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President Michael D Higgins at
Colgan Hall, Carndonagh
15.09.14
President Michael D
Higgins' address at the 100th anniversary of the
Colgan Hall in Carndonagh on Friday, September 12,
2014.
It gives me great pleasure to be here with you today
in Carndonagh to celebrate the hundredth anniversary
of this striking building, Colgan Hall.]
May I thank Colgan Heritage committee and its
dedicated Chairperson, Mrs Letitia Doherty, for the
invitation to come here today, and all of you for
your warm welcome. It is an honour to have been
asked to unveil a commemorative plaque marking the
centenary of an important site of Carndonagh’s
community life.
Buildings are not mere functional structures, made
out of stone, brick, mortar, timber and plaster –
structures erected to provide for our particular
needs for shelter, work, worship or entertainment.
Buildings, in particular those described as
architecture, are much more than that: they are
about ideas, they are a statement about the beliefs
and aspirations of the people who commission, design
and use them.
So it is useful to take a step back in imagination
and consider: what were the major issues that
exercised our forebearers a hundred years ago? What
were their hopes and concerns? Why did William
Doherty – a young, 27-year old Derry architect for
whom this parish hall was his first commission –
design it as he did?
The years leading up to 1914 were, as you know, a
period of huge expectation and turbulence in
Ireland, with the awakening of the modern Irish
national consciousness going together with a
rediscovery – some would say a “reinvention” – of
Ireland’s distinctive history and cultural
traditions.
This Celtic Revival, as it is commonly called, was
the key influence behind the design of Colgan Hall.
This is reflected in the Hall’s Hiberno-Romanesque
external details, inspired, it seems, by the great
monastery of Clonmacnoise and the magnificent 8th
century Donagh Cross, with its interlacing patterns,
here in Carndonagh. The similarly decorated St.
Mura’s cross slab at Fahan, also on the Inishowen
peninsula, is another possible reference. This is
suggested by art historian Françoise Henry, who
pointed out that John Colgan, although born in
Carndonagh, spent some of his youth at Fahan. Henry,
Françoise. 1963. L’Art Irlandais 1. La Pierre-qui-Vire,
Yonne: Zodiaque. p.163.
Colgan Hall thus invites us to reflect on the ways
in which successive generations, in different eras,
relate with the past. It was, as I have just said, a
certain vision of Ireland’s ancient traditions and
of the role this distinctive cultural heritage
should play in the future of the nation that
galvanised the architects of the Celtic Revival.
Similarly, all of you who are involved with Colgan
Community and Resource Centre Committee or with the
Heritage Subcommittee, are people who recognise the
value and the relevance of the past to our lives
together.
When this hall fell into disrepair, there were the
inevitable voices that suggested that it should be
demolished and replaced with a new, more readily
functional facility. This might well have been the
easier option. But in what was, I believe, a real
commitment not only to the past but also to the
future, you decided otherwise. You resolved not to
let the construction you inherited from previous
generations, with the wealth of memories and stories
embedded in it, go to waste.
John Colgan himself, of course, was a man who was
animated by, as he put it about a fellow chronicler
of Irish Ecclesiastical history, “a very thirst
after the antiquities of his country.”
Born in a learned Irish family, he understood that
his era was witnessing the end of the old Gaelic
order, and, after leaving Ireland in 1612 and
entering the Franciscan Order in St. Anthony’s
College, Louvain, he resolved to dedicate his life
to compiling “The lives of the Irish Saints”.
As most of you here are well aware, it is John
Colgan who is reputed to have given the name of
“Four Masters” to Mícheál Ó Cléirigh and his three
associates who compiled the famous “Annals of the
Kingdom of Ireland”, one of the principle
Irish-language sources for Irish history up to 1616,
the year of the death of Hugh O’Neill.
John Colgan shared with those men a conviction that
the recording of Ireland’s history was fundamental
to exerting its right to exist and to be described
as “civilised”.
John Colgan was an Irish European, in the best
sense, gathering and sharing valuable components of
an archive time and ill-health would not allow
himself the opportunity to fully analyse.
I need not explain to this particular audience the
importance of the work carried out by the 17th
century Irish chroniclers. The diligence with which
they collected, copied, transcribed, and annotated
ancient documents is one that is not alien, I
suggest, to the care and enthusiasm applied by our
contemporary local historians to their own
chronicling of the history of their locality.
I want to avail of this occasion to salute in
particular the work conducted by all those who are
associated with Colgan Heritage Committee, including
Sean Beattie, our MC today, who gave a very
informative lecture about Colgan Hall earlier this
year, which I have had access to in preparing my own
words today. I am grateful to him.
At a more general level, I wish to acknowledge the
research carried out by so many vibrant local
historical societies and grassroots associations
across Ireland, and the valuable resource it
provides in the context of our decade of
centenaries.
Finally, let me congratulate all those involved in
raising the funds necessary to refurbish Colgan Hall
and transform it into the fully functioning
Community and Resource Centre we see today. I know
that this was not an easy endeavour and that despite
the LEADER funding you secured, a substantial local
contribution had to be garnered, requiring your
Committee to take out a bank loan.
Of course, gathering funds for a social or cultural
enterprise was never a simple matter, and it is an
issue which John Colgan himself, for all the
spiritual nature of his project, had to face. Indeed
it is said that the Convent in Louvain being too
poor to fund “The lives of the Irish Saints”, it was
decided to dispatch a monk to Ireland with a
document signed by five of the Louvain Franciscans,
including John Colgan. As a result of this
fundraising mission to Ireland, “three pounds and
half the money in hand” were sent from each Irish
Friary, enabling Colgan to publish, in 1645, a
volume of his Acta Sanctorum hiberniae containing
the lives of those Saints whose feast days occur in
January, February and March. Unfortunately, due to
shortage of money, the volume comprising those lives
commemorated in April, May and June was never
published...
Similarly, Mr Beattie’s lecture informs us,
fundraising was undertaken on a very large scale to
allow for the construction of Colgan Hall in the
second decade of the twentieth century. Local
volunteers helped quarry the stone; anyone who had a
horse and cart was mobilised; and representatives
from each town land and street were responsible for
collection in their own areas – a task they
performed with so much zeal as to prompt one
parishioner to remark: “They’d lift hens off the
streets to make money for the hall!”
Indeed raising money for a project that would not be
seen for twenty years required a particular strength
of purpose. But it was done, and Colgan Hall was
built and has served Carndonagh very well over the
last hundred years – as parish hall, as school, and
now as community centre.
During the past century, the people of the area and
beyond have enjoyed plays, movies, concerts,
operettas, recitals, feiseanna, and fancy dress
parades in this community space. May Colgan Hall
continue, for many decades, to be the site of those
public encounters that contribute to sustain a
robust and fulfilling sense of community. Go raibh
míle maith agaibh go léir. |
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