We had spent seven or eight years in different parts of Europe, and then we moved back to Ireland. I was teaching English as a foreign language to Saudi Arabians and Libyans, and it was getting more foreign to me by the minute. We were living in a very nice flat in a lovely area of Dublin, overlooking Palmerston Park, where you could see sparrowhawks nesting and homosexuals cottaging, and all the joys of urban life. It was one of those periods when you find yourself almost instinctively scanning the jobs ads, and then this thing swam up, as well as a job as wildlife warden in one of the national parks, which were being set up at that time. So I was applying for both simultaneously, and seeing them as in some way connected.
We came between Christmas and New Year of 1980 to have a look at the place, which was being renovated - doors off, windows off, and empty - and we immediately felt that this was it. The children were at an age when a move was possible, particularly a move to the country. We knew we liked country life, and particularly in this context, where, as a friend of mine said, it's not so much rus in urbe, more like urbs in rure - a constant succession of people coming to visit you. We come and go a lot. We're not stuck here. And now, when I go to any city, I seek out cathedral, red-light district, sleaze, whatever is funkiest and dirtiest and most threatening, not as a contrast to the country, but because that's where the city is really the city, just as here the country is really the country.
I grew up in a semi-detached house in a cul-de-sac in Andersonstown, in Belfast, one step up from corporation housing. In my gardening capacity I call myself Capability Brown from Andersonstown. I do the garden here. I also call myself The Janitor. I've come to realise, not having been a custodian of property - either my own or anybody else's - before I came here, that when you love a place as much I've come to love this, and when you become as intimate with it as I am - I go onto the roofs, I have an eye for the gutters, and I hear every sound that might be a bit awry - you absorb the physical place, it becomes part of you. Keeping the house rainproof and warm and decorated and welcoming, and full of the atmosphere of the Guthries is a job in its own right, in which Mary is deeply involved also.
We were having dinner with friends recently, and their teenage daughter wanted to know if I was an idealist. I said, well, I was a member of the Communist youth league in my youth, marcher against the Vietnam war; my first act as an even-then unmatriculated student at Queen's University in Belfast was to be in the demonstration after October 1968; I was editor of the student newspaper and various wildly radical gazettes. That was nowhere in my family background. In the Irish context, the seeds of radicalism and idealism come from the 1947 Education Act. Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane, and lots of others in that first generation, have acknowledged it as crucial in allowing them to break away from the farm.
There was also the prosperity of the post-war years, and the opportunity to travel, the growth in communications. So that you could be me, as a very incoherent sort of socialist in Belfast, watching les evenements de mai in soixante-huit a Paris, and wanting to be there, and in a way being there, with Rudi Dutschke and Daniel Cohn-Bendit as my proto-heroes.
It's a rare privilege to be able to attest your idealism. People simply have to be covert about it, and if they get away with anything, it's little jabs against the establishment, or being able to do something of use for the disadvantaged. What I do isn't art. But to help to sustain a context in which artists can find their own niche, their own milieu, is to participate vicariously in what a lot of us would envy about artists: they work at home, selon leur propre gre, they have distinct steps of achievement - publications, exhibitions, etc - and their work is their pleasure, as well as, of course, their anguish. I know this concept from the Pyrenees, where there's still a residual peasant community in the true sense of the word peasant, as in paysan, which is to do with the land. These villages have grown out of the land, they're quarried from the mountainside; work, for the people who live there, is not the obligation that it is in developed society.
We have a house of our own in the Pyrenees, in a village where we've been instrumental in fermenting a centre for art and nature a bit on the model of Annaghmakerrig. There are so few opportunities for people to do absolutely what they want. I see myself doing exactly what I want; this is completely it, for now.
Bernard Loughlin: `It's a rare privilege to be able to attest your idealism.'
