- Culture
- 31 Oct 16
One of Galway's great characters, Mark Kennedy, died last week. But there was far more to the man – and his history – than even those who knew, and loved, him might have been aware. He gave a rare interview to Hot Press’ Olaf Tyaransen in the recent past – at least in part with an eye to posterity.
Mark Kennedy strolls into Galway’s House Hotel exactly on time for our mid-afternoon appointment, places his trademark beige, badge-festooned, hat on the table, and orders a sparkling mineral water from a passing waitress. Speaking in a gravelly American drawl, the 78-year-old Galwegian explains that he had been in two minds about showing up for this interview.
“One's own story is never interesting to one's own self,” he muses. “But I was thinking about talking to you, Olaf, and I very nearly decided not to… and I'll tell you why. I have a sort of dread of any kind of celebrity.”
He practically spits out the word. “I just can't bear the thoughts of it. It bothers me immensely. Even at the minimal level of local anything. But that aside, what made me decide to speak to you was that I was thinking about a story that I thought I'd tell you. It's a story about when I worked in Hollywood...”
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We’ll get to his Hollywood years in a little while, but first it needs to be said that, whether he likes it or not, Mark Kennedy is already – or at least has previously been – something of a celebrity. Many years ago, during his brief acting career, he did the rounds of Canadian radio and TV chat shows alongside his leading lady in a theatrical production, the legendary Tippi Hedren.
Closer to home, he has featured regularly in the Galway press, and occasionally the nationals, over the years, most recently for his campaigning work in establishing the Celia Griffin Famine Memorial Park on the outskirts of the city.
He’s even better known as a man around and about his hometown. Always wearing a neatly pressed suit, dark shades and headphones (he’s a big heavy metal fan), he looks like a Doonesbury character brought to life. He’s popular with young local music fans, too. There aren’t too many old age pensioners regularly spotted grooving in the Roisin Dubh.
Older Galwegians will recall a different, rather less respectable, character. When I first encountered Mark, more than 20 years ago, he was seriously struggling with alcoholism and living rough on the streets. Since getting sober and pulling himself out of that trough, he’s made documentaries, earned a degree from NUIG, and has publicly campaigned on various local and national causes.
Despite being highly articulate and possessing an obviously sharp mind, he tends to occasionally ramble with his storytelling. So let’s just sift through the quotes and the memories, and start at the very beginning…
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Patrick Joseph Mark Kennedy – “My family call me PJ, and everyone else calls me Mark” – was born in Galway on April 14th, 1937. “I was born into a very beautiful family called the Kennedys of New Road,” he recalls. “I was raised by my grandparents until I was 10. At that time, it wasn't uncommon for married people to go back to their respective houses because accommodation was terrible. My grandfather was a civil servant and had seven daughters and two sons. It was a beautiful environment to grow up in.”
At the age of 10, he found himself transplanted to the rougher side of town. “My mother was given a house in Bóthar Mór on the condition that she look after her mother. It was a terrible culture shock to me because it was peculiar mixture of people who couldn't speak English – they were first generation Connemara people in the city -–and ‘tinkers’, as we called them. So it was this incredible hotchpotch of people and I found it a bit intimidating, actually.”
The experience proved formative. “In me, there are two people,” he says. “There's what I call the New Road boy, who is very nice and respectful of authority and all the rest of it. Then there's the Bóthar Mór boy. whose bottom line is, 'Who the fuck are you looking at?' I have a struggle with those two people up to this day.”
He attended St Brendan’s School until the age of 13. “We were propagandized into believing that Brian Ború started the IRA and all that bollocks, and given a totally false view of history. I wasn't told anything about the Civil War. Nothing.”
He pauses for a moment, when asked if he would describe his childhood as happy. “Well, I did see a lot of violence and anger and drunkenness, and I had never seen that,” he considers. “Was it a happy childhood? I think had it not been for the first 10 years of my life, which had been unequivocally happy, I'd dread to think what my life might have been. I knew that what I was experiencing in the raw environment of Bóthar Mór, I knew there was something else besides that. I was very self-aware, very self-conscious, spent a lot of time by myself. I wasn't any good at sports, even though I tried to be. I was conscious, very early, of what girls were for. I was a bit isolated but happy as a person who went dancing and jiving and all that.”
Having left school at the age of 13-and-a-half, he worked at a variety of menial jobs around town. “I worked in places like Corbett's, a little shop assistant kid getting kicked around by people, and Hunter's, the pram factory. I was a child slave, as a lot of us were. It wasn't for me. I did have a job for a time as an usher at the Savoy Cinema, though, which I loved. My mother had been there before me.”
He eventually joined the army, but that wasn’t for him either. It was, however, where he first started drinking. “I was 17 when I joined the Free State Army, as it was called then, and straightaway I was addicted to it. Instantly. It gave me very good times… and very bad times, too.”
He received a two-week prison sentence for attacking a corporal. “I got 14 days in Arbour Hill, which was a serious, serious thing. I'd never been on a train, man! There were 208 cells in that prison, but only eight prisoners and we had to clean out those cells every Friday. Happily for me, I was only there two Fridays.”
Having left the army, he took the mail boat to the UK at 19. Soon after arriving there, he met and married a Sligo woman. They went on to have four children, two of whom died in infancy. Today his adult daughters live in the US.
Although he found a job in a London brokerage, that kind of lifestyle didn’t really suit. “I have a sort of vocation for remaining free of obligation to employers or being a wage slave or anything like that,” he smiles. “I’ll do anything if it’s a vocational, free-and-for-fun thing. I have to be free of being beholden to any institution. Now this is a hard road… I paid a high price for that.”
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Mark continued drinking heavily in London, but had managed to quit the booze by the time he washed up in Canada, more than a decade later. “I emigrated to Canada in 1966 with my then wife – beautiful woman – and my child. We ended up in a hideous place called Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. My reason for being there was that I had a friend in London who had a friend there who said, 'We'll have a house for you'. We got there and there was nothing. I was wandering around looking for jobs. I'd had a job at a brokerage in London for five years so I knew the 9 to 5 trip, and I knew it wasn't for me.”
He had occasionally acted with an amateur theatre group while living in London. In Canada, he managed to blag a lead role in the stage version of A Hatful of Rain, starring alongside Tippi Hedren, famous from Hitchcock’s The Birds.
“She turns up, we're rehearsing and she's very stiff and weird. It was known that she wasn't an actress, she was a model. It was the first thing she'd tell you herself.
“One day, when rehearsals had gone very badly, we were sitting together on a couch and she said, 'I'm not doing very well, Mr Kennedy, am I?'. She really wasn't sure of herself. It was very touching to see that. I asked if she had ever been pregnant. She said she had, with her daughter Melanie [Griffith] which I didn't know at the time. I said, 'Well, just act as you did then' – and she was brilliant, she got incredible notices.”
As it happened so did he, but his heart wasn’t in acting. “I get these fabulous reviews and it's just confounding me and I'm thinking, 'I hate this. I hate acting, I can't bear it'. I used to be sick to my stomach, but the minute I got onstage I was alright. A very strange thing. A friend, Richard Basehart, told me later that he had the same feeling and that he wanted to give up acting all his life but couldn't. That's another story.
“Anyway, A Hatful of Rain was written by an actor/writer called Michael V. Gazzo; he’s the guy who kills himself at the end of The Godfather. He'd written this play about men who had returned from the Korean War and were hooked on morphine. I was the guy hooked on morphine and my wife was played by Tippi Hedren, who had done The Birds and the whole Hollywood trip with Hitchcock.
“Her husband, Noel Marshall, knew a lot of agents and managers and he manipulated everybody, but I liked him. He called me to his hotel room before the play opened, and said, 'You've probably noticed that my wife can't act'. I didn't answer that. He said, 'You've been a help to her and I appreciate it so if you give her as much help as you can, she's out of work and blackballed in Hollywood, this could be a new start for her'.
“So she and I played together in this play for about two weeks. We both got good notices and went on the chat shows on TV. Tippi wasn't very good at chatting so I kind of held her up that way. That's how I got to Hollywood.”
A successful film producer, Marshall convinced Mark and his family to move to Hollywood. “He thought I could write. I don't know why he thought that. Americans think that if you have any verbal facility at all, this means you can write. Noel said, 'Come with us'. We lived in their house for three months.”
Through Marshall’s contacts, Mark landed a studio job almost immediately. “I got it in at the top,” he recalls. “The day I got there, I had a contract given to me by MGM in the form of a man called Buddy Ebsen who was a producer as well as an actor – lovely man – he was in The Beverly Hillbillies for years. He was better known as a dancer, he'd worked with Shirley Temple when she was a child and all that. Remarkable man, wonderful man.”
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Although he’d landed on his feet, Mark Kennedy wasn’t really a Hollywood animal. “Almost the minute I got to Hollywood, I didn't like it,” he recalls. “I just felt creepy about it. I thought, 'This is not the place for me'. Part of what I was asked to do was to write speeches for celebrities who were supporting a dreadful man called Sam Yorty, who was at that time a three-time mayor of Los Angeles. He'd previously been the chief of police. Some of the people I was asked to write for – Buddy Ebsen was one of them, Edward G. Robinson was another, both supporters of Yorty's. There were several others, too.
“That was part of what I was asked to do. So in a sense I was on the inside straightaway, but I knew I didn't belong there. I think we live in two worlds – at least I do, I can't speak for other people. I live in the world of the mind – brain – and I live in the world of the hunch, of the intuition. And I always know when a thing is not for me, always. I can never quite articulate why it isn't for me, I only know after I've jumped ship. I never know before I jump why I'm doing so.”
Despite his reservations, he stayed there for several years. His job had its perks. “Part of my freedom in Hollywood was that I could wander around any studio I wanted to; I just put my name on the gate and they let me in. Having worked in the Savoy cinema as a boy, it was a childhood fairytale kind of thing. I saw Fred Astaire one day, in the distance between two stage sets dancing his way towards me! I didn't believe it. My mother loved him of course – 'That man!' So when he got towards me I said, 'Nice going, Mr Astaire' and he said, 'Yes, I've been doing it for a long time!'
“There were lots of those lovely things,” he continues. “Another day I was standing on the set of some series that Barbara Stanwyck was in; a Western series. I noticed her looking at me, quite a lot actually. She came over to me and she said, 'Are you Irish?' and I said, 'Yes, I am', she said, 'Irish Irish?' and I said, 'Yes, that's right, Irish Irish…' She said, 'It was an Irish son of a bitch that broke my heart… but I wouldn't have lived without him'. She was a lovely, lovely woman.”
Unfortunately, Hollywood life had many downsides. He was contracted to adapt a little known Liam O’Flaherty novel for the screen. “Those moments, I loved all that. What I didn't love was when I was writing my script for Buddy that I had to turn up every Friday for what were called 'script conferences'. The script concerned a book that Liam O'Flaherty had written called The Jackboot in Ireland. Any time I mention it to people, they don't know about it, but he did write this book about German agents in Ireland.
“Now, how I happened to be writing a script about it was I was with Buddy one day when I was writing a speech for him for Yorty, and I began to tell him this story about the Germans, the Abwehr sending agents into Ireland, most of whom were captured straight away but there was one who wasn't. Buddy was breaking his bollocks laughing because this man from the Abwehr was supposed to be met by IRA people, but he wasn't, so he ended up living with tinkers and didn't quite know where he was. It's an extraordinary story.
“So I freely adapted the book and part of it was that I had him check into a B&B where there was already an English agent in residence. Both of them knew that the other was an agent, but they don't want to fuck each other's gig up, because they don't want to go anywhere else. The deal with Buddy was I got $10,000 to sign and $600 a week, as I recall.”
It was serious money at the time. “Well, I thought it was ridiculous!” he laughs. “Why is he giving me this money because I told him a funny story? The pressure of having to write the pages was just horrible, but I have a kind of a gift for writing. But I don't like to write. I hate it, actually, but I will write if I get paid for it and I was getting paid for it. Now, I don't know if you have been to script conferences but there's always some little bollocks there who has to put in his tuppence ha'penny because he's gotta make his mark, and he's gonna make his mark by fucking up Mark – me! I never liked that. I hated all that stuff, but I knew that that was the game that you were going to have to play if you were going to succeed here.”
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As so often happens in Hollywood, that film was never produced. Mark wasn’t credited on the only script of his that was. “I wrote a screenplay for Noel called Roar, which he made. It bombed. Look it up, you'll see. It cost $17 million - all of Tippi's money, basically, and it bombed (It recouped just $2 million – OT). Now that wasn't the script that I wrote that bombed, I have to say.”
Marshall didn’t just rewrite the script, he also directed and, together with Hedren and their daughter Melanie, starred in Roar (which famously took over a decade to make). “He rewrote it. Not only that, he starred in the film! He was a crazy person, a pill-popper. He was from a Chicago family and three of his brothers had been shot dead in the street. There are a lot of kids in Hollywood like that, you know, 'I'm gonna make it big!'
“Last time I saw her, I came down to visit LA in 1974 and I visited the set of Roar. Tippi's a very uptight woman, she wasn't warm, but you knew at the same time that she appreciated any act of kindness. That was the last time I saw her, and she was nearly killed by a lion afterwards, actually.”
The pressures of making the film – during which his wife and daughter, along with numerous cast and crew members, were injured by wild animals – also ended Marshall’s marriage to Hedren. “It all ended badly. They got divorced, he was court-ordered not to appear within 500 yards of her. It was a messy, dirty, dirty business. Thank god, she seems to have come through it and has made her name as an environmentalist in the preservation of lions and all that stuff. She owns this beautiful valley in Northern California and lives there, as far as I know.”
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Meanwhile, Mark’s own marriage had broken up and he had gotten involved with a young American poetess. “My first wife and I are divorced, amicably, happily and we remain friends to this day, thank god. I love her dearly and I think she has a lot of affection for me, so that worked out beautifully. And then there was my second wife, who is deceased now. I met her in 1969 on the day of the Moon Landing. She and I thought we should have landed with the men, because that's where we were!”
Although they had a son and daughter, that marriage didn’t ultimately last either. “Yeah, but you know, people have to fill in the blank spaces,” he shrugs. “I'm not going to go into why my marriages failed and who was the villain and who wasn't. There was no villain, as it happened, because in my case I think both marriages floundered due to economics. I wasn't willing to sell out. 'Sell out what? What the fuck are you talking about?', people say to you. Sell out the right to say to myself and to everybody else, 'I'm not doing that. It's creepy’.
“I'll give you an example,” he continues. “Noel and I had terrible rows about a film called The Exorcist, which Noel was the executive producer on and I, as his assistant, was supposed to have some say on. William Peter Blatty, who was a horrible man – I thought, he might not be – and a very clever man, was writing the script. He pre-sold it sight unseen to Bantum Books and they'd given him a $200,000 advance. On the strength of this, he'd sold an option on it to a producer – whose name escapes me – who produced Slaughterhouse-Five. He sold the rights to him for $2 million and he sold it on to Warner Brothers for $6 million. Nobody had seen the script, it was a novel. Bantum Books refused to publish it first. Blatty wrote the screenplay and brought it over to Noel and me, and it was 480 pages long. The golden rule in Hollywood is 139 pages, setting aside the technical stuff. There was a lot of technical stuff here, so it was two scripts, really. “
“Noel said that he didn't have time to read it, so gave it to me to take home and read over the weekend and write a report on Monday. I went home to my wife and I began to read it, and I could not read it. It was pretentious, shallow shit exploring every pseudo-Catholic myth about exorcisms. He told lies, saying it was based on a girl in upstate New York and we knew they were lies. My friend Jack MacGowran died on the set and they tried to make out that the Devil killed him and all that bollocks, all that horrible shit.
“At this point, I said to her that I couldn't read it so she read it. She had a literature degree and she read it and said, 'It's shit'. I went in on Monday and Noel asked for the report and I told him that there was no report to be written, that I thought it was shit and so did my wife. He said that he thought it was shit, too. So we were in agreement.”
Even so, Marshall stayed on as executive producer and The Exorcist proved a massive box office smash. “Blatty had hit on a thing, an ingrained terror in people, which is fear of the Devil. They pretend they don't believe in the Devil and possession and all that, but he was very lucky because he hit into a moment in which people were ready to have the shit scared out of them by the proposition that there is a Devil and he can possess people. There's a lot of evidence to support that, actually, but not in the way that Blatty presented it.”
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Mark and his new woman decided to get out of California. They moved to the San Juan Islands, in north-western Washington, and spent the next few years growing their own vegetables and living more or less self-sufficiently on Orcas Island.
“Yes, we got married and we had two children together. My daughter is now an arts administrator in Liverpool, and my son is an academic here in NUIG. So anyway, finally, my head is telling me, 'You don't belong here' – whether in Hollywood or the business executive side. What the gut wants to do is move. Geographical change. 'Things will be different if you go somewhere else', right? But I knew that I could not go to a place where there was a repetition of Hollywood or where I had previously gotten a job like the brokerage. So, on Orcas Island I had the long hair, the whole thing. I worked in the woods, built my own cabin, planted my own vegetables.”
Not wanting their children to be educated in America, Mark and his wife took their young family back to Galway in the late Seventies. “Her ancestors were from Kerry – the McCarthys – and she always had a soft spot for Ireland. We moved into my mother’s old house around 1977.”
Thanks to his old Galway contacts, and impressive new American accent, he quickly landed an executive position at a prominent local business. Although he held down that job for a number of years, with many lunches and dinners to attend, he eventually renewed his disastrous love affair with the drink.
“I never drank when I was in Hollywood, and I didn't smoke dope,” he says. “I stopped drinking in 1961 and I resumed drinking in about 1986. I'm not quite sure. I'm never quite sure. This is a tricky one. Why does a person resume an addiction after a person has beaten it, essentially? I only believe I am an alcoholic when I drink. I don't believe that there is such a thing as an alcoholic personality. I absolutely disavow that.
“The reason that people drink is that it's a solution. It's not a fucking problem. It's only a problem for the people who are watching it, and human beings use whatever stops the cold wind inside blowing, man… and so they should!”
It took a few years for his life to spiral completely out of control. This time he went way down. Having lost the job and separated from his wife, he eventually wound up spending five years living rough on the streets of Galway.
He quit the drink, cold, one winter’s night in 1992 following a sudden epiphany. “I was walking down Church Lane one evening with a bottle of Buckfast and I was looking for some of the guys to have a drink with,” he recalls. “Street guys, homeless guys, don't drink alone. One or two do, but it's rare. They're always looking for companionship because in companionship there's safety. You're going to sleep out at night, it's a terrible thing because nice middle class bank workers will come to you in the middle of the night and kick you in the ribs while you sleep.
“It came to me as loud as I am hearing myself now: 'Okay man, this is it. Is this the legacy that you want to leave your children and your grandchildren? That you died drunk and disgraced in the streets of Galway?' Damascus, right? I found myself putting the bottle of Buckfast on the ledge and walking away from it and I had two years of absolute hell. Absolute hell.”
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Mark Kennedy was ultimately saved by what he calls an ‘Eskimo’. “I have to tell you a little story first about the guys in the tundra in North Alaska,” he says. “They’re in a shebeen telling each other about how they'd had terrible times and blah blah blah, and one guy said he had been saved by God. Another guy interrupted and said, 'This is a load of bollocks. There is no God. I have absolute proof that there is no God. I was lost in the tundra, my dogs had died and I'd fucking eaten them. I prayed and prayed and prayed and nothing happened'. And one of the guys said, 'How come you're here?' and he said, ‘Some fucking Eskimo turned up in a fucking jeep!’ Now I believe in the Eskimos, you see. I believe that people turn up. In my case, one of the Eskimos was Niall Rivers.”
Niall Rivers – aka Niall Hughes – was an artist and filmmaker from Moate, who had also wound up living on the streets of Galway for a time.
“Niall had worked on the streets of San Francisco as a street worker with Dangerous George, a black guy, about consciousness raising, not about making up organisations. I was going through absolute hell. Nothing works for me. It don't work when I'm sober and it don't work when I'm drunk. Now what is it? But my old friend Eddie's words came to me again. 'You've run out of moves, man, and you're panicking'.
“Eddie's thing was to wait when you run out of moves. Wait for a fucking Eskimo. Can you dig it, man? Somebody will come along and say something to you. I was blessed in my street life with my companions. They've cleared all that out of Galway now. Niall incited in me the ethical, moral person I knew myself to be and we started to make documentaries. Socially conscious documentaries.”
Together with Niall (who passed away in 2007), Mark made a series of low budget documentaries between 1993 and 1995. “We made one called Clear The Streets,” he recalls. “ When we made it, we didn't know what to do with it. It won the all-Ireland no budget documentary thing. Then we made one called Horselands, and gave a copy to Allen Ginsberg, another great awakener.”
They encountered the infamous Beat poet during his appearance at the Cúirt Literary Festival in 1995, and made an offbeat documentary entitled Getting to Ginsberg about it.
“As a person Ginsberg was a wipeout, a promiscuous fuckin' lunatic, but that's not what we're talking about here,” Mark says. “Character assassinating people is not what helps people. What helps people is looking into one another for the goodness and kindness. Now, there’s a scene in that film where we were all stood outside the door of the Atlanta Hotel, and Niall was trying to put words in his mouth, and Ginsberg said, 'If you want to put words in my mouth, what can I say? Resistance implies that you have already lost. Resistance incites resistance. Anger incites anger', and he goes on for about five minutes… and then you realise, this is why this fucking pederast is such a great poet!
“These are people who were brought to consciousness by the likes of Ginsberg and by the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco. Niall Rivers was of that persuasion. What we did here was social work. We filled out forms for immigrants from across the way, but we did it on an individual basis. Stuff like that.”
Clean, sober and newly invigorated, Mark got involved in various campaigns and social causes over the following few years. “I thought, 'Yes, I know what pleases me now – where I can do things for free and for fun, there's no restraint on me',” he says. “And then suddenly I was called for jury duty and the letter said if you're under 18 or over 65, please sign this to disqualify myself. I thought, 'Will I fuck!' so I went to war with [the help of] Age Action. I went to the Dáil and they came with me and I canvassed all the leaders. It's a terrible place. The fuckin' vibe in that place is something awful. It was the Duke of Leinster's house: what are they doing in there? Because of that socially conscious action, that was amended.”
Not that everybody appreciated his efforts. “And wouldn't you know it, the week after it was amended, some fucker pulled me up on the street and gave out to me for 'getting' him to do jury service. I said, 'Hey man, read the fucking thing, would you? You can do it or not do it. You're fucking free to do as you please!’ So we won that little war.”
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Mark won other subsequent wars, too. Undoubtedly, his greatest success was the establishment of the famine memorial park. “I have a taste for that. I love that kind of thing. I heard about a Volvo [Ocean] race that costs €6 million – and I thought, this is a port, through which hundreds of thousands of starving refugees passed, much like what's happening in Libya now, more or less, except compared to that our traffic is luxury. I found out there had been four attempts to do it already and they didn't succeed.”
It was another Eskimo who gave him the impetus. “One day I was invited to a book launch in Kenny's Bookshop. It was Dickie Byrne's book, Tell Them Who You Are. It was pissing out of the heavens and I thought, ‘No way am I going out there, no way!’ Finally I decided I would go and I went and listened to the talk. William Henry came over to me. I didn't know him, but I had been thinking of a famine memorial and I had said it to him because I thought, ‘Well, he's a local historian who knows about that’. It turned out he was writing a book on the famine right at that moment and he showed me the report on Celia Griffin's death.”
Celia Griffin was a six-year-old child who died of starvation on the streets of Galway in 1847. “We needed to reach into this darkness and strike some kind of the light. The light, to me, was: we rescue Celia from this anonymity where children were not mentioned. During the famine, things became so bad that people initially did help, and go to bat for each other; then they began to abandon each other; then they began to abandon their young people. Not all of them, of course. But I thought the Irish holocaust needed memorialising.”
Although getting on in years, he feels there may be more to come. “Well, I kind of go with the flow,” he shrugs. “Niall was the Eskimo to begin with, then William Henry when I met him. A couple of months ago I got a phone call from someone in an organisation called Afri, a charity that works in Africa for famine victims. They asked me if it would be alright to come plant a tree for Celia in the park and have a little ceremony, which was lovely. The belief is that the tree won't last because of the salt, but we did it anyway. As I say, whenever I ran out of moves, I came up with another move. As my old friend Eddie said, 'Don't move, wait'.”
Is that what he’s doing at the moment?
“Yeah!” he laughs, reaching for his hat. “And you might be an Eskimo, Olaf, I don't know. My ambition is to reach 80 in two years time and to go to America to visit my beautiful daughter, and her daughters, and talk about the Eskimos in our lives who have come and shown us the way. Every time when I was about to 'give up' – the final move is to give up… but now you have to figure out how to give up. You can't just sit there, can you?”
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Mark Kennedy didn’t quite make it that far. He died last week at the age of 79. Among those who attended the funeral of this truly remarkable man was President Michael D. Higgins. It was a very moving occasion, made all the more poignant by the feeling that Galway had just lost one of its great characters.
Mark will be sadly missed by his loving family ¬– daughters Deirdre, Serena and Maura, son Miles, and sisters Bernadette and Philomena, as well as his grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and relatives. And, of course, by his many friends. Galway will not be the same without him.