Born August 20th, 1970
Died October 2nd, 2025
When Manchán Magan was a young man exploring the world in the 1990s, his travels in India led him to the Himalayas. In a remote hill station high in the mountains, he took up residence in a disused cowshed. The accommodation could hardly have been more basic. But there were stupendous views of the snow-capped Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest peak and a place of deep mythical significance.
Magan was tracked down there by his brother Ruán, who worked in film. He had a minor commission from the start-up Teilifís na Gaeilge, as TG4 was then known, to provide a short item on the unlikely Gaelic romantic who had shunned modernity in the Himalayas. “I went to India to make a video diary but came back with two documentaries,” Ruán said.
It was the beginning of a fruitful partnership, with Manchán in front of the camera and Ruán behind it. Together they produced some 60 programmes, pushing out the boundaries of Irish-language broadcasting. It made a national treasure of Manchán Magan, who has died of cancer.
Described as a “gatherer of light”, this was no ordinary media personality. Not given to ego or fashion, he was known for his open-hearted outlook, vast reserves of language learning and the practical application in his own life of ecological values. He had a profound rapport with indigenous people in far-flung corners of the earth.
Magan’s writing, live shows, radio and podcast work radiated infectious curiosity, cultural nuance and a sense of the mystical undercurrents in life. His funeral was told how he lived in the knowledge that “everything that exists has a flame inside of it”.
“Through his work, Manchán inspired so many people, across every generation, to engage more deeply with our native language, its cultural richness, and through it to engage with, respect and learn from our natural landscape and environment,” President Michael D Higgins said in a statement on his death.
[ In Manchán Magan, Ireland had a writer whose words could light up the synapsesOpens in new window ]
Manchán was born in 1970 and grew up in an Irish-speaking family in Donnybrook, Dublin. His late father, Michael, was a radiologist at St James’s Hospital. His mother, Cróine, is the daughter of Sighle Humphreys, a noted republican activist of the War of Independence and the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War.
He was quiet boy, happy playing in the garden sandpit. Childhood summers were spent in Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht in Co Kerry, in the house at Muiríoch built by his mother’s people. He drew inspiration there from the language and landscape all around him.
He attended Gonzaga College, Ranelagh. His funeral in the college chapel heard how he developed a special fondness there for a majestic copper beech tree in the school grounds, an early sign of his enduring wonder at the natural world. He went on to UCD, taking an arts degree in Irish and history.
After graduation he embarked on extensive travels, journeying over land to the Democratic Republic of Congo, then known as Zaire. This trip inspired his Irish-language book Manchán ar Seachrán, later translated into English as Truck Fever.
As his TV career took off, travel intensified. The brothers filmed in South America and went to China as it opened to international media. On a visit to the Middle East, they were in Ramallah in the West Bank when the second Palestinian Intifada or uprising broke out in 2000.
Films nearer home included No Béarla, in which Magan travelled around Ireland attempting to establish whether he could live speaking only in Irish.
The Struggle was a documentary on Sighle Humphreys. Her uncle The O’Rahilly was killed in the 1916 Rising. Another in the family line was Aogán Ó Rathaille, the wandering bardic poet born in 1670.
Still in his 20s, Magan built his own house on land he acquired at Cummerstown, Co Westmeath. He bought bales of straw from a local farmer, laid it in blocks and plastered it with lime and sand. When the time came to build another “more luxurious” house on the site, he took down the first one and sold the straw back to the farmer.
Magan had an affinity for trees and rewilding, the practice of returning areas of land to a wild state. Around his home he planted 6,000 oak, maple, larch and Scots pine, and an orchard of 40 fruit trees. In Lough Lene nearby he swam almost daily.
He contested the 2016 general election for the Green Party in Longford-Westmeath, casting this brief foray into politics as a way of offering “fresh perspectives” on the region’s potential. He did not win a seat, his 1,102 first-preference votes comprising 1.99 per cent of the total.
The Irish language was the pursuit of a lifetime. But he achieved a new degree of prominence in 2020 with 32 Words for Field – Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, an exploration of deep-rooted connections between the language and the natural landscape.
In a new forward for the international edition of this bestselling title, he described how words were believed not only to describe things but also to help summon them into being.
“An Ghaeilge, to give it its proper title (or Gaelic, as it’s called outside Ireland), is a complex and mysterious system of communication. It has encoded within it the accumulated knowledge of a people who have been living sustainably on these rocky, verdant Atlantic islands for millennia,” he wrote.
“As a result, it is profoundly ecological, with an innately indigenous understanding that prioritises nature and the land above all things. Equally important is its ability to convey the magic that our ancestors perceived in the natural world and the otherworldly realms that surround it.”
A new volume, 99 Words for Rain (and One for Sun), was published weeks before his death. In an essay last month in this newspaper, he described the “incredibly rich bounty of weather words” in Irish.
“The word for a sudden, heavy shower is spairn; as opposed to sprais, a sudden, heavy, spattering shower; or búisteog, which is simply a sudden shower; or múirling, a sudden heavy shower that moves like a wall of water; or liongar ceatha, a particularly nasty sudden shower; or tuile shléibhe, a sudden shower near a hillside,” he wrote.
Other books included Listen to the Land Speak, Tree Dogs, Wolf Men and Water Hounds, and Brehons and Brahmins, which examined the resonances between Irish and Indian culture.
Magan’s life changed 12 years ago when he met Aisling Rogerson, owner of the Fumbally café in the Liberties, Dublin. After their first brief meeting in Inis Oírr, he presented her with a copy of his book Angels and Rabies. She was “already madly in love” when she finished reading it.
They married in September in the Fumbally. Returning afterwards to St James’s Hospital, they were touched to find staff there had made an improvised bridal suite in his room, with flowers and Champagne.
Magan gathered many close friends around the world, among them musicians, poets and writers. But he also liked to keep to himself, such that he was seen as a hermit who loved being with people.
Aisling Rogerson told his funeral how “an ideal day” for him began with a walk on the land “saying hi to the hens”. Breakfast followed, a pot of green tea, then work on his computer. Lunch was sourdough and “salads from the garden”. After writing again, he would tend crops and plants, swim and take wood in for the fire. Then the time came to start thinking of dinner. “Preferably he liked to do all of this alone,” she said.