Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin
by Paul Durcan
When I was a boy, myself and my girl
Used bicycle up to the Phoenix Park;
Outside the gates we used lie in the grass
Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin.
Often I wondered what de Valera would have thought
Inside in his ivory tower
If he knew that we were in his green, green grass
Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin.
Because the odd thing was – oh how odd it was –
We both revered Irish patriots
And we dreamed our dreams of a green, green flag
Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin.
But even had our names been Diarmaid and Gráinne
We doubted de Valera’s approval
For a poet’s son and a judge’s daughter
Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin.
I see him now in the heat-haze of the day
Blindly stalking us down;
And, levelling an ancient rifle, he says, “Stop
Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin”
Copyright © Paul Durcan 1978. Reproduced by kind permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.
About the poem
Dating from 1751, what became the Viceregal Lodge in the nineteenth century became Áras an Uachtaráin in 1938 and Eamon de Valera, third President of Ireland lived there from 1959 to 1973. When he retired, aged 90, he was the oldest head of state in the world. As Ireland changed, especially during the 1960s, de Valera was seen by many as out of touch, his vision for Ireland old-fashioned and out-of-date.
Paul Durcan’s poem in its very title announces a different world, a world of individual freedom and a refusal to be curbed by convention and a conservative past. ‘Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin’ is from Durcan’s 1978 collection Sam’s Cross [which takes its name from near where Michael Collins was killed]. This narrative poem ushers in a new Ireland but it also reminds us of Ireland’s rich inheritance and glorious mythological past, an Ireland where Diarmuid and Grainne were young and in love.
Stanza one celebrates young, easy loving. A young boy and a young girl cycle to the Phoenix Park and in the green, green grass they make love. De Valera is an unseen presence and is seen as someone living in an ivory tower. He is in a place apart; he is unaware of what is happening outside his gates. The speaker wonders what de Valera would have thought of their al fresco love-making and suspects that “Dev” would strongly disapprove. But the boy admits that he and de Valera ‘both revered Irish Patriots’ and both dreamed of a flag of pure Irish freedom, ‘a green, green flag’ flying high. The tone is one of wonderment and gives way to a mood of unease and fear as de Valera, with his ancient rifle and negatives, prowls and stalks.
The line ‘Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin’ is the final line in every stanza but in the final stanza the line is prefaced with a dogmatic ‘Stop’. But the love-making has happened and poem itself has, as it were, hoisted its own flag of freedom and it flutters freely, exuberantly, over a modern Ireland. There is no stopping it.
This poem, unthinkable and unimaginable in another era, liberates a generation to be themselves, to celebrate themselves and to embrace a new Ireland. The rhythm, the repetitions, the humour and the striking contrast between freedom and oppression create a poem that is a whoosh of fresh air.
Paul Durcan was born on 16 October 1944, in Dublin, of County Mayo parents. His father was from Turlough, his mother, Sheila MacBride was a niece of John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s husband, who had been executed for his part in the Easter Rising. He was educated at Gonzaga College, dropped out of UCD, worked in London, married Nessa O’Neill, lived briefly in Barcelona, then London, and they had two daughters.
In London he was a freelance writer and looked after the children. The family later moved to Cork and Durcan graduated from UCC in 1973, with a first-class honours degree in archaeology and history. Durcan had studied English in his First Year at UCC and intended to take it to degree level but was told by a lecturer at the end of First Year that he ‘did not have a proper understanding of poetry’.
In 1974, Durcan won the Patrick Kavanagh Award with his collection O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor. Since then he has published over twenty titles. In 1984, one hundred and sixty secondary schools were sent books by Raven Arts Press for their libraries. Among them was Durcan’s 1980 collection, Jesus, Break His Fall; following a newspaper report some TDs, some teachers and some parents, some of whom hadn’t even read the book, called for it to be banned.
In his poem ‘A Cold Wind Blew in from Lake Geneva’, Durcan says that his two logos are ‘Provincials To The Wall/ And – Never Conform’. Gerald Dawe commenting on Durcan’s work says that he uses poetry to ‘expose hypocrisy, deceit and repression’. In an interview Durcan said that a line from one of his poems sums it all up: ‘My job is to be present, which I am’. Paula Meehan in her review of Life is a Dream said that Durcan’s poetry is ‘a poetry for the befuddled, the disorganized, the demented, the muddling through, the most of us. His songs celebrate our small mercies and tender decencies in a world that favours the corrupt, the greedy, the alpha-gobshites.’ He is a charismatic reader of his own work and has a large following.
Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007, a life’s work, was published in 2009 and his most recent collection is The Days of Surprise [March 2015]. His poetry is both private and public and his titles reflect this: ‘At the Funeral of the Marriage’; ‘The Anglo-Irish Agreement, 1986’; ‘Hymn to a Broken Marriage’; ‘In Memory: The Miami Showband – Massacred 31 July 1975’; ‘Six Nuns Die in Convent Inferno’ or the two-line poem ‘Ireland 2002’ which reads:
Do you ever take a holiday abroad?
No, we always go to America.
He has given readings ‘hundreds, perhaps thousands’ of readings all over the world: in Russia, Australia, America, Japan, Brazil . . . . He won the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1990, the Cholmondeley Award in 2001 and Mary Robinson, when elected President, quoted Durcan’s poem ‘Backside to the Wind’ in her victory speech. He is a member of Aosdána and was appointed to the Ireland Chair of Poetry from 2004 to 2007.
