Shane MacGowan considered Nenagh to be his real home
Worldwide tributes have been paid to The Pogues lead singer Shane MacGowan on his death last Thursday week at the age of 65 – a revered artiste whom the people of North Tipperary took to their hearts and claimed as one of their own.
Shane was the only son of the late Therese MacGowan (née Cahill) from Carney Commons, a townland situated between Nenagh and Borrisokane. His father Maurice MacGowan, now in his 90s, resides in Nenagh, a town that always remained very close to the heart of his late and famous son.
Shane is also survived by his sister, the writer Siobhan MacGowan, who lives with her husband, Anthony, in Dromineer.
Although born in Kent in England to Irish emigrants, Shane had a deep love of his parents’ native country, particularly his mother’s home place in Carney Commons where she was reared by aunts and uncles.
His mother’s people, the Lynchs, farmed in the locality for generations. Shane’s attachment to that place and his older relations who lived there was moulded from early childhood. He spent the first six years of his life with them.
Despite the family emigrating to the UK, they never lost touch with home. Shane would return from England with his parents and sister on regular holidays.
His sister Siobhan, in an interview with this newspaper earlier this year, recalled how the family would drive off the ferry in Dublin in the dead of night and later arrive up the lane to the house of her mother’s aunts and uncles in Carney Commons before sunrise.
On arriving in the door they would be treated to a breakfast feast laid on to welcome them home for their holiday.
Coming from the hustle and bustle of London life to the rural solitude of Lower Ormond and a farming way of life was an experience that exposed the MacGowan children to a very different type of existence - one that left an indelible influence on Shane.
Siobhan recalled how she and Shane delighted in the freedom of the expansive fields and how they would both mischievously hide when their grandaunt was calling them in to the house for the daily Rosary.
DEEP CONNECTION
The fame that Shane later came to know never lessened his connection with the Nenagh area. If anything, he returned even more frequently as the years passed and made many friends in Nenagh and surrounding areas.
He frequently visited Philly Ryan’s pub in Silver Street, and other local pubs too. One of his great local friends was Tom Creagh who had the privilege of visiting him in hospital over the last few weeks of his life, as did many other friends from Nenagh.
Another reason for Shane coming back to the town was to visit his parents, who since had moved back from the UK and purchased a house in Silvermines where they resided for many years.
The lead singer with Clannad, Moya Brennan, a close friend of Shane’s, referred to his great love of his mother’s county when paying tribute to him. “He used to visit Tipperary quite a lot,” she recalled. “He loved the fact he was from Tipperary. I remember speaking to him once about that, and he was talking about the passion he felt for the county and the history of it, and where he came from and everything. That was a very important part of his life - it really was.”
OLD HOME PLACE
In the BBC Four documentary on his life and songs, ‘The Great Hunger’, Shane is filmed speaking fondly from the old Lynch family home of the profound influence the place had on him in his early years and his subsequent music career.
“This house is what I always basically regarded as home,” he said, speaking to camera in the old kitchen with the open-hearth fire blazing behind him.
He told of how as a child in the 1950s-60s he used to sleep on an old settle bed by the fireplace. That open fire was the only means of cooking in the house and there was no running water.
“It was basic and beautiful,” Shane recalled. “It was the end of an era that I just happened to catch it - and I'm glad I caught it.”
Old black and white family photographs of the era feature Shane in a meadow helping his older relatives to build a cock of hay.
There’s him as a little boy petting the black and white collie sheepdog in the company of his granduncle in the farmyard. Another features him sitting on a trailer with another male relative, both drinking a bottle of lemonade. In another he’s travelling down the lane on a donkey and cart.
MUSICAL HOUSEHOLD
It was a musical household and Shane grew up set dancing in the old kitchen with his grandaunts and granduncles. “He absorbed all that wonderful traditional music and dancing and it had a wonderful influence on him,” his mother recalled.
During the sessions in the house, Shane would be cajoled by his older relatives to stand up and sing. “I did my first gig when I was three,” he laughed, adding that all he ever experienced in that house in Carney Commons was happy times.
His aunt Monica in a documentary on his life on TG4, ‘If I Should Fall From Grace’, recalls his first song performance in the kitchen as an infant. “He was only two and a half and he used to sing ‘Hole in the Bucket’. It was a scream to look at him.”
TOUCHING SCENE
Included the BBC documentary is a touching scene of Shane and his mother singing her favourite ballad, ‘Kitty’. The song was later sung by Finbarr Furey at the request of Shane to mark his 60th birthday celebrations in the National Concert Hall five years ago.
The event was attended by the President Michael D Higgins, who presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of the State and all the great and good of the Irish music industry and singers from abroad turned up to pay homage.
Sadly, Shane’s mother was the first person to die in a road traffic accident in 2017 when the car she was driving collided with a wall at Ballintoher, Nenagh, on New Year's Day.
Shane, a very religious man, is now reunited with her again. But it’s a very sad time for everyone in this locality - particularly his father and sister who live among us - that one of the greatest and gifted of our own is gone forever.
RIP, Shane.