Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

Regular readers of my blog will know how I like to use it to expand upon my “Echoes of the Past” pieces for the Cavan Echo. I truly enjoy writing these, and I hope that people enjoy reading them. The blog provides an opportunity to say a little more. This is especially important given the fact that Northern Sound’s Donagh McKeown seems to have lost my ‘phone number and e-mail address – this is the charitable explanation for why he hasn’t been in touch. I am sympathetic enough to know that he is not the master of his fate and that his employers are a pack of miserable bastards. The fact that I am no longer heard on his radio programme is quite frankly, his loss. I am often forced to realise that the town of
Cavan is quite special. It is not as bad as some people who live in it would like it to become. I suppose this is what lay behind my latest piece on Cavan’s
Champs Elysees aka

Farnham Street does possess some of its former glory, though to be honest it seems tatty today. It is a little like an old and once beautiful princess who in her youth attended the most splendid balls but who was later forced by revolution and despoliation into a life of prostitution. Look very very carefully and you’ll still see some of the trappings of her former splendour which still make it through the coarseness of decades spent on the game. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have not been kind to

. It was even robbed of its name in favour of Roger Casement. If the British had not hanged Roger Casement I somehow doubt that his humanity would have warranted the naming of a street in his honour. He exposed the wicked and pernicious abuses of that most Catholic of monarchs King Leopold of the Belgian on his hapless Congolese subjects. This alone would make him worthy of honour for me. Attempts to besmirch him, by prying into and publicising his sexuality were also made. It seems ironic that the people of Cavan who for so long berated the Farnhams as cruel landlords have not taken the new name for the street to their hearts in preference to the old.

 The Town Hall suffered neglect for about seven decades. This neglect went under the heading of routine maintenance a la Irlandaise. It received a new lick of paint and some long needed TLC in the 1980s. I have to say that the building is like an oversized cottage – and I use the term not in the “Rent-an-Irish…” sense, but a cottage in the sense of a public convenience used as a site for gay rendezvous. It is an oversized edifice which seems to embody the similarly oversized egos of those who meet and those who occasionally work there. It is like one of those brothels you sometimes meet hidden away n the wooded outskirts of American cities. You expect to see “gentlemen” entering and exiting from the place after making furtive side-ways glances to ensure that no one sees them. And on entering the small little vestibule I invariably feel that I am going to hear a cacophony of flushing toilets and rushing feet, accompanied by screams of “Quick, the fucking cops.” Narrow stairways lead from this entrance hall, perhaps to discrete cubicles and washing facilities. 

Other buildings of “note” along the street are the YMCA or CYMS, also mentioned on my Tourist Tips. No doubt there will be those who expect me to say something nasty about
Jackson’s Show-room. Well, surprise surprise I won’t. It has attracted enough adverse commentary from architectural experts, such as the pompous Patrick Shaffrey. True, it may not win many hearts for its beauty, but it does not block the daylight and overlook the surrounding area. It was built in the late 1970s on what had become an overgrown and derelict site. In that sense it was an improvement on what it superseded.   Yet my anger has to be expressed at the act of vandalism carried out on the Protestant hall in October 1995. This was worthy of the Afghan Taleban. Naturally it occurred on a Saturday, the day when
Ireland’s demolition industry did so much of its work. It is hard for me to write about it, as it summons up so many ghosts which I had hoped to exorcise. I had just moved back down to Cavan from
Dublin, a place which was far from free of the stench of corruption. Yet back home in dear old Cavan I felt I had been kidnapped by country-and-Irish loving aliens and transported to another planet. The Protestant Hall was knocked on the whim of the County Council and its then chief executive, and no one was allowed to protest. Indeed anyone who even alluded to the fact that it had ever stood there ran the risk of being victimised and joining the long list of people whom the then County Manager didn’t like. As the man is now deceased I do not wish to say too much. He cannot defend himself from his grave. Let me say this much. I said what I felt needed saying when he was alive. The coven of his detractors has swelled amazingly since his untimely death. He wasn’t the only one responsible for what happened that October day. (Who’s he gettin’ at? They will ask.) The Protestant Hall was a building I had grown up with. It had served as the venue for the Cavan Arts Exhibition for many years, as well as a venue for concerts. I recall attending one by the Douglas Gunn Ensemble and being surprised by how good the acoustics were. This reminds me of the joke about the world-famous conductor who was once asked to give a concert in a small parish hall in Kerry. “The acoustics in here are terrible” he complained to the caretaker. “Ah sure haven’t I been puttin’ down traps for the hoors for over a year…” answered the caretaker.It was sad to see its site taken over as a stopping-off point for migratory birds in the winter. I recall one dark December day in 1996, following a particularly heavy rain shower, looking at the spot which had once echoed to music but which was now occupied by a small lake, the only sound the incessant thud of cold raindrops. Not even the ducks stayed there for long. Sick Transit Gloria Mundy.