I WAS UP before the court in Lifford at the weekend. Nothing criminal, you understand. It’s just that the Donegal town’s old courthouse was among the venues for a Flann O’Brien Literary Weekend, and I was one of a number of alleged experts subpoenaed to give evidence of the man’s genius.
Still, as a venue for public speaking, it made for an even more nervous experience than usual. Among the people in whose footsteps it involved standing, for example, was John “half-hanged” McNaghton.
The latter was a star-crossed lover who in 1761 shot and killed his beloved (in fairness, he was aiming for her father at the time) during an attempted elopement. Wounded himself, he had to be helped up the steps of the Lifford gallows on the day of his execution. Then, noose around his neck and only too willing to embrace his punishment, he jumped off the platform with such vigour that the rope snapped.
McNaghton’s life-story should perhaps be taught at public relations school, as a warning of the complications involved in self-marketing. He could have attempted escape, but he didn’t. Instead, declaring that he would not live to be laughed at as a “half-hanged” man, he borrowed another noose (the one meant for his accomplice) and reascended the gallows.
Whereupon he became fully-hanged McNaghton, yet in the process, still condemned himself to an eternity of being known by the nickname he was trying to avoid.
Despite my own worst fears, meanwhile, no trapdoor opened under me during Saturday’s talk. The Lifford Courthouse session passed without major incident. And duly acquitted, I then crossed the river (an international boundary in these parts, although you’d hardly notice) to Strabane. the other half of the festival venue, for a walking tour of Brian O’Nolan’s original home town.
In Paris they have a term to describe someone who strolls the streets in search of amusement: flâneur. But in Irish literary circles, increasingly, the word is spelled with a double-N. And as such, it describes participants in Flann O’Brien festivals, especially whenever pedestrian activity is involved.
So it was that, led by John Dooher of the local history society, our group of Flanneurs ambled around Strabane on Saturday, visiting the house in which O’Nolan was born (on the imaginatively named Bowling Green, although there’s no evidence of bowling ever taking place there and, far from green, it’s covered in tarmac now), and other sites of interest.
Flann O’Brien aside, Lifford and Strabane have between them a very colourful history, which in one way could be book-ended by two men called John Dunlap. One was the hapless accomplice from whom the aforementioned McNaghton borrowed the noose and who was hanged himself immediately afterwards.
The other was a Strabane printer who came to a somewhat better end, emigrating to the US, where his print jobs would include a little thing called the American Declaration of Independence.
But local history didn’t stop in the 18th century, of course. Strabane’s more recent past has been turbulent, to say the least. There was a time during the 1970s and 1980s when it was the most bombed urban area in Northern Ireland. Yet, although it escaped the explosions, Lifford arguably suffered a bigger fall from grace because of the Troubles.
It remains the county town of Donegal, but has lost much of its former commercial prominence to Letterkenny. Whereas Strabane can these these days boast such phenomena as a 24-hour Asda supermarket, thriving in large part on the flood of economic refugees from across the Border.
Both towns are now in the process of making a comeback, happily. In fact, the Flann O’Brien weekend is just one offshoot of a major renewal plan launched earlier this year. Called the Riverine Project, it takes its name from the natural feature that both divides and unites the twin towns.
And the several local rivers do indeed provide a model of conflict resolution. From Lifford bridge, you can see the point where the Mourne and Finn meet and merge, peacefully – except after heavy rain, maybe – to become the much greater Foyle.
There’s a moral in that somewhere.
Reflecting on these and other matters on Saturday, post-walk, I adjourned to MK’s bar, formerly Flann O’Brien’s (and if I were the owner, I’d change the name back before another local pub beats him to it) in the company of several members of the local De Selby Institute.
This latter body jointly hosted the weekend, and is of course named after the lunatic scientist of the O’Brien novels. As described by one its founders, Diana Zolton-Sproule, a Detroit-born Flannorak who came to Ireland for love and literature, the De Selby Institute is still in its infancy, with no laboratories or lecture halls yet, and indeed not much in the way of a campus.
But at a time of rapid expansion in third-level education, and ever-growing interest in de Selby’s ideas, I predict great things for the DSI in the coming years. The potential for internet-degree sales alone must be huge. And if I myself don’t get an honorary doctorate from it in the near future, I’ll be very disappointed.