Catherine Patricia Shiels O’Shea was born on January 22, 1931, the youngest of five children, known locally as Patty Shiels. Her father Patrick was a carpenter who built one of the first radios in Galway, her mother Bridget a homemaker. They lived in Bohermore. Her mother died when she was very young, leaving her elder sister Teresa to care for the siblings and their elderly father. Pat went to national school in the Presentation Convent and to secondary in the Mercy Convent.
For her, Galway was “A good place to grow up in”. Her imagination ran free in the streets and lanes of the city. She haunted the bookshops and libraries and often borrowed three books at a time. She believed in self-teaching, “The masters are already there on the bookshelves – we can learn by reading good writers and valuing excellence and by teaching ourselves to be self-critical”. Her cousins remember her writing little plays and staging them in an old shed. She developed the art of storytelling and could hold a roomful of listeners entranced by an incredible story she was making up as she went along.
At the age of 16, she went to the UK where her older siblings had already emigrated. She worked as a doctor’s receptionist, as a wages clerk and then as an assistant in a bookshop. She met her husband Jack O’Shea and they had one child, Jim, before amicably separating and going their own ways.
She began to write plays and this brought her to the Library Theatre in Manchester where she helped out on various productions and staged three of her own one-act plays. One of her plays, The King’s Ears was commissioned by BBC Northern Ireland.
It was her native city and the countryside around Lough Corrib that inspired her to write The Hounds of the Morrigan which was published by Oxford University Press in 1985. It took her 13 years to meticulously research and write this masterpiece of children’s literature which draws deeply on Irish mythology and features fantastical characters and creatures. The story revolves around a brother and sister Pidge, aged 10 and Brigit, aged 5, who are charged with the responsibility of conquering the Morrigan, the Irish Goddess of War. The adventure starts in Kenny’s Bookshop when they come across a collection of ancient writing without realizing that it was the prison of Olc Glas, an evil being, or that Dagda, the good god of the old world would want them to find a way to destroy that being. This causes them to travel to familiar locations around Galway and to less familiar places in the world of faerie as they are caught up in the battle of good versus evil.
The book received rave reviews, such as: “The breadth of vision, the imaginative force, the mastery of dialogue, which marks this book indelibly as a major contribution to the literature of fantasy, as a ‘great read’ and as a very big bundle of fun,” and: "There is enough magic and adventure in the book to keep generations of children spellbound for years to come." The book became a bestseller and was translated into several languages.
Pat also published two other novels, Finn MacCool and the Small Men of Deeds in 1987 and The Magic Bottle which came out in 1999, both of which helped establish her reputation as a ‘true teller of tales in the grand tradition’.
Pat was a very warm person who always seemed to be in good humour. She was very modest and could never understand how she was so successful. She was terrific company, a born storyteller with a hearty laugh. She loved to reminisce about her childhood days in Galway. With the money she received for the Italian translation of The Hounds of the Morrigan, she was able to buy a house in Ballyglunin and this allowed her to spend extended periods of time in her beloved County Galway.
Our illustrations today feature the cover of The Hounds of the Morrigan – there is some serious talk going on about it being made into a film – of Pat at her writing desk, and of Pat.
She died after a long illness in Chorlton, Manchester on May 3, 2007. Her ashes were scattered in Galway.
Our thanks to Jim O’Shea from Chorlton-cum-Hardy near Manchester for his help in compiling this article.
