Bøger af Pádraig Standún

"Stop The Tsunami" is the English language version of an Irish (Gaelic) novel published by Cló Iar-Chonnacht in An Spidéal in the West of Ireland. It tells the story of a couple on a mythical island called "The Western Isle" off the Atlantic coast. They have money to spend, some say from a lotto win, others from tunneling in Britain and the Middle East, they decide to invest in environmental projects to help save the island as well as the planet. Tom builds a wall on the clifftop to break the power of freak waves, He has a folk memory of a wave that swept fifteen men to their deaths on a neighbouring island more than a century ago. Róisín acquires land to cover with glass and provide fruits and vegetables for the island. Their two children live quite an is idyllic life, close to their grandfather whose wife is in a Nursing Home with dementia. She was the keeper of a thousand year old religious relic which she has forgotten where she left it. The children blame their dog, Topsy for eating the bone. Politics, religion, and the threat of extinction by a Tsunami dominate conversations on an island which can be seen as a microcosm of our fire and ocean threatened world. But wit and wisdom live there too.

¿Catacomb Church¿ is an English language version of a book first published in Gaelic (Irish) a decade ago as ¿Eaglais na gCatacómaí¿ by Cló Iar-Chonnacht. Some Irish writers have found religion, and Roman Catholicism in particular, to be stifling. Standún was the opposite. He loved the colours of vestments and stained glass windows, the smell of incense, the Bible stories told by local priest, Tommy Gibbons, whose melodious voice he still remembers as the voice of Jesus. Growing up in the late forties and fifties with no electricity, no running water, no indoor toilet, radio or television did not make for an unhappy childhood. There were books, left by a schoolteacher uncle who died young, Irish legends, English classics. Even the schoolteacher was imaginative. When the second Soviet Union sputnik was sent into outer space with the dog Laika on board in 1957, the school essay was: ¿I am a flea on Laikäs back on board the sputnik.¿ The world through the eye of an insect fascinated the future author. Could that now elephant sized flea still be out there?

Pádraig Standún has spent nearly half a century as a Roman Catholic priest in the Gaelic-speaking islands, highlands and coastlands of the West of Ireland. His articles reflect the changing seasons of the church year and their connection with nature. It is no coincidence that death is commemorated during winter¿s dying of the light and falling of the leaves. Resurrection takes place amid the bursting buds of spring, while the Holy Spirit arrives with lightning-tongues and thunder in May or June. Priesthood deals with life and death, tears of sorrow and of joy. Wit and wisdom are to be gleaned from the spirit of a people shaped by land, sea and mountain, people who refused to have their language taken out of their mouths.

Adrienne is an Irish artist who has come to live in Venice after the breakup of her marriage. She meets Giorgio, a water-taxi driver who happens to be a former Irish Republican sniper. His death was faked during the "Troubles" to take the heat off him and he was given a new identity. He is now an embarrassment to former colleagues in government in Northern Ireland, as well as being a target for a drugs gang whose leader he had 'taken out' in his sniping days."Close Far Away" is based on an Irish language novel, "I gCongar I gCein" published by Clo Iar-Chonnacht.