Pádraigín McGillicuddy, "A Terrible Beauty"

Maureen Hurley From Literrata

While writing a blog on Seamus Heaney, I was checking on some fact and I was saddened to discover the passing of Bay Area Irish cultural activist, author and producer of an Irish radio show during the 1980s, "A Terrible Beauty," KPFA/KPFK FMs, Padraigin McGillicuddy. According to Macha's blog, Pádraigín died in Ireland in 2006. (Her daughter Kerry later wrote that it was in 2003. See comments below.)

I guess we're getting to that long in tooth age where the (e)mail brings more sad news than glad tidings. So many poets and artists passing this year—the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darweesh, Belgian's Laureate poet, Hugo Claus, Hayden Carruth, Navajo author Tony Hillerman, science fiction giants Michael Crichton, Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

In 2008, we also lost explorer Sir Edmund Hillary (Everest has never recovered), Irish American comedian George Carlin, blues legend Bo Diddley, even South African anti Apartheid activist, songbird, Miriam Makeba who just had a heart attack in the wings, after a show in Naples. Also gravelly Ronnie Drew, founder of The Dubliners.

And now, after a long bout with cancer, founder of New College Irish Studies, Danny Cassidy, author of “How the Irish Invented Slang,” is gone from us too.

I want to write to honor people who've inspired me, who've had an impact on my life and my art. Pádraigín was among them. Her arena was the spoken word.

I really only knew Pádraigín McGillicuddy from afar but she was a one-woman force of nature. Pádraigín's acerbic wit and no-nonsense intellect ever spurred me onward. I rarely listened to the radio when I lived in Forestville during the late 1970s and '90s as it was difficult getting reception ringed by steep coastal mountains and tall redwoods but Pádraigín's show was well worth the bother.

I first met Pádraigín at a Rose of Tralee pageant in the early '70s (or so I thought), and then again along with musicologist and linguist Jim Duran (Séamas Ó Direáin) and harpist Sharon Devlin Folsom at the Treasures of Early Irish Art exhibit at the San Francisco De Young Museum ca. 1977? It was the first time that most of the artifacts had ever left Ireland, including the Ardagh Chalice and the Book of Kells, so there was a lot of hubbub around the exhibit. Some pieces never made it across the Pond, as they were too fragile to ship.

You can still find the museum catalogue, 'Treasures of Early Irish Art: 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D. From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, Dublin" online. The Irish sent their most precious treasures to a series of museums across the American continent. I think it came to San Francisco before it went to the Met in New York but that doesn't make sense, and I can't find a reference. The book was in its 3rd printing by 1977. I remember we had to wait to get a copy. Anyone remember it?

In the late '80s or early '90s, Pádraigín later moved out to the Russian River, Occidental—I think—at least that's where we'd sometimes run into each other at the coffee shop or at events when I was still running the Russian River Writers' Guild poetry series. She'd invited me over for tea and I always meant to visit but never did... We had a mutual interest in Ella Young, as my childhood friend Micaela Carr's mother, Rosalind Sharpe Wall, knew her from the Bixby Canyon days of Big Sur.

But I was way over my head trying to survive at teaching poetry in the schools, finding and creating my own funding sources, writing grants, writing poetry, and writer-photographer-darkroom technician and newspaper deliverer for a chronically flailing alternative West County newspaper, The Paper (now The Bohemian), that I had little time for socializing.

We had grantwriting in common—she was editing a book on grants administration and fundraising in San Francisco. I remember one crisp winter afternoon, the both of us leaning on the hood of my truck, soaking up sunshine and talking grants. But she was in a whole other league than me. There's a copy of her grants compilation in, of all places, the King Saud University Libraries in Saudi Arabia! There's gotta be a story there.

Then I lost track of Pádraigín. I think she moved back to Oakland. I saw her at various Irish cultural and literary events from time to time. Last time I saw her was at a restaurant after a literary event (Finnegan's Awake?) with Jennifer Stone. They were bookends—the fine grand dames of letters, sipping wine wine in late afternoon. I don't recall what all we talked about but perhaps in the writing, memory will awaken. I might have even taken pictures....

Macha said "Pádraigín used to live in a huge old Victorian in Oakland, said to have been the childhood home of Gertrude Stein. She who is said to have said of Oakland, "There is no there there." I can't say what Oakland was like in the late 18th century when Gertrude lived there, but I find plenty there now."

Last I heard, she'd moved to Galway.

Some other references I found on the web were: No There There By Chris Rhomberg. The Irish in West Oakland, an oral history conducted 1982 by Kathryn Hughes, Padraigin McGillicuddy, Pamela Morton, and Sally Thomas.

KPFA Archives 1981-1994: Folk Music from Near and Far Out A Terrible Beauty. Old and new music from the Celtic regions, hosted by Pádraigín McGillicuddy.

Somebody had the presence of mind to record some of her later radio shows, and the tapes are listed as being stored at Stanford Dept. of Special Collections, and at Willamette University's Pacifica Tape Library.

At AudioPort.com, under Pacifica Radio Archives there's a downloadable fragment from Patriarch Revealed and “Six Variations On A Theme of Blarney,” with Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. You must be a member of a Pacifica affiliate station to play audio. Anyone able to get a copy? Jack Foley?

Pádraigín interviewed hundreds of people including literary giant Iris Murdoch, activist Bernadette Devlin, Elsa Gidlow, UC Berkeley Chair and founder of Celtic Studies, Brenden O'Hehir, Joycean expert, Dr. Robert Tracy, Joan Keefe and more. Does anyone have a list?

If anyone has photos or stories about Pádraigín, please come forth.

There's not much else to be found on the web about Pádraigín except for her booklet,
The Patriarch Revealed: A Feminist View of St. Patrick (1981). I'd love to see that change.

Pádraigín McGillicuddy, Jim Duran, Sharon Folsom 1978—at KPFA.
 With thanks to Sean Folsom 

See also Pádraigín McGillicuddy & the Rose of Tralee