Willie returns to Miltown

A BUST of the inimitable Willie Clancy was presented to Oidhreacht An Chláir at its centre in Miltown Malbay on Wednesday afternoon.

It was officially handed over by an American couple, Barry Merrill and Judith Spencer Merrill, who commissioned it as a “thank you” for the enjoyment they have gained from attending the Willie Clancy Festival for years.

 

The timing was also fitting on Pipers’ Day after a lecture about Clancy’s music and life by piper, author and researcher, Pat Mitchell.

The bust was modelled in clay by one of Clare’s best-known sculptors, Shane Gilmore, who brought it to Seamus Connolly’s foundry in Kilbaha where he moulded it and remade it in bronze.

It was the culmination of months of work by Shane, who drew his inspiration from  photos and recordings that are on CDs.

“Between the collection of photos that I’ve gathered from a few different places, it’s the images that stays. The most challenging task was to get his likeness. A lot of the other work that I’ve done before, the people wouldn’t be as familiar as the face. It might be a concept.

“I was absolutely honoured. I’ve known of him for 30 years. It was a great privilege to be asked to do this work.

“His most unusual feature was his cheeky smile. I thought it would be nice to reproduce this aspect,” he said.

Judith admits she and Barry fell in love with the festival once they heard the uilleann pipes. She was just 12 when she first heard them.

“The Rising of the Moon, which was one of the first Irish films I saw as a child. This had a great meaning coming from our own Civil War history in our hometown. But it was probably the ’90s, when my older brother – who is quite a player himself with the fiddle and loves uilleann pipes – that I became familiar with the sound.

“When we came here to Miltown, and I saw them being played live, and especially – well there’s so many great players to name, right in this room as a matter of fact, the hair went up on the back of my neck… in a good way. We just absolutely fell in love with everything about the festival.

“I told Barry the other day ‘the first time I heard them, it was as though I heard the voice of an old uncle that I hadn’t met before’.

“It was just some ancient beautiful voice, and then when they took off in a wild way – if I had been around in the day, I would have hit the road and followed them. I would have been on the road after them – there’s just something so bewitching, haunting and spiritually uplifting about them, it’s brilliant,” she said.

Meanwhile, Shane Gilmore  has also pledged to produce a life-size statue of the piper before the 2013 summer school.

He expects the statue will be quite big, considering Clancy was six foot two, and plans to have him sitting on a stool with his legendary uileann pipes in his hand.

Having been commissioned by Barry and Judith, the sculptor visited Aras Oidhreacht and Chlár last April to show a preliminary clay model of the bust of the statue to some of Willie’s old neighbours. The neighbours unanimously approved the likeness achieved by the sculptor.

Summer school director Harry Hughes admitted people in Miltown have been talking about a statue of Willie Clancy for years.

“To go back 40 years ago, when Willie Clancy died, the first discussions when people were talking about commemorating him, they were talking in terms of a statue or something in that nature.

“It turned out to be the summer school, and  that worked well too but I’m glad they’re going back to the idea of the statue and they’re coming close to that realisation. The bust is the first step, the statue is the next step.

“Few enough would have had access to a public place where Willie Clancy’s features would be. I think that’s important too now, here they can see the physical realisation of the man once the statute is finished,” he said.