Fiacc

About Fiacc

 

Pádraic Fiacc was born in Belfast in 1924. His poetry is a vivid documentary of his extraordinary life lived between Belfast and New York. Themes in his poems include nature, mythology and conflict. Often called ‘the troubles poet’ Pádraic Fiacc has written a large body of work exploring many aspects of the Troubles.

Fiacc is a legendary modern poet of the twentieth century, whose stature is being recognised on both sides of the atlantic.

He won the prestigious George Russell (AE) Literary Award in 1957. He is a member of Aosdána, a prestigious affiliation of Irish artists, which includes Seamus Heaney, Ciarán Carson and Medbh McGuckian in its ranks.

 

SEA SIXTY BOOK - Biographical Notes

 

Patrick Joseph O’Connor was born in Elizabeth Street, off the Grosvenor Road, Belfast.  It was 1924. The family then moved to East Street in The Market where he spent five childhood years. The little house on East Street accommodated Fiacc, his mother, his aunt, his grandfather and grandmother, and brothers Brian and Rory. Owing to sectarian strife in Belfast, his father Bernard emigrated to New York  and set up a grocery business there. Eventually Bernard persuaded Fiacc’s mother to join him in America. Reluctantly she took the young Fiacc and his two little brothers to join their father. Fiacc was just five years old and later wrote Standing Water (A Rag) describing this boat journey across the Atlantic. They settled in Manhattan’s 96th Street enjoying a good standard of living until the father’s business went bankrupt, necessitating a move to the poorer district of Hell’s Kitchen. Irish, Italians, South Americans, Jews, Russians, Germans and other nationalities comprised this melting pot of humanity. Crime, violence, drug use and other social problems were rife there. It was an environment that partly formed this sensitive young poet into a tough survivor. His mother, never enthusiastic about leaving Belfast, did not settle in New York especially now that the family fortunes had changed so dramatically for the worse. She inspired in Fiacc a sense of  ‘Irishness’ reading poems by Yeats and singing Irish songs to him. Fiacc formed close bonds with her that were somewhat strained when she started work in a local factory. He was writing poetry and plays while still at Haaren High School in the late 1930’s.

The Irish poet Pádraic Colum, living and working in New York, read some of Fiacc’s work and contacted him. Colum’s advice to Fiacc was to ‘dig in the garden of Ireland’ for inspiration, which the young Fiacc, to some extent proceeded to do using Irish mythology as source material and producing such poems as Tenth-Century Invasion.  On leaving Haaren, Fiacc entered a Franciscan Seminary in Calicoon, upstate New York. Apart from his academic studies, he experimented with painting and penned some poetry such as Red Man Country. Little of this work has survived and the college principal, Father Adams,  frowned on Fiacc’s creative ability - ‘Patrick you cannot be a priest and a poet’. This advice may have been self-fulfilled as Fiacc left the seminary after four years, entering a monastery in which he spent a further year. Leaving The Monastery describes his departure from there in 1946 whence he returned to Belfast. He was twenty-two years old and describes his journey back to Belfast as ‘escape across the sea’. Here his aunt Mary remarked how thin and impoverished he looked and she embarked on a mission to restore his health.

He settled in traumatised, post-war Belfast writing poems such as Marauders, which describes the paranoia and fear that existed in the population, and Man Alive, the study of an individual maimed in World War II. He returned to New York to attend his mother’s funeral in 1950. While there he was contacted by a young woman, Nancy, the daughter of a Detroit businessman, who had been impressed with his poems. The two returned to Belfast and married in Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, setting up home in Farmley Crescent, Glengormley, a village about ten kilometers north of Belfast. Fiacc won the prestigious George Russell (AE) award in 1957 and his home in Glengormley soon became a hub for poets and writers. Fiacc and Nancy had a daughter Brigid in 1962.
More collections followed but by the late 1960’s Fiacc sensed conflict brewing within Northern Ireland. He wrote Against Oncoming Civil War, a prophetic pointer to the violence that engulfed the North from 1969 and was to last some thirty years.  At this time he met a poet from Glengormley, Gerry McLaughlin. The two became good friends and would often discuss poetry. Fiacc included McLaughlin’s anti-war poem Why The Gun? in his anthology The Wearing Of The Black (Blackstaff Press, 1974). By the early seventies violence was in full rage across Northern Ireland, with murders and bombings almost daily occurances. One such bomb which exploded in Glengormley frightened Nancy who desperately began to seek escape from the fearful situation. In 1973 she took Brigid and left for the safety of Detroit, never to return. Fiacc was devastated and suffered severe emotional distress. About eighteen months later Gerry McLaughlin was murdered  on his way to work in Campbell’s Mill, at Mossley outside Glengormley. Fiacc’s anguish and pain about this murder was expressed in Ditch of Dawn and Panis Angelicus. He was distraught and to the present day still finds it difficult to come to terms with the death of this innocent and aspiring young poet who was just twenty years old.

Fiacc survived this most difficult time in ‘our very own corner On Devil’s Island...’  (Victory On Ship Street), expressing his desolation in a series of bi-partisan poems that chart front-line civil conflict in all its ugliness and futility. A number of close friends undoubtedly played a courageous and sensitive role in helping him through this period. Fiacc was elected a member of Aosdána in 1981. He still lives in Belfast. His life has spanned the 1920’s civil strife in Belfast, The Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s, The Second World War, The Korean and Vietnam Wars, The Gulf Wars, The War in Iraq and countless others. He has lived through the deprivations of the New York ghettos, the Wall Street Crash, family bankruptcy and the terror of the Northern Ireland conflict.  His appreciation of the natural world with its varied species, his moral conscience and sensitivity to the pain of others has left us a legacy of powerful poetry.  For this Pádraic Fiacc has paid a heavy personal price.