The Dreams of Paddy Flanagan: Song for man who found the Ardagh Chalice

A SPECIALLY composed song has been launched to commemorate Paddy Flanagan, one of the farm labourers who discovered the Ardagh Chalice 150 years ago.

And the seven-minute video accompanying the song “The Dreams of Paddy Flanagan” was launched to a capacity crowd at Neary’s Bar, Ardagh.

The song will also feature next month in an open-air drama The Last Druid telling the story of the Ardagh Chalice across 1000 years.

The song was written by Paul Moriarty and was inspired by his reaction to discovering that Paddy Flanagan died in the Newcastle West workhouse and was buried in a pauper’s grave in the nearby Famine Graveyard.

“When I read that in the story of the finding of the Ardagh Chalice, I was shocked,” he explained. And he felt very strongly that it was an injustice that the man who had helped restore one of Ireland’s leading national treasures was buried in an unmarked grave.

“I think it was an injustice,” he said. “I felt if I didn’t know, then many others didn’t know either.”

That feeling intensified following a visit to the National Museum where the name of Paddy Flanagan was not even mentioned in the information about the Ardagh Chalice. Paddy Flanagan and another man Joe Quinn  were working digging potatoes on the Widow Quinn’s land in September 1868 when they dug up the hoard, which included the chalice, a second chalice and a number of brooches.

Paul was particularly taken by Paddy Flanagan’s story and determined to do something about it. So he wrote a song.

“He would have had the typical dreams of any young man of the time and he thought all his dreams were going to come true when they found the hoard. Unfortunately, life had something else in store for him and he ended up in a pauper’s grave in Newcastle West,”

The song and video trace Paddy’s dream of a hearth and home of his own to the dying of the dream after the finding of the hoard for which he received  a pittance from the Widow Quinn. “For finders are not keepers,” as the song goes. The Widow though got £50 when she sold the hoard to the Bishop of Limerick, “whose holy nest was feathered” when he  in turn sold it on for £500.

The idea of the video is to generate interest in the open-air drama, The Last Druid which will take place on September 29 and 30.