Two years after a €1.2 million refurbishment, the new Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen finally received an official opening on Thursday, in time for what is hoped to be the first normal tourist season since Covid-19.
In his most famous poem, Kavanagh angrily complained of how Monaghan’s drumlin country had “flung a ditch on my vision”.
But just as a multimedia celebration of his life was about to be unveiled in 2020, fate flung a pandemic on the project, with a “soft launch” that summer followed by another lockdown, and another again, until dust settled on the exhibits.
Aptly, Thursday’s reopening ceremonies included the formal launch of an outdoor “poetry jukebox”, which, taking the shape of a submarine’s periscope, appeared to be resurfacing from the earth along the banks of the nearby river Fane.
The centre’s re-emergence after a global medical emergency mirrors the poet’s own rebirth after recovery from cancer in the 1950s. Then, the anger of Stony Grey Soil and earlier works gave way to the stoicism of his Canal Bank poems, in which he relearned to “wallow in the habitual, the banal/Grow with nature again as before I grew”.
Both extremes of his career are represented in the centrepiece of the redesigned museum-cum-theatre.
The Pincer-jaws of Heaven is a film in which 10 of his greatest poems are read by actors and writers to the accompaniment on a giant screen of ravishingly beautiful footage of the drumlin country he sometimes despised. The work already has a European Cultural Heritage award to its name.
In another of his best-loved works, Kavanagh once likened a childhood Christmas prayer to “a white rose pinned on the Virgin Mary’s blouse”. But he could hardly have imagined the extent to which, posthumously, he would be blessed among women.
The opening ceremony was performed by a Minister for the Arts from nearby Carrickmacross, Catherine Martin. And as she pointed out, nodding towards another Cabinet member in attendance, Heather Humphreys, it marked “an historic moment” for reasons other than poetry: “Two Monaghan Cabinet Ministers together opening this event in their home county; two female Cabinet Ministers from two different parties coming together on their home turf.”
The coincidence added a new meaning to an adjective popular in these parts, but typically applied to good weather: “Powerful.”
The Ministers’ home turf has a more notorious division than mere party politics, of course. Just north of Inniskeen, the meandering Fane forms the (currently) soft border with a hard place, Northern Ireland: another historic affliction that, pandemics aside, has blighted the area’s tourism potential.
The reopened Kavanagh Centre coincides with a five-year Destination and Experience Development Plan for Monaghan. It is hoped that after the tremendous silence imposed by Covid, Inniskeen will be welcoming a lot more tourists this summer. The longer-term ambition is for 10,000 visitors a year by 2026.
