A Just a Memory piece by the late Tom Nestor

 

Unless the mist comes down I can see the Slieve Bloom mountains. Saw them first when I mooched around the back of the new house that we had designs on and perhaps to buy.
That first viewing made me stop dead. Here I was, cheek by jowl with an enemy of long ago. In that long ago time the Slieve Bloom mountains provoked nothing but misery for me and for all my classmates. If you suggested to me then that there was something about the Slieve Bloom mountains, I would go into prayer time, evoking Jesus, and his Blessed Mother, and all those saints that were sometimes quoted by my father at the tail end of the rosary.

I grew up in a rural school in west Limerick in the early nineteen forties. Our teacher had a great grá for the Ireland of ‘once upon a time’ when all the songs were sad and all the wars were happy. We should find it again, now that we had great people to carry us forward. Our own language will be spoken again, we will endure. And it will be people, like you, who will makes us a great nation once again.

And so we headed for the time when the word was Gaelic and our heroes were many.

Fionn Mac Cumhaill himself was oft times included amongst the heroes. I learned that he had a flowing mane of blonde hair, was never beaten in battle, and was the boss man of a band of warriors called the Fianna, and was always on the side of the downtrodden.

And when he and his band of warriors had won the day, they decamped to the Slieve Bloom mountains and made merry, hunting boar and deer with his famous dogs, Bran and Sceolán.

After each of those sessions someone was appointed to start the rousing song. ‘Oró Sé Do Bheatha Bhaile’ with gusto. When my turn came, I refused, because I had no other choice. It was written in stone that Nestors couldn’t sing. But she persisted and I hung dumb until I was put knelling before the map of Europe where all dissenters were sent.

So here I am looking out on the real Slieve Bloom mountains. I see them every day now. I can read their mood and their vagaries, their wonder and their beauty. Out there is where Fionn Mac Cumhaill dallied, to this day his being is written in place names.

The most telling name is Seffin. That name has a wonderful lilt about and probably the most intuitive. Seffin is the result of many years wearing down to basic. ‘Se’ is the Irish suidhe, a place of rest, ‘ffin’ is for the man himself, Finn or Fionn.

Probably the name is connected to the many places on the mountains where Mac Cumhaill dallied, for whatever reason. And supposedly, being a lady’s man, it probably marks a place where he dallied with a fair lady.
I can never understand why Fionn Mac Cumhaill was regarded as a hero. But I can nod to his ambiguity and how he secured the Salmon of Knowledge. Every boy and girl in infants, in my old school, knew that one off perfect, as if it came full in birth.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own