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First anniversary tribute

By Lolly Spence

It’s very hard to believe that a year has passed since Dr Éamon Phoenix died – made harder because his distinctive, beautiful voice still sounds so clearly in my head.

In the past year, Éamon’s memory has been kept alive through tributes and articles; by the setting up of a Foundation in his name; and in conversations with mutual friends who all share the loss. I’m honoured that Mark has asked me to share some thoughts today about my friendship with Éamon and in particular, our connection to Friar’s Bush graveyard.

It all began in 2008 when I wrote to “Dr Phoenix”, in my role as a producer in BBC NI. Éamon’s immediate and warm response led to our first (of many) coffees in a Botanic Avenue cafe. Little did I know then what adventures would follow, how I’d come to know and love his family as well as himself, and how significant a friend and mentor he would be to me.

We went on to deliver bus tours, make radio programmes, speak at public events and enjoy private lunches; and we walked together several times amongst the hallowed stones of Friar’s Bush, a place Éamon loved and where he taught me to ‘touch’ history.

I remember the first time we passed through the creaking gates. Éamon had borrowed a key from Gerry Ward, his friend who lived in the Gothic gatelodge, and now he and I stepped onto the frosted, mossy path, cocooned from busy, modern Stranmillis outwith the forbidding walls – entering a place where…

‘In ancient times, as peasants tell,
A friar came with book and bell
To chaunt his Mass each Sabbath morn
Beneath Strath-milis’ trysting thorn’.

“This,” said Éamon, “is Belfast’s most ancient Christian site and burial ground”. He watched to make sure that I appreciated the quality of ancient mystery which pervades the two-acre site – a place which goes back in time at least a thousand years to the days when an ancient monastery flourished here, where the ‘sweet streams’ of Stranmillis flowed through the dense forest of Cromac Wood.

The scene thus set, Éamon led me up the long, ice-crunching aisle to the friar’s grave – a round slab inscribed with the date AD 485 with three crude crosses; and a taller, pillar-stone less than a metre high and hoary with age. The round slab? Well, Éamon dismissed it as ‘pure Victoriana,’ attributing it to the well-meaning Belfast lawyer and historian, Francis Joseph Biggar of Ardrigh – a man who blended history and romance and wanted to associate Friar’s Bush with St Patrick.

The taller stone, however, was more suggestive of a holy water font. “Can you imagine,” Éamon asked me, “generations of fingers dipping into a holy water font here? Crossing themselves in the medieval church that stood on this site?” Almost subconsciously I found myself touching the stone – and touching history. This was Éamon’s magic: he engaged your mind in a multi-sensory way. I was no longer just touching an old stone: I was listening to the monastic bell summoning the early Christians of this place to worship. I was part of a bustling community of monks, observing our rites and rituals. I felt the history – and the mystery. Even now, as I’m writing this at my desk at home, I can remember Éamon and I standing at the friar’s grave, in the shadow of a skeletal tree, its foliage shed, and somehow I’m breathing again the crisp air.

Éamon and I continued then to weave our way through the serried rows of tombstones. He ‘conducted’ me – not just in the sense of leading me, but by weaving periods of history into our tour, as a conductor might bring in different parts of the orchestra. Here, he pointed out stones which brought us to Plantation times – “Here lyeth the body of John Gibson, son of Thomas Gibson of Belfast, 1717” ; and there, he drew my attention to the 1760 mausoleum of Charles Lennon, and thrilled me with tales of body-snatchers (see my other recent post). We dropped to our knees in the wet grass to sift about for an old metal plaque which he knew to be there; and we listened to the birdsong – entirely oblivious to city traffic.

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At a gnarled and mossy whitethorn tree, Éamon transported me to the penal era of the 18th century when the tiny and poor Roman Catholic population of Belfast and its neighbourhood, used to gather here – or at mass rocks – or in the shadows of other quiet, pre-Reformation sites to worship on Sabbath mornings, facing arrest and even execution. “Look up,” Éamon suggested, as he shared the legend of the hanging of a friar at Friar’s Bush in the early 1700s. “Could it have been here, just really above our heads, that he breathed his last?” I never see that old tree now, without imagining the early cleric who…..

… guarded by the grace of God.
Unharmed he went his weary road
Till of a darkling Lammas day
A stranger took his life away.

“Envisage the scene”, Éamon continued. “Picture people huddled in the ruins of the old monastic church, with someone keeping watch for the approaching Redcoats… The fear of arrest, persecution and even execution in one of Ireland’s darkest periods…..”

And as I pictured that, unsurprisingly, Éamon guided my thoughts to the 1798 Rebellion. We always wound up in 1798! I remember one time, over dinner, asking Éamon if he were able to travel back in time to any period, when would he most want to witness history. There was no hesitation. The last years of the 18th century fascinated him – that era when an alliance between Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter came to fruition in the birth of the United Irishmen. This was Belfast’s golden age of liberalism, radical politics and cultural renaissance – electrified by the revolutionary breezes gusting from America and later from France, and heralded by the rise of the Irish Volunteers.

To illustrate this, Éamon produced from his old and travel-worn briefcase, a print showing a view of Georgian Belfast, looking northwards from Friar’s Bush in 1780, with the Irish Volunteers drilling on ‘The Plains of Belfast’. The artist, John Nixon, depicted the growing Georgian town, its market-house, its parish church, and Cavehill in the background – while, to the front, “just here where we’re standing,” noted Éamon, was a Volunteer, rifle on the ground, chatting to a gentleman and lady with a dog. With his words, with the picture, Éamon led me back to a time when fires of joy were lit in Belfast to celebrate the fall of the Bastille in faraway France.

Memories of Éamon

I could write for hours here; but it crosses my mind that I will save some thoughts and memories for another time – for example, memories of stories Éamon told me at the Plaguey Hill when the ‘ceol na bacach’ was heard throughout Belfast during ‘An Gorta Mor’ and the starving peasantry poured into the town – only to make a final journey in death-carts, to this grim mound where as many as 2000 bodies were interred.

Or memories of how Éamon guided me amongst the grave markers of the 19th and 20th centuries, resurrecting in words the people who lay beneath – from Barney Hughes to prominent vintners and newspaper men; and leading my thoughts from the period of the Anti-Repeal riots to the emergence of a more polarised town struggling with Home Rule and sectarian differences.

Our visits to Friar’s Bush let Éamon shine – a historian, a guide, a balanced and liberal seanchaí, a friend who generously opened his own vault of knowledge to give me history from headstones; and a man of great humour who couldn’t help himself trying to give me a little scare with his ghost story at the Plaguey Hill. Every time I visit Friar’s Bush, Éamon will always be as present and real to me, as the ‘people’ he introduced me to, who lie beneath this beautiful, tranquil gods-acre.

If I miss Éamon so much, how painfully worse for Alice, Mary-Alice, Nicole, Stuart and his loving family. To them, with much love, I dedicate these thoughts today.