In the radio documentary 'Gods Make Their Own Importance', Kavanagh's sisters and a neighbour talked to Tom McGurk about the poet's early days. A neighbour describes Kavanagh as a schoolboy as “raw, ignorant and thick, but still he had the brain to self-educate”. Kavanagh finished school early but maintained an interest in reading through the books his sisters and brother used in their schooling and regular visits to the library in Dundalk.

In an article for the RTÉ Guide on the programme, Tom McGurk wrote: "I hope to present a picture of the forces which sent Kavanagh off to walk the sixty miles to Dublin with his first volume of poems in his pocket a few months before the Hitler war; the forces which caused a young farmer of little education "to lisp in numbers and find it was his very life", the forces which created the most important poet since Yeats".
(RTÉ Guide, April 6, 1973, Vol.10, No.14, p.9)

Episode 5 of 'Gods Make Their Own Importance',  presents "a partial portrait of Patrick Kavanagh, poet and novelist, as seen by himself, by his own people in South Ulster and by Tom McGurk, who wrote and compiled the programme."
(RTÉ Guide, April 6, 1973, Vol.10, No.14, p.12)

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