Myles, from home

This week sees the commemorations of the Great War with a host of speakers, exhibitions, music, food events and more take place. Historian, broadcaster and author Myles Dungan returns to the county of his birth to compere, narrate and lecture. The Anglo-Celt’s PAUL NEILAN spoke to him about his Breffni connections, his extensive World War I work and his future project on a Cavan frontiersman in the Old West, 'Broken Hand’.

Writer, broadcaster, lecturer, historian, Cavanman?

Myles Dungan may have been gracing the airwaves since the late seventies in various guises; current affairs, politics, sport and history to name but a few, but this week he returns to the county of his birth for the 1914 Centenary commemorations. See, Myles was born in Kingscourt and while he finds it difficult to call himself a Cavanman, his family roots are steeped in the county.
He explains his own background over the phone from his Kells home after we briefly dissect Meath’s and Galway’s weekend defeats - it is Sunday after all.
It’s a history lesson in itself: “I suppose I’m a sort of hybrid,” the former St Pat’s, Cavan student says of his county allegiance.
“I was born in Kingscourt but at the age of six we came to Kells. I’ve not many memories of Kingscourt beyond being let out at the age of three to go down to the local pub to watch television programmes, O’Brien’s I think it was, it would never happen now, that was when it was safe to do things like that,” he laughs.
His own connection with Kingscourt more or less ends with the move to the north Meath town but he still had relations in Bailieborough that were visited by the young Myles.
“My mother was from Cavan Town and was the daughter of the county medical officer. She was born and bred in the town and married my father, who was basically from Belfast, though he was born in Wales. I only recently discovered that his father was originally from Waterford and moved to Wales, then my father was born and moved for a while to Mountmellick and then to Belfast.”
Throw in Arklow, Ballinasloe and Dublin and it’s no wonder he used the word 'hybrid’.
“I consider myself to be a Meathman but really I’m a Cavan-Meath hybrid,” he explains. It’s a bit of a grey area, it’s east Cavan, north Meath, basically Kingscourt, Mullagh, Moynalty, Kells, a little quadrilateral that you can throw a blanket over - my grandmother was O’Reilly and grandfather was McKenna.
“Kingscourt is barely in Cavan, I remember the railway station for Kingscourt actually being in Meath - put it this way; it wasn’t a huge shift to go from Kingscourt to Kells.”

Family histories
Now, he spends his time researching and writing from home and does a weekly commute for his hosting of RTÉ’s The History Show.
Speaking of which, where does this interest in current affairs, politics and history come from - his book, 'Conspiracy: Irish Political Trials’, is just one example of his more prominent strands of interest being sewn together.
“Probably from my grandmother, she was a great reader, and taught me to read at a very young age, she would talk to me about history, family history, being raided by the Black and Tans and had brothers in the IRA and one brother who was an MP for Meath and pro-treaty but his brothers were very much involved in the IRA, so I heard all of theses stories and became interested and she would read the papers to me and I became very much interested in Irish politics, too, in JFK and Bobby Kennedy and so on, by the age of seven or eight... Yes, it was very much a 'nerd-alert’.”
Myles is back in the county of his birth for the Great War Commemorations, compering, narrating and delivering his own work: “My thing is on Irish soldiers and the Irish involvement in the Great War and their treatment by the generalship. To put it this way: if you were in the audience and you were a Great War general you would get up and walk out - it’s not very complimentary.”
He has his own family connections, too, to the Great War.
“A Cavanman and a Clareman on my mother’s side, yes. I have a book that’s revised and re-written called Irish Voices from the Great War and the new cover on that is a photograph of my granduncle who is JP O’Reilly from Bailieborough and he went at 18 and lived to the ripe age of 20 - he was killed on the Somme. I have a couple of his letters to my grandfather, some from Gallipoli, he survived that but not the Somme.
“The other one is my father’s side and was in the Grenadier Guards, a machine-gunner, he was the grand old age of 23 when he died.”

Trench commemoration
The commemorations in Cavan began on Monday with the launch of the WWI Trench Experience in the County Museum in Ballyjamesduff, with which he sounds more than impressed.
“I’ll try to get out to it, but we’re in the library in Cavan Town. I have an invitation but it was just addressed to 'Myles Dungan, Kells’ so it took a while to get here - it only arrived on Friday - and I don’t know who will be answering any response now.
“It’s a fantastic idea, though, they have something similar in the Imperial War Museum in London but that’s indoors - for the best experience you probably want to go in the middle of December when it’s pissing rain. Two foot of it would be reality.
“I’ve been in those trenches on the Western Front, the preserved ones and you know these are preserved so fair dues to them in the county museum.
“But in fairness Cavan is well ahead of the game in terms of the memorial - the county roll of honour, which I was involved in a few years ago, is one example, when they were inaugurating the memorial and with the names of all the Cavanmen who died.”

US connection
It’s been a varied career inside the broadcasting world for the now-unmistakeable voice of history on RTÉ - not quite fitting with his radio work, many will remember he was the face of US golf for many a year.
“In radio I did news and current affairs but on television I did sport. I started off doing American football, then Australian Rules football, then basketball, all the weird stuff that RTÉ used to do and just ended up doing the golf, starting with the Irish Open in Killarney and did it for, ooh, it must have been fifteen years.”
The US connections didn’t end there; it didn’t even begin there. Young Myles was an avid Wild West fan, consuming book, film and TV.
“I taught in Trinity and UCD and then Berkeley, my wife is an academic and in 2007 we both got Fullbright scholarships to go, that was to do research, while I was there I made a few friends in the History Department in Berkeley and went back in 2011 teaching Irish history. My research topic was in American history but went back to teach Irish, which was great, really enjoyed it.
“There were about thirty who signed up for it and myself and a retired lecturer, Tom Brady, divided the course up between the two of us for about four months.”
He laughs as The Anglo-Celt tries to crowbar in another Cavan connection in the mention of Brady, before explaining an altogether different Breffni-related topic.

Cavan’s fur-trapper
“When I went to Berkeley I got sidelined with a very interesting Cavanman, Thomas Fitzpatrick, who was born in 1799, left Ireland when he was about eighteen or nineteen and became one of the most important figures in the early years of the American West. He was a fur-trapper, a mountain man, an explorer and guide and then became an Indian agent who negotiated a very famous, important treaty: the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851, that allowed immigrants to pass through the region but he died in 1854 and, of course, then, well, the whole thing went to shit. The Indian tribes trusted him but didn’t trust anyone else and that was pretty much the end of peace. Fitzpatrick was based in St Louis, I’m not sure exactly where in Cavan he was from; but nobody is absolutely certain where. That’s something I need to do a lot of work on because he is a very interesting figure.
“I could be wrong but I have an inkling he might be from Killeshandra somewhere.
“I’m working on it in parallel with other things, what I do have are his letters to the Bureau of Indian Affairs which are very interesting because that’s when the reservations were just starting and he had reservations about reservations, so to speak. His letters are beautifully written, I think he is self-educated, but very, very well self-educated and I think a very intelligent man.
“From the mid-1820s to 1850s he was hugely important. So important that the Indians gave him a nickname, 'Broken Hand’, because it was shot, or shot off completely. He had a very adventurous life, he escaped death on a number of occasions but died in Washington of pneumonia.
“Of all things, you’d think he would have died under the stars or with an arrow in his back but he died in DC and his grave is there in the Congressional Cemetery. I did a book a while ago, 'How the Irish Won the West’ and he would have stood out. So, I’m excited about it, but it will be a few years because World War I has taken over.”
Taken over it has.

 • Myles was in Cavan on Wednesday evening at the Johnston Library alongside Sebastian Barry, Dermot Bolger, Piet Chielens and others at the World War Conference, and in the Town Hall on Thursday evening for 'A Lovely War’, where he narrates the song of the Great War.