Half Slave, Half Free: Patrick Macgill and the Catholic Church

Extract

I do not sing

Of angel fair or damosel That leans athwart a painted sky;

My little verses only tell

How human beings live and die And labour as the years go by.

I do not sing

Of plaster saints or jealous gods,

But of little ones I know,

Who paint their cheeks or bear their hods Because they live in doing so Their hapless life on earth below.

Patrick Macgill Songs of the Dead End

Patrick Macgill (1889—1962), the Donegal poet and novelist, was an articulate spokesman for a suppressed, inarticulate migrant workforce. He is also effectively an important voice of the sensitive layman in a clericalised church around the turn of the century. To give rather than to acquire is his message; to give freely and to become truly liberated is his ideal of the Church which he loved to hate: ‘If a man is born to the ould ancient faith he’ll never lose it’, it will always be there, (1918 : 200). That tension between the authoritarian clergy and the layman runs through his work. The preoccupation with sexual morality and the only moral issue runs through his scorn for that lace-curtain respectability of his time. His class-consciousness is remarkable in early twentieth-century Catholic writing, when many churches seemed to have lost their sense of personal involvement with the poor as people rather than objects of charity. That, for Macgill was the ultimate pornography. Himself a navvy in Scotland, he knew the bitter experience of the emigrant Irish far removed from the organisational church, from the main stream of secular life and effective personal relationships, and so from God.