Gearóid Ó Muilleoir’s speech launching ‘Surfing into Life on a Bathboard’
This is the text of Journalist Gearóid Ó Muilleoir’s speech launching Jake Mac Siacais's autobiography, Surfing into Life on a Bathboard, at St Mary's University College, August 10 2022
Dia daoibh, welcome everybody to the launch of Surfing into Life on a Bathboard, which is as unique a title as the author himself!
It’s hard to describe the effect this book will have on you. It’s many things: moving, informative, inspirational. But there is one thing we can agree on - it was written by an extraordinary person.
I think it’s important we recognise what Jake Mac Siacais brings to this community and indeed to this country. And I think it’s fair to say we have been very lucky to have someone of his calibre contributing to life in West Belfast.
There’s a word which I learned for the first time last year on the passing of the great Cumann Cluain Ard stalwart and singer Albert Fry - the headline of his obituary in the Andersonstown News described him as a polymath. I’m afraid if you don’t know what it means, then you’re not one! I had to look it up myself. Because it describes someone who knows a helluva lot about a helluva lot of things. A person who triumphs across many fields - a genius, really.
Jake can blush all he wants, but I’m in no doubt that he is the very definition of a polymath because throughout his life he’s managed to cram as much information into that head as is humanly possible by reading every book he could get his hands on.
And even when he was in prison and denied books, and the bible was the only reading material allowed in his cell, he devoured that. Not once, but five times from cover to cover, in Irish and English. Of course, Jake being Jake, he emerged from prison a steadfast agnostic!
We happened to start Queen’s University at the same time in 1985. He was just a few years older than me but already had experienced and learned more than I could possibly imagine.
I remember at Queen’s during classes in the Irish Department, while we teenagers sat at the back planning that evening's social life, the former prisoners would all be in the front row, diligently taking notes. They fully appreciated the value of an education they didn’t get first time round.
And I remember one day the class stopped in stunned silence when Jake corrected the lecturer - renowned scholar Professor Ruairí Ó hUiginn - who sort of froze at being corrected because he couldn’t quite believe it himself. He walked back to the board to correct the sentence he’d just written, shaking his head in wonder, muttering ‘Tá an ceart agat, Jake’, you’re right Jake. It was clear then to me that learning biblical Irish certainly had its benefits!
I remember retelling that story to Jake’s mum Rosie who I happened to meet on the street one day, and her face lit up with pride.
Soon after that time in class, a group of us were having a coffee with Jake in the Students’ Union Snack Bar, baby Orliath by his side, when I blurted out the question we all wanted to know: ‘How come you know so much about so many things Jake?’
And he revealed his secret - which I’m going to reveal to you now. It wasn’t just reading books, but reading multiple books at the same time. He said he had about eight on the go at that moment. ‘I have them all over the house,’ he told us. ‘As I move around, I read a few pages from each one.’
But I’ll say this: None of the myriad of books that have passed through Jake’s hands over the decades will have a plot that comes anywhere close to his own life story in this book. Because the events that Jake recounts are tumultuous.
From a childhood in Andersonstown when British soldiers took over his primary and then secondary schools - where a community was living under military occupation - to the 17-year-old youth being waterboarded and dangled by his ankles out the second-floor window of Springfield Road barracks.
Then arriving in the H-Blocks as a teenager, where he and his young comrades faced years of degradation and brutality before they ultimately prevailed. Jake spent time in terrible conditions with many of the hunger strikers, and in particular Bobby Sands, and it’s amazing to read details of what is a normal friendship in extraordinary circumstances. The stories contained in this book will be pored over by future generations.
When writing about the period after his release, he reveals some crucial previously secret events in the early peace process. When Jake’s original Irish version of this book was launched in the Cultúrlann, I mentioned how the mainstream media outlets would be tripping over themselves to find out what was in it, but said that we Irish speakers will never tell them - they’d have to learn Irish themselves to find out. Then what does Jake do? He publishes it in English!
It’s beyond dispute that the Irish language community is indebted to Jake. The founders of the Shaws Road Gaeltacht had a famous motto - ná habair é, déan é, don’t say it, do it. And that certainly chimed with Jake as he devoted himself to the language.
He moved from one project to the next - or more accurately he dealt with them just like they were books, working on many at the same time - helping secure millions to build the Gaeltacht Quarter, writing for Lá, founding the Irish language GAA club Laochra Loch Lao, opening a Palestinian gift shop, helping develop Coláiste Feirste into the shining educational example it is today, my God, even making and marketing his own honey from beehives he put up on the school roof! And that’s probably all just in one week!
Still, as you’ll learn from this book, wife Chrissie, his five kids, and his brothers and sisters are everything to him. I know his family are so proud of him, as he is of them.
This book details many tragic events in our recent history, but it’s not a sad book. It’s as full of craic and anecdotes as the author himself.
And I think if there is one overriding message you’ll take from it, it is inspiration from the arc of Jake’s life – from war to peace, from oppression to liberation, from looking into the abyss to building a future of hope, community, culture and opportunity.
Tréaslaím leat a Jake - so congratulations Jake - may you continue to do us all proud for many years to come.