This year, James will be the Grand Marshall for the St. This is not a wish for me, or a theatre for me, it is something needed in the town that I love so dearly, and I will keep fighting.” I have fought for one for so many years, and this June will be the first time that one of my productions will be staged in Tramore, in Lafcadio Hearn Gardens. I have staged my plays in theatres all around Ireland and it maddens me and breaks my heart that there is none in Tramore. “It is my dearest wish to see a theatre in my own town. Shortly afterwards, Stagemad was born, the product of many years of tentative ambition, and the kindness and generosity of people who were once strangers. He credits Lily O’Reilly from Garter Lane for not only giving him the Front of House job, but also for chasing the funding required some years later to allow James to study in Maynooth University. I got the job.” James wasn’t to know how many doors that job would open. I saw a job advertised for Garter Lane, and that voice was there again, holding me back, and you’re talking about a man approaching 40 at this stage. “Writing and reading your work is difficult because you are revealing something of yourself. Although his plays have been staged in New York, and all around Ireland and beyond, he reminds himself that he is “that boy from Peter’s Street.” A chance encounter with Mark Roper in his classes gave a very self-conscious James the courage to write and eventually to read his own work.Ī tremendous, almost crippling sense of imposter syndrome was with James at that time, and in many ways, it remains today. Around this time, a love for film and cinema was starting to grow within him, with a young James sneaking into an often sold-out Rex Cinema in Tramore to see the latest films.Ĭoupled with his already established love for poetry and reading, James was rapidly developing into the man he was to become. He delivered to every house in Tramore on his bike and all the money was brought back into the running and upkeep of their new house in Kennedy Park. James left school at the age of 13 and his first job was as a messenger boy for Dermot Cahill. When I think about that, she walked there and walked back, it breaks my heart, she loved us so much, she would have done anything for us.” She used to walk from the train station to Cabra because they just didn’t have the money. Following numerous tests, my mother used to go down to the dispensary in Tramore to get a docket to bring him to Dublin. But my grandmother noticed something wasn’t right. My oldest brother, Michael, is deaf, and this was a time when medicine wasn’t as advanced as it is today. It was her house and that’s the way it was back then. “My mother of course reared her children, and took care of us, but it was my grandmother, Margaret, whose word went. Yet, his grandmother was permitted by the hen to go outside, untroubled, so that it seemed even the animals respected her. The only problem with the chickens was that the hen was enormously protective and when James or his siblings went outside to use the toilet or to get water, they needed to bring a long-handled brush as protection against the hen. While bread was being cooked inside the house, at the back of the house were chickens which provided fresh eggs. I have so much respect for that generation, and I can only hope that I’ve carried on some of that respect with me.” Sticks would be collected from Knockenduff for the fire, and blackberries to make blackberry jam for the bread. “My grandmother basically reared us, we were never hungry, there was always food, it was always found from somewhere. The television itself, was only turned on for the Angeles or the news, never for any other reason. In the poem, he recalls the local priest visiting the house, seeing the Sacred Heart above the television, and a photo of John F. The memories of that time are so tangible for James that it prompted him to pen one of his earliest poems and it was published. This would then be sliced and shared among the neighbours. Along the street, the aroma drifting from James’ house would fill the road as his grandmother would cook bread in the range and allow it to cool on the windowsill. The neighbours on Peter’s Street and Peter’s Terrace were a close-knit community and enormously influential on a young James. James slept at one end of the bed, and his sister Margaret on the other end of the bed. In their cottage house on Peter’s Street were five boys and one girl. I grew up being taught respect, and the importance of knowing where you came from and how to treat others. We lived on Peter’s Street in the shadow of the church. “We lived with my grandmother, Margaret, and she was the matriarch of our family, her word went.
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