A New LifeA radio producer is using his retirement to do all the things he loves . Sylvia Thompsonreports on a man who loves time
Former RTÉ radio producer John Quinn is active retirement personified. And while he doesn't like the word retirement - "it's the word tire in the middle that I don't like" - he has unquestionably been active since he retired as a RTÉ radio producer four and a half years ago.
"I've written five books since then. It's a question of having more time to do what you want to do," he says. "For so many people now, retirement is a blossoming - a new phase of life - and while they may not be as physically robust, there is nothing wrong with their brain cells."
Best known for The Open Mind, the radio series he produced and presented for 13 years, John Quinn worked with RTÉ for over 25 years - briefly as an education officer and then as a radio producer.
"I loved it. I never saw it as work," he says.
In the earlier part of his life, he worked as an editor for educational publisher Fallons and as both a primary and a secondary school teacher.
Quinn acknowledges that moving from a full-time day job to long days in which you have to organise your own activities can be demanding for some people. "I was lucky in that I was writing anyway but for some people, there is a problem with what they can do with all their time."
However, for Quinn, time is something to be valued and he worries that with the fast pace of life nowadays, little time is left to reflect or indeed to simply do nothing.
He speaks of young people's need for mentors and how he himself learnt so much from people like engineer Mike Cooley and writer and social commentator Charles Handy.
In his role as ambassador to the Bealtaine festival of arts for older people this month, he is also conscious of how much older people can contribute to society.
He speaks enthusiastically about an innovative programme in Galway which brings together transition year students and older people.
"It's called Living Scenes and it involves weekly meetings between older people and transition year students. At these meetings, they interact through arts activities and learn from each other. It is wonderful to see how people strike up lasting friendships," he explains.
Quinn believes this form of intergenerational learning is important for communities. "There is a whole army of retired people with talent, wisdom, experience and time . . . I would love to see a nationwide sharing of skills (SOS) where tacit knowledge is freely shared in a community. It would be a way of rebuilding and refocusing community," he writes in the newly published collection of talks from last year's Céifin conference.
Quinn, who is a director of Céifin, gave a talk entitled Knowledge is Freedom, Freedom is Knowledge at the Co Clare conference in November 2006.
Also active in Poetry Ireland's Writers in Schools scheme, Quinn says he often digs up some worm-filled soil from his garden in Clarinbridge, Co Galway and brings it into the classroom to show the children.
Once there, he asks them to look at it and lets the worms wriggle about on their hands. He then asks them to write about the experience.
"I do between 30 and 40 school visits a year. Children can energise you. They are so buzzing with spontaneity," says Quinn, who has two grown-up daughters and one son.
"When I'm in the classroom, I tell them that what they need to be as a writer is part magpie, part sponge, part daydreamer and as curious as a cat. And that whoever said that curiosity killed the cat was wrong."
Quinn's children's books are The Summer of Lily and Esme (Poolbeg) and Bill and Fred (O'Brien).
Remaining aloof from technology (he doesn't have an e-mail address but does use a mobile phone), Quinn continues to write his novels long hand, creating much of the story in his head before he commits his words to paper.
The youngest of four children, he grew up in Ballivor, Co Meath. He was at boarding school at the Patrician College, Ballyfin, Co Laois and then completed a two-year primary teacher training course in St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin. He did a BA by night while working at his first teaching job in west Finglas, Dublin.
While studying for his Higher Diploma in Education, Quinn contracted tuberculosis and even now, 40 years later, he speaks of how much he learned about life from the nine months that he spent in Blanchardstown Sanitorium (now James Connolly Memorial Hospital).
It was also during this time that he met his wife to be, Olive McKeever.
Their initial courtship and subsequent marriage is beautifully documented in the memoir, Sea of Love, Sea of Loss - letters to Olive (Townhouse), that Quinn wrote following his wife's sudden death in 2001. Initially broadcast as a radio programme on RTÉ, the memoir was expanded and presented in book form following heartfelt encouragement from listeners including writer Maeve Binchy.
"Writing it was an act of reparation - making up for things we never said. Five years later I wouldn't change a word of it. It was also written for others who have suffered bereavement, loss and separation," he says.
His current project is a memoir about his early years growing up in the Co Meath village of Ballivor.
"In 1995, I did a radio documentary called Goodnight Ballivor, I'll sleep in Trim. Now, what I'm interested in is how there are so many ways of knowing and how people with very little formal education can have a natural wisdom that can be more valuable in life than any amount of academic study.
"And there were many of those people in my childhood."