As admirers of Patrick Kavanagh gather at his grave this weekend for the annual commemoration, I wonder if it is not finally time for those involved to right a wrong and acknowledge in some formal way that his wife is buried there too, writes Frank McNally.
Katherine Kavanagh's remains have lain unmarked for nine years now, ever since the poet's brother Peter destroyed a monument erected by her family and replaced it with the wooden cross and stones that he had earlier taken from the grave in protest at her burial there.
The cross honours Patrick only. A separate marker commemorates his sisters Annie and Mary. But the woman who was Kavanagh's companion for the last years of his life, and whom he married months before his death, has been airbrushed from the record.
It is true that Kavanagh was secretive about Katherine. He did not invite his family to the wedding, and in their voluminous correspondence, he never seems to have mentioned her to Peter, by then an academic living in the US.
This was not unusual in the brothers' relationship. Patrick only learned about Peter's marriage after the fact too. But it may have contributed to the problems that arose later, exacerbated by the epic dispute over copyright ownership. At any rate, Peter never accepted Katherine's legitimacy.
There were practical issues too. The old Irish marriage proposal - "How would you like to be buried with my people?" - was not as much a joke as we think. In this case, the plot reserved for Patrick in Iniskeen graveyard was for only three persons, and as they faced their final years Mary and Annie must have felt safe in assuming this would suffice.
Patrick and Annie were already buried there when Katherine - a niece of Kevin Barry, incidentally - died in 1989. When the remaining part of the plot was opened for her, Mary - not unreasonably - objected. After some confusion, that grave was closed again. And as two decades had elapsed since his death, Patrick's was reopened and Katherine was buried there.
Then began a sequence of events that would keep the grave in the news headlines. First, Peter removed the cross in protest at the grave's "desecration", re-erecting it in the garden of the homestead. Months later, Katherine's family replaced it with a stone monument recording both names. But in August 1998, this too was removed overnight and replaced by the original cross. The headstone was later found nearby, smashed.
Peter Kavanagh was home on holiday at the time. But, expressing relief at the "pagan" monument's disappearance, he attributed the operation to "spirits in the night". He was arrested and questioned by gardaí in Carrickmacross, however. And in a book published later, he admitted responsibility, insisting that he owned the gravesite and could do what he liked.
The incident might have lingered longer in the newspapers, except that it was swamped by tragic events elsewhere. Later that same week, a bomb exploded in Omagh, killing 29 people. In a macabre twist, it emerged that the car involved had been hijacked in Carrickmacross, even as the investigation into the Iniskeen incident was under way.
The last word on the issue then was a letter to this paper by Eunan O'Halpin, Katherine's nephew. Responding to the "pagan" headstone claim, he wrote: "What could be more un-Christian than to despoil a grave in such a way as to deny a blameless woman public acknowledgement that she lies in death, as she did in life, with her husband?"
Peter Kavanagh was a hero of his older brother's life-story. He supported him, financially and psychologically, when few others did. The small fortune he ploughed into the short-lived Kavanagh's Weekly inspired a joke in Dublin that this was a case of "robbing Peter to pay Patrick". But without such actions, the poet would probably have died younger and certainly more obscure than he did.
Peter's unshakeable conviction of his brother's genius was part of an unshakeable conviction about everything else. His defence of Patrick's reputation was especially zealous, however. When Antoinette Quinn wrote Patrick's biography a few years ago, John Montague's Irish Times review praised her "bravery" because, as he added, "the brother is always in the background, commanding all approaches, like a spiritual bouncer". The brother is no longer commanding the approaches. He died last year and is now also buried in Iniskeen, a few feet away from his siblings. Only months before that, he had made his first visit to the nearby Patrick Kavanagh Centre, formally ending a feud with the founders.
I was present that day, and it was a sad as well as happy occasion. Peter was a very old man. He struggled at times to remember why he was there. But the fires had not burned out entirely. In the question and answer session, there were flickers of his former feistiness. As I recall, nobody brought up the subject of Katherine.
The issue now lies uncomfortably between the private and public realm. The reaction of literary tourists to her exclusion ranges from bemusement to occasional anger, especially among women. Opinion in Iniskeen is torn between those who think it a shame and those who consider it to be a family issue. But now that the main protagonists are all dead, surely a decent compromise is possible.
The Kavanagh Weekend begins tonight with the annual poetry awards and a keynote address by Macdara Woods. Events tomorrow include a conducted tour of the Kavanagh literary trail in Carrickmacross. The graveside commemoration will take place as usual on Sunday.
• Further information at www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com.