As the greatest GAA Championship summer of my lifetime draws to a close next weekend, the arrival of ‘September Sundays: As heard on Sunday Miscellany’ couldn’t have proven timelier.
Edited by Clíodhna Ní Anluain, this collection of essays, drawn from the RTE Radio One programme’s past decade, makes for both marvellous reading and listening – the book also comes with a CD of original essay recordings.
Poignant, evocative, tribal and humorous, this wonderfully pieced together tome is destined to prove a popular stocking filler come Christmas time, and features some whimsical writings from a Waterford perspective.
In a beautifully vivid essay simply titled ‘Dan Shanahan’, Catherine Foley captures the Lismore man’s legend, catalysed for her by Dan’s delivering of home heating oil to the Foley ‘teaghlach’ in An Rinn.
“It was better than having a film star or pop star come to call,” she writes of the thrill both her and sister RoseAnn felt when the Deise goal machine steered his Comeragh Oil truck into their front yard. “We were out the door like greyhounds.”
Foley writes of Shanahan: “In Dungarvan town, middle-aged women smile with admiring nods when he passes. Men salute him with a congratulatory shake of the head and a comradely ‘well, Dan the Man. Young boys, and sometimes girls, nudge each other when he goes by. Simply put, he’s a celebrity in the Deise.”
