OMAGH IS NOT TO BE PASSED BY
Omagh is not to be passed by
Liam Farrell's
Medical Casebook
A FEW weeks ago I visited W B Yeat's grave in Sligo, and sat a while in thought by the simple stone monument with the words:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death
Horseman pass by
Later a few miles south, I was in a bar on the Atlantic coast, drinking a pint of porter, eating crab claws fresh from the sea and soaking in garlic butter and hammering away at my guitar in an impromptu session.
Pausing to check that the kids were still alive (exposure to bitter north-west gales and 12 foot waves being, in my view, an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood), I fell into conversation with a local who told me proudly that Dr Oliver St John Gogarty was also buried nearby.
Oliver St John Gogarty was unflatteringly immortalised as Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's Ulysses but he was a substantial literary figure in his own right, and like most of us substantial literary figures he needed the day job to make a buck; further evidence, as with Chekhov, Somerset Maugham, Celine, Munthe and Michael Crichton, how the vocations of medicine and literature form a fecund union. Similar sensitivities are required to fulfil either role successfully; we share the ability to be both involved with our "characters", yet at the same time to be able to remain detached enough to make objective decisions.
Gogarty was a practicing doctor: it was he who performed the autopsy on Michael Collins in 1922. He died in America, and his body was flown home in a lead-lined coffin. He was buried with all honours in a graveyard overlooking the ocean, and a few weeks later the respectful natives dug him up and sold the lead.
IN the middle of this happiness, as if from another universe, came news of the car bomb in Omagh.
If you were to bake a cake of sorrow the ingredients could not have been more carefully chosen: the unborn twins, the unknowing foreign students, the little children, the three generations of one family, all wiped out in an instant.
There is a strong sense that this tragedy is the last, shuddering spasm of the troubles, that no more can be tolerated; no more grief, the peace process must work.
It is to me sickening that this act was performed with the noble aspiration of a United Ireland.
"To be greatly and effectively wicked", as C S Lewis observed, "a man needs some virtue."
Liam Farrell's
Medical Casebook
A FEW weeks ago I visited W B Yeat's grave in Sligo, and sat a while in thought by the simple stone monument with the words:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death
Horseman pass by
Later a few miles south, I was in a bar on the Atlantic coast, drinking a pint of porter, eating crab claws fresh from the sea and soaking in garlic butter and hammering away at my guitar in an impromptu session.
Pausing to check that the kids were still alive (exposure to bitter north-west gales and 12 foot waves being, in my view, an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood), I fell into conversation with a local who told me proudly that Dr Oliver St John Gogarty was also buried nearby.
Oliver St John Gogarty was unflatteringly immortalised as Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's Ulysses but he was a substantial literary figure in his own right, and like most of us substantial literary figures he needed the day job to make a buck; further evidence, as with Chekhov, Somerset Maugham, Celine, Munthe and Michael Crichton, how the vocations of medicine and literature form a fecund union. Similar sensitivities are required to fulfil either role successfully; we share the ability to be both involved with our "characters", yet at the same time to be able to remain detached enough to make objective decisions.
Gogarty was a practicing doctor: it was he who performed the autopsy on Michael Collins in 1922. He died in America, and his body was flown home in a lead-lined coffin. He was buried with all honours in a graveyard overlooking the ocean, and a few weeks later the respectful natives dug him up and sold the lead.
IN the middle of this happiness, as if from another universe, came news of the car bomb in Omagh.
If you were to bake a cake of sorrow the ingredients could not have been more carefully chosen: the unborn twins, the unknowing foreign students, the little children, the three generations of one family, all wiped out in an instant.
There is a strong sense that this tragedy is the last, shuddering spasm of the troubles, that no more can be tolerated; no more grief, the peace process must work.
It is to me sickening that this act was performed with the noble aspiration of a United Ireland.
"To be greatly and effectively wicked", as C S Lewis observed, "a man needs some virtue."
Further Information
Publisher: THE IRISH NEWS
Ref: IN/0399
Published Date: 23-Sep-98
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