Born August 20th, 1970<\/p>\n
Died October 2nd, 2025<\/p>\n
When Manch\u00e1n Magan<\/a> was a young man exploring the world in the 1990s, his travels in India led him to the Himalayas. In a remote hill station high in the mountains, he took up residence in a disused cowshed. The accommodation could hardly have been more basic. But there were stupendous views of the snow-capped Nanda Devi, India\u2019s second-highest peak and a place of deep mythical significance.<\/p>\n Magan was tracked down there by his brother Ru\u00e1n, who worked in film. He had a minor commission from the start-up Teilif\u00eds na Gaeilge, as TG4<\/a> was then known, to provide a short item on the unlikely Gaelic romantic who had shunned modernity in the Himalayas. \u201cI went to India to make a video diary but came back with two documentaries,\u201d Ru\u00e1n said.<\/p>\n It was the beginning of a fruitful partnership, with Manch\u00e1n in front of the camera and Ru\u00e1n behind it. Together they produced some 60 programmes, pushing out the boundaries of Irish-language broadcasting. It made a national treasure of Manch\u00e1n Magan, who has died of cancer.<\/p>\n Described as a \u201cgatherer of light\u201d, this was no ordinary media personality. Not given to ego or fashion, he was known for his open-hearted outlook, vast reserves of language learning and the practical application in his own life of ecological values. He had a profound rapport with indigenous people in far-flung corners of the earth.<\/p>\n Magan\u2019s writing, live shows, radio and podcast work radiated infectious curiosity, cultural nuance and a sense of the mystical undercurrents in life. His funeral was told how he lived in the knowledge that \u201ceverything that exists has a flame inside of it\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThrough his work, Manch\u00e1n inspired so many people, across every generation, to engage more deeply with our native language, its cultural richness, and through it to engage with, respect and learn from our natural landscape and environment,\u201d President Michael D Higgins<\/a> said in a statement on his death. <\/p>\n [\u00a0In Manch\u00e1n Magan, Ireland had a writer whose words could light up the synapsesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Manch\u00e1n was born in 1970 and grew up in an Irish-speaking family in Donnybrook, Dublin. His late father, Michael, was a radiologist at St James\u2019s Hospital. His mother, Cr\u00f3ine, is the daughter of Sighle Humphreys, a noted republican activist of the War of Independence and the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War.<\/p>\n He was quiet boy, happy playing in the garden sandpit. Childhood summers were spent in Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht in Co Kerry, in the house at Muir\u00edoch built by his mother\u2019s people. He drew inspiration there from the language and landscape all around him.<\/p>\n He attended Gonzaga College, Ranelagh. His funeral in the college chapel heard how he developed a special fondness there for a majestic copper beech tree in the school grounds, an early sign of his enduring wonder at the natural world. He went on to UCD, taking an arts degree in Irish and history.<\/p>\n After graduation he embarked on extensive travels, journeying over land to the Democratic Republic of Congo, then known as Zaire. This trip inspired his Irish-language book Manch\u00e1n ar Seachr\u00e1n, later translated into English as Truck Fever.<\/p>\n As his TV career took off, travel intensified. The brothers filmed in South America and went to China as it opened to international media. On a visit to the Middle East, they were in Ramallah in the West Bank when the second Palestinian Intifada or uprising broke out in 2000.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Manch\u00e1n Magan was a great man for a video message. You\u2019d never know what you might getOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Films nearer home included No B\u00e9arla, in which Magan travelled around Ireland attempting to establish whether he could live speaking only in Irish.<\/p>\n The Struggle was a documentary on Sighle Humphreys. Her uncle The O\u2019Rahilly was killed in the 1916 Rising. Another in the family line was Aog\u00e1n \u00d3 Rathaille, the wandering bardic poet born in 1670.<\/p>\n Still in his 20s, Magan built his own house on land he acquired at Cummerstown, Co Westmeath. He bought bales of straw from a local farmer, laid it in blocks and plastered it with lime and sand. When the time came to build another \u201cmore luxurious\u201d house on the site, he took down the first one and sold the straw back to the farmer.<\/p>\n Magan had an affinity for trees and rewilding, the practice of returning areas of land to a wild state. Around his home he planted 6,000 oak, maple, larch and Scots pine, and an orchard of 40 fruit trees. In Lough Lene nearby he swam almost daily.<\/p>\n He contested the 2016 general election for the Green Party<\/a> in Longford-Westmeath, casting this brief foray into politics as a way of offering \u201cfresh perspectives\u201d on the region\u2019s potential. He did not win a seat, his 1,102 first-preference votes comprising 1.99 per cent of the total.<\/p>\n The Irish language was the pursuit of a lifetime. But he achieved a new degree of prominence in 2020 with 32 Words for Field \u2013 Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, an exploration of deep-rooted connections between the language and the natural landscape. <\/p>\n In a new forward for the international edition of this bestselling title, he described how words were believed not only to describe things but also to help summon them into being.<\/p>\n \u201cAn Ghaeilge, to give it its proper title (or Gaelic, as it\u2019s called outside Ireland), is a complex and mysterious system of communication. It has encoded within it the accumulated knowledge of a people who have been living sustainably on these rocky, verdant Atlantic islands for millennia,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a result, it is profoundly ecological, with an innately indigenous understanding that prioritises nature and the land above all things. Equally important is its ability to convey the magic that our ancestors perceived in the natural world and the otherworldly realms that surround it.\u201d<\/p>\n A new volume, 99 Words for Rain (and One for Sun)<\/a>, was published weeks before his death. In an essay last month in this newspaper, he described the \u201cincredibly rich bounty of weather words\u201d in Irish.<\/p>\n \u201cThe word for a sudden, heavy shower is spairn; as opposed to sprais, a sudden, heavy, spattering shower; or b\u00faisteog, which is simply a sudden shower; or m\u00fairling, a sudden heavy shower that moves like a wall of water; or liongar ceatha, a particularly nasty sudden shower; or tuile shl\u00e9ibhe, a sudden shower near a hillside,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n