Louis MacNeice once called Galway "the strangest town in Ireland". And when I arrived here to become Galway City Writer in Residence, fewer things seemed stranger to me than the city council's plan to erect a plaque in the Claddagh bearing a poem by MacNeice.
In this centenary year of MacNeice's birth there has been much talk about his true identity. He was once known as part of "MacSpaunday" the stage-horse composite of left-wing English poets of the 1930s - MacNiece, Auden, Spender and Day Lewis.
He has since been reclaimed as an Irish poet, even as an Ulster poet. But despite his famous poem Galway, I had never thought of him as a Galway poet.
It soon became apparent to me, however, that Galway is a city where everybody seems to come from somewhere else. Nowadays on its streets you are as likely to hear Russian, Polish or Portuguese as Irish, never mind English. MacNeice characterised himself in Ireland as a "holiday visitor, no matter how often he came". And that now applies to many of us in Galway. After all, to be a true Galwegian, I was given to understand, you have to have two grandfathers buried up in Forthill Graveyard.
However, as Galway's energetic and visionary Arts Officer James Harrold explained to me, in Galway MacNeice was always far more than a holiday visitor. I have long been an admirer of his poetry yet never realised how deep his family's roots in the West actually were. It was a surprise to hear that both his parents had been born in Connemara, but that the connection had ended in bizarre and fascinating circumstances.
The poet's father, John Frederick MacNeice, was born in 1866 on Omey Island, that most desolate and haunting of Connemara places. His father's father, William MacNeice from Sligo, was the schoolteacher in Omey, which then had a population of more than 200, compared with its current four. He worked for the Irish Christian Mission to Roman Catholics, an organisation which aimed to convert Catholics by providing education and sometimes food.
After an altercation in 1879 with a local Catholic priest who wanted to teach Catholic doctrine in the school, the MacNeices, including Louis's father, 15 years old at the time, were literally run off the island.
Going to matins on the mainland one Sunday morning, with armed police protection, they were attacked by a large mob of angry locals. The police were disarmed after allegedly shooting at the crowd, and were badly beaten. The MacNeices sought refuge in a farmhouse but it was surrounded and broken into, after which the family were savagely assaulted by the mob, and were saved only by the intervention of a local priest who happened to be passing. They fled to Dublin.
Such traumatic events leave deep traces in families. Despite this, MacNiece's father retained an attachment to the Connemara of his youth and was a fervent Home Ruler. In his later years, as the Bishop of Down and Connor he caused great controversy when in 1935 he refused to allow a union jack to be hung over Edward Carson's tomb in Belfast cathedral.
The poet's mother was also born in Connemara, a descendant of English stonemasons, the Clishans, who were brought over in the early 19th century to build D'Arcy's castle near Clifden, and later Clifden itself. She was born in the townland of Claddaghduff. Her family had only recently converted from Catholicism but she too joined the Irish Christian Mission in Dublin, where she met the poet's father. It was widely believed that her passionate homesickness for Connemara while living in Belfast and Carrickfergus contributed to her early death.
With such a background it is hardly surprising that MacNeice's attitude to Ireland was ambiguous, to say the least. The Ulster-born, English-educated, left-wing classicist may have been just a tourist in Galway, but he was one with special baggage. And right until the end of his life he kept returning to Galway. As late as 1962, he sailed with Richard Murphy to Inishbofin on Murphy's hooker the Ave Maria. The following August, he struggled to get out of his death bed, saying he had to go sailing in Cleggan again.
It was on one these recurrent trips to Galway that he was inspired to write the poem which was unveiled yesterday on the plaque on Nimmo's Pier in the Claddagh, as part of the Cúirt festivities.
In August 1939 he had recently completed Autumn Journal, now recognised as one of the most original and enduring poems of the last century. With his friend Ernst Jandl he decided to tour Ireland in advance of the war he was convinced was coming.
Having arrived in Galway, he was kept awake by the sound of dredgers trying to deepen the harbour, in order, as he put it most prophetically, "to make Ireland safe for plutocracy". The next day, September 1st, 1939, he walked around the Claddagh, and looked at the salmon in the Corrib. That is where Jandl found him to tell him the news that Hitler had invaded Poland and the long-expected war would begin.
Salmon in the Corrib
Gently swaying
And the water combed out
Over the weir
And a hundred swans
Dreaming on the harbour:
The war came down on us here.
The poet: Tom Paulin