Manchán Magan on living with cancer: ‘Death is something I’ve always been very comfortable with’

Manchán Magan was abroad when he learned he was ill. At the time, the broadcaster and writer was in the Basque region of Spain, shooting his latest television series, Manchán’s Europe by Train; having given up air travel for journalism purposes in 2020, he was happy to be documenting his adventures across the continent’s rail network. But he had other things on his mind too. “I was in San Sebastián and I did a Zoom with my oncologist,” says Magan. “I knew there was a problem with my prostate and I had got an MRI, so when we were filming, there was a sense that this isn’t going to give good news.”
So it was. But despite receiving an unwelcome diagnosis of prostate cancer that day last year, not only did Magan finish making his travel series – “We did it in two bouts” – he has if anything increased his already prodigious work rate. Having written multiple books about the Irish language and landscape since his surprise bestseller 32 Words for Field in 2020, he has three more volumes in the pipeline for the coming year. There are also podcasts and performances of his one-man shows, including an Irish tour in November under the typically Manchán-esque banner of Rewilding the Mind. “My life has speeded up so much, every single day now my inbox is full of people asking for things.”
[ Manchán Magan: ‘The Hill of Tara does nothing for me. All these people going up and doing one-legged yoga’Opens in new window ]
A preference for the road less travelled has long been Magan’s trademark. His personal life as well as his professional career has been marked by a singular combination of spartan self-sufficiency and wide-eyed otherworldliness. For the past 25 years he has lived in a self-built house in rural Westmeath where he grows crops and rears livestock, though the straw bales of the original structure have since been replaced by concrete blocks. But while this may have been an Arcadian life, it’s been turned on its head by his recent diagnosis.
“In terms of the psychology, I was never someone who was really rooted in this world,” he says. “In my youth in Eglington Road in Dublin, it was just me and my herb garden. I never really made friends or was into sports. And again when I was travelling, it was out on my own, looking for eco-communities or indigenous groups, but always people who were more focused on the spirit world and nature. So it’s a lovely irony that the illness I now get is so rooted in the body. And not just the body, but of course the groin.”
Sure enough, some of the effects of his illness have been ickily intimate, such as being unable to urinate due to growth of his prostate tumour. But, characteristically, he views such health challenges in obstinately positive terms. “I had to self-catheterise, which is basically sticking a pipe up yourself, until two weeks ago, when I got an operation. That was an amazing growth thing. It sounds like the worst thing imaginable, yet I just do this mind-melding thing that it can’t be that hard, and you just get over it.”
Otherwise, he says the cancer hasn’t felt too difficult or painful so far. And while it has naturally left him fatigued, Magan again prefers a positive spin on the situation. “I came back to my land and didn’t have the energy to do anything, I just stayed at home. And that was so beautiful. It’s a cliche, but it takes an illness for you to stop and really focus.” Not that he underestimates the seriousness of his condition, which has spread to the lymph nodes and bones as well. “Cancer brings up death,” he says. “What I have is more serious than normal [prostate cancer]. But death is something I’ve always been very comfortable with – life beyond the physical body.”
Death was one of the catalysts that set the young Magan on his idiosyncratic path of intrepid traveller, new age seeker and affable evangelist for the Irish language. He grew up in a family steeped in Gaelic culture and republican politics: he is a direct descendant of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, the last great bardic poet, while his great-grandfather was 1916 rebel The O’Rahilly, killed during the Easter rising. The young Manchán was taught Irish and spent his summers in the west Kerry Gaeltacht, nurtured by his “terrier-like” grandmother, a veteran republican who he says viewed him as “another foot soldier in this cultural war”. Instead he ended up rebelling in his own way.
“That was so claustrophobic and choking for me, I wanted nothing to do with it,” he says. At the same time he suffered from depression, which was greatly exacerbated by the death of his father when Manchán was 18. “I thought, I need to get out of here.” After working in Germany, he joined an expedition of ex-army trucks going to Congo, then called Zaire. There, he not only caught a variety of tropical diseases but also was bitten by the travel bug.
“I realised, oh sh*t, this world is so much grander, so much bigger, the vision so much more than my little Donnybrook, Dublin 4, perspective. And had my dad not died I might have just buckled down into the depression and could easily have ended up in an institution, and I mightn’t have seen the cultural richness of the world.”
Travel may have opened his eyes, but it didn’t give him much direction initially. Stabs at university education were punctuated by bouts of wanderlust. By 1996 he was a “hippy dreamer” living in a Himalayan cowshed, happy just to meditate and write. “But my mother realised that her son had gone off the rails, or just too far up his own ass.” Eventually, Manchán’s director brother Ruán tracked him down and cajoled him into filming his first series, the lo-fi Teilifís na Gaeilge (now TG4) travelogue Manchán san India. Almost by accident, he found his calling. “All my life, there have been things I wanted to say. So when Ruán came out and stuck a camera in my face, I just started talking.” (Ruán has been his regular collaborator, directing the current series.)
Over the next few years, Magan honed his distinctive approach, travelling the world in search of native cultures and ancient customs, exuding a cheerful on-screen idealism as he offered his commentary, usually as Gaeilge. But the farther he went, the greater the connection he felt to the language he had once tried to turn his back on.
“It was the paucity of ideas with which the Irish language is normally communicated that depressed me,” he says. “Yet I would be in South America or China, Greenland or Africa, meeting people with their own language, seeing how their language, placenames and myth were all entwined. I decided that I wanted to do the same in Ireland, to talk about the Irish language in different ways.”
Over the years Magan interspersed his travel journalism with documentary series on TG4 about Irish houses and native trees, but it was the 2020 publication of 32 Words for Field that boosted his reputation as an engaging chronicler of the Irish language’s deep connection to the flora and fauna around it. The book was seven years in the writing, and its timing was fortuitous, giving Magan’s career a new lease of life just as the country was in the throes of lockdown. Since then the books have flowed, from illustrated volumes to weightier tomes, all dealing with variations on his signature theme of language, people and place.
“It has chimed very well,” he says. “I gave up flying and said I’m going to be local after 20 years, at a time when people instinctively seemed to want to get to know their own surroundings.” While the pandemic played a pivotal part in this new focus on locality and lore, Magan sees his newfound role as part of a wider shift. “During the Celtic Tiger years there was no place for an idealist who did things in the national media, but after the crash there was this space for it.”
Not that Magan appears overly concerned with status or profile. He is at his most animated when talking about his meetings with Irish mediums or the creation myths he heard from Cree elders – “They told me things that just blew my head away” – while he cheerfully describes himself as an “oddball loner”. Determinedly single for many years, he has been in a relationship with a Dublin woman for the past decade, though they don’t share a home. “I like being alone with my own energy,” he says.
One hopes Magan’s drive will remain undiminished as he continues treatment for his illness. He certainly doesn’t act like a man who is sick, working on separate books on the connections between Irish culture and their Vedic Indian, Aboriginal and Icelandic equivalents respectively. Above all, as his rail odyssey “from Amsterdam to Zagreb” testifies, Magan remains a vibrant, compelling and above all original figure in Irish media. Long may he thrive.
“Why am I doing it? The cancer doesn’t make me feel sick, so I feel I have loads of energy,” he says. “If I was really serious about looking after my health, I would stop everything and stay home. I don’t have kids, I produce my own food, I don’t have expensive tastes, I can live on zero. So I don’t need to do any of this financially. But my head is alive. All I can say is I just feel so eager.”
Right now, however, the focus is Manchán’s Europe by Train. The four-part series, which concludes on RTÉ1 on Sunday, marks Magan’s first appearance as a travel presenter since he quit flying for ethical reasons, instead deciding to journey by land and water: “I knew there would be huge guilt if I continued my life of getting free trips around the world while I knew the damage I was doing.” His ethical stance came at a price. While he enjoyed taking ferries and trains, few media outlets shared his enthusiasm for flight-free trips. (The Irish Times was an exception.) “It was the end of me as a travel journalist,” he says. “So when [Riverdance producers and television company] Tyrone Productions came to me with the idea of a TV series that had no flying, I just jumped at it.”
The final episode of Manchán’s Europe by Train is on RTÉ1, Sunday, 6.30pm