The History of Connemara
Macken was born in 1915. Just one year later, his father was killed in the trenches of Flanders.
The young man was gifted academically and as he grew he began to show promise as an actor and playwright.
He began acting as a teenager and eventually secured regular, if poorly-paid, work in An Taibhdhearc the Irish language theatre in Galway.
Here he was a prolific writer and producer of plays.
These works were often well-received but being in the Irish language were rarely profitable and it would be for novel writing through the medium of English which Walter Macken would find fame.
In August 1950, Walter and his wife Peggy bought a house at Gort na Ganniv in the countryside near Oughterard.
The author had not enjoyed living in cities, having spent some time in London and Dublin, and he later stated that the Connemara countryside allowed him to ‘just write,’ although he was an avid fisherman in his spare time also.
It was here, in fact, that Walter Macken would write many of his most acclaimed books, including Seek the Fair Land (1959), The Silent People (1962), and The Scorching Wind (1964).
All his novels were simple and unsentimental, examining starkly the difficult lives of the poor in the west of Ireland; they variously looked at the Famine, the Cromwellian Massacres and the War of Independence. They proved hugely popular.
Walter wrote from the perspective of the ordinary people, having little time for the elites. He researched his work meticulously however, believing that any historical errors would be pounced upon by the experts who did not appreciate his manner of writing.
It was Walter’s time in Connemara which allowed him to write so realistically of the plight of ordinary people in bygone days. As one reviewer wrote in 1962:
‘Macken has been criticised for burying himself away, among the lakes, bogs and mountains, away from city life. They think he is missing a pool of knowledge.
But in Dublin, people are more than a century removed from the Famine and from Irish as a native tongue.
In Connemara, even where they speak English, they are not far in time from the Irish language, and there are many who are the sons and daughters of people who knew famine.
Walter Macken might go out to Connemara to study the history of the first half of the last century but nowhere outside the western county could he have come as close to the people who suffered most and really understood the harsh reality of our past.’
Walter Macken died very suddenly, aged just 51, in 1967. He was survived by his wife Peggy, who had been an inspiration to him, and his two sons.
He had ideas for several more novels and although he had an amazing back catalogue of books and plays, it is likely he would have written even more high-quality works had he lived.
As his son lamented:
‘A voice was stilled that night. The voice of one who spent his life writing and living with the people of the west.
The personal loss is to us, his family, is indescribable but it was also a loss to the world.’
For more stories of Galway and the west of Ireland, see ‘The Little History of Galway.’ In all good bookshops or pick up a signed copy at:
https://www.etsy.com/…/little-history-galway-ireland-colm