TheWeek. The Galway Advertiser/
BY KERNAN ANDREWS
“I Did history to BA level and I never heard of John Boyle O’Reilly until I played at a club named after him in
Springfield, Massachusetts. I’d love to know why he’s been written out of Irish history.” So says the great Galway folk-singer and songwriter Sean Tyrrell who is on a one man mission to re-awaken awareness of and interest in John Boyle O’Reilly (1844 - 1890), the Irish journalist, poet, Republican, and civil rights campaigner, through his show Message Of Peace. Sean will present Message Of Peace in The Crane Bar, Sea Road, this Saturday and on Saturday July 25 at 6.30pm as part of the Galway Arts Festival. “I cannot understand why lesser Irish men are celebrated while better men like O’Reilly are forgotten,” Sean tells me during our Monday afternoon interview. john Boyle O’Reilly was born in Co Louth and at 19 joined The Fenians, was later convicted and deported to Australia, he emigrated to the USA where he became an influential and outspoken journalist and newspapereditor, civil rights campaigner, a poet, and a champion of Irish poetry, concerned to promote awareness of the form in the States. Sean first became interested in O’Reilly when he found O’Reilly’s book A Thousand Years Of Irish Poetry in a bookshop in New York. Five of O’Reilly’s own poems were in there and three of them - ‘Cry Of A Dreamer’, ‘Message Of Peace’, and ‘Only From Day To Day’ - captivated Sean. was so astounded,” he says. “It could be a pen picture of any US president of the last 30 years from Nixon to Reagan to Bush, and particularly Bush.” He set them to music and they became the “backbone” of his acclaimed 1996 debut album Cry Of A Dreamer. Thanks to a friend in Boston called Ted Moriarty and Galway bookseller Des Kenny, Sean amassed all the information he could about O’Reilly and produced “on an old Apple Mac, my first computer”, a treatment for a film on his life. However a friend suggested it might be better if Sean
did it as a  one man show. it. As a result the show Message Of Peacewas born. The show traces O’Reilly’s colourful life as a rebel, prisoner, campaigner, and poet, through stories, slow airs, jigs, and songs by John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Bobby Sands, and Oscar Wilde. Also included is Little John Nee’s song ‘Wee Moroccans’ and songs from Sean’s own pen. “O’Reilly just fascinates me,” says Sean. “He predicted that the US would one day have a black president. He foresaw a united states of Europe, he campaigned for the rights of Native Americans in the 1880s when most campaigned for the rights of African- Americans, and against anti- Semitism.“He was a newspaper editor in Boston and during an Orange parade there, there was a riot in which many people died. O’Reilly wrote about it in his newspaper and he lacerated both sides - and remember he was a Catholic and a Republican.” Sean considers Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ appropriate given O’Reilly’s crusading stance as a civil rights campaigner. “O’Reilly joined The Fenians in 1863. He then joined the British cavalry. About one-third of the British army at that time were Irishmen. The Fenians wanted to infiltrate them and cause a rebellion but it was foiled by an informer. Sean also feels that John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ was an obvious choice for the show. “O’Reilly was often referred to as a ‘working class hero’,” he says. “The forthcoming album will have a ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker on it as Mr Lennon uses the F word twice and I’m not about to sabotage the song.” Sean has already performed the show in the States where it, and indeed O’Reilly’s message, received a great reception - which is the point Sean is trying to get across with Message Of Peace. “I performed the show at a festival in Oregon and afterwards a woman leaped onto the stage, took me by th hand, and said ‘At last, somebody is saying something!’” says Sean. “I never got a reaction like that before. O’Reilly was so broadminded and ahead of his time. What he said is as relevant now as when it was first published. I’m trying to bring that message into modern times and become O’Reilly’s conscience for the 21st century.”

By Charlie Mcbride

In what promises to be one of the highlights of this year’s Cúirt, singer-songwriter Sean Tyrrell will premiere his new show Who Killed James Joyce, inspired by the poems and life-stories of some of Ireland’s foremost poets, both past and present.

The show features Tyrrell’s musical settings of works by poets such as Louis McNiece, Seamus Heaney, Oliver St John Gogarty, Michael Hartnett, Mairtin Ó Direain, Oscar Wilde, and WB Yeats interwoven with anecdotes about their lives.

“I’ve been setting poetry to music for a few years now,” Tyrrell observes over an afternoon phone call. “I decided I would like to do a whole night dedicated to that and as something more than just a concert. I wanted to try and show the person behind the poet.”

The show’s title comes from a poem of Patrick Kavanagh’s which includes the lines: “What weapon was used/To slay mighty Ulysses?/The weapon that was used/Was a Harvard thesis.”

“I like Kavanagh as a poet but I don’t think I would have liked to have met him,” Tyrrell muses. “He was a difficult man. Oliver St John Gogarty, on the other hand, is someone I would have enjoyed meeting.

“He was so witty. He said that de Valera looked like ‘a laugh in mourning’. During the Civil War he was abducted by Republicans at gunpoint and bundled into a car whereupon he enquired ‘Should I tip the driver?’”

The show features Galway poets like Mary O’Malley and Rita Ann Higgins and Tyrrell reveals there is also a Galway connection in the poem he chose from Louis McNiece.

“I do his poem Prognosis which he wrote in Galway after being on a three-week binge. He wrote it in the spring of 1939 and the form is like a children’s rhyme but it’s full of these dark forebodings.”

How did Tyrrell find the challenge of setting the poems he chose to music?

Some of them were very difficult” he acknowledges. “I had to break out of every pre-conception of songmaking. They’re not all written in forms that lend themselves readily to song.”

Tyrrell also reveals a particular, and growing passion, for poems in Irish.

“It upsets me when I travel around the place and you see these posters in Irish bars featuring Joyce, Wilde, and Yeats, etc, and none of them ever mention the likes of Mairtin Ó Cadhain, Mairtin Ó Direan or Sean Ó Riordain. It was very important to me therefore to include Irish poems in the show. I’ve actually been reading more of it in the past few years.”

Mention of Joyce, who also features in the show, prompts Tyrrell’s observation that “Joyce was an extrovert. He was a clever mimic and a star turn at charades. He famously came second in a singing contest behind John McCormack. It’s possible that Joyce only lost because he had to sight-read the piece he was singing and of course he had weak eyesight. He had to pawn his books to raise the entrance fee for the contest.”

Of all the writers whose work he has included, does Tyrrell have a personal favourite?

“Michael Hartnett,” he replies without hesitation. “He was a remarkable poet and person. I remember the first time I met him, I was in the Orchard Bar in Dublin. I looked out the window and this eccentric looking character was walking past, and it was Michael Hartnett.

“He stopped and waved and came into the bar; he leant over to me and whispered ‘I met some folk who said I was a dreamer’ which is a line from one of my songs. I liked him, he had a devilish sense of humour.”

Sean Tyrrell performs Who Killed James Joyce at Druid on Friday April 15 at 10pm.