Peter Costello
Memoir: Remembering Krzysztof Joseph Romanowski
by J. Anthony Gaughan (Kingdom Books, €15.00; available from Veritas branches)
Today Polish is now the second most spoken language in Ireland (as Joe Carroll observes elsewhere on this page). Fr Gaughan’s new little book goes some way to explaining why this is. It consists of a brief, but moving memoir, of his friend Krzysztof Joseph Romanowski, whom he first encountered in a Dublin travel agent’s office in November 1982.
Romanowski was then in the travel business, but this was the outcome of misfortune. He had originally worked as a journalist for Poland’s national broadcasting service. He was sent to Ireland to cover the Pope’s visit in the autumn of 1979, but was prevented by the Polish authorities from returning home.
This blow was followed by worse for they then refused to let Maria, his wife, leave Poland, and prevented her getting the right documents to enter Ireland by the simple means of intercepting them in the post.
As Fr Gaughan was going to Poland on holiday it was arranged that he would carry on his person the documents and hand them over in person. There then followed for him an adventure which echoes some Cold War thriller, and is very revealing about life under an authoritarian state.
Thanks to Fr Gaughan’s under cover help, Maria came to Ireland to join Joseph and live a new life in Ireland.
They couple accompanied Fr Gaughan to Poland for the Pope’s visit there in 1983. However, the main connection was to be through Irish P.E.N., the international network of writers dedicated to freedom of expression.
They were involved with supporting Fr Gaughan’s efforts to have Gerry Adams elected a member – he had, after all, fulfilled the requirements of having two books professionally published.
There were those, including the late O.Z. Whitehead, the veteran actor who was a leading figure in the Baha’i Community in Ireland, who objected, feeling that whatever Adams status as a writer (and he has published many more books since – including a short story about an IRA shooting), his organisation could hardly be said to be a supporter of universal freedom of expression.
But this was only an episode in a way, for Joseph, by now a correspondent again in Ireland for Polish radio, was involved in other developments in P.E.N., including initiating the presentation of an annual award.
However, the memoir deals with many other ways in which these Polish friends of the author became a real part of the community, until Joseph’s death in 2006 and Maria’s in 2017.
The pamphlet inspired by her passing casts interesting light on the profound social changes that have taken place over recent years.