The Last of the Name

‘So whenever I die, they will know where to bury me. And after my day the grave will not be opened again, for I’m the last of the name’ Charles McGlinchey (1861-1954), weaver and tailor, lived his entire life on the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal. Never married, he outlived his brothers and sisters, none of whom left an heir and so he became ‘the last of the name’. On winter evenings in the 1940s and 1950s, McGlinchey would visit the local schoolmaster, Patrick Kavanagh, and talk about his life and times. Master Kavanagh kept a careful record of his friend’s words and thirty years later his son, Desmond, passed the handwritten manuscript to Brian Friel who edited it into its present form. Here then, thanks to the devotion of a schoolmaster and the editing of a master dramatist, is a voice that transports us to a period now beyond the grasp of living memory, telling a story that is at once autobiography, a compendium of folklore and a vivid account of the life and times of a particular community in the north-west of Ireland. This release will be followed by the audio book of Charles McGlinchey’s words, read by Sean McGinley.