Donegal/Fermanagh journalist's first poetry collection

The poetry collection will be launched by his two old hurling friends, ex-Galway Captain Joe Connolly, and Sean O’Coistealbha, a poet from Connemara.

Another of Gerry’s hurling friends, Conor Hayes, is also a special guest.

Speaking about his poetry collection, Gerry said: “There are more than 60 poems in the collection and many of them are tributes to those who have passed on, to my family, friends, neighbours and figures in the GAA who made a big impression on me growing up on the Donegal/Fermanagh Border in the 1960s and 1970s and in my playing career, which did not end until I was 45, in 2003, when I lined out for Naomh Eoin hurlers in Sligo.”

The collection also features poems of places that Gerry will forever hold in his heart, places he describes such as “Meenaleck, in the Rosses, where I was the first of Willie and Rose’s children to ‘see the light of a Gaeltacht morning’ after three miscarriages and a death; Cloghore, where I grew up, and played football and hurling on the green where Donegal were never defeated”.

SEE ALSO: Fermanagh writer's poem on Lough Erne to feature in BBC concert broadcast

Speaking more about his poems, he said: “They are also about my mother, Rose McGuire’s, home in the hills of west Fermanagh in Tullygrevagh – my long-stepping ancestors, and about my granny, Tessie Ward’s people who were and are the bards who will always inspire me.”

There are poems about University College Galway and Galway, which Gerry describes as “that eternal city of my youth”.

He added: “[There is] one about Belfast in dark days where I worked as a young reporter with the Irish News, and still do, but most of all about Corlea, the world’s loveliest townland, to where my father Willie McLaughlin came in 1925.”

Gerry started to write his poetry as a way of coping with grief at the loss of his parents, Rose and Willie McLaughlin, who died in 2017 and 2018, within nine months of each other.

SEE ALSO: Fermanagh presenter John Kelly's new poetry collection

“I began to think about them and the qualities they gave us, our own people, ‘The Breed Of Me’; my father Willie, who filled my world with songs, stories and tales of GAA giants he played with – and he was a great actor, too.

“My mother was a queen of the land of books, but had to work from a very young age, and she gave me a love of words, and she was wise and witty, but above all, kind,” he said.

Summing up his poetry in ‘The Breed Of Me’, Gerry said: “Most of all, many of these poems are in memory of people who deserve to be remembered, my heroes of home – my eternal legends who should never be forgotten, and may their songs always be sung under mellow moons.”