Shedding habits – Frank McNally on painting rackets, poetic justice, and French rats

The ghost of Patrick Kavanagh may have smiled at an item from the latest Farmers Journal, one of his former outlets, in which the paper felt it necessary to explain that it does not have a sideline business painting sheds. As columnist The Dealer put it: “In the past I’ve seen signs for shed painting with the Irish Farmers Journal logo on them and last week I even got a flyer in the letterbox myself. I cannot stress this enough – the Irish Farmers Journal does not paint sheds and does not condone the use of its logo on these signs. Always do your research and employ a trusted painter . . . "

Some things never change. As a man who swapped farming for poetry, but rarely turned a profit in the latter trade, Kavanagh (1905-1967) was often on the look-out for a sideline job himself. He found one once in shed-painting.

More specifically, he was a front man for a firm of spray-painters, travelling the country to canvass farmers for business. This was during the same era when, lamenting his exile on Dublin’s Grafton Street, Kavanagh wrote: “The queen of hearts still baking tarts/And I not making hay”.

But he made metaphorical hay in Dublin for a while thanks to shed painting, being paid in cash from a pile of banknotes spread out by his employers on the bed of a flat near Stephen’s Green every weekend.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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Alas, it was a fly-by-night operation. His conspirators cut corners by painting onto rust, among other economies. So, stricken with conscience, Kavanagh soon quit and wrote an exposé of the racket in – where else? – the Farmers Journal.

He also afterwards claimed the exposé led to his attempted drowning by big paint interests. Others believed he just fell into the Grand Canal one night, without a push.

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At a book launch in Cork on Monday, discussion turned briefly to the subject of how you might describe the sound rats make in French. Not that rats speak French. The question was what word French people would use to describe the noise a rat makes and how best to translate that into English.

This thorny issue arose in connection with Les Amours Dispersées, by Maylis Besserie, which has been translated into English as Scattered Love. The novel is inspired by the long-running controversy about where WB Yeats’s bones really lie. Hence the subject of cemeteries and rats, although the debate in Cork was meant to illustrate the problems of translation generally.

Scattered Love’s translator, Clíona Ní Ríordáin, had first suggested that rats “squeaked”. Besserie didn’t think this sounded right. So while travelling by train somewhere, they had found themselves listening to an online rat-noise resource, in search of the mot juste.

Anyway, the discussion at the launch reminded me, as I reminded the Franco-Irish audience in turn, of the diplomatic embarrassment whereby Irish uses the same word for “rat” and “French person”.

Thought to have been introduced to these shores by ships from France, the rat was initially called “an luch francach”. But over time, the “luch” was lost in translation, scandalously turning the adjective into a noun.

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It’s a small country. When Darren McCreesh rang me Tuesday to discuss the line-up at this year’s Kavanagh Weekend in Inniskeen, he mentioned the poet Thomas McCarthy and asked if I knew him. “Vaguely,” I lied, thinking I probably should. As I now know, McCarthy won the Kavanagh poetry award way back in 1977, when the adjudicators were some guys called Heaney and McGahern. He has since published multiple collections. In Kavanagh’s “standing army” of Irish poets, he’s a senior officer.

“But I’ve never met him,” I added. And that turned out to be a lie too. Googling his picture, I realised we’d been talking for a full 15 minutes in Waterstones Cork the night before, but nobody had got around to introducing us.

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Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Francis Meagher: Young Irelander, American war hero, and the man who first hoisted the Irish tricolour.

Born in Waterford, he earned his nickname “Meagher of the Sword” from a famous speech in 1846 when, rebelling against Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Movement, he reserved the right for Ireland to resort to military means if necessary to win freedom.

He brought the green, white, and orange tricolour back from revolutionary France in 1848, was involved in Ireland’s doomed uprising of that year, and after escaping the penal colonies of Australia, started a new life in the US, where he burnished his reputation as a soldier in the civil war.

He died prematurely in 1867, when falling off a riverboat. Some believe he was pushed. As with Patrick Kavanagh, the case remains open.

His fellow Waterford man, former ambassador turned Cambridge academic Dan Mulhall, will lead a commemoration at the city’s Granville Hotel today. The big celebration was in March, for the flag’s 175th anniversary.

But “Mulhall of the Words” will be among those paying verbal tribute this evening, while a musical salute will climax with The Battle Hymn of the Republic.