It Occurs To Me: The O’Donnell - Forgotten music maestro

In November 1979, Brian O’Donnell died in Belfast. His Irish News obituary read: “Brian O’Donnell, Irish traditional music adviser to UTV, BBC and the Northern Ireland Arts Council has died. He was 61. Mr. O’Donnell, of Cooke Street, Belfast, was a skilled instrument maker and had a skilled library of music recorded live all over Ireland. Singer and producer David Hammond described Mister O’Donnell’s contribution to the world of Irish traditional music as indispensable. ‘He played a great part in keeping Irish music alive during the 40’s and 50’s when it was at a low ebb. He really was a national figure’, he said. Mr O’Donnell is survived by his wife Mary, four sons and two daughters.”

In UTV, he was simply known as The O’Donnell, and I want to thank Anne Hailes, former UTV presenter and Irish New columnist for providing me with so much information on Brian, who was actually a Kilcar man, born in Shalvey in 1918. I had the pleasure of meeting up with Anne in Ardara last month, while she was on holiday in Rosbeg. We first met in 1995 in Bellaghy at Seamus Heaney’s homecoming after he won the Nobel prize for Literature, and I hadn’t seen the accompanying photo she had held on to, until recently. (If the black haired buck bears some resemblance to the current silver ‘ceann’, you’re not far off!)

 
Seamus Heaney, Anne Hailes and Frank Galligan in Bellaghy in 1995

Anne had some great stories about Brian, and I also want to thank former UTV producer Andy Crockart for reams of additional information. Andy produced that wonderful 1972 documentary about Johnny Doherty, Fiddler on the Road, and The O’Donnell was credited as ‘adviser’. I watched it again recently and it’s an absolute gem. 

Andy, Brian and the film crew were once at a traditional music festival in Donegal and on the way home the driver of the crew car hit a sheep in the middle of the road. Thinking they had killed it, they stopped and put it into the back seat beside a sleeping Brian. A few miles further along the road, the car hit a bump and Brian woke up with a yell, the sheep revived, tried to get out of the car and all hell broke loose. Eventually, the car came to a halt at a deserted part of the countryside, the back door was opened and Brian shoved the bleating sheep out and resumed the journey back to Belfast.

On another occasion Anne was babysitting for the director Derek Bailey who was out on the town with Brian. In Anne’s own words: “They arrived home and I was persuaded to stay for a cup of coffee before going home to my mummy and daddy!  I was about 20.  When Derek was in the kitchen Brian stood up saying he had something for me. Anyway after a lot of rummaging he found what he was looking for - ‘Here it is, here it is. I have it specially for you’. With that he laboriously drew out a bottle of poitín. He also took my great grandfather’s fiddle, fixed it perfectly and apologised that it wasn’t a Stradivarius. Brian was a gentleman.”

He was the vice-chairman and organiser for Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Eireann in the North, and if he still has Shalvey/Kilcar relatives, I’d love to hear from them. 

                           Unfortunate idiosyncracies

I’m looking forward to the September reunion of the 1971 St Eunan’s College Leaving Cert class. Sadly, we have lost some 16 of our colleagues since then, but we will recall them at a remembrance on the night. We have a WhatsApp group and as you might imagine, the reminiscences and yarns have been flying, particularly  some of the ‘teachers’ who still are embedded in our memories. One deceased friend was from Ardara, and he once borrowed a bible from the chapel. His punishment was to write 50 lines: “Ardara Bible stealers are not welcome in Letterkenny.” The same priest ordered one of the Buncrana lads: “Write the following 100 times - Acting the blackguard before class is an unfortunate idiosyncrasy!” 

Another priest was approached by a friend from Carrick whose father had had a heart attack and asked: “Can I go to the hospital, father?” The answer was: “You can…but you may not!” Although he eventually consented, the mantra - which was often used - stayed in my friend’s head until now. We’ll have a book of them after our reunion! 

                                   Horror in Gaza

We witness a daily horror show from Gaza…it sadly has become a game of numbers, as we anticipate casualties of hundreds or thousands, and those numbers numb us. Yet, it takes just one image, of a bleeding or limbless child, a weeping mother or a dust-covered father frantically searching through rubble, which embeds itself in our consciousness, and adds to our increasing anger at the daily carnage. The one recent image which has seared itself in our collective consciousness must surely be of a wounded Palestinian strapped to the front of an IDF jeep. 

As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy (unpopular with his own!) has suggested, far too many in the IDF and Israel treat Palestinians as ‘subhuman’. Now where did we hear that before? Yes, Hitler and Himmler’s categorisation of Jews and Slavs. Have the former learned nothing?

Gideon Levy has outlined the three core principles that enable Israelis to live in peace with the occupation: “1. Most believe they are the chosen people, so they think they have the right to do whatever they want; 2. There were more brutal and longer occupations in history than the Israeli occupation, but there was nowhere where the occupier presented himself as not only the victim but the only victim; 3. And this is the most dangerous, is the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians, so you can do whatever you want with them.”

Author Shlomo Sand, like Levy, is unpopular at home and in the US and Zionist circles, because he is Jewish and unafraid to rock the boat. I recently read his 2009 book, The Invention of the Jewish People, in which he reminds us that portions of the Old Testament, which many Israelis believe to be their history, justify what they are currently doing. For example, in Deuteronomy 20:17, it states: “Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you.” Rather ironic, given that the "Land of Israel" is hardly mentioned in the Old Testament, rather the more common expression the  “Land of Canaan”. So when Moses and Joshua are instructed to slay the Canaanites, it seems like an invitation to the Jews to annihilate their own. According to Sand, "Jewish People" is a political construct, an invention, and that even the "Land of Israel" was invented. 

He adds: “No Jew who lives today in a liberal Western democracy would tolerate the discrimination and exclusion experienced by the Palestino-Israelis, who live in a state that proclaims it is not theirs. But Zionist supporters among the Jews around the world, like most Israelis, are quite unconcerned, or do not wish to know, that the ‘Jewish state,’ because of its undemocratic laws, could never have been part of the European Union or one of America’s fifty states. This flawed reality does not stop them from expressing solidarity with Israel, and even regarding it as their reserve home. Not that this solidarity impels them to abandon their national homelands and emigrate to Israel. And why should they, seeing that they are not subjected to daily discrimination and alienation of the kind that Palestino-Israelis experience daily in their native country?”

                              A boat full of laxatives!

Shlomo Sand, in an aside in his book, writes: “Although the British have always been proud of their mixed origins (Norman, Scandinavian, and so on), at the height of the liberal British Empire political thinkers and leaders saw the inborn English character as the source of its greatness, and their attitude toward the inhabitants of the colonies was always contemptuous. Many Britons took pride in their Anglo-Saxon heritage, and viewed the Welsh and the Irish ‘of pure Celtic origin’ as their inferiors, races alien to the ‘chosen Christian people’.”

At the time of writing, one of these so-called ‘inferior’ Celtic races, the Scots, are out of the Euros, while the “chosen Christian people” have yet to play Slovenia. Watch out, for either Nigel Farage studio imitations or painful self-flagellation. 

 I’ve had a strange Euros, watching games but muting much of the punditry. I’ll make an exception for Roy Keane on ITV. Please bring back Dunphy, Giles and Brady, and as for GAA punditry currently, I can’t comment on Michael Murphy as I refuse, as a matter of principle, to use the buffering GAA GO… but how I yearn for Brolly and Spillane! 

Far too many of the ‘safe’ pundits are afraid to rock the boat as the laxatives might fall out!