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Archiver > Beara > 1999-11 > 0942497121


From: "Riobard O' Dwyer" <>
Subject: The German Orchestra Conducter & the "Poc ar Buile".
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 12:45:21 -0000


Guest Speaker at the Boston Beara Society Dinner next February will be the very well-known singer, and now retired schoolteacher, Sean O Se whose most famous song was the "POC AR BUILE" (the story of a mad or crazy puck goat that wreaked havoc through Co.Cork and finished up in Dingle, Co. Kerry, where the Parish Priest there thought that he surely must have been the reincarnation of the devil himself). Sean's father was from Adrigole in the Beara Peninsula, where his 1st cousin Morty O'Shea now lives, and he is also a 1st cousin to, among others, Fr. Sean O'Shea of Castletownbere. The singer Sean was Headmaster in a Cork City school and because of the fame he achieved with the Gaelic song the "Poc ar Buile", he was affectionately known in the Cork City area as "The Pucker". No better man to tell a story against himself, he seemingly one time was up in the balcony of a Cathedral in Germany practising with an orchestra for a forthcoming concert of sacred music and song when two!
women on holidays there from Cork City happened to be passing by and, hearing the lovely music and singing, they opened the Cathedral door and in they went. During the next song or hymn, one of them thought she recognised Sean's voice. Then the music and the singing stopped. Looking away up towards the orchestra, she exclained to her friend: "Julia, that's the Pucker !" "It couldn't be the Pucker", says Julia. "How could it be the Pucker ? Sure isn't he at home in Cork, girl. Didn't I see him there last week. How could he be here in Germany ?" Pointing up towards him, Maggie again assured her friend in an even louder voice that echoed through the Cathedral: "Julia, it IS the Pucker, I tell you. That's him ! Wouldn't I know the Pucker's voice anywhere. That's the Pucker alright !!" Not understanding the Gaelic language, or at least the Cork City version of it, and thinking they were using what sounded to him like a word which rhymes with Pucker, the German Orchestra Conducter !
turned to Sean very seriously, with a worried look on his face, and says he: "Mr. O'Shea, those two women down there, they say very bad words to you ?!! They do not like you, yes ?!! RIOBARD.

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