Christy and Brendan
14 Jun 1986I STOOD at the fine granite tomb in St. Marys Churchyard, Crumlin Village, and read the details in the stonework.
Sir Frederick Shaw Bart Recorder of Dublin. Died 1876.
He was the man who built Kimmage Manor on the banks of Dublin’s old watercourse. The Poddle River flows by the Manor down to the Stone Boat, where the late Christy Brown, paddled and splashed in the brown waters on fine summer days so long ago, now it seems like another world.
Christy was another genius of Dublin, the kid who wrote poems and stories with his left foot I can see his mother pushing him in the pram and Christy’s head rolling around admiring all the hall doors and knockers and nice gardens on the Kimmage Road Storing it all in his memory until his mother showed him the way to write with his left foot Not far away from Christy’s house was another young fellow, Brendan Behan, who was another Kimmage genius, but no one knew it then, least of all myself. I never knew he was a genius until he died … Does a man in Dublin have to die before he is recognised as a genius?
Why didn’t someone tell us of Brendan Behan’s genius so that we could have listened to him, talked to him and praised him, instead we just ran away when we saw him coming! We return to the Manor and find the Shaw family moving out to Bushy Park. The Manor House was let to several families and in 1911 it was sold to the Holy Ghost Order and became a Missionary College. The sons of many local families joined this order and are giving great service to the Church and the Foreign Missions.
After my halfpenny black babies school-days I became a member of the Kimmage Manor Burse Organisation, with Michael O’Neill and the O’Brien family. Some of my happiest days were spent working for the foreign missions with the congregation of Kimmage Manor.