Flash fiction and Franco: the Dublin connection:Stories were submitted from around the world for the first flash fiction competition run by online journal Dublin Review of Books(drb.ie). Now the DRBhas a winner of the €1,000 first prize: Sheilagh Foley, for her story Stage Fright.
The journal has just published its 15th issue, which includes a long review by the former diplomat Michael Lillis of Ireland at the United Nations: Memories of the Early Years, by Noel Dorr, in which Lillis shares hilarious recollections of his own days in the department of external affairs, as it then was.
He remembers an evening in 1968 when, during a posting to Madrid as a third secretary, and dressed in full white-tie evening dress, he called at Palacio de El Pardo, the residence of Franco, and escorted the Spanish dictator's granddaughter to the opera, where they sat in the royal box under the watchful eye of her duenna. "Later we joined the generalissimoand his wife and family at home at dinner," Lillis writes. "At that time I could not, on the tiny allowances payable to the third secretary in Madrid (£800 a year), afford even a small car. I recall that we were driven to and from the opera in the caudillo's splendid motor, a beflagged Hispano-Suiza if I correctly remember. I think I may have been the only foreign diplomat ever to dine en famillewith the Francos – as I did several times and got on well with the old man, who was by then manifestly suffering the early symptoms of Parkinson's disease. I was invited only because they wanted to send their granddaughter to the security of Catholic Ireland to learn English and requested my assistance to arrange this."
In his own way he was, he says, carrying out the classic diplomatic role of cultivating the circles of power, and of opposition, in his country of accreditation.
‘Soundings’ ready for a fresh hearing
"Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky . . . " How many dreamy Irish teenagers had those TS Eliot lines from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrockas their mantra as they prepared for the Leaving Cert in decades past – courtesy of Soundings, edited by the late, great English teacher Augustine Martin. First published in 1969 as a poetry anthology for the syllabus, it stayed on for 26 years. Now it has been reprinted by Gill Macmillan, at €14.99, just as we remember it but with an evocative foreword by Joseph O'Connor. "I was young in the era of The Boomtown Rats and punk rock, but no lyric that was ever spat into a microphone by the glorious Johnny Rotten could ever compete with the strangeness of Emily Dickinson. 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,' she said. Every teenager on the cusp of adulthood knew what she meant," writes O'Connor.
Memories of Soundingsare welcome at facebook.com/ soundingspoetry.
