From IrishTimes.com

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The keepers of the trad flame

BEING THERE: With more than 120 years of storytelling and music behind them, Mick 'Micil' Quinn and Sam Andrews are happy their treasure troves are still loved, writes Róisín Ingle.

DOWN IN Mullaghbawn in the belly of south Armagh lives a man called Mick Quinn, a storyteller of great renown. And in that village, nestled in the shadow of Slieve Gullion, Mick Quinn, known to all as Micil, spends his days making up stories and songs in his head. He tells these stories to audiences at festivals in Dublin and in Wexford and in Leitrim and above in Scotland and below in London and across in America. Spend enough time in his company and you find yourself imitating the flow of his words, the rhythm of his stories. Like the one about the first ostrich in Mullaghbawn or the one about his father's Spanish ass, but especially the one about his sheepdog Ned and the time the aul pooch got shot in the head for falling in love with a dog that was way above his station.

At 82, with more than half a century of tale-telling behind him, Micil's version of this shaggy dog story is more polished. The Man that Shot the Dog is based on a real life event that happened around 15 years ago and the story won him first prize in 1993 at the All-Ireland fleadh in Clonmel.

As though it's the first time he has told it or as though he's just made it up on the spot, neither of which is actually the case, Micil stands in his kitchen in Mullaghbawn giving the background to the story of the time his sheepdog Ned had a romance with a neighbour's pedigree Labrador.

"The owner of the bitch was waiting for a pedigree sire but my dog went over and did the job, gave her a litter of puppies," he recalls. "But there was no need to shoot poor Ned just for making love. Have you ever had a dog? To shoot another man's dog is an awful thing, a terrible thing. There was nothing I could do at the time, so I composed a story to let out all the badness that was in me."

The "badness" in the story comes in the form of a colourful scattering of verbal invective, insults fired like so much buckshot at the man that shot the dog:

"May piles surround his big backside, like strawberries on their stalk,
And every time that he lifts that gun, his stomach it may balk,
And as he goes a-hunting over heather hills or bog,
May the diarrhoea skite, with all its might, from that man who shot the dog"

After that line, you can only pick at the fresh cherry scones Micil offers from a brown paper bag. The dog survived, incidentally, and lived to be 17 years old while the song was never off the radio. "It was the best thing that happened me," says Micil sitting down to slowly demolish a chicken curry dinner and explain the workings of the hiring fairs in "the hungry 1930s".