Celebrations of Con Houlihan’s life and times and the marking of the 10th anniversary of his passing have already taken place in Dublin earlier this month with a gathering at the Lower Deck in Portabello.
This weekend, on August 20th and 21st in his home place of Castle Island, events over the two days will include the film on Con’s life and legacy – Waiting for Houlihan made by Maurice Healy and the 1973 television documentary on life in the Castle Island area, Wheels of the World the narration for which was scripted by Con and delivered by Éamon Keane.
Film Shows from 7pm on Saturday
These will be shown at the River Island Hotel on Saturday evening from 7pm and introduced by Con’s friends, Maurice Healy and Jimmy Deenihan.
Stories, music and song from 9pm also in the River Island. Many of Con’s old friends, ex Kerry footballers and some of his many students will be in attendance and the Sam Maguire Cup will make a guest appearance.
Tommy and The Legend
Sunday morning at 11:30am an anniversary Mass for Con will be followed by a guided tour with Tommy Martin of Con’s favourite places in the town and its surrounds.
A gathering at the monument to Con at Lower Main Street at 2pm will be addressed by Mikey O’Connor and will be followed by refreshments in the River Island Hotel.
First Script on TV
As an appetiser for the couple of days of remembrance for Con here’s one of his loveliest, most evocative pieces on life in Castle Island.
In this article he writes about one of his happiest literary days on which he saw his first piece of script writing broadcast on television.
He sets the scene as ‘in the early days of Irish television’ the early 1960’s in Tom McCarthy’s Central Bar where he found himself on his favourite stool on a fair day. He was ‘sick with apprehension’ as his work was about to be broadcast to the nation – and, probably more frightening still, to the very public house in which he sat.
As the great man himself would say, Now read on…..
Making a Great Impression
“It is as if it happened this afternoon. And you would feel the same: it was my debut as a writer on television and as the hour approached it made me sick with apprehension — it might go well or it might be a total disaster.
Being present at the final cutting was a bit confusing and my fear was that it would be even more so to the audience.
All this happened in the early days of Irish television. Sean Ó Mordha was very much involved in Teilifis Scoile and he asked me to do a piece about An Gearrscéal.
We set about the work with the enthusiasm of Christopher Columbus and his crew as they started out to find a new world. Television was then very much a new world to us.
I loved French writing and Guy de Maupassant excelled in the short story and my plan was to write my piece around him.
Then I loved Impressionist painting and hoped that the pieces by de Maupassant and by some of the Impressionists would go well together.
It was a fair day in Castle Island and by midday most people, including myself, had their work done.
The programme was timed for noon. Believe me or not, I had told nobody about it and intended to watch it on my own in Tom McCarthy’s pub which had one of the few television sets in the town.
By about 11.45, I was ensconced in my favourite seat and, even though it was a busy fair, I was surprised to see so many people in the pub. Little did I know — the word had got around and my debut was to have a big audience.
I didn’t know whether to be pleased or embarrassed.
The minutes moved slowly to midday and then for the first time ever I saw my name on the screen — An Gearrsceal le Con Houlihan. There was an audience of about 100 people. They were nearly all young men and there were a few girls.
The script was in Irish but almost all of them weren’t long out of secondary school and they had a fair knowledge of the old language. And for good measure I had written a very simple script. I still do — it’s the only way I know.
You write as if talking to a few friends and thus the mighty film came across.
All the people present understood almost every word but that wasn’t the real merit of the little film. It was illustrated by many Impressionist paintings. Many of the audience, through no fault of their own, were seeing good paintings for the first time.
There was a gasp of delight and astonishment when Van Gogh’s painting of Paris at night from a terrace high up in Montmartre came into our vision.
It is a wonderful painting and Vincent, God rest him, found an appreciative audience in a little town in the south west of Ireland. Then there was Utrillo’s paintings of the roofs of Paris. It was a simple thing but it made the houses almost familiar. Manet’s Girl In The Bar Of The Olympia is one of my great favourites: as well as being a superb painting, it evokes all kinds of thoughts about the mentality of the people it portrays.
All this was new to most of my audience and it was new to me in the sense that I had never before seen those paintings so well represented as on Teilifís Éireann’s screen.
It was a new sensation and it confirmed my belief that on television the images should be the more important. The words should be an accompaniment.
And it made me feel like a pioneer who was spreading a new gospel.
At the end there was an ovation that couldn’t have been greater if I had scored a goal for Kerry to win an All-Ireland.
It was a day that I will long remember. My next appearance on television was an attempt to capture something of the atmosphere and character of the country around Castle Island.
In the meantime, I had often been on radio working with a congenial spirit, Aindreas Ó Gallchóir.
We worked together on a radio programme called The Heart of the Kingdom.
It was a neat job of work and went down very well. Then I made a television film with a director called Pat O’Connor, who was on the brink of going to great fame.
He was a very easy man to work with. The film was called The Wheels Of The World: it showed a fair day in Castle Island. We were all pleased with it.
Those jobs of work were only about 20 minutes in length. Since then there has been work on long documentaries, and I was not always happy with the finished work because when you are working with a director, he may have his own intuitions and they may not coincide with yours.
That is life. Nobody is infallible and we have to listen to other people’s concepts and intuitions.
That morning in Castle Island when the documentary was shown will always stay with me because all our concepts had been illustrated. The film was only partly about the short story. It said far more about Impressionist painting.
It would be wonderful to get a free hand at attempting to express the essence of life in my own town.
To do that is nearly impossible. There are always colleagues who like to go their own way. It would fulfill a dream to make an evocation of life in that town in the course of one day.
My endeavour would be to make it far more honest than Ulysses and it would possibly make me immortal, kind of.”
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