Connemara is both a place of temporary refuge and a landscape the couple seriously considers making home. During a period of renewed literary success, John McGahern and Madeline Green rented a house near Clifden, lived among local neighbours, and explored the coast. Their eventual decision not to settle there turns on a contrast between the ocean that drew McGahern and the inland country that felt more deeply familiar to them both.

Arrival and temporary home

After McGahern’s first story collection, Nightlines, was published and won him a substantial prize, he and Madeline were living in Paris. He asked whether she would consider trying Ireland for a year, with the understanding that they could leave if she disliked it. Through a friend, they found a house to rent by the sea near Clifden. The arrangement brought them back to Ireland without making their return irrevocable.

Their life there was shaped by proximity and informality. They made friends, drank with neighbours in local bars, walked or cycled from place to place, and readily found lifts. For trips farther afield they took the bus to Galway. McGahern was lent a boat and began fishing in the ocean, so the rented house became a base for both village sociability and a new coastal routine.

Publicity and local life

The couple had returned without telling McGahern’s family. One evening at the Pier Bar, they found the locals excitedly reading a Dublin newspaper whose headline announced that McGahern had taken a cottage in Connemara. The publicity unsettled him because it meant his sisters and father would learn he was back through the paper. The locals, by contrast, were pleased: the article praised the beauty of the area and mentioned notable people living nearby. The same notice that exposed McGahern’s private return served as a flattering public portrait of the place.

The following summer in Cleggan was hot and dry. Army tents stood above the strand during military exercises, while a marquee in the middle of the village hosted a week of dancing. McGahern and Patrick O’Malley fished with pots, nets, and lines. Their catch ranged from lobsters, crayfish, and crab to salmon and sea trout, as well as pollock, mackerel, mullet, and rock fish. Patrick sold the salmon; they kept the sea trout. Madeline seldom joined them when they fished with lines, but often came along when they lifted or set pots.

They took visitors out by boat and sometimes made the hazardous trip to Inishboffin on their own. The engine could overheat and stop; when it did, they had to let the boat drift until it cooled. The coast offered work and pleasure, but its excursions also depended on calm weather and a functioning engine.

The proposed purchase

McGahern often helped Patrick work the bog after finishing his own work. Patrick was proud, generous, quick, and competitive; seeing McGahern move through the turf quickly, he suspected him of cheating. McGahern’s earlier experience working turf made him more practised than Patrick realized. In the course of their work, McGahern told him that he and Madeline were thinking of buying land and settling in Ireland.

Patrick immediately began looking for a property and found a house with twenty acres close to the village, most of the land running along the ocean. The solid, slated house stood beside the road, but its plan had been read the wrong way: its back faced the road and sea, while its front looked inland. Patrick had learned from a solicitor that the property could be bought for four thousand and could not be auctioned. He argued that the land alone was worth more, that bog came with it, and that the house could be improved or eventually sold to a tourist.

Madeline did not dislike the house itself. She could see that it could be made habitable, and she loved the setting and the fields beside the ocean. What troubled her was the prospect of living in a place she thought might become too fashionable. She was more drawn to the countryside inland, including the country where McGahern had grown up. McGahern would have been content to remain in Cleggan and felt the pull of the ocean, but the people, language, and landscape of his childhood were as familiar to him as breathing. He judged that acquiring such knowledge in a new place would take years.

Choosing inland

The couple decided against buying the house and fields. Patrick was not surprised when McGahern told him; he had already read Madeline’s reluctance in her face. He continued to look for places for them, not realizing that the obstacle had been the location rather than the house. In later years, when Patrick visited them in Leitrim, he was eager to return to the sea and to the activity he associated with it.

McGahern and Madeline instead searched among the small farms for sale in Leitrim. They found a low hill behind the Ivy Leaf Ballroom, with small fields and tall, thick hedges, restored and added to a stone cottage, and bought a few cows for the land. Connemara therefore remains a vivid alternative in their settlement story: McGahern could imagine making a life there, but the couple chose the inland landscape that better matched Madeline’s preference and McGahern’s intimate knowledge of home.