Veteran socialist and writer Peadar O'Donnell receives homage in his lifetime.
The Patrick MacGill Summer School was founded to honour writer Patrick MacGill in his native Glenties, county Donegal. The "navvy poet" and novelist had died in 1963 in relative obscurity in the US, but by the 1980s, his works were enjoying a new popularity. In 1985, the MacGill committee decided to pay homage to another Donegal writer in his lifetime, Peadar O'Donnell of the Rosses. Committee-member Joe Mulholland tells Tommie Gorman why in this RTÉ News report.
The veteran Socialist is introduced to the crowd by Tánaiste Dick Spring of the Labour Party. At 93, O'Donnell now has only peripheral vision. When asked how he feels about listening to leading political and literary figures praise him for a week, he says:
I feel that I am present at my own wake.... You couldn't have a proper wake without the corpse, and it's a tradition of Donegal that an old person's wake is always cheery.
An RTÉ News report from 20 August 1985.
