Just before I headed to the Cuirt Festival launchTuesday afternoon I checked my email and
read Gene’s Mahon About Town bulletin about David Halberstam’s death, which shocked and saddened me, and lent a somber edge to the high spirits of the launch.
In the event, about 200 people gathered at the new Galway City Museum by the old Spanish Arch along the Corrib River at 5:30, sipped wine and nibbled pate, and listened to the welcoming speeches by the festival directors, Tomas Hardiman and Maura Kennedy. Then the launch speech was given by Nell McCafferty.
She couldn’t resist (no one here can for very long) commenting on the failure of the water system in Galway, where the water has been rendered undrinkable since about St. Patrick’s Day by a bloom of cryptosporidium. “Ah, Galway,” McCafferty said, “water, water everywhere,
but not a drop to drink.”
Nell McCafferty is an iconic figure in Irish culture. A journalist, born in the Catholic Bogside in Derry, she was an outspoken commentator on the Troubles in the North and an indefatigable campaigner on women’s issues such as abortion and contraception. As someone there said to me, “That’s a woman would fight with her nails.” After she’d praised the great internationality of Cuirt and called the festival open, the crowd, including a number of the participating writers, drifted off to pass the time until the opening readings.
Nell McCafferty’s biography, Nell: A Disorderly Woman, a frank and colorful book, is only available from out-of-print sources in the States right now, but you can get her The Best of Nell: A Selection of Writing Over Fourteen Years, published by Attic Press. (Sadly, Roisin Conroy, Attic’s groundbreaking publisher of feminist literature, died just last week.)
Filed under: Miscellaneous
