Dawn Chorus Meath Ireland

Dawn Chorus Meath Ireland 28 April 2022
Sounds of Dawn Chorus
Magnificent sounds of birdsong, dawn chorus, Ireland

Dawn Chorus, Meath, Ireland 28 April 2022

I recorded the dawn chorus this morning at 5.15am using an ordinary Android phone. It’s extraordinarily rich in sound, birdsong, an occasional bellow from a cow, and a very distant and barely audible plane, drowned out by the rich variety of birdsong.

How lucky we are if we live in the countryside, surrounded by nature; and how often we take it for granted. What a gift that we can hear! And that we live in a land at peace.

No doubt birds still sing in Ukraine, suffering the invasion of puny Putin’s deluded mind and his uninformed or blinded population.

I wish for the people of Ukraine that they too will sing the song of freedom and that all of their land will be liberated from the invading army of the autocratic dictator, the pariah Putin.

International Dawn Chorus Day is the first Sunday of May each year. Don’t miss it this Sunday 1st May. Derek Mooney on RTE Radio One will be doing his usual great job, celebrating the dawn chorus. For details, click here.

Someone

I recently caught on RTE Radio One an interview with Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll. I’d never heard his work before and the interview finished with a recitation of his  extraordinary poem ‘Someone‘. It’s a remarkable poem, stunning, dramatic, arresting. It grabs you deceptively with its ordinary everyday words and revolutionizes one’s viewpoint on the ordinary, helping us to realize the great fragile transitory and fleeting magnificence of life. Like a funnel, we rethink our habitual awareness of the everyday, the things we take for granted – an erection, eating buttered toast, saluting the neighbours, listening to the weather forecast – and the poem transforms our awareness of the banal. Someone today is doing all those ordinary things for the last time. And becoming aware of that transforms our consciousness to live each moment – this moment – to the full.

Someone who is going about his ordinary business today is doing so for the very last time. Much of the genius of the poem is that that one word – Someone – is imbued with new meaning and that single word evokes the whole poem and its simple yet profound wisdom.

My documentary ‘From Belief to Unbelief’ now live online

Click here to listen to my documentary ‘From Belief to Unbelief’ which charts the story of the journey of three men – Declan Wynne, John O’Sullivan and myself, each of us former members of a Roman Catholic religious congregation – from religious belief to outgrowing those beliefs.

‘From Belief to Unbelief’ documentary on RTE Radio 1, Sat. 13 October, 2012.

I’ve spent more than six months working, with Nicoline Greer from the Documentary on One team at RTE Radio 1, on making a 40-minute documentary called ‘From Belief to Unbelief’.

It charts the story of my journey from belief to unbelief, and also that of two fellow novices, John O’Sullivan and Declan Wynne, who entered the Marist Fathers’ seminary at Mount St Mary’s, Milltown, Dublin, in September 1980.

Of the twenty who entered that year, only three remain in religious life.  I left after nine years. Declan after ordination, having spent thirteen years in the order. John is the most recent to leave: he was a member of the order for some thirty years.

We each speak of the insights, realisations and key events in our personal paths starting with our sense of a call to the priesthood and religious life; entering the seminary; our challenges, questions and crises; our deeply personal and painful decisions to leave religious life; and our contented lives today as unbelievers.

The documentary is not only the personal story of three men: our lives may be seen as a microcosm for the transformation taking place in Irish society in the last 20, 30 or even 50 years. In the early 1980s there were some 40 seminarians in the Marist Fathers’ seminary in Ireland alone. Nowadays, there are no Irish seminarians in the order and Mount Saint Mary’s is no longer a seminary. The chapel which once reverberated to the sound of many young vibrant seminarians now lies silent and is rarely used. As recently as the early 1980s, the houses of the Marist Fathers in Ireland boasted full communities of priests, compared to the small and aging communities remaining today.

Thirty-two years after entering the order, I revisit the former seminary in the company of Father Denis Green SM, now in his nineties, who used to be my spiritual director.

Documentary maker: Joe Armstrong.

Production supervision by Nicoline Greer.

‘From Belief to Unbelief’ is scheduled for broadcast in the Documentary on One slot on RTE Radio One, at 6 p.m. on Saturday, 13 October. It will be repeated the following evening at 7 p.m. From broadcast date it can also be listened to online or downloaded from www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone as an mp3 or Podcast. If it isn’t on the front page of that link, simply search for ‘From Belief to Unbelief’ in the RTE Radio One, Documentary on One search bar, or find it under the ‘Life’ category.