Patrick Galvin (15 August 1927 – 10 May 2011)[1] was an Irish poet, singer, playwright, and prose and screenwriter born in Cork's inner city.
This experience had a powerful influence on his earlier poetry which expresses the fear and brutality of that time:[3] Come fifteen now, the flogging belt, the prison cell, The cruel days, the friendships hanged and cold, The dead beat of winter and the hungry bell, The very young are battered and grow old.
His anti-war memoir Song for a Flyboy from 2003 records his war experiences and his play The Devil’s Own People from 1976 denounces Ireland's neutrality in the face of fascism and the Holocaust.
At that time he was also in the process of establishing himself as a playwright in London and Dublin where his work was closely monitored by the Catholic Church hierarchy in Ireland, which found that his play Cry the Believers was not one "to which young, impressionable minds could be exposed without risk to faith".
His final play at the Lyric, My Silver Bird, was an operetta based on the life and times of Grace O’Malley, dramatically culminating in the battle of Kinsale and the fall of the Gaelic order.
The play was first staged the night after Bobby Sands died and due to the prevailing political climate, it was prevented from travelling to and showing at Cork Opera House as scheduled.
Patrick was Writer in Residence with East Midlands Arts (UK), DunLaoghaire Rathdown Council, Portlaoise Prison and finally with University College Cork where he was awarded a Doctorate of Literature in 2006.
Latterly the constraints of his lengthy illness and his inability to give creative expression to his thoughts on the current state of Ireland, with its culture of greed, exploitation and refusal to deal with systematic physical and sexual clerical abuse, contributed greatly to his demise.
He was next married to Stella Jackson, and then for 27 years to Diana Ferrier (divorced 1978), with whom he had two sons, author Patrick Newley (died 2009) and film director Liam Galvin.