God rest him.

G o raibh suaimhneas síoraí dá anam. (May there be eternal peace upon his soul.) Like anyone who has tried to learn the Irish language, Gaeilge, I am in eternal debt to Manchán Magan, who died on Thursday of cancer at age 55 shortly after marrying his longtime partner, Aisling. God rest him.

Magan was an occasional presence on Irish television and a newspaper columnist. His Irish language is a product of Coláiste na Rinne, the famous (infamous) summer school, and University College Dublin. He made travel documentaries for television. He wrote cultural columns for the Irish Times and several books. He is descended from what would be known as a strong “nationalist” stock, a nephew of the enigmatic figure known as “The O’Rahilly.” But his political type, which was once common, especially in Ireland, was spiritually traditionalist but left-wing. He ran unsuccessfully as a Green Party candidate.

A typical Magan column would be his defense of the independent and conservative Michael Healy-Rae, a member of the lower house of Ireland’s parliament, when he defended “the sacred places” — the fairy forts of Kerry. In the column he demonstrates a peculiarly Irish attitude toward spirituality, where pagan and Christian sit alongside each other.

It is the abrupt denial of fairies by the vast majority of society that is more pathological than Healy-Rae’s continued belief.

After all, our first Uachtarán, Douglas Hyde, and two of our Nobel [laureates], WB Yeats and Samuel Beckett, all believed in fairies.

It is true that science has now proven that the fairy forts (also known as a ringfort, lios or rath) were not in fact the abode of spirits, or entrances to their underworld realms, but instead are the remains of the most common form of one-off housing and defensive outpost in Ireland from the late Iron Age right through the Bronze Age, Early Christianity and up to the Medieval era in some places. Yet that does not mean that these areas are not sacred — if for no other reason that they’ve been used as burial sites for unbaptised babies for centuries.

He built and lived in a straw-bale house on a cheap piece of land, which he discussed with Tommy Tiernan years later. But his heart really was in promoting the Irish language. He did so in a clever-dick way by filming No Béarla (“No English”), a 2007–08 Irish television series in which he traveled around Ireland, trying to use only the Irish language. But what could have been a kind of arrogant, biting social commentary on Ireland’s deracination via Anglicization was tinged with something melancholy, namely the question he asks at the start, “Will I be a foreigner in my own country?” Over time I’ve actually come to find the series more encouraging toward using the language precisely because even Magan makes a few grammatical errors in this, never letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Over the years he would find other projects to do in Irish that connected him to the land and the landscapes. The most powerful, I thought, was Crainn na hÉireann, a 2016 television series profiling ten different tree species found in Ireland. The concept sounds insane and boring, but through telling the story of trees, from their genetic structure to their use in the landscaping of grand estates, Magan was able to tell the social, political, and spiritual history of the island.

In his later years, he was given to writing books such as Thirty-Two Words for Field. He loved that Irish had such a large treasury of words, many of them nouns, that denoted a very specific form of natural landscape. Geamhar, a field of corn grass. Reidhlean, a field for games or dancing. In his appearances, he would sometimes make himself into a kind of a priest of the language. You would enter a small room with him, and he would with charming ceremony share with you one Irish word, charging you with preserving it unto death.

You can catch something of their spirit from this clip from The 2 Johnnies podcast. His favorite Irish word: iarmhaireacht, which means the lonesomeness of dawn. Or the phrase, Go mbeidh smóilíní beaga ag sclimpireacht i mo chroi: May the little thrushes dance like shards of light in your heart.

I never made it to one of those events. But he was generous with correspondents. I looked back on our exchanges dating to before I wrote my 2019 book. He gave me these seven words and their multiple meanings in an email ten years ago.

I took the charge seriously. And I promised to return these to him, like jewels fitted tightly into sentences of clear, sound Irish prose, delivered with a Donegal flavor. The next time I’m rambling widely around the gem of the sea, I’ll seek the gravestone bearing his name and pick up the conversation where we left it. I trust he’ll hear and welcome me.