Padraic Fiacc recalls attending a debate with Graham Reid and Medbh McGuckian:
I whisper to Graham – “I may be old fashioned but two men against one woman!”
“She’s not a woman,” says Graham.
“But if she’s not a woman what is she?”
“She’s a woman’s lib and if you cherish anything on you … and think of me too… tear right into her for a start!”
Padraic Fiacc, ‘It’s Me, Joe: From an Unpublished Autobiography’, in My Twentieth-Century Night-Life: A Padraic Fiacc Miscellany (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2009), pp. 149-57, (153-4).
McGuckian goes on to strike quite a blow to Reid about his own literary esteem.
Fiacc later describes a visit to the pub with Seamus ‘Tweeds’ Heaney who doesn’t like Fiacc’s poems because he doesn’t understand them (p. 155).
‘Tweeds’, of course, went on to be a Nobel Laureate and Oxford’s Professor of Poetry. So there may be hope for us all yet.
