And Matt Wrote Stories Too (PDF)

The short stories of Matt Duggan, collected here for the first time, follow on neatly from the works of Shan Bullock of Crom and the world he portrays. They overlap in time and place with the stories of Bryan Gallagher of Derrylin. The stories, which were mostly published in the 1970s, reflect life in south Fermanagh in the previous hundred years. They are the stories of ordinary people living in a rugged but beautiful landscape. Matt Duggan knew the Derrylin area better than most. He travelled the roads and lanes and traversed the fields every day, meeting people as he did his daily round as a postman, in the early days on his bicycle and later in a van. He had time to observe and to think and his poems and songs for which he is best known were composed to the rhythm of the pedals. His stories are full of surprises, capturing as they do the events which shaped the otherwise quiet lives of the people. They also sympathetically portray a way of life that is gone and unknown to the younger generations and as such must be of interest to the historian and the social anthropologist.The stories have been placed the stories in a rough chronological order so that the reader can get a sense of how life evolved in the rural area around Derrylin in the 1870-1970 period. The shadow of the Great Famine still lies over the landscape in the first story and by the end of the book the Troubles are beginning to cast their grim shadow over the lives of the people. All these stories portray a way of life that has changed so much in recent times. Older rural readers will recall much of what is described here. For everyone else this book is a window into another world.