In Fond Memory of Kevin McFadden
by Patrick MacFadden
Kevin wrote in a recent one-paragraph autobiographical note that he was born on the coast of Northwest Donegal, went to school in Sligo and "wasted a lot of time kicking a football around," came to Canada where he lives "with his wife and best friend Helen, not far from the sea."
No great matter that such terseness leaves a lot out. What matters is what Kevin saw fit selectively to attend to, that his day began beside the Atlantic and that it ended beside the Pacific. “The winds blow constantly from the North Atlantic Ocean,” he wrote in one of his short stories, “on to the sands of Tramore. At low tide the oyster catchers with their yellow beaks dodge in and out of the waves in search of food. In the evening the curlew’s plaintive cry heralds the falling of darkness.” By one of those happy significances that are a writer’s one true pleasure, he chose as the story’s title The Holy Water.
The time spent kicking a ball around saw him as goalkeeper for the local Mulroy Stars. He dourly records on his first outing – he was 16 – he listened as 11 goals went whistling past him. For the Donegal County Minors he played Gaelic, interrupted briefly when one of the mullahs of the GAA spotted him heading a ball, a practice then held to be irredeemably “foreign.”
Not that he was ever particularly partial to regulations unless they were for the common good; his enthusiasm for authority of all sorts he never had any trouble controlling. When he joined the Guards in Dublin he may well have figured that ex-poachers make the best gamekeepers, in any event he went on to became a detective. The street life and the business of the Dublin Circuit Court left him a lifelong supply of good yarns, as well as a deeply rooted political conviction that liberty for the lions meant death for the lambs.
Kevin remained at heart a culchie, in his book a badge of honour, and in the latter part of his life he was to find sustenance in th Irish language that had formed him. For he took language to be not just a means of communication but the soul of a people. And it was in this community, on this other ocean, that he had helped to share and that in turn gave him great love, that he found fellowship and heart's content.
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