Blue plaque to ‘Poet of the Troubles’

A poet with Cavan roots who confronted unflinchingly the conflict in the North has been honoured with an Ulster History Circle Blue Plaque, six years after his passing.

The plaque for Padraic Fiacc (1924-2019) was unveiled last Wednesday on the Falls Road Library, Belfast not far from where he was born.

Fiacc’s work won widespread acclaim, but he was also criticised by some at home for his stark portrayal of violence and suffering during the conflict. Fiacc’s subjects range from his boyhood as an exile in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen to the bloody mayhem that erupted on the streets of his native city in the years after his return.

He won the A E Russell award for Woe to the Boy, a collection of poems published in 1956. He was given the Poetry Ireland award and was a member of Aosdana, the distinguished Irish association of artists and writers.

Despite these successes, for years his work was largely overlooked, something that both hurt and heartened him, as he embraced his outsider reputation.

More recently a new generation has come to appreciate what his fellow poet Gerald Dawe recognised: Fiacc was “forthright and committed in saying the uncomfortable thing”.

Fiacc was born Patrick Joseph O’Connor in what was then Elizabeth Street not far from the Falls Road in Belfast. His father was Bernard O’Connor from Arva who has been described in Aodán Mac Póilin’s biographical outline for Fiacc’s selected poems ‘Ruined Pages’ as coming from a “family of well off shopkeepers”.

Bernard’s father - Fiacc’s grandfather - was Peter O’Connor, and the family are linked to both Pound Street and Lower Main Street in Arva.

Bernard moved to Belfast where he worked as a barman, and according to Mac Póilin was active in the IRA.

In Belfast Bernard met Annie McGarry whose family were burned out of their home in Lisburn in the pogrom of 1920, resettling in the Markets area of Belfast.

They married and had three sons in Belfast before Bernard left for America, and Joe was initially brought up by his maternal grandparents in the Markets.

In 1929 the family “followed reluctantly”, according to Mac Póilin. Bernard had initially enjoyed a measure success by pursuing the family trade of grocery shopkeeper, owning two stores in Manhattan. The year the family emigrated, unfortunately went down in history as the year of the Wall Street Crash which had global ramifications, and Bernard’s business was one of the countless to fail.

That resulted in a move to the much poorer Hell’s Kitchen quarter where Bernard began to drink heavily. He did however work on the subway and MacPóilin describes him as a “militant trade unionist”. The family grew to include a fourth son and a daughter.

The falling on hard times did nothing to quell Annie’s dislike of America. Homesick she read Yeats’s poems to her eldest boy Joseph, the future poet Padraic Fiacc.

The harsh realities of this new life left their mark on the immigrant Irish boy.

Still at school Joseph submitted to Macmillan collection of “immature verse” which spoke of life as an Irish immigrant in the states. There it was read by the poet Padraic Colum, then based in New York, who encouraged him to seek inspiration from his Irish roots.

It’s easy to imagine that Padraic Colum’s north Longford roots, and Fiacc’s father being from next door in Arva contributed to their initial bond.

‘Colum’ is derived from the Irish for ‘dove’. In tribute, Joe took the name Fiacc, meaning ‘raven’. Images of birds and the natural world occur frequently in his work.

After school Fiacc attended a seminary but abandoned training for the priesthood and in the next decade divided his time between New York and Belfast.

He eventually settled in Glengormley, on the outskirts of Belfast with his wife Nancy, having had work published in New York in the 1948 volume New Irish Poets. Publication of his collection Odour of Blood in 1973 followed the breakdown of his marriage and coincided with the return of the sectarian violence he’d known as a boy.

The murder in 1975 of a young poet who’d become a friend, Gerry McLaughlin, affected Fiacc deeply.

His imagery could be brutal, for example in his poem ‘Christ Goodbye’ he describes loyalists abducting and torturing a vulnerable man in graphic detail before closing the poem: Poor boy Christ, for when/They finally got round to finishing Him off/By shooting Him in the back of the head/’The poor Fenian fucker was already dead!’

There were more volumes of poetry in the ‘70s and ‘80s - Nights in the Bad Place (1977) and Missa Terribilis (1986) as well as a Selected Padraic Fiacc. According to Fiacc’s friend and fellow-poet, the late Gerald Dawe, these “were barely noticed, or discounted as the work of a poet who had become unhinged by events in his native city.”

The poet could be infuriating and disruptive and, at his worst, destructive. But that was only part of his personality, as Dawe wrote “There was an emotional delicacy and care that the poems reveal, and a wicked sense of fun, urbane, rascally New York-Belfast wit, one-liners which could bring the house down. There was a touch of the genius buried within the self-pity and the recklessness.”

President Michael D Higgins is an admirer. He visited Padraic Fiacc in the care facility where the poet was being looked after, shortly before his death in January 2019. In a tribute, President Higgins said: “Having experienced tragedy and loss, Padraic Fiacc was never afraid to reflect dark, deeply emotive and disturbing elements in his verse. His empathy for the frightened and maimed individuals on either side of the divide shone through his work.”

The plaque to Padraic Fiacc was unveiled in his honour last week (August 13) at Falls Road Library in Belfast. Chris Spurr, chair of the Ulster History Circle, said: “Padraic Fiacc, born in the Falls of Belfast, began his poetical journey in the melting pot of New York, then returning to his home city he engaged robustly in verse with the tumult he found there.”

Credo Credo was reproduced above with permission of the Padraic Fiacc estate.