Big-screen debut for Tommy

NORTH Clare man Tommy Fahy will travel to Dublin next week to watch himself on the big screen as part of the 10th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Tommy will appear in the documentary Silence, which is showing next Thursday at the Lighthouse Cinema, Smithfield, Dublin and is already sold out.
The energetic 78-year-old was filmed last April as part of the documentary that follows Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde, a sound recordist, who is returning to Ireland for the first time in 15 years. The reason for his return is a job offer: to record landscapes free from manmade sound.
His quest takes him to remote terrain, away from towns and villages. Throughout his journey, he is drawn into a series of encounters and conversations, which gradually divert his attention towards a more intangible silence, bound up with the sounds of the life he left behind.
Tommy spent some time showing Eoghan how to catch lobsters and talks to him about growing up on the Finnavara peninsula on Galway Bay.
“I am not so sure how they found me. I am a seanchaí and I tell stories and would be reasonably well known for that,” Tommy suggested.
“Sometimes people just show up here to talk to him about old Ireland,” his son Donnacha explained.
“They wanted me to catch a lobster with my bare hands,” Tommy continued. “I fished lobsters with my hands or with a gaff all my life. The gaff is just a stick with a hook on one end of it. A lobster burrows under a stone and the hook goes in under it and pulls him out.
“There are only certain times you can do this. We have two spring tides every month and at the big spring tide, when the lobsters bed in, they get stranded. We know where the beds are and we walk out to them and get them that way.”
Tommy has yet to see what Silence, and his role in it, has become.
“I am looking forward to the premiere but I don’t know what they did with the footage. I haven’t seen the film yet,” he outlined.
Silence is a South Wind Blows and Harvest Films production directed by Pat Collins, produced by Tina Moran and written by Pat Collins, Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde and Sharon Whooley.