Ireland

Nationwide events mark traditional Nollaig na mBan holiday

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Swimmers took to the cold January sea for Women’s Aid on Sunday ahead of January 6th

By Sarah Burns

A number of events are taking place across the country today (Monday) to mark the traditional holiday of Nollaig na mBan, or “women’s little Christmas”.

January 6th, the feast of the Epiphany, is recognised as the last day of the Christmas season. In Ireland Nollaig na mBan is by tradition the day when women would generally take a break from the cooking and cleaning associated with the festive period, leaving them instead to men.

While domestic duties may be more equally shared across households in contemporary Ireland, the day of celebration is still marked by many.

Women’s Aid encouraged people to sign up for its Cold Swim for Women in order to raise funds for the charity, with participants able to take part in the event nationwide. Swimming groups and individuals around the country took their dip on Sunday to raise funds to support survivors of domestic violence and abuse.

The Irish Writers Centre is, meanwhile, hosting an event at Pearse Street library in Dublin on Monday night showcasing women writers including Jessica Traynor, Zoé Basha, Marianne Lee, Nuala O’Connor, Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan, Anne Tannam and Sophie White.

The communities of Ballybough, Clonliffe and North Strand in north Dublin will celebrate Nollaig na mBan with a daylong festival honouring local women. It includes an awards ceremony, a special conversation with Olympic gold medallist Kellie Harrington and a live music trail. The event begins at 2pm at the Charleville Mall Library.

he Cabragh Wetlands Centre in Holycross, Co Tipperary, also hosted an event on Sunday which included a range of talks on women’s health, chanting and poetry as well as some workshops.

The VHI mini-marathon, which takes place in June, had been running an early bird offer to mark Nollaig na mBan with a discounted registration fee, which has now sold out.

Source: Nationwide events mark traditional Nollaig na mBan holiday – The Irish Times

The Royal Showband (with Brendan Bowyer) – Loop De Loop (1963)

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Brendan Bowyer (12 October 1938 – 28 May 2020) was an Irish singer best known for fronting the Royal Showband and The Big Eight, and who had five number one hits in Ireland. He was also renowned for having The Beatles open for the Royal Showband at a concert on 2 April 1962 at the Pavilion Theatre, Liverpool, some six months before the release of The Beatles first single “Love Me Do” in October 1962. Bowyer was regarded as one of the first headlining Elvis impersonators. Elvis Presley himself was a big fan of Bowyer’s performances and would often attend Bowyer’s concerts in the Stardust Resort & Casino, Las Vegas during the 1970s. [Wikipedia]

BBC4 “Showbands”- an Irish cultural phenomenon explained

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By Veronica Lee, The Arts Desk

Ask most people what a showband is and they’ll give you a blank look. But ask any Irish person (or those born in the Irish diaspora) who is north of 50 and they will probably look misty-eyed. For between the late 1950s and 1980s showbands were a huge Irish cultural phenomenon, and Ardal O’Hanlon was our amiable guide through this brief but illuminating history of them.

Taking a break from his Caribbean sojourn in Death in Paradise, in Showbands: How Ireland Learned to Party O’Hanlon explained that Ireland in the 1960s was very different to the young, outward-looking country it is now – poor, mainly agricultural and rural, and living under the yoke of the Catholic Church. America had Elvis Presley, and the UK The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but none of these acts played Ireland’s small rural villages – and out of this musical vacuum came showbands, whose sets were a curious musical hybrid of covers of pop, country & western and traditional Irish ballads.

Showbands were distinct from the four-man beat combos elsewhere; they were larger for a start, typically numbering between six and eight: drums, guitars and brass, fronted by a lead singer who was usually the cutist-looking fellah. As O’Hanlon said: “They were versatile, hardworking mobile jukeboxes in shiny suits.”

O’Hanlan, who is from the border county of Monaghan in the Republic, got in a VW camper van to travel around the island of Ireland (showbands were a cross-cultural, cross-border phenomenon) to recreate the days when the musicians would chuck their instruments in the back and drive from gig to gig, six days a week. It was an unnecessary contrivance, as he spoke to his interviewees when they were both safely ensconced on sofas.

Initially, the bands played in church halls, managed by the local priest (who would measure the distance between couples to make sure the Holy Ghost would be able to fit between them), and where nothing stronger than soft drinks (“minerals” as the Irish have it) were served.

But pretty quickly promoters realised there was money to be made and commercial dance halls started springing up all over the place. At their peak, it is estimated there were more than 600 showbands working in Ireland – including the Royal Showband, the Miami Showband, Big Tom and the Mainliners, and Margo and the Keynotes – and they were household names, regularly pulling crowds of more than 1,000 people to ballrooms, six nights a week.

O’Hanlan spoke to several members of the best-known bands, who spoke with affection about their time on the road, not just in Ireland but in the UK too. Anywhere there was an Irish community there was a dance hall and many showbands were as popular here as back home. Some, like the Royals and the Miami, even went to Las Vegas, though with differing success.

O’Hanlon pointed out that showbands managed to work through the Troubles in Northern Ireland – their fans, from either side of the religious divide in Northern Ireland, didn’t care they were from the Republic. As Steve Travers of the Miami Showband said: “A showband is a perfect blueprint for integration,” while his bandmate Des Lee said: “We stayed away from politics. Our aim was to deliver two hours of entertainment.”

But then sectarianism did affect them. On 31 July 1975 when the Miami Showband were returning to Dublin late one night from a gig in County Down, a group of loyalist paramilitaries from the Ulster Volunteer Force attacked their van, killing three of the band. Some would read the attack as the beginning of the end for showbands, but in truth it was Ireland’s steps towards liberalising licensing laws – bars and hotels could now serve alcohol while live bands were playing, for instance – that did for them, as well as a new wave of emigration from Ireland’s rural areas, which took away much of the showbands’ fanbase.

There was little in the way of backstage gossip and it was a lot to run through, but O’Hanlon, with some excellent archive material and interesting reminiscences, made this an enjoyable hour.

Source: Showbands, BBC4 review – an Irish cultural phenomenon explained

Watch the complete BBC Four documentary

Review: That They May Face the Rising Sun is a poignant rural meditation on life and friendship

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In this adaptation of the John McGahern novel, about a middle-aged man who has returned, with his wife, to the countryside of his childhood, makeshift friendships are forged and life’s grand rhythms observed

By Phil Hoad

Does anything happen, or is it the usual?” asks a regular loose cannon in Pat Collins’ rural-set Irish drama. “Not much in the way of drama, just the day-to-day stuff,” replies his writer friend. That’s very much the lay of the land in this film, with squirely novelist Joe Ruttledge (Barry Ward) serving as a proxy for John McGahern and his early-Joycean realism, and from whose lauded final 2002 novel this is adapted. By extension it speaks for Collins too, who remains a faithful follower of that approach – almost to a fault.

At some point in the 1980s, Joe and his wife Kate (Anna Bederke) – who is from some unspecified European country – have quit London to return to the Irish countryside of his upbringing. With him racking up the pages of a never-finished book, and her twisting local plants into art creations, there’s a bohemian tint to their household that attracts neighbours to their kitchen table. There’s “the Shah” (John Olohan), the big-eyebrowed garage owner tiptoeing into a new romance; Bill (Brendan Conroy), a subdued labourer condemned to working in slave-like conditions because he was “illegitimate”; and the aforementioned loose cannon Patrick (Lalor Roddy), never short of a chippy observation but always popping by like a man who needs company.

Ever-present in this tangle of middle-aged, makeshift friendships is an undertow of faint but inexorable melancholy, occasionally articulated in words (presumably) straight from McGahern. “The rain comes down, the sun shines, the grass grows, children grow old and die – that’s the holy all of it,” reflects the Shah. Nothing too purple, which would violate the terms of the quiet stoicism in the face of life’s grand rhythms admired by McGahern; Collins, more usually a documentarian, keeps in lyrical step with simple, stirring compositions of cloud-swept hillsides, rams teeming down lanes, and one especially moving sequence when Joe lays out a deceased acquaintance for his funeral.

This reserve means the drama verges on indistinct, with bravura camerawork out of bounds and sometimes timid characterisation that threatens to blur the multiple visitors into one Irish version of Ted, The Fast Show’s groundsman. The reticence is a particular issue with Joe and Kate, whose London allegiances, artistic aims and marital state of affairs are alluded to, but never fully explored. But, despite its somewhat diffuse centre, Collins’ film still has a straightforward poignancy, with subtle and dignified performances across the board.

Source: That They May Face the Rising Sun review – poignant rural meditation on life and friendship | Movies | The Guardian