was enough to have it republished by Blackstaff.
This was soon followed by the publication of The Charnel Housein 1990. The book is set in a TB sanatorium in 1950s Ireland.
The lyrical quality of the writing together with deft touches of comedy and romance, added to the diversity of character, make this a moving novel.
Indeed the reviewer in the New York Timessaid of the characters: "They are as real and engaging as the characters in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel The Cancer Ward. 'Why me?' is the novel's central question."
Young Richard, the central figure, sees an answer in human nature: "As long as bishops live in palaces and tinkers in tents, as long as some rode high in limousines and others crawled like insects in the gutter, as long as man could view with complacency the degradation of their fellow man, it was the worst kind of hypocrisy to ascribe evil in the world to an indifferent or malicious deity.
"The fatal flaw in human society was the ice at the heart of man himself."
His next book, The Fish in The Stone, was published in 1994 and concentrated on the taboo subject of incest. It was generally well received.
McGrath retired after nearly 40 years of teaching in 1994 but cruelly suffered a stroke in 1996 and wrote about it in his book From the Belly of a Whale(1998).
The late Eamonn McGrath was a shy man who enjoyed his refuge by the sea in Inchydoney and is survived by his wife Joan, his seven children, Garvan, Orla, Fergal, Grellan, Cliona, Ultan, Donogh and his brother Jimmy.
Eamonn McGrath: born June 14th, 1929; died May 5th, 2008