Pádraic Fiacc was born almost 100 years ago in 1925 in Elizabeth Street in the Lower Falls. He is remembered for writing ten books of poetry and many articles on literature in Hibernia in the 1960s.

He was married and had one daughter, Brigid.

The late Derek Mahon dedicated 'Glengormley' to him in the late 1960s. President Michael D. Higgins visited him in the South Belfast nursing home where he lived in the week before his death in January 2019.

Pádraic was five-year-old when he arrived in New York with his mother, father and two brothers. About 1929, there was a little colony of Belfast people who lived on Amsterdam Avenue in the garment district of Manhattan. 

His father had two grocery stores which collapsed in the 1930s during the Great Depression. 

Fiacc's work as a poet was influenced first by Padraic Colum and, thereafter, by the school of life. He won the A.E. Russell Award for 'Woe to the Boy', a short story collection published in 1956. 'Semper Vacare' (1999), 'By the Black Stream', (1969) 'Missa Terriblis' (1986), 'Red Earth' and the controversial book 'The Wearing of the Black' (1974) were all published in Ireland.

He was perceptive, compassionate and an acute observer of turbulent Belfast life from 1965 onwards. Some of the articles and reviews of his work were published in the Andersonstown News and Irish literary journals across Ireland. He was a member of the Irish academy of artists Aosdána for a long time. 

Influences on his poetry were many and varied: Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett and Belfast's own Michael McLaverty to name but a few. 

In a series of letters, McLaverty advised him to keep his style sparse and clear.

Padraic was a pacifist writer who seems to me to be more like some of the old Gaelic writers of the 1890s. The great themes of writing - love, loss, life and death characterised his work. He was a distinct addition to the Irish literary canon and is included in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. 

I have sometimes thought of Fiacc as a Belfast version of Patrick Kavanagh walking through the autumn leaves on University Road. When he got older, he used to say to me — in his Vincent Price accent — "Brendan, you've seen all this show before." And so I had.

The late John Kilfeather, who was a reader for the Blackstaff Press, told me once: "When they want to know what it was really like, they'll take down his works."

John and his wife Irene brought Patrick Kavanagh to the Kashmir Road home of a Miss Peggy Duggan in 1947. He wrote a regular review in this newspaper on Irish literature. he is greatly missed. 

Kudos to the new kids on the block in Maynooth University who are bringing a new, wide-angled lens to his work. 

Brendan Hamill is a West Belfast community and arts activist whose most famous work of poetry is Emigrant Brother.