Kevin Shanaghan, “the bowsie.”

Michael turned to look at Kevin Shanaghan, one of the strangest figures in Ballycullen. A man who, still not without a certain glimmer of intellect, lived from pub to pub, and from drink to drink. He might be about fifty, but neglect and hunger and drink had added to his years and the unshaven gray stubbles upon his white, wasted face gave him the look of a man who had descended past all hope. And the look in his eyes too was one from which hope had fled. It was a sad, wistful, famished look and might be that of a man who, at some time in his life, had been stricken by a great misfortune from which he had never since recovered…

Then he turned to drink to lift up his mind, for he was after getting very, very quiet in himself. He would never be out of the public-house, where he might be seen the whole day long with a bit of a newspaper in his hand, wasting his time reading some speech or another out of it to a lot of fools who would be only grinning in their sleeves all the time.… It is there he would be always with a dirty collar round his neck and an inch of beard on his face and the front of his waistcoat all slobbery and shiny. … Then sometimes he would let a mad screech out of him that no one in Ballycullen could ever understand: “A wasted life, a blasphemy of life! Oh, Jesus, lift up my life again!”

In Ballycullen no one ever thought of what this man had once been, for he was now merely Kevin Shanaghan, “the bowsie.” Having no purpose in life he had effected something in the nature of a transvaluation of Ballycullen’s valuation of him and had become a kind of philosopher, particularly on the political side. … Thus it might be that he had a purpose in this place after all, for often as he stood wasting his life over a pint in some pub, he would say a thing which those standing by would treat with indifference as coming from a person of no consequence, but a few days or a week or probably a year later, if his mind had thought it worthy of notice, he would have seen such people acting as it were in obedience to the ideas which had blown casually out of his philosophy of life and the almost God like way in which he laughed over the political rages of his time. It was thus that his life had been lifted up again. In this way, remotely as it might seem, did he exercise a definite influence upon the life of Ballycullen towards its prosperity and upon his own life towards its decline; and they became more and more contemptuous of him, yet was there the same wan smile upon his face always as he observed their doings. “A fool,” they called him, yet he knew a wisdom which all the mean struggle of their lives had prevented them attaining. His simple anxiety was for sufficient money to keep him “a kind of foolish” always, the only condition to which drink was able to bring him now. When he was “a kind of foolish” he dropped the best things out of his mind and was most successfully blinded to the sight of Ballycullen. …

Brinsley MacNamara, The Clanking of Chains, 1919