Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 13 February 2025

Making an Irish Free State City – The BBC Interview with Fr O’Flynn

Some of those who began their acting careers at the Cork Shakespearean Company’s Loft became household names, such as Monica Murphy, Joe Lynch, Niall Tóibín, Edward Golden, Chris Curran and Edward Mulhare (who went onto have a successful Hollywood career).  Fr O’Flynn carried on gallantly, holding classes in the Loft, producing plays down the years at various venues and appearing in Sunday concerts. In addition, in 1946, Fr O’Flynn was made Parish Priest of Passage West.

In 1960, Hywel Davies of the BBC visited Fr O’Flynn at The Loft to make a half-hour documentary on his life called, It Happened to Me, produced by James Buchan. Mr Buchan noted of Fr O’Flynn: “I have met many great humanitarians in the course of doing documentary programmes for television, but Father O’Flynn was the greatest of them all What impressed us all about him was his tremendous love of his fellow-man as well as for God. To us he epitomised the Christian”.

Raymond Smith in his book Father O’Flynn – The Well of Love denotes that the 30 minute documentary was televised on Tuesday night, 17 January 1961. It showed Fr O’Flynn taking a Shakespearean production class in The Loft. An estimated 3 ½ million BBC viewers are said to have watched the programme.

The programme opened with children playing ring-a-ring-o’-roses in a street in the Shandon area and there were many scenes taken in The Loft – the old hay loft above Linehan’s Sweet Factory. The programme showed an amazing improvement after six weeks in a young man who was hardly able to say his own name at the beginning, but who finally declaimed a lengthy Shakespearean passage admirably.

Schoolchildren and grown-ups were shown in excerpts from Shakespearean plays. The programme also included a recital by Fr O’Flynn’s school choir, showing his authority on Irish language and Irish music. There was a warm tribute from Gus Healy, who told Mr Davies that but for Fr O’Flynn insisting on his doing principal and minor parts in Shakespeare he would not have had the confidence to go into public life and would probably never have done so.

The programme created a sensation. Fr O’Flynn received hundreds of letters of congratulations and hundreds asking for help with their stammer. Letters asking for advice poured into him from across Ireland, Britain and even from the Channel Islands. They came from people of all religious beliefs. Raymond Smith outlines that one letter from an Aberdeen housewife: “It is good to know that such men as you live in this trouble world of ours”.

Some people asked if they could come to Cork see him and no one who came was turned away. A British doctor wrote that he was so impressed by what he had seen that he was sending over a boy who had. bad stammer.

Fr O’Flynn tirelessly devoted himself to helping the people who wrote to him. Raymond Smith recalls that one evening a well-known Cork journalist, Larry Lyons, told him that he was on the way to Passage West to gather material for a special article for The Guardian on Fr O’Flynn. He suggested that Raymond come along.

When Raymond and Larry called at his house, Raymond recalls finding Fr O’Flynn him sitting in his famous old armchair in front of a blazing fire the sitting room replying to a letter from a Scottish housewife whose brother had a speech defect. Raymond’s eye was immediately caught by the big bundle of letters, divided into two piles those already answered and those yet to be answered. Fr O’Flynn noted; “It’s so easy to show how stammers can be cured but so hard to put it in writing…People are in need of help and we must give it to them”.

Raymond in his account continues to outline that any money enclosed was immediately sent back. In addition, money was sent for special prayers by people, even non-Catholics, who had been deeply moved by the television programme. In particular there was one pound note which Fr O’Flynn could not return, for all that was enclosed with it was a covering note that read simply: “From a black Ulster Protestant”. Fr O’Flynn confessed to Raymond afterwards more than once that he cherished that note most of all and he carried it with him to his death bed. Unconsciously he felt he had broken down the barriers that divide for “his business was with universal humanity and not with a fragment of it”.

Inspired during his visit to Passage Raymond Smith also outlines in his book that he was the person who pushed Fr O’Flynn in the penning of a series of articles in the Sunday Independent setting out ideas on how to cure impediments. Raymond was staff representative for Independent Newspapers Ltd in the Cork Office at the time, having just returned from his first trip to The Congo.

In his book on Fr O’Flynn he noted; “Going down to Passage, I had no intention taking on such a heavy task for, looking back on it no more sweat and toil went into that series than into anything ever I did in my journalistic career. And yet in the end it was a labour of love…The rain-swept road to Passage West that night became as it were the road to Damascus. Father O’Flynn made such a deep impression upon me during that first meeting that I came away a disciple, intent lifting from his shoulders, if I could, some of the burden of answering all those letters. For then he could refer those seeking advice to the newspaper series rather than try to reply to each letter individually”.

On 18 January 1962 – almost on the first anniversary of his famous television appearance – Fr O’Flynn passed away.  After his death, the Cork Shakespearean Company continued the work that he had started. It is still going strong in the present day. In 2024, the Company celebrated their centenary.

Caption:

1291a. Fr O’Flynn with Hywel Davies, BBC 1960 (source: Raymond Smith’s Father O’Flynn – The Well of Love).