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Listen to Johnny Connolly's talk.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode criminologist Johnny Connolly outlines current research and policy on the broad areas of crime and drugs, and also discusses crime statistics and recent trends in drug consumption. Recorded in front of a live audience in the Central Library on 8 September 2011 as part of its 'Crime and the City' series.Very happy to be here.  Happy to be invited.  Right, well what I’m going to do is start by looking at what we think we know about drug related crime.  Now first of all when we talk about drug related crime, we’re talking about illicit drugs and the reason I’m talking about illicit drugs is because certain substances have been made legal through statute often as a result of international obligations and our main sort of drugs legislation are based in the 1977 Misuse of Drugs Act.  Now later on hopefully in a bit of discussion we can talk about some contemporary issues.  One particular issue is the whole issue of so-called head shops and psychotropic substances and new substances, every week apparently a new substance is being created and the challenges that creates for any legislative system or any system of criminal deterrents.  So we’ll have a little chat about that.  I want to start, however, by just talking a little bit about the background to the issue of drug related crime.  And then I’m going to talk about the official picture and that is what people talk about or what you read in the newspapers often about the, you know, where politicians say the crime rate is increasing or decreasing etc., I’m going to sort of interrogate that a little bit and see what exactly that means.  And then I’m going to look at what we referred to as the dark figure of drug related crime, what that picture, that official picture, doesn’t tell us.  And then I’m going to go through the various models that look at ... that have emerged to try and explain the connection between illicit drug use and offending behaviour.  And there are four sort of dominant models that have emerged in the literature to explain the connection because people sort of assume that’s it quite simple but it’s actually a very complex area in terms of determining the causative connection between the use of illicit drugs and offending behaviour.  Most people who use illicit drugs don’t commit any offence whatsoever expect the offence of possession and that’s something that we can touch on as well.  I’m then going to go into a little bit, you know, in a more sort of topical way looking at how we understand the drugs phenomenon in a Dublin context in particular.  The way in which different sort of perspectives within society have responded to the problem, the way in which the State has responded, the way in which communities most affected by the problems have responded and then maybe we’ll start talking about other different approaches that are debated – legalisation, decriminalisation and various other models that have emerged perhaps in Portugal or in the Netherlands etc.  So hopefully, you know, be as interactive as you want, feel free to cut across and at the end hopefully we’ll have time for a bit of a discussion.  Now the photographs I’m using and I’m trying not to be overly academic here so I’ve used photographs that have been taken by a friend of mine called Ronnie Close.  And myself and Ronnie worked on a project in the mid 1990s where we were looking at the whole revival of the anti-drugs movement that emerged at that time and for those who aren’t familiar with this the drug phenomenon, particularly heroin, really impacted in the north inner city in the late 70s and early 1980s.  At that time a movement emerged made up of what was referred to as ‘the concerned parents against drugs’ because there was a perception that the State and that the police either couldn’t or wouldn’t respond adequately to the problem.  This phenomenon emerged again in the mid 1990s, particularly with the emergence of ecstasy and the whole rave scene and then the resurgence in a way of heroin back onto the scene and a number of drug related deaths, particularly in inner city Dublin communities and in sort of economically deprived parts of the area of Dublin as a whole. And then we had sort of a quite ... what you might refer to as a watershed and that was the murder of Veronica Guerin, a journalist, in 1996 by people allegedly connected to the trade in drugs.  And that led to a major reaction from the State in terms of legislation and that sort of approach has really been sustained over time like there was sort of a renewal of the whole sort of what is being referred to as ‘the war on drugs’ at that time.  It was a major challenge to the democratic institutions of the State that a journalist was murdered who had been prominent in writing about people involved in drug related crime and gangland and those involved in gangs etc., associated with drugs and this was what was perceived a major symbolic threat to the State and so it was quite an important watershed.  So we’ll talk later about all of that.Now I’m going to go through ... and then we’ll talk a little bit about the challenge in recent times as a result of head shops and also the Internet and the challenge that has created for people trying to legislate against psychoactive substances which are changing so rapidly and which can be sold so easily over the Internet etc. Now I’m going to show a couple of graphs and I hope you can see them easily enough.  And this reflects what I refer to as the official picture.  Now when you read in the newspapers or you hear coming up to election time in particular where one group of politicians are saying that this group are soft on crime and the other group are saying that we’re hard on crime and we’re tough on crime and then one group will come back and say but drug crimes are increasing or crimes associated with drugs are increasing dramatically, now what we’re actually talking about in that debate is very little in terms of what actually is happening but what the statistics, the official picture, is telling us is really what the police are doing.  They are a reflection of law enforcement activity.  So, for example, the statistics that we see are produced largely by Customs and by the Garda Síochána who have the main responsibility in the State for the prosecution of drug offences.  But those statistics are determined by the resources of these agencies, by their ability to detect drugs, by the ability of those involved in the trade to conceal their drugs and to evade detection.  So really what these figures are telling us is about what the police do in response in carrying out their mandate to enforce drug offences, the offences contained in the Misuse of Drugs Act.  And the main offences that are prosecuted are possession, or what we refer to as simple possession, it’s a Section 3 offence, possession often for personal use, amounts of a substance, most cannabis and then drug supply, Section 15, where you are prosecuted for the possession and distribution of drugs.  And then you’ve a couple of other offences that sort of are dominant such as obstruction where you might try and throw drugs down a toilet or you might try and resist arrest and this is another dominant area.  Cultivation of drugs, personal cultivation is an area that has increasingly been ... it’s increasingly dominating headlines and we’re hearing about factories where people are producing their own drugs.  Now again is this a real increase in this phenomenon or are we just seeing law enforcement focusing more on it and this is a very difficult one to know. Now what you see here if you follow the yellow line, that’s the total drug offences between 1993 and 2005.  The pink line is for possession and the blue line is for supply.  So what that tells us immediately is that the main trend in drug offences is determined by possession offences.  That is the bulk of the offences that are prosecuted through the courts.  If you notice something interesting there as well, in 1997 you see that the line jumps up very rapidly.  Now I think that that is because of the murder of Veronica Guerin in 1996 and what you saw was this major reaction by the State but in terms of statistics where you’d see politicians say we’re winning the fight against drugs etc., what you see in actual practice is a huge increase in people being prosecuted for the simple possession of cannabis not really what you would see as a very significant response to that murder.  Now a number of other things happened as well of course which we’ll talk about, but all I’m trying to illustrate here is the way in which statistics can be so revealing but also the way in which they can conceal so much of what is actually happening.  Now again this shows you that most of the offences that are prosecuted are for Cannabis as the line sort of very clearly follows each other, the possession, most of the possession offences are related to cannabis so most of the prosecutions that we see in the statistics are for people possessing cannabis for personal use.  Now I’m not offering any moral position on this, that is the law, the law must be enforced, but that is also what is actually happening.  And of course there is a huge debate as to the legal status of cannabis and it is probably one of the most hotly contested issues within this whole area both publicly and in terms of the literature etc. Here we look at prosecutions for heroin and prosecutions for cocaine between 1995 and 2005, over that decade.  And what is interesting if you look at the pink line which is cocaine through the whole Celtic Tiger era you saw cocaine moving beyond its sort of idea as the rich man’s drug contained within sort of a certain section of society.  And heroin was seen as a drug that was always associated with those really on the margins of society, what we refer to as dependent or problematic users.  But what you see is a steady increase in prosecutions of cocaine until it eventually eclipses heroin for the first time in the history of the State in around 2004.  Now another thing that tells us is that this data can be useful, it can show us trends in what is actually going on and it’s an indirect indicator of availability.  You can compare say police data with treatment data and that can help you build up a picture of what actually is going on. This is one that I think is very interesting and this is under 17 year olds prosecuted by gender from 1995 to 2005.  Now if you look at that you’ll see that the number of females remains very low and relatively steady while the number of males increases year on year pretty much dramatically over the decade.  Now is that because more boys are using or is it something else?  And it doesn’t reflect, say, use of alcohol by girls because what we have seen in alcohol data is that the use of alcohol by girls is actually coming closer over that period of time to the use of alcohol by males and sometimes alcohol and illicit drug use can be sort of comparable to a certain degree.  There’s another way that might be ... there’s another explanation.  For example, when young people are stopped and searched for a girl to be searched there needs to be a female guard present but there is a lot less female guards than there are male guards so possibly it could be that.  If I was a teenager and I was walking down the street with drugs it would be the girl who’d be carrying them because she’d be less likely to be stopped, to be searched, to be detected and what that tells us is the way in which statistics or production of the discretionary behaviour of law enforcement, the way in which often the picture that we think we have is a picture that has been constructed by the day to day activities of law enforcement.  Because I don’t think that picture really reflects what is going on out there.  And you could also argue from the perspective of young males that that is discriminatory police behaviour and this young male I think would probably agree with you.  (laughter) Now if we look at drug offences more recently again we have seen a consistent increase – that’s a bit difficult to read  - but the broken line at the top is total drug offences, the second one is drug possession and the third one is supply and again we can see that supply is relatively consistent, the trend in the total number is really determined by simple possession.  If we look more recently as well what we can see is – and this is an interesting phenomena in recent times – a decline as the Celtic Tiger and people’s disposable income has declined we have seen a simultaneous decline in the use of illicit substances or at least in their detection.  Now I wouldn’t say that that reflects any difference in police behaviour, I’d say it actually is probably a more accurate reflection of people’s actual use of illicit substances because other surveys, other studies, have also reflected this decline.  Again if we look here we can see the dark broken line is ecstasy and that’s an interesting phenomenon because where in the mid 1990s you had huge seizures of ecstasy and it was a very popular drug, what this tells us is that it was a culturally relevant drug.  It emerged at a particular time, probably associated with the rave culture, it was popular at a certain time, but something else might be happening there as well and that is the growth, the emergence of head shops and the use of other substances that might have mirrored ecstasy or mirrored cocaine, for example mephedrone, which increased and became popular and possibly displaced the use of ecstasy.  Sort of the other line there, the sort of smaller dots on it, that’s cocaine and that’s interesting where you see this rapid decrease in cocaine and again I would say that reflects the lesser availability of disposable income for people and the lesser use of cocaine.  And then heroin at the bottom is relatively consistent because heroin is a drug that often those who use it who are dependent drug users the economic circumstances don’t really matter to them, it’s what we refer to in economic terms as an economically inelastic demand for that drug because if it becomes more expensive people will rob more to pay for it.  And the economic circumstances don’t really matter because there is a serious dependency or a serious addiction.  So it doesn’t as easily as other drugs, such as cocaine, it doesn’t necessarily reflect people’s disposable income. But what are we missing?  Firstly, in general when we talk about crime and the law that is there politicians, when they respond to crime, maybe they’ll pass some legislation.  Now that’s fine but we know very little about how that legislation is actually enforced.  We know next to nothing about how that legislation is actually enforced.  We also know very little in this country.  In the UK, for example, we know that about 1 out of the 4 crimes that are committed upon people are actually reported to the police.  Now the reason we know that is because what they do, they’ve been doing it since the 1980s, they’ve been comparing the official picture from the police data with self report studies that are conducted every year.  So they look at the official picture and they ask people were you a victim of crime in the last year?  And they say yes.  Well did you report it?  No we didn’t.  Why didn’t you?  Well there was no point, nothing would happen.  There was no insurance potential.  I couldn’t be bothered.  The police wouldn’t do anything, nothing would happen.  So actually in terms of the crime picture what we are seeing is only a very small part of the picture of crime.  If we go into certain types of crimes, for example, shop lifting.  Only 1 out of 11 shoplifting offences are actually reported.  If we look at bicycle thefts it’s even higher.  So in terms of our picture of crime, in terms of the official picture it is extremely limited in terms of reflecting what is actually happening.  And even when people do report crimes that doesn’t mean they’re actually ever recorded.  For example, a study in the UK showed that 40% of crimes reported to the police weren’t recorded.  Perhaps the police office at the time didn’t think it was a crime, didn’t believe it was important enough.  Maybe they were finishing their shift and they couldn’t be bothered and all of these things have been shown as reasons why this might be the case and again human behaviour is an important element of this and discretionary behaviour in terms of how our picture of crime is affected.  But the dark figure of crime, that’s what we call this, is much higher for drug related crime because a lot of drug related crime never enters the official picture.  A lot of drug related offences, like serious ones, are never reported and one of the main reasons for this is because people are fearful of those involved in the drug trade.  Other times people don’t care, if they see somebody smoking a joint or they see somebody, a crime is being committed but it’s their business, it’s not really that important and there are much more serious crimes and we know in this country, of course, that the really serious crimes aren’t often seen as crimes, for example, tax evasion.  I remember having a conversation with a business man one time and it took me about an hour to explain that tax evasion was actually a crime and that was a culture that we are beginning to see the consequences of now, that only certain crimes on the criminal statute books have ever been enforced.  And so crime is also… and who we see as offenders is also a production of how society determines what’s important to prosecute and what’s not important. Most of what we know in terms of crime or as we see crime it relates to street level crime – theft, burglary, robbery, assault, etc.  That is the sort of bread and butter of what we would determine as crime and those we would see as criminals are often referred to as police property groups, the people that the police prosecute on a day-to-day basis, usually young working class males make up the bulk of the offender.  And if you look at, say, those in prison, for example, the vast majority of those in Mountjoy prison come from three postal districts in Dublin.  And that is also a reflection of the discretionary nature of the system.  Certain people are stopped.  Certain people are arrested.  And certain people the way they talk back to the guards might determine whether they will be actually prosecuted or not.  Or where they are from, the whole attitude test, do they pass the attitude test?  Certain people for the same offence might be likely to get a custodial sentence while others would not and that is the whole discretionary nature of the criminal justice system and that makes up our picture.Now there are four dominant models explaining the link between drug use and crime.  The first is what we refer to as the psychopharmacological model, which says that there is something within the property of the substance that leads to the offending behaviour.  Intoxication where it might cause criminal especially violent behaviour, now research has shown a very strong connection between offending behaviour and the consumption of alcohol.  There’s a consistent association between violent crime and alcohol and I don’t think that would be huge news for most of us here.  But the link between offending behaviour and particularly violent crime has been refuted with regards to heroin and cannabis.  There is some evidence for crack cocaine.  There is some evidence for heroin particularly where people are interfered with if they have heroin in their possession or if they are shooting up there can be a violent reaction but really the link, the violent link, has not been proven.  It is in the social environment, the context in which drugs are used is a much more important indicator of violence than the actual psychopharmacological effect of the substance themselves.  The second important link is what we refer to as the economic compulsive or the acquisitive and this would be one that would be most dominant probably in most of our minds, where people are committing crimes to feed their habit.  This has been proven in terms of research, international and Irish research that we have seen an increase in economically motivated crimes after addiction.  After people become dependent on drugs and when they are in an effective, well-resourced treatment programme, for example, methadone maintenance with other supports, we have seen a reduction in offending behaviour.  So again that proves from the other side, from the treatment side, a clear connection between economically motivated crimes and addiction. I’m going to show you a couple of police studies that were done here which I think are interesting.  What they show and what a lot of other data shows is that an increase in employment and the availability of treatment has seen a very large reduction in economically motivated crimes here in Ireland.  Another important point, however, is that those who are dependent on drugs are far more likely to be caught offending than those who are not dependent on drugs.  The police know who they are because they’re essentially their bread and butter, they’re picking them up every day or they’re stopping them every day.  So somebody who is let’s say a chaotic drug user or a dependent or problematic user is much more likely to be stopped and prosecuted than somebody who is not dependent.  For example, somebody who uses drugs at the weekend, a recreational user who goes to work on a Monday morning, they do not appear in the statistics.  They’re not generally stopped, they’re not prosecuted etc.  And their use of the substance is manageable, they are managing it and they’re not engaging in serious crime, in any crime beyond possession, so they don’t appear really. Just very quickly, two studies were done, one that got a huge lot of attention in 1997.  It was a Garda study and they asked a number of people who they knew were dependent drug users a series of questions and then a sort of follow-up study, not as strong a study, was done in 2004 again by the Garda Research Unit.  And just to go through a couple of the findings, those who found as crime as their main source of income, in 1997 it was 59% in 2004 it was 13%.  Now at that time, in 2004, there was a huge increase in employment.  There was an almost levelling out of unemployment.  Unemployment was effectively gone at that time.  And what that tells us is that people who are dependent on drugs can also maintain a job so it sort of breaks that sort of stigma that we have, that people were actually maintaining employment, at some level, and also maintaining their drug use and it was serious drug use, heroin primarily.  And again the unemployment rate was far less in the latter study than in 1997.  The drug first used was cannabis and that’s been fairly consistent, although if we exclude tobacco and we exclude alcohol cannabis was the drug first used.  First introduced to drugs by a friend, and this again is consistent, is 81% and 86% and that’s very consistent with all studies I’m aware of, that people are first introduced to illicit drugs by someone who they know, by a family member or a friend.  Now why that’s a very important point is that there is this perception of drug dealers as the stranger at the school gate, as it’s put, preying on people.  Actually most people are introduced to drugs by somebody that they know and somebody that is close to them and that must question our whole understanding of the drug dealing enterprise and how people actually become involved in drugs in the first place.  Drugs sourced from a local dealer had increased from 46% to 76% and what that tells me anyway is that drug markets are far more integrated into local communities.  We must also remember that the mobile phone became very, you know, everyone had mobile phones and anyone with a mobile phone and a list of names can be a drug dealer and they’re very difficult to detect from a policing perspective.  So an easier access to drugs was also facilitated by the mobile phone.  The number who had been to prison had decreased slightly and the estimated daily expenditure, allowing for inflation etc., wasn’t that different.  And an interesting finding was the movement from the Punt to the Euro and honestly people aren’t going to start looking for change on the street, like you know it’s 12.5 Euro from 10 Punts so what is that, 7.50?  You know, that’s not going to happen.  So really what happened was that the legitimate market wasn’t followed in the illegitimate market, changes that took place in the legitimate markets where prices largely increased to allow for the Euro in the illegitimate market there was no real change, it was just rounded figures was all that was important.  And systemic crime is crimes committed as a consequence of the fact that drugs are illegal and there is an illicit market.  And we refer to these as systemic types of crime.  How we understand this, we look at things like drug seizures, drug prices, drug purities, drug roots, price impurity.  If the purity of drugs is lower will the price be lower?  And in any studies that I’ve conducted here anyway and there are very few there doesn’t seem to be a huge connection between price and purity, certainly not at a street level.  If somebody keeps giving somebody crap, as it’s referred to, they will simply go to a different dealer but it doesn’t seem to be reflected in changes in price.  But you would assume also let’s say for example if there’s a lower availability you would assume that prices would increase following basic demand and supply.  And yet what we have seen is that drug prices have decreased in Ireland over the last number of years while availability hasn’t really been affected.  So these are the sorts of indicators we try and use to understand the market. We have seen sort of a stabilisation of markets over time and often we look at drug markets, as a simple way of explaining, as involving three levels, you have the import level, you have what we refer to as the middle market level and then you have the street level.  And then you have what we refer to at street level as open and closed markets, so an open market might be a market on the street where you can go up and you can be a complete stranger and they would sell you drugs and there was a time in Dublin, particularly when there was all those street protests and marches were taking place, when you did have a lot of that around the city.  It still exists but it’s less open in the sense that often you have to know the person that your getting drugs off so we use the concept of open and closed markets to describe this type of thing.  You might have closed markets in that they take place in clubs, in night clubs, and again you would have to know the person or be introduced to the person by somebody who is trusted before you will get drugs.  And also one of the reasons that forces markets from open to closed is because of police undercover operations which are a major factor of policing in the illicit drug trade where they pose as drug users or people looking for drugs and as a consequence people are increasingly cautious about who they are buying and selling from.  Local drug markets are particularly important of course, particularly open ones, because they cause huge community disturbance.  People see them all the time.  People who are trying to get treatment have to run through a gauntlet of drug dealers which is an extremely difficult thing to do.  Also for younger people they might be attracted to the money that is being made particularly in very socio and economically deprived communities, so open drug markets are attractive to young people and they are problematic from that perspective as well because they are seen as legitimate.  If they are happening openly without interference well then there must be something okay about them so they are particularly important.  In terms of the involvement of organised crime and organised crime is a term that I think requires a lot of like analysis because two people and recently we’ve had legislation on organised crime but two or three people can be organised.  They can arrange something together but does that mean they can be referred to as organised crime?  Yes it does in one way but it’s not what we understand by organised crime.  And this is something, a study that I’m completing at the moment, it’s the first national study on illicit drug markets which is taking place in four locations around the country where I’ve tried to address those types of questions – how are drug markets structured?  Who is involved?  What sort of roles do they perform?  And these types of questions.  Because in a way you have to look at like an ordinary market, like a legitimate market, because there are massive profits to be made but there are exchanges, there is supply, there is demand, etc., and these are important. So how organised is organised crime?  Europol has looked, has sort of compared different types of markets and it says one of the unique things about the Irish market is that it involves families, that at a certain higher level it is very much centred around families.  In a lot of other countries of course it would be centred around perhaps particular ethnic groups.  Now one study I conducted here in Dublin was on crack cocaine, there’s a copy of that at the back, and that found that crack cocaine initially in around 2005 was associated with West Africans, initially.  Or else people coming back from England who had the ability to wash up cocaine into crack and so that was an interesting factor in that it was something that was associated with a new ethnic group emerging here who had the know-how, who had the ability, but that is no longer the case now throughout the city.  And then there’s the final model, this is called the common cause model, where illicit drug use and offending behaviour are common factors of perhaps a deviant lifestyle.  One doesn’t necessarily lead to the other but they are both factors of other things or consequences of other things, they’re not causally linked but they’re produced by underlining social factors such as inequality, deprivation, etc.  And just to go through this list studies that have been conducted here since the 1990s, since Paul O’Mahony conducted a major study and he’s speaking here I think in a couple of weeks on a sociological and criminological profile of Mountjoy prisoners and he went through ... and nothing has emerged to say that this profile is any different today, that most were single male age 14 to 30, they were urban, living in the parental home, from large and often broken families.  They left school before the minimum age of 16.  They were from areas with high levels of unemployment.  Their best ever job in the lowest socioeconomic class.  They had a high number of previous convictions and rates of recidivism – where they’ve been to prison before.  They had a history of family members being in prison and they were from local authority housing and areas of high levels of long-term unemployment.  The common cause model is probably the most under-investigated model but it is also probably the most important.  But from a policymaker’s perspective it is a much more difficult model to handle because the common cause model says that a drug policy on its own is not going to solve the drug problem or the drugs and crime problem.  Unless you look at all of the socio and economic context in which drug use and crime take place you can’t fix the problem and so it’s a much more challenging reality from a policymaking perspective.Participant 1: Sorry there, if that is the case, and you clearly have this well researched, have successive governments that the research board has been informing are they are taking any of this kind of research on board?Johnny: Well they are.  I mean like the National Drugs Strategy combines five pillars including demand reduction, supplier reduction, treatment, education and rehabilitation and research so in a sense the model is right and it’s quite a well-respected approach.  So it is acknowledging those multiple dimensions.  Now if you’re talking specifically about crime, however, and the causes and the solutions to crime they can not only be policing solutions or imprisonment etc., certainly not that, they must be responded to in a more holistic way.  So I think that is ... I don’t think that anybody who doesn’t realise that is the case but translating it into actual policy is much more challenging because there is no quick fix solution to that.Participant 1: Yeah it’s long term.Johnny: It’s a long-term societal change, it’s not just about introducing the policy with 50 action points, it’s a much broader societal change that you have to address.  For example, if you look at the initiative that was taken in Limerick, that was a multi-faceted approach to that problem involving changing infrastructure, looking at education, looking at pre-school, looking at family support and that is the way you address not only the drug problem but the crime problem and that’s the important thing that this, the common cause type of research, has shown. So just to summarise the link between drugs and crime, most drug users do not commit crimes other than those of possession.  There’s a link between some forms of illicit drug use and crime and particularly violent crime, some forms of illicit drug use and crime mostly heroin and cocaine.  Most problematic users receive prison sentences for drug related offences rather than drug offences.  And just a point to explain what I mean by that.  There’s a major crisis of overcrowding in our prisons and increasingly this is getting some attention and a lot of international organisations, recently the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, has focused on this major issue and the inspector for prisons has written a lot about this very serious crisis within the prison system.  Most of those who are dependent drug users receive very short sentences of between 3 to 6 months in prison so they’re obviously not seen as a threat to society if they’re only serving such short sentences.  And clearly given the state of the prisons, although the treatment in prisons has improved a lot since about 2006, clearly that is not the answer to somebody who is a dependent problematic addicted person.  Now legislation is to be introduced to basically force judges to consider non-custodial sentences for anybody who they would have given a 1-year sentence and that has to be most dependent drug users.  And that is a question again for society that we have to look at different ways of treating people who are dependent users and a very highly stigmatised group of people as well, people will serious health problems.  This is a very important finding, most problematic users began their criminal career before their drug use so it wasn’t drugs that led them to commit crime, they were already committing crimes.  So drugs didn’t cause crime, their offending behaviour had already begun.  Now drug use and particularly addiction would have increased the rate of their offending behaviour but it didn’t cause it in the first place so if you’re trying to address the cause you have to address the cause of crime in the first place.  So there’s no clear causal link between drug use and crime, there is links proven between alcohol and violent crime and that is clear in the evidence.Again although there is so much concern about illicit drug use, although we read in our newspapers every day about some gangland killing and there is a lot of public concern and public fear and there are huge amounts of legislation out there to address it, we know very little about illicit drug markets in Ireland.  We know almost nothing.  The research that has been done, the research I’ve done say on crack cocaine was the first study that really tried to address this as a market and the dynamics of a market and tried to apply that sort of logic to it.  If you’re trying to interfere or you’re trying to intervene and address it I think you have to start approaching it in that way.  What brings people into it?  What sort of profits are being made?  And these types of questions, how is structured?  How many people are involved?  And this research has been done.  Early next year there will be a study that is finished now which is due to be published by the National Advisory Committee on Drugs and ourselves, in the Health Research Board, which again looks at drug markets from that perspective, looking at four markets around the country, you know, one city, one suburban area, one inner city area, one regional town, to try and get a sense of different types of markets and how they evolve, how they are organised and structured and how we respond to them.  And that’s the other point, there’s almost no research done on what the police are actually doing.  We see the statistics, the data, the graphs and the trends that I’ve shown, but we don’t know how many people are stopped and searched.  We don’t know how the legislation is being implemented?  How many people are stopped and searched and who are they?  How many of them are arrested?  What happens those people?Participant 2: Have people tried to get that information?  I mean I used to work as a journalist and I know it’s extremely difficult to get information out of the guards, have there been attempts to get that kind of information?Johnny: Well it’s not something ... I mean the IT system in the guards has improved dramatically, in the PULSE system – Police Using Leading Systems Effectively – it’s called.  That has improved dramatically but it was never introduced for the journalists and for researchers, it was introduced as an operational factor.  Now something that is improving is the connection between the different parts of the system, for example, the police, the prosecutor’s office, the courts and the prisons because there’s no connection, in terms of trying to understand it from a research perspective or a journalistic perspective.  You can’t follow people through the system, you know, and that’s something that we have been very weak at, it is to improve and it is improving slowly but it doesn’t ... and also let’s say if you go deeper than that, like there’s a huge amount of what we would refer to as captured data, for example, those being prosecuted, you know, the sort of research that I’m interested in and the guards worked very closely with this research project in a huge way.  They have cooperated with it.  So I think it is not only about that resistance because it’s not their ... like this is something now that is not only an Irish thing, this is something that the European Commission, Europol and an organisation called the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction in Lisbon are now collaborating on developing indicators to understand the connections between drugs and crime and supply reduction efforts and that is only now really developing.  And that’s the other point, we don’t know how many people are committing offences as a consequence of a drug addiction, we don’t know that, what we refer to as the attributable cause of the offence.  So, you know, in prison they are drug offenders but most of them, as I said, are in there because of an addiction and a crime committed as a consequence of that addiction but we don’t know how many.  We know the numbers using methadone within the prison system so clearly they are people who have a very serious drug problem.  But in terms of understanding crime and offending and criminal justices responses to it our understanding is very limited and from a democratic or accountable perspective huge resources go into this area and have always gone into the area.  There’s almost never been any sort of cutback on spending on law and order but there’s very little understanding of how that money is actually spent in practice so that is a very important issue.Participant 2: And are you saying there isn’t a culture of ... in my dealing with the Gardaí there was a cultural issue about giving information, the guards are very closed and compared to many other societies, I include military dictatorships.Johnny:  Yeah.Participant 2: Very secretive.Johnny: Yeah.Participant 2: So you’re saying that the lack of information from your point of view is not a cultural issue?Johnny: I didn’t say that but the culture, there is of course a cultural issue and policing studies have shown a very inherent conservatism and a great wariness of potential criticism etc.  Now what we’ve had here up until very recently, up until about the mid 2000s, was that the guards would never give any information on say things like seizures, drug seizures, or things like that in the local area until the Garda Commissioner’s Report was published.  Now the Garda Commissioner’s Report was usually about 2 years out of day so it was of no use in terms of understanding what was going on locally.  I was involved in setting up a community policing system in the north inner city in 2000 with the late Tony Gregory and local guards in Store Street and it’s still functioning very effectively.  But it was I think January 2000 when a member of the local Garda Drugs Unit stood up and he explained to the local people, about 300 local people, the number of seizures that had been made in the last 3 months in the area.  Now I was flabbergasted at the time because that was something that had never been done before.  Now it didn’t tell them a huge amount they didn’t know anyway because they live there but I think what the Gardaí didn’t realise was the importance in terms of communicating to people of just showing them that you’re actually doing something rather than just saying it but showing that you ... and it is a form of accountability.  I think what you could probably say is, and this isn’t only just institutions like the Gardaí, there has never really been accountability in that sense here in any of the institutions that have sort of formed the identity of the State and that is something that I think is now breaking down.  Clearly it is breaking down and people are demanding it.  But I think that probably is part of the picture. Now in terms of our debates about drug related crime and drug crime and all of these various things I think one thing that has often been missing is a perspective on those who are most affected by drug related crime.  The drug problem has always disproportionately impacted on the most vulnerable communities in the sense that they are already suffering numerous aspects of socio and economic problems – low education levels, early school leaving, high levels of unemployment, etc.  And they are also the greatest victims in terms of drug offending.  There isn’t this romantic idea that people in certain areas go out to other areas and rob from other areas and that is one of the things I think that really led to the huge marches that emerged in inner city Dublin in the 1980s and the 1990s was that heroin changed the complexion of crime in a lot of these areas because people were now robbing on their own people whereas traditionally there had been a sense of well you don’t rob on your own.  But the drug problem it completely undermined that whole romantic notion and I think that is a perspective that responses have to look at it.  For example, one of the major issues at the moment I believe – and this was sort of a picture of how communities responded at that time, you know, having marches, marching on Government Buildings, setting up vigils out on the street to stop people dealing, marching on people’s houses who they alleged were drug dealers and evicting them from their houses and on one occasion killing somebody who was an alleged dealer – and that’s the whole aspect of vigilantism as well, there is that potential but what it did show was a serious crisis where a lot of communities felt we’re not noticed and our problems are not addressed.  And I think there is a sense that their problems, as the saying goes, they were over policed but they were under protected in that their priorities, their crime priorities, were not really being reflected in what was happening and what the criminal justice system was doing.  After Veronica Guerin the State response was to symbolically assert itself, that we are winning the war on drugs.  The Criminal Assets Bureau was something that was quite original and was something that has been followed up in many other countries and a range of new drug laws were introduced in the wake of that, of Veronica Guerin’s killing.  But again communities were asking when you actually look at the legislation in practice are our priorities actually being reflected in the policing process?  And the police initiative I mentioned there earlier, in 2000, was the first time that you really had a sort of form of local democratic accountability in Store Street which is still going on. Subsequently now since 2005 there has been the Garda Act, this is quite an ambitious poster of the Labour Party in 1997, yeah the 1997 elections, “1992 drug barons reign, 1997 drug barons run”.  Now there’s a number of reasons why they might have run, one reason is that the source of drugs are not in Ireland they are often in Spain or they’re in Portugal or they’re in the Netherlands so there’s a logical reason to move.  Now recently I believe as a consequence of the organised crime legislation that is something that seems to be causing some concern and also the ability to use different forms of evidence, particularly photographic evidence and telecommunication evidence in prosecutions, is something that is apparently causing some concern.  But drug markets have changed as well, they’ve become more hidden and, as I said, the mobile phones facilitated this.   They become more credit based where people are giving drugs on tick or on credit, more mobile, but they become more violent.  A lot of research has shown that.  And they become much younger, much younger people being involved and much younger people being brought in to keep a look-out, to hold on to drugs, to run drugs between various people but being brought into the enterprise at a much younger age and some say that is one of the reasons it has also become more violent.  And where people to get debts of very small amounts of money are prepared to use levels of violence that historically only 10 years ago you wouldn’t have seen in the Irish drug scene. And some of the issues that are there of course that need to be addressed, one of the major issues I think that hasn’t really sort of got national headlines as of yet I think is the issue of intimidation and violence.  Drug related intimidation of not just users but their families in response to drug debts and economically as the market decreases people’s determination to recoup their debts becomes much more heightened and there have been some studies done by the Family Support Network and by Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign which has been trying to put some sort of focus onto this really serious issue.  But again I think the fact that it isn’t really in the mainstream yet shows you the way in which the drug related crime problem how it’s prioritised.  This, I think, is the main priority for a lot of communities around the city, addressing the issue of intimidation, but it’s not really on the national thing.  There’s an article at the back I wrote there in our journal Drugnet Ireland, which you can get your hands on, where I’ve written up on a recent conference which looked specifically at this issue of intimidation. No-go areas, community stigma, the development of gangs, particularly the involvement of young people and the emergence of sort of gangs around drugs, fear of reprisal which is a major issue in terms of the State, and the drugs strategy, a lot of it is based on local drug taskforces requiring people in local communities to work with the organs of the State to address the various problems but fear of reprisal and the fear of seeing to be associated with responses of the State breaks down that cooperation or that willingness to cooperate and there’s a major democratic problem in relation to that.  So in terms of things like intimidation and drug related crime and fear there is a serious requirement of the State, if it wants to sustain some sort of policy response, it has to address issues of intimidation. Okay, I’m going to move on and conclude.  I think one of the things we have to question in terms of responses is on whose response is the behalf being made and how do we prioritise this issue?  First looking at it, analysing it and then prioritising, what is the important thing to start with because you do have to prioritise.  You can get a copy of this presentation.  I just want to just finish with this slide.  Some of the debates of course doing the rounds of course are like legalisation of drugs and some argue that will take the market from underneath the gangs and the dealers, decriminalisation where you introduce different sanctions.  Portugal is the first country certainly in Europe if not in the world to decriminalise all drugs and so people are now sent to a form of sort of committee that deals with issues of treatment etc., but they are taken completely out of the criminal justice system.  De-penalisation where you don’t send people to prison if they have a health problem, that’s what you address, you don’t incarcerate them as a consequence.  The Dutch solution which has virtually legalised the consumption of drugs in regulated conditions in what they called ‘Coffee Houses’ but a very interesting solution in that in the Netherlands the front door is legal but the back door is illegal, as they say.  The supply of drugs to the coffee house remains illegal but the consumption of drugs in the coffee house is legal.  So this is a sort of a form of, you know, and then you’ve things like community-based mediation, problem solving, local community policing, etc.  I’m going to finish on that.  So feel free to question or comment about it. Participant 3: What’s the data from the Portuguese solution and the Dutch solution?  Is it helping?Johnny: Yes, I think the data is generally fairly positive.  There’s a few articles have been written about that.  Say the Portuguese situation first in that there has been no increase in drug use, that’s one thing.  There has been no increase in drug related deaths which is a very important indicator.  And the Netherlands has shown a consistent decrease in drug related deaths.  Because what the Dutch were doing, and this was as early as 1966, was it wasn’t about legalising drugs, that wasn’t their interest, their interest was about separating markets so separating the cannabis market from more serious drug markets and that is something that they have succeeded in doing.  Now they’re under a lot of pressure.  One of the problems at the moment is because of the much higher purity of cannabis and in the Netherlands in particular and that’s a concern that a lot of other countries would have.  A problem for the Dutch of course is they’ve come under huge pressure from other European countries to reverse their approach and they seem to be yielding to that pressure and there’s some internal pressure as well, there is some political division.  Now as far as I’m aware there’s no political party in the Netherlands that wants to reverse that general approach but what they’re talking about doing is making them only accessible to Dutch people, for example, so that they’re not a tourist attraction for non-Dutch people.  So those are the sort of issues.  The Portuguese process I’ve read everything that’s been written about that and that also seems to be a very ... and I’ve seen them actually working and it seems to be a really interesting process.  Now one of the problems associated with this and like it’s about 10 years now in operation is the message it gives out to young people and this is often a very difficult thing to address, does that mean drugs are okay and that is something that they’re sort of looking at at the moment.  And it’s a very difficult one to square, how do you actually ... because you don’t know what message the more deterrent or prohibitive approach is giving, what message is that giving?  But the more liberal approach that is also giving a message that needs to be considered and I think also the coffee shop phenomenon is a very interesting concept that I think challenges anybody who calls for a liberalisation of drug laws because one of the concerns about that here was that a lot of people could avail of drugs in these coffee shops that mirrored, for example, cocaine, mephedrone.  But many people started using mind altering substances who would never have done otherwise except alcohol so they would never have experimented with substances like that but the fact that you could go into the city centre and go into a main street and go in and buy your drugs and go into the night club next door it did give a message to people that that’s okay and that was a major issue.  Now they’ve been pretty much all closed down but I think anyone in a free market economy who argues for legalisation must also confront the fact that people will then sell aggressively.  They will sell aggressively.  Look at alcohol, you know,alco-pops, people are making profit and there’s huge amounts of profit to be made.  Of course there’s massive profits in an illicit market but there’s also massive profits in an illicit market.  Like one of the things about the head shop phenomenon was the amount of money that was seized.  Like, for example, there was one burned out in Capel Street and they seized I think it was half a million from that shop and if you observed them there was a huge trade so there’s a lot of money to be made and this is a free market economy so ... and there will be aggressive advertising and so people who argue for a more liberal approach have to look at that.  Now that is not to say that those arguments aren’t valid but people come often from a harm reduction approach and they’re saying that the current system isn’t working because people are generally ignoring it and so the harms of their use is hidden so we have to try and bring it more out to the open so we can address these harms.  Another argument about the coffee shops was that once you made them illegal all the substances would simply be transferred into the illicit market.  I don’t think that has really happened.  Mephedrone I’d say it is very likely it has happened but a lot of other substances seem to disappear.  And then of course there’s the reality that people are getting drugs over the Internet so how do you challenge that?  How do you legislate for the Internet?Participant 4: Just around the thing around the inelasticity of heroin in particular and it’s kind of counter intuitive to think that it would be elastic because it’s like the archetypal drug of addiction and people are very dependent on it but interestingly about this time last year or a little bit later there was a good 6 month drought of the availability of street heroin and it just became unavailable really, now that threw up its own consequences like people getting ripped off buying stuff that just wasn’t heroin and whatever heroin was around became very, very pricey but one of the things I would have expected and you heard anecdotal evidence of it happening but it didn’t come across in the statistics that people hammered treatment centres then, the people that would have been addicted to street heroin then all of a sudden would have gone to their local treatment centre but the statistics at the treatment centres didn’t reflect that so.Johnny: And they’d be going there for Methadone, yeah?Participant 4: Yeah.  So I don’t know what that was about, maybe some of it is to do with some heroin use being discretionary, maybe people using heroin on top of their methadone maintenance and using heroin on dole day or when they’ve had a few bob extra, you know.Johnny: Yeah.Participant 4: And then that discretionary use went out and it might have diverted into other drugs, you know, if you like benzodiazepines and things like that.Johnny: That’s what I was just thinking that it’s probably I would say I mean that drought they say was because of a drought in Afghanistan, the crop being affected in Afghanistan how that then rebounded here, but that I would see it as the polydrug issue, that was very interesting, there was a study done in the south inner city called A Dizzying Array of Substances which showed how in a very small ... and often people there’s a perception sometimes that you’ve got a heroin market and you’ve a cannabis market and never the twain shall meet but I think you know yourself better than I do that that’s not the case and so it is probably that people were moving maybe for a similar hit or something similar but it’s an interesting like factor, did that increase the number of people seeking methadone?  People who were happy to use heroin and weren’t interested in methadone.Participant 4: You would imagine there would have been a spike and there wasn’t in the statistics according to the treatment centres.Johnny: Yeah.  Have those statistics been published yet, have they?Participant 4: Yeah, for that time period it must have been about 8 months ago now or 10 months.Johnny: Okay, yeah.  It would be very interesting to check it out.Participant 5: Johnny hiya.Johnny: Hiya.Participant 5: You mentioned about the drugs taskforces earlier and I know that a lot of the funding was cut very recently and most of their funding I think would have been cut in most of the organisations and I wonder is there any statistics or data out there yet about the impact that’s having on communities?  I mean I’ve read anecdotal stuff but I don’t know if there’s anything ... is it too early even to say?Johnny: Well you see there’s a guy, is it Harvey, I know his second name is Harvey, who has written a lot on this, on the actual social infrastructure of communities or the social capital as Putnam would put it and how those taskforces and all of the voluntary work around those taskforces is so important for those communities and so that tiny amount of money that they’ve cut back the effect that has, it has a multiple corrosive impact.  Now he’s the only one I’m aware who has really written about that so far but in terms of other like data has that ... I don’t know, I think that would require that type of sociological analysis that he applies.  And the thing is that it’s probably the most well spent money is money spent at that local level.Participant 6: In your recent research is there much evidence of crystal meth use?Johnny: No, there was a lot of fear of crystal meth and crystal meth was something ... like in a European context the main area, or main country, is the Czech Republic and I think Norway or Sweden were sort of standout countries in terms of crystal meth.  The UK has had a big problem with it as well but there was a concern about 2 years ago that because it was sort of emerging in the UK that the guards felt there’s an 18 month transfer period but UK have had crystal meth problems since the 80s and it’s never really taken off as a big problem here.  Now there have been a number of seizures but it hasn’t seemed to have taken off and any research I have done it’s been talked about and mentioned but nothing like say crack cocaine has been mentioned and there we’ve seen since it emerged really in 2005 it is now available certainly in all taskforce areas around Dublin and it is a market that is a very stable market and a very lucrative market.  Like while prices have fluctuated in other drugs crack is something that has been very steady and very lucrative because people are, you know, there’s such a demand for it, such a repeat demand.  But in terms of crystal meth and it’s also probably more concealed, you know, if you can call it a market because it can produce it in their home.  Like I remember watching a video once where the only way police seized crystal meth was when houses blew up because of the mixture of chemicals and so it might be something that is concealed possibly within certain ethnic groups who have a cultural background of using crystal meth but I don’t think it has transferred across to mainstream Irish society.Participant 7 Yeah, I was just wondering and it’s the same as you were talking about just now, I’ve read in the media about this new phenomenon in the UK that they label it as bath substance but ...Johnny: Bath salts, yeah.Participant 7: ... yeah, yeah has that reached Ireland already because it’s a very strong substance?Participant 4: Been and gone.Johnny: It’s been and ... yeah, it’s been and gone in that like the substances in what were referred to as head shops were nearly always marketed as something else like bath salts and things like that so that’s how the head shops were sort of getting around it.  Now the new legislation that was passed in 2010 prohibits that so now most head shops – and I think there’s about 10 of them out of whatever there was 80 or 90 or more are remaining open and that’s largely because of that new legislation that was introduced, the Psychotropic Substances Act, 2010.  We’ll just take one final quick one there.Participant 8: Just very quickly, are you optimistic or pessimistic for the future?Johnny: Optimistic.  (laughs)Participant 8: In relation to drugs?  (laughter)Johnny: I think one issue that I’ve mentioned that I think is really an important one is the issue of intimidation because that is really breaking down families in ways that mainstream society and the government doesn’t seem to really appreciate yet.  And I think there really needs to be a concerted response to that because once that is allowed and particularly if  the whole concept of gangs and territorial control is allowed to develop well then it’ll turn a corner and it will really be very difficult to come back.  I mean there was a study done recently in Limerick called Understanding Limerick and it showed the way in certain parts of Limerick and it was a very organised destruction of a community to facilitate drug dealing.  And there was a very sort of conscious disintegration of areas to assert control by people involved in the drugs trade and I think if that’s not grasped, you know, we have a sort of a ... I think we can see what can happen and if that isn’t grasped and I think the issue of intimidation is something that really has the potential to, you know, where you have people coming together in the past in large groups and sitting in meeting rooms like the photographs I’ve shown you, it’s very difficult to get that because people are so fearful but I think without that, without that willingness of people to come together and to address it the State can’t address it on its own, they certainly can’t.  So that would be ... I wouldn’t be optimistic unless that is addressed.Facilitator: So I’d just like to say thank you very much for coming along and thank you very much to Johnny for giving the talk.Johnny: You’re very welcome.  Okay.  (clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to Declan Burke's talk and reading.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode Declan Burke, crime author and journalist, reads from his novel 'Absolute Zero Cool', and explains how he had come to write the book. Recorded in front of a live audience at the Central Library in September 2011 as part of its 'Crime and the City' series.Thanks everyone for coming along, particularly on a sunny ... we don’t get so many sunny days these days so I’m sure you all have better things to be doing maybe on a Thursday afternoon, so delighted to see you here.  Padraic, when he contacted me, suggested that I would do a reading for 25 minutes/half an hour from the book and then kind of get involved maybe in a question and answer session which gives me the creeping horrors to be honest because I hate reading aloud, particularly my own work, but I just find it makes for a sterile kind of environment so there’s various sections I was going to read and maybe if people were interested after each section perhaps, because they’re relatively short, maybe then engaging if anyone had any questions I’d be much more comfortable and I think it would possibly be more enjoyable for people if everyone is happy with that.  I suppose the second thing to say then is the framework of the series is ‘Crime in the City’ and ‘Drugs in the City’ is that the title?Padraic: Crime and Drugs.Declan: Crime and Drugs.  And when Padraic contacted me I was going oh I don’t think my book is really appropriate for that because it’s actually about two guys trying to blow up a hospital so there isn’t an awful lot of drug related crime in it.  Except then (laughs) I started going through it and that’s the first half of the book alone, the drug related sections not just references, so I don’t know if that says more about me or the culture that we live in but I’m taking the ‘Drug in the City’ idea relatively broadly in that in my mind drugs or, you know, cigarettes and alcohol are equally as dangerous in the wrong hands as heroine and cannabis and what have you.  So it’s in that context I’m going to read the various sections and, as I say, they’re relatively short and hopefully after each one we might have a short Q&A session if there’s anyone still left in the room. The context of the book I suppose I should explain.  I had written the first draft of this book about 6 or 7 years ago and I sent it to my agent at the time and he read it and he came back to me and said I really, really don’t know what I can do with this.  It was quite dark.  It was about a psychopathic hospital porter who had a sideline in euthanasia and that was one of his penchants.  So I put it in the drawer and I actually ended up writing more kind of comedy related crime fiction.  About 3½ years ago then was just about to have our first baby and at the time I thought I was ready for this but to give you some idea of how unready I was for fatherhood the big sacrifice I was prepared to make at the time was that for a whole 6 months I wouldn’t do any writing just to be there to lend a hand or at least look useful and so forth.  That lasted about 3 weeks because I think if you’re involved in writing it does become a bit of a reverse drug and the compromise I came to with Aileen was that I wouldn’t write anything new because that does take a huge amount of energy, not so much physical but psychic energy, and I would redraft something older.  And 2 days later, literally 2 days later, I was standing at the window of the office looking out onto the back garden which is an essential part of the creative process I think any writer will tell you and it was if the character, the psychopathic hospital porter, his name is Karlsson, as if he had popped into the back garden and said what about me in effect, he didn’t refer to the fact that we had just had a baby but what he ... I mean the line in book is “publish or I’m damned” is what he says.  You’ve created me but I only have a half life and I’m living in this kind of purgatory, you need to redraft me, you need to make me a more likeable psychopath and, you know, make me come alive in effect.  And I thought it was a neat idea.  It made me laugh at the time and if an idea makes me laugh it’s usually a good sign for me to kind of carry on with the idea.  And the idea was that, yes, I would redraft the book and I’d try and make him a more likeable psychopath and for his part in order to grab the attention of the publishers he would plough ahead and blow up the hospital where he works.  So that’s the scenario, that’s the opening section and the book then alternates with sections from the old first draft with Karlsson and the unnamed author then talking about the piece that they’ve just read, they’ve just rewritten and the reactions to it.  So this is the first page of the old draft:The cancer counsellor waves a rolled up a newspaper to shoo us away from the windows so his clients won’t have to watch us smoking.  We are the bolted horses.  Some of my co-smokers drift away around the corner to where a breeze whips beneath a glass corridor connecting the hospital’s old and new buildings.  There they huddle together, shivering.  It’s a grey December day, sleet is battering the glass, the wind, cool easterly.  The cancer counsellor raps on the windows, jerks his head and thumb.  I flip him the bird.  He opens the window and leans out, beckons me across.  I stroll over.  When I’m close enough he mimes writing down the name on my plastic tag.  “Let me get this straight,” I say “you’re miming a disciplinary action”.  This provokes him into taking out a pen, writing my name on the back of his hand.  “You’re on report Karlsson.” he says “Ingrate” I say “If we didn’t smoke you’d be out of a job”, his face reddens.  He doesn’t like being reminded of his role as a parasite, not many do.  “Between you and me” I say “stress is the big killer”.  He’s fuming as he closes the window.  I try to make the connection between a patient’s cancer and my smoking but it can’t be done, there’s a fuzzy blurring of divisions, okay, and carcinogens, either side of the wire but I’m not finding the tangent point.  My line for today comes from Henry G. Strauss, I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified about what he had read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.So that’s section one and obviously cigarettes are the drug of choice in that particular one.  Just a tangent, I didn’t mean to talk about this, but cannabis as a gateway drug is often laughed off particularly by people who use cannabis but I suppose I’m living testimony the fact that it is because I was a virulent anti-smoker before I went to college and dabbled a little in first year with – and I think as you’re supposed to do, almost obliged to do in college – and smoking cannabis didn’t last but I’m still smoking cigarettes, smoking about 40 a day 25 years later.  If cannabis isn’t the gateway drug to cigarettes at least I don’t know what is.  So yeah that’s the first section, that’s the first section of Karlsson’s original draft or the original draft of Karlsson I should say.  If I anybody has any comments to make or wants to leave I’ll look away in the corner so it won’t be too embarrassing for anybody.  We’ll plough on to page 56 then.  And at this point things are not entirely running smoothly.  Karlsson isn’t getting all his own way because the writer obviously believes that he should be the one to shape the narrative and tell Karlsson what he is and what he isn’t going to do.  Karlsson, by the way, has abandoned the name Karlsson and his calling himself Billy because he believes it’s just a nicer name to be known by and, you know, it’s all part of his reformed psychopath role.  But the writer then is being slightly intimidated by interacting with this psychopath.  Now the writer, I should say the author, isn’t demented, isn’t deluded, he actually is based in a writer’s residence, an artist’s retreat, and he has been approached by this guy calling himself Billy who wants to bring the character of Karlsson to life and because he’s in a artist’s retreat the author believes that the character calling himself Billy is actually kind of an avant-garde actor who want so to bring this unpublished character to the stage as soon kind of metafictional comment on life-meets-art-meets-life-meets-art possibly, I don’t know.  So that’s the general context so the author of the book isn’t sitting having coffee with some fictional character that he brought to life but he does believe he’s dealing with a flesh and blood person.  So at this point Billy, being flesh and blood, has offered to chip in and write some of the sections himself, not just rewrite but write because once you start toying with any aspects of a redraft I don’t know how many times I’ve said to myself I’ll just give this one last polish, just one last ... take out the comment ... and, you know, within a week you’re up to your ankles in broken sentences and the whole thing has fallen apart so it never works out.  So in making Karlsson a nicer psychopath that automatically affects every other aspect of the book and we’ve got to the point now where Billy/Karlsson is now writing sections of the book himself and here he is writing about two of his fellow hospital porters, they work in the security department of the hospital, one of them is called Tomo and the other one is called Austin.Tomo says “kill your babies”.  To be precise he croaks this through a lungful of exhaled smoke.  Tomo is into the late afternoon of a wake-n-bake, horizontal on the couch, the drapes pulled.  Killer Tomo twiddles his controller sending his POV avatar roaming through the airport on the TV blasting away at enemy soldiers and cowering civilians alike.  I advance into the apartment until I enter his field of vision.  He pauses the game, smiles up at me sloppily.  “Hey K, how she hanging?”.  He offers a hit off his joint.  I decline.  “Word to the wise” Tomo I say “Frankie was looking for you all morning”.  “Kill your Frankies”, “No really, he was seriously pissed, he had to watch the monitors himself there was no relief cover, Austin rang in sick too, Frankie was up and down the stairs all day”.  “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out”.  “I’m just letting you know Tomo he was seriously pissed”.  Tomo frowns, he struggles into a half sitting position, “K” he says “who the fuck let you in?”, “Austin” I say, I jerk a thumb at Austin who was sitting in the armchair nearest the TV sucking on a hookah, Austin gives a thumbs up then exhales and subsides into the armchair bong tube a dangle.  “Yeah well” Tomo says “now you’re here shut the fuck up about Frankie, take a hit or take a hike, but go easy” he says “it’s pure Thai”.  He takes a deep draw on the joint beckons me closer, I understand he is offering a blow back so as to ease me in gently.  I kneel down as he sits forward until our lips are almost touching then he exhales into my open mouth.  “You might want to ring in sick for tomorrow before you start in proper” he says, “Trust me it’ll be too much hassle after the first draw”.  Tomo sounds far too lucid for this to be true but the smoke floods my lungs as if they were those of an infant, new and pure.  Though smooth going down the blowback causes my brain to pulse like a mushroom cloud.  The effect is one of immediate bliss swiftly followed by gut sucking paranoia then a wonderfully mellow sense of sensory disorientation.  Acute dehydration ensues.  I go to the kitchen for water. I come back from the kitchen thirsty having somehow failed to locate either sink or fridge.  Austin appears to be comatosed in the armchair.  Tomo says something about how every language ever invented has been a failed attempt to discover a means of expression by which mankind might communicate the full extent of its ignorance.  He says kill your babies is a metaphor for eradicating metaphors.  He says it’s an irony rather than a tragedy that most people experience their lives as metaphors for how they would have preferred their lives to be.  He says the real tragedy is that most people already know this.  Tomo says a lot of things but I’m not really listening.  Irony isn’t half as clever when you’re thirsty.  People, you can carve this one in stone, you will seek in vain for irony in the vicinity of a cacti patch.So that’s the second section.  And what follows on from that is that having set up Tomo and Austin as pretty serious cannabis abusers and they are missing work as a result it means that Billy in redrafting the book can then go ahead and he now has an excuse to have them sacked from the hospital because he no longer needs them as characters in his version of his story which is where we start getting into the fact that there are kind of frames within frames within frames of the story, we have the author telling you about Billy who is telling you about the likes of Tomo and Austin etc., all of which of course is between the covers of a book by someone called Declan Burke.  The unnamed author in the book by the way I should say is unnamed obviously but he has published the likes of The Big O and Eight-Ball Boogie, for example, in the past which are books that I have published myself.   So that’s section two.Participant 1: I’d like to know what you feel as a writer you gain by essentially technically you’ve shifted POV, I mean you know that Billy isn’t really a character and so forth so you’ve invented this for POV, what do you feel you’ve gained by making it as elaborate as you have?Declan: That’s a very good question and it’s quite a personal question, believe it or not.  But I’ll answer it. I will answer it.  When I wrote the first version, the first draft, I had split up from a very major relationship in my life and it was quite a dark time in my life, as they say on Oprah, and I used the experience of writing, I purged a lot of black stuff from my life, a lot of poison, went on to the page, a very, very useful exercise in catharsis for me personally, but when my agent read the book he just goes “I really don’t know what I could do with this, this is incredibly ...” you know, usually he would go through a book making notes as he goes along and very good he is at it too.Participant 1: This is Jonathan yeah?Declan: Jonathan Williams that’s right.  A lovely man.  And he gave up about a third of the way through and he said “There’s no point in me making notes about this because I know I’m not going to sell it” (laughs) and that was fair comment, absolutely.  So to answer the question when I came back to it given that where I was in my life then I was at that stage happily married to the person I had split up from and subsequently wrote the book and we had a lovely baby girl so things were completely different and that’s where I think the character of Billy and the idea of a reformed sociopath came from and by using the kind of frame within a frame within a frame kind of scenario and I hope I’m not making it sound as if it’s complex, it’s actually pretty straightforward on the page when you’re reading it, it’s very clear as to what stage you’re at at all times, but it allowed me to differentiate between Karlsson, for example, is the sociopath, the dark stuff, the black stuff belongs to Karlsson.  Billy is the intermediary then between me and Karlsson and it’s as if I’ve put this buffer of distancing an almost ironic distancing to say that I’m not responsible, Declan Burke who is married to Aileen, as the father of Lily, is not responsible for some stuff that’s actually quite bleak in this book.  And that was written originally certainly with a sense of irony but if it was taken out of context could be, you know, there’s some virulently right wing fascist material in this book like.  So while I think it’s worth saying in order to kind of, in the sense of kind of throwing up the question so that people can maybe batter them down again I think given that I was or had become a father I definitely wanted to distance myself from the material so that was one of the reasons for ... probably the major reason, the emotional reason, for creating those frames.Participant 1: The way that you structure it, what made you ... were you stuck when you wanted to hold on to some stuff and redo other stuff, were you stuck with the structure or is that a way of inventing, putting a new author in, which is very complex what might have been a crime novel or did it just come to you that that’s the way you’d do it?Declan: It felt very natural to do it.  I wasn’t particularly stuck at any time.  Touch wood I’ve never been actually ... I never really suffered that writers’ block thing.  When the idea came to me it kind of came to fully formed and I could see it, start, beginning and middle, this framework will work.  You know, obviously it took a lot of work and a lot of finessing certainly and there were certain aspects of the original draft that had to come out and there had to be new stuff to write to keep the structure firm the whole way through but, yeah, sometimes, very, very rarely you do get those beautiful ideas that allow you to tell a story that might have been less ... that maybe if it wasn’t working ... I think the story, the original story, worked nobody just was going to read it, that was the bottom line.  So I think in this, once I had that idea and I saw how it would work the whole way through, sometimes you get an idea and you can see well that’s how the first section will work and then I’ll have to get another idea to make the second and the third act will have to fend for itself type of thing, but this one, when I seen it, for me it worked the whole way through so.Participant 1: Thank you.Participant 2: What’s a wake-n-bake?Declan: A wake-n-bake is, apparently and I’ve been told, you just, you don’t even get out of bed, you wake up, you reach over, you skin up and you just get stoned for the whole day.Participant 2: Right.Declan: Yeah.  Not sure where it originating but there’s a book called Dispatches by Michael Herr, I don’t know if anybody has ever come across it?  It’s a wonderful, wonderful piece of war journalism and it’s called Dispatches because he was I think the Washington Post correspondent in Vietnam so it’s a collection of pieces that he wrote, he sent back from Vietnam, and that book starts off with Michael Herr on a wake-n-bake and he’s a superb, superb writer if you haven’t read the book I would heartily recommend it.So that’s cigarettes and cannabis we’ve dealt with, moving on swiftly now to legal drugs, prescription drugs, why people take them and how people get them I suppose is what the next section is dealing with in one respect.  But you’ll know at this stage that Karlsson/Billy is not a conventional thinker so he does tend to go off on tangents so if they are a wee bit too tangential for you I do apologise for that.  So ...Suffering is part of the natural order.  Pain is as essential as birth and decay.  In scientific tests radishes were proven to scream when ripped from the earth.  Can other radishes hear these screams?  Who cares for the agony of radishes?  The idea of stealing drugs came to me when an old lady asked one night if I had anything on the cart that might dull the pain that had her doubled up and speaking so quietly, I could barely hear her words.  “No mam” I said, “I’m sorry” but it sent me thinking.  There was a certain symmetrical nobility in the idea of pilfering drugs to help those who need them most like a Japanese orderly breaking into Red Cross packages to help British POWs.  But that would have been a crassly stupid thing to do.  Certainly I will plead with a nurse on behalf of a patient who appears to be in pain.  I am not animal except in the literal sense.  But even animals know not to defecate on their own doorstep.  Still, the majority of people who are in pain are not in hospital.  Agony cannot always be x-rayed.  Anguish cannot always be pumped out.  A broken heart cannot be splinted.  These people would rather not pay a General Practitioner’s fee in order to obtain a simple prescription to cure an ailment they can diagnose themselves, this is where I, yours truly, Karlsson, comes in.  The joy of theft is the lack of overheads.  I skim from a different hospital storage facility on alternate floors every month.  In this way I don’t allow a pattern to build up.  This is not difficult to achieve, there is no set schedule to subvert.  If the opportunity presents itself, if the nurse’s station is deserted say and I have not targeted that particular facility for some months and I have the means to transport the contraband undetected, I will avail of the opportunity.  Furthermore I do not skim the same merchandise every time.  The range is wide enough to qualify as eclectic, uppers and downers, anything morphine based, the deliciously bewildering pick n mix of antidepressants and the atypicals, these I offload at a competitive rate to P, my connection in town.  P used to deal weed and E to students until he realised the potential of black market script drugs.  Soon he will graduate to heroin, eventually he’ll become a TV salesman.  I call P.  “My mother in law is out of town” I say, this is his idea of code, P is a paranoid who watches too many gritty American cop shows.  He has The Wire running on a perpetual loop.  His mood swings give him emotional whiplash.  He says “Usual place, 10 bells”, he hangs up.  I ring back.  “Remind me”, I say, “where’s the usual place?”, “The usual for fuck’s sake”.  “I go to a lot of places that are usual” I say.  “Strand Hill” he says, “Strand fucking Hill” this is code for Rosses Point, the swanky resort across the bay from Strand Hill.  I like the idea of dealing illicit contraband at the Point.  “Okay,” I say “see you around 10”.  “At 10” he grinds his teeth.  “10 on the fucking dot” he even sounds like he’s sweating.  So I turn up at 20 past just to be cuntish.  When I get in his car he sees hypnotised by the flicker of the lighthouse beam, his complexion is pasty.  “You alright man?” I say “You don’t look so good” but he’s not listening.  “Give me the shit” he says.  I hand it over.  He gives me the money.  He starts babbling about an upcoming skiing holiday in Bulgaria then confuses it with a skiing holiday he took a few years ago in the Italian Alps.  I cut in, make my excuses.  P drives for home seemingly unaware that two distinct arks in time have just intersected.  I smoke a cigarette before I follow him back into town, the last place I want to be is behind a driver who is unaware that he is trapped at a tangent point between then and when.So there be another section.  I’m fascinated, to be honest, about the use of script drugs, about legal drugs, about prescription drugs, I mean how wide spread it is and how dependent people can come to be on prescription drugs through no fault of their own or necessarily their doctor.  But it certainly is ... I would say it’s more prevalent than that of illegal drugs.  We hear all about heroin, we here about cannabis seizures at Dublin airport etc., etc., I don’t know what the statistics are but I would imagine that far more people are addicted to prescription drugs than are to the harder drugs, the class As particularly.  There’s actually a relatively small core of registered addicts in this country that are addicted to the class A drugs, 30,000 as far as I know, which is quite small when you think about all the headlines you see about heroin etc.  And I know that not all heroin addicts, for example, are registered, not by a long shot, but I would imagine if you measured that statistic versus the people who are in regular receipt of prescription drugs I’d say it would be dwarfed and of course that’s not fascinating in its own regard to the facts and figures but it’s the pain, it’s what’s being treated by those prescription drugs that I think is absolutely fascinating and heartbreaking and I would love to see a graph of the last 5 years in this country, for example, to see the usage of prescription drugs providing people most in need of them can still afford their prescription drugs but I would love to see a graph of the usage and how often and how much is being prescribed because, you know, this country is sick, you know, I mean it is sick metaphorically and literally.  You know, the health service, the fact that Billy Karlsson is a hospital porter is incredibly important to the book obviously but it’s incredibly important to me because I think what’s being done to the health system in this country is an absolute disgrace, you know, sometimes I ... the riots in Athens, for example, you know, part of your brain is saying I wish the Greeks would just realise the extent to which they’ve dug their own grave really in terms of their financial scenario and the other half of you is going fair play, you know, because especially in this country we seem to be incredibly passive while ‘the elite’ carry on regardless, you know, and it’s the ordinary people that are suffering and continue to suffer.  And, you know, if we say metaphorically the country is sick what’s the answer?  We close down the hospitals?  I mean that’s almost a Kafkaesque response like, you know.  I was listening to a guy on the radio the other night and he was saying we lived in the year of absurdonomics where ... and I agree with him because one of the economists who actually I think is quite good but he was saying in The Irish Times there 2 weeks ago that the debt forgiveness scenario that’s on the table at the moment could be sorted out if we just throw 5 or 6 billion at the situation and I was going if we just throw 5 or 6 billion at the situation (laughter).  This morning on the news the big news was that France has released 1 billion of seized Libyan assets back to the new ... the interim Government and that’s going to get Libya back on its feet at least in the short term.  1 billion is going to get Libya back on its feet in the short term.  We’re talking about throwing 5 or 6 billion at debt forgiveness.  We live in an absurd time, an absolutely crazy time and I will say, just to go back to the prescription drugs thing, I would love to know what the extent of it and I wouldn’t even necessarily characterise it as abuse of prescription drugs because, you know, there’s a lot of people out there who need it, badly, badly need it and understandably so.  Here endeth the sermon, sorry about that!  (laughter)Participant 3: I think the Irish health service spends about 3 billion a year on drugs.Declan: Right.Participant 3: About that, I think what it is.Declan: Okay.Participant 3: So probably most likely the prescription drugs go in through that 3 or 4 billion.Declan: Okay.Participant 3: And there’s financial profit as well ...Declan: Sure, sure.Participant 3: ... and if you think about the States where it’s quite normal for obviously anecdotally it’s quite normal for office workers to be taking whatever is the latest upper or downer of choice, you know, it was normal for people to be taking Prozac in an office environment so.Declan: Sure.  And variations thereof, yeah.Participant 3: And I think it’s not quite ... maybe it will get worse here.Declan: Yeah well I mean Americans have a reputation for being a Prozac nation, I can’t remember who wrote that book but there was a book with that provocative title and, you know, there’s any variations on Prozac, for example, and I think part of the problem with the Irish health service is that there are non-brand drugs that will be far cheaper than the brand ones and that was an ongoing and it still is an ongoing situation so I think it could be done far more cheaply but essentially, you know, and I don’t want to be too simplistic about it but, for example, they’re threatening now to close down the emergency ward in Tallaght Hospital because it hasn’t come up to ... because it falls down on various aspects of safety and health and safety because they’ve had to strip back their budget because they’re not getting ... meanwhile (laughs) we’re just lobbing billions at these gamblers on the international markets and I don’t know about you but I’m looking over my shoulder at Iceland and looking at what they’re doing and Iceland were the laughing stock of the world 3 years ago.  Who is laughing at the world now, you know?  But again ...Participant 4: Do you explore that passivity that you’re fingering there in your book?Declan: Yeah I do.  It’s an angry book and it’s too angry.  It shouldn’t be.  I mean a work of literature shouldn’t be angry I think.  Yeah absolutely I think that the ... and not just books, I think that ...Participant 4: So we’ve just wiped off Beckett and a huge number of people who were angry?Declan: Well I think that the artist can be angry but I think that, you know, the great artists have the wit which I don’t have (laughs), have the wit to distance themselves from their material because if what you’re reading is ... I mean anger is a real unformed emotion, you know, it’s raw and it tends to explode and it tends to go off and a lot of people tend to get hurt in the fallout.  You know, quiet and cold rage I think would be more appropriate for this but, you know, like I’m not ashamed, I’m not embarrassed by the fact that it’s angry, I mean these are times when I think a lot of people are angry, you know.  I’m not criticising the Irish people for being passive because what else do you do?  I mean, you know, you can’t have a one person march up O’Connell Street, you know.  There have been marches, there have been very, very rare marches but we don’t want to go the way they did in Athens either and start bombing banks well (laughs) let me rephrase that, we don’t want to go the way they did in Athens and see people killed when they bombed banks.  (laughter)  I certainly don’t.  But if I was to wake up tomorrow morning and hear that a few banks had gone up in flames it would certainly brighten my September I’ll tell you that for nothing.  But yeah I think the book is too angry and I think a great writer doesn’t let emotions cloud the work, that’s my personal opinion.Participant 4: I’m quite hard of hearing ...Declan: Sorry.Participant 4: ... so I’m not hearing everything that you read because I’m not sure the room has T-loop and if it has that it’s on, but I felt that by choosing your kind of character that you chose really below the radar that you kind of defused some of that anger because he’s commenting all the time in a kind of wry way on the situations like how does his smoking effect the patients and that so with my limited hearing I felt that you had managed to sublimate that anger quite well in what you’ve read so far.  So I didn’t have a problem with it.Declan: Okay.  Well, you know, I can only give you my reaction to the book and I’m obviously not the best person to judge.  That said I mean the idea of the hospital porter at one point Karlsson says that one of the huge benefits to being a hospital porter is the fact that you’re so systematically underestimated by the rest of society.  And on two different occasions he’s asked, you know, ‘well what are your plans, like what do you want to be when you grow up?’ in effect. And he’s kind of outraged that the idea of being a hospital porter isn’t enough, that it wouldn’t be regarded as being a function that’s important in society.  Okay he doesn’t get paid enough as ... as much as we’ll say the average bank manager (laughter) but the role he performs in society is far more important, for example, so he believes, but as he says sacrifice is passé in this day and age.  And the fact that society underestimates him is not the reason that he sets out to blow up the hospital but it certainly facilitates his undercover work as he goes about the job, so.Anybody else? Well it looks like we’ll have time for one more section rather than two you’ll be delighted to hear so the last section I was going to read, again we’re back to Karlsson and we’re roughly halfway through the book now and at this stage his plans for blowing up the hospital are fully in train although the reader is not privy nor is the writer (laughs) is not privy to what his plans are either.  But the character that was mentioned in the context of the Tomo and Austin piece, Frankie, who is Tomo and Austin’s supervisor, he was looking for them, so he is the main character here.  Karlsson has gone to ... after work they’ve gone together for a pint.  Previously, a few pages previously, Frankie had agreed to buy a quart of dope from Karlsson.I meet Frankie for a pint after work.  We play some pool in an upstairs pool hall betting on the outcome of each frame, double or nothing each time.  “Frankie man you’re sharking me over here, you’re a fucking hustler, Paul fucking Newman, man”.  Frankie is a big man, muscles are hulking but he’s a surprising delicate touch with a cue, I like him.  Despite his obvious limitations which include a deprived socioeconomic background Frankie is ambitious, he always has a plan.  Frankie wins six games on the bounce.  I concede and shake his hand in the process palming the ounce of dope “Call it quits I say, what do you reckon?”. Frankie is agreeable, he has just scored a couple of weeks worth of low grade bliss, in the process he has implicated himself in the tragic elimination of my superior, should the truth about tampered breaks emerge Frankie cannot take to the witness stand unless it is to confess his gross negligence, he would have to admit to a dereliction of duty in the pursuit of illegal narcotics, behaviour unlikely to impress prospective employers.  We go downstairs.  The pints are on Frankie.  He tells me about his latest plan which is to translate his experience at the hospital into a company that will provide security staff for bars and nightclubs.  The pitch is that the cost of employing Frankie’s well-trained bouncers will be less prohibitive than paying out insurance claims to customers who have been manhandled by delinquent primates.  He has been to the bank, laid out the business plan and all lights are green bar one tiny hitch.  Frankie needs to go back to college.  He needs a piece of paper that says he understands management theory, basic accounting tax laws, etc., ad nauseam.  Frankie’s dilemma is that he can’t afford to take 2 years out to go to college but he can’t afford to not either.  His girlfriend and future life partner, Joanne, is not an especially demanding woman, but Frankie wants to achieve security and respectability on her behalf.  Joanne’s interpretation of security and respectability includes a 3-bed suburban semi, at least one car in the driver and a non-negotiable one fortnight per year in sunnier climes.  Aspirations such as these require cold cash or at least the illusion of cold cash that lending institutions can create.  Thus Frankie’s ambitions are reduced to hard currency, this is the process by which Frankie will be brought to heel, this is how Frankie becomes a meek cog in a machine that despises both meekness and cogs.  “What about you?” he says, “Anything cooking?”. He asked this because the income of a hospital porter isn’t sufficient to qualify as adequate by the modern world’s expectations which appear to be index linked to inflation thus I should be plotting my escape.  It does not occur to him that such a question would be offensive to a hospital porter who believed he was providing an invaluable service to society by taking on a job no one else wants.  Sacrifice is passé.  There is no percentage in martyrdom these days, in the western world at least.  “Not really,” I say, “I’ve enough on my plate working out how to blow up the hospital”.  “Blow it up?” he says.  “Blow it up, close it down, what’s the fucking difference?” he nods, “It’s some fucking dump alright, once I’m gone those fuckers can kiss my hairy hole”.  He sups again frowning.  “You know” he says “I can’t think of anyone who wants to be working there, not one fucking person, you’d only be doing them a favour if you blew it sky high”.  “Apparently a building that size only needs to move four or five feet in any direction, gravity does the rest”, he nods, drains his pint and looks into the glass as he swirls the creamy head around the bottom “Want to go again?” he says.  Cassie has book club tonight so I nod, “My twist” I say.  “Put your money away Frankie, your money is not good here”.  The pints arrive.  I toast him.  “Here’s to going back to college” I say.  “To blowing up the hospital” he says.  We touch glasses and drink deep.That’s that.  That’s probably a good example or a bad example I should say of, you know, it being too angry, you know, the “blow it up, close it down, what’s the fucking difference” I mean that’s clunky, you know, I mean I obviously liked it at the time that’s why it went in (laughs) looking back on it now maybe, hmm, a bit too obvious, a bit too raw, but there you go so.Padraic: We might take a few questions now if people have any?  I have one just to start off.  So far you’ve been published by Lilliput.  Then your second novel you co-published with a smaller publisher, Hag’s Head, then you published your own book on Kindle and now you’ve put out two books through Liberties Press.  Do you think that’s inevitable for a writer now?  And what did you enjoy or what were the upsides and downsides of each?Declan: I don’t think it’s inevitable by any means.  Most writers will have war stories like, for example, I was telling Padraic before we started off that The Big O which was my previous novel it was picked up by Harcourt in the US and they did a terrific job on it, made a beautiful hardback book and 6 weeks before it was due to come out the editor who had signed me up lost her job in a merger between Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin or Harcourt and Dunder Mifflin as a friend of mine refers to them.  And she lost her job and they lost interest in the book The Big O, they published it because the wheels were in motion but, you know, it died a death, they didn’t back it at all.  So those kind of war stories, you know, once you start talking most writers will say ‘oh yeah well wait till I tell you about my editor or my publisher, oh my God’.  So yeah I mean it depends, it differs from writer to writer, some writers will be lucky enough to be picked up from the get-go, signed up to, you know, a 3, 4, 5 book deal and things will progress through the mid list and they’ll become bestsellers and they will live happily ever after.  For most writers I would think because the way the industry is going and particularly because of the impact of e-publishing and Kindle and the Sony Readers etc., that there’s going to be an awful lot more writers I think self publishing and publishing on a very, very small budget so I think you’re going to see a lot more of even the bigger publishers not so much splashing out the 4 or 5 book deals but, you know, taking a ... much in the way that the music industry has gone.  I mean 10 years ago or 15 years ago a band would be taken on by a music label and, you know, given three albums to break into the top 5 or the top 10 or whatever it is and, you know, maybe a couple of top 10 hits on the singles chart, these days in the music industry it’s, you know, if you don’t hit number one with your first record you’re done, you’re dropped, good luck.  It’s becoming the same thing in the books industry, the publishing industry.  And that’s just the way it is, you know, I mean I wouldn’t ... like it’s been a rollercoaster ride, there’s been ups and downs and there’s been some terrific experiences.  The one of publishing ‘The Big O’, co-publishing with Hag’s Head, Hag’s Head Publishing Press is in effect Marsha Swan, it’s a one woman operation and she’s an American lady, she’s living back in the States now.  But it was a wonderful experience because it was 50/50 costs and profits (laughs) ‘profits’ but what it did was it just gave me an insight into the industry really from the grassroots up, literally from putting the first words on the page to write the book to once it was published I was the distribution wing (laughs) of the book, I mean I was literally walking into Waterstones and various book shops with it clutched in my sweaty palms and, you know, ‘Would you please put my book on your shelf’ and quite a lot of the shops did, you know, and the big chains, you know, they were good enough to take a wee punt on it.  We only published 880 copies and it sold out and it eventually got picked up in the States by Harcourt so it had a happy ending of sorts.  So it was hard work and I would much rather to have it being published by one of the big five publishers and then handed a cheque for a million quid and say, you know, go and write another five books but, you know, it doesn’t work that way for 95% of the writers.  As I understand it roughly speaking 5% of published authors pay for the other 95% of writers to get published and when I say 5% we’re talking about the likes of James Patterson and J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown, the writers that come in for a lot of flak for being not marvellous writers in effect by the critics and particularly ... if it wasn’t for these people writing the kind of books and publishing the kind of books they do there’d be very, very few books on your book shelves and on your library shelves these days, you know.  So yeah tough times at the moment but then I don’t think it was ever easy to get a book published and it depends hugely of course on the kind of book that you’re publishing, yeah.Padraic: Then another question, you started the blog when you co-published the second novel and on the first post it’s really clear that it’s a promotional tool for the novel.Declan: Absolutely yeah.Padraic: But in the year since then it’s really taken off, last month you’d 20,000 visits, you’ve interviewed a number of crime writers.Declan: Did I?  (laughter)  Oh wow.Padraic: So how has the blog worked out for you and how has that integrated into things like Green Streets?Declan  The blog worked out terrific.  I’ll just say like we didn’t have a penny to promote The Big O, literally not a red cent, and I had been doing some blogging for another company and I liked the idea of it, I like the immediacy of the publishing thing because I work as a journalist and even when you’re writing, you know, you write a piece, you send it in on a Tuesday, it might pop up in the paper on a Saturday, there’s still a delay I mean of four days and especially in the culture in which we live, this immediate gratification.  So the idea of blogging is quite nice because you write a piece and you blog it and 30 seconds later it’s live to the world which can also be a bad thing (laughs), you know, blog in haste repent at leisure (laughter) as they say.  But it was a promotional tool in part in order ... I mean nobody cared or cared even less than they do about Declan Burke and his novels so in effect what I did was I wanted to talk about ... there was quite a number of ... well I thought there was quite a number of Irish writers, crime writers, coming through writing some very, very good stuff.  People will be very familiar with the name John Connolly, for example, and then perhaps Declan Hughes, Tana French, Juliette Parsons and Colin Bateman.  When I started the blog I thought that, you know, if I got maybe 20 names and kind of piggyback what they were achieving particularly in the States to bring people to the blog so that therefore they would become of my own book and I was absolutely stunned not just by the number of Irish crime writers that were out there but the quality was absolutely fantastic.  I was very, very pleasantly surprised.  Very disappointed originally to find out that Cormac Millar, who is sitting among you, the handsome gentleman in the blue shirt, (laughter) had got there before me and had set up his website all about Irish crime fiction but one of the really nice things about blogging over the last, I don’t know what it is, 4 or 5 years now at this stage, has been that it’s completely the reverse almost of the newspaper industry, for example, where everybody is in immediate competition with one another.  The bloggers and online website people, the community, the blogosphere as they call it, are incredibly helpful and friendly and welcoming and bend over backwards to help you out, whereas instead of kind of protecting our own little patch they’re throwing the ... the land is open to everybody to come and stake their own claim type of thing and there is no staking claims everybody is sharing the kind of same information.  A simple example is I will tell the people who read my blog about Cormac Millar’s book and he will tell people who read his blog about my book as often it’s not the same people that’s reading the two blogs, the two websites.  But there’s a nice ... there’s a lovely kind of crossover with ... there’s a couple of other Irish blogs now but there’s an incredible network and community across the world of various crime fiction/crime writing blogs and websites and that’s been one of the really nice aspects but I have to say I really enjoy doing it but if it hadn’t been for the explosion of quality, particularly in terms of Irish crime writing, then nobody would have come to read the book and the names I’ve mentioned along with those, the likes of Ken Bruen, I think I mentioned Tana French, Arlene Hunt, Jane Casey is a new name coming through, Conor Fitzgerald is a new name coming through, Kevin McCarthy.  Really I could go on, Cormac himself actually, a very fine writer.  I could go on and on.  I would say there’s at least fifty Irish crime writers currently publishing.  Now the quality is not sky high all the time, it can be patchy at times and that’s fine, that’s, you know.  As John Connolly says if I can paraphrase John Connolly he says “95% of crime writing is shit but that’s because 95% of everything is shit” and if we’re lucky we get to read only the 5% so.  If you want to know what to read Cormac Millar, he’s your man.Cormac: ThanksPadraic: So we should open this up to ... is there any more questions?  Does anybody have anything they want to ask about or make a comment?  I’ll keep going otherwise but it’s probably not fair.Participant 5: If there was one thing that keeps you going in writing what would that be, you know, with the novel?  There’s probably more than one.  (laughter)Declan: (laughs) Sometimes it just does come down to just one thing, you know, sometimes you’re hanging by a thread.  I mean I work full-time and I work as a freelancer which is pretty, you know, it’s more time consuming that simply just the 9 to 5 so the days can be long and we have a baby girl so.  I mean I need to get up at 5 in the morning to write from 5 till 7, that’s ... and then the house comes to live at 7 o’clock, if I don’t do it then it doesn’t ... so when the alarm goes off at 4.50 and sometimes you are lying in bed going, what was the ...?  Why did I want to ...?  (laughter) Or I knew there was ... and ultimately when all else falls away as it frequently does (laughs) it’s just words, it’s simply about messing with words, getting the words in the right order.  And there have been days, not many of them, but there have been days when, you know, you’ve spent 2 maybe 3 hours if you’re lucky at the desk and you’ve written one sentence, one sentence, twelve, fifteen, twenty words long but it’s right, it’s good, it works.  (laughs)  That doesn’t sound like an awful lot but, you know, at some stages of writing a book that can be an awful lot, you know.  I mean I think there’s an apocryphal story about Joyce running down one of the Parisian boulevards waving his cane in delight, you know, and asked he’d done a terrific day’s work, he’d written one word but it was the right word.  The right word.  (laughter)  So yeah words in the right order and the best order you can put them, that’s the first reason and I think ultimately it’s why you keep plugging away.  Also because of something like that you didn’t get it right that time so when you start on a new book it’s ‘this time’, ‘this time I’ll get it right’, ‘this time it’ll be ... it won’t be perfect but it’ll be really, really ...’ so this time next year I’ll be sitting here, well hopefully I’ll be sitting here, talking about my new book and how it’s not right and how I’m writing something new that’s going to fix all that and it’ll all be top notch so.Participant 6: Do you start off with an idea in the beginning or do things just come to you and you’ll start off thinking I might write about this and then you went talking about something totally different?  Do you have a kind of rough plan at the start?Declan: Yes, yes and yes.  Sorry?  I didn’t catch that?Participant 6: Do you have a kind of rough plan at the start?Declan:  Oh God I wish I did!  And every time I start off I say this time I’m going to plot, I’m going to be really meticulous, at least I’m going to know what’ll happen in the first, second, third act but the problem is I sit down and I just like tinker around with words and I’ll write down a couple of ideas and off I’ll go.  But yeah it generally starts with an idea.  For example, this one, you know, what if a guy tried to blow up a hospital.  Oh, that’s interesting to me, and you kind of go from there.  As often it’s not for me it’ll be a setting, it’ll be a place, I’ll spot a place, oh that would be a fantastic place to set a scene or given the kind of books I write, that would be a fantastic place to kill a person, wouldn’t that be marvellous (laughter) to hang somebody from that particular ... (laughter).  So yeah an idea, a setting, it could be one line, I mean it could be anything that kind of pops into your head and gives you enough impetus to sit down and write the next line or flesh out that particular place, that setting.  Or just I ... as often as not you think well it’s a really good idea and then you start kind of fleshing it out slightly and then it just falls apart because, you know, maybe it’s a good idea for a short story maybe but not necessary for a novel or whatever.  But that’s one of the things, every time I write a book and this is ... I’ve actually written about nine or ten, I mean I’ve only had four published, but every time I start off I completely forget about how bloody hard it is and how you get the original idea and you charge through the first 20/25/30,000 words and it’s going terrifically and then suddenly you start to, hmm, I should have thought this through a bit more, you know, I should have made out that ground plan as you say but things do occur to you as you go along and that’s one of the joys of it.  That’s one of the flukes, that one thing tends to lead onto another and that’s really one of the ... and you’ve got to the 25,000 word mark and you say well what happens now and it has almost suggested itself to you and then the next 10,000 words are covered and then the next 10,000 words and it’s an evolving process and then you finish the first draft and you go back and you’re oh it’s complete rubbish, how did I think that was any good and you start to rework it and redraft it and more ideas, you know, more things will suggest itself. There was a creative writing teacher, he’s dead now unfortunately, he was fantastic.  He wrote a couple of books.  His name escapes me now I’m afraid but he basically said, you know, you have to trust your imagination and if you write a particular kind of story or write a particular line or whatever it is you may not know why you’ve written it at the time in the context of the piece but when you come back to redraft for example it’ll stand up in like an iceberg out of the story and say well that’s what the story is about, why didn’t I realise that the first time.  And on top of that I should also say that, you know, every writer has their own method, every writer has their own reason for writing and every writer will get across the finishing line in their own way, you know, it’s one of the wonderful things why it makes talking to the writers about books so interesting because there is no single formula, there is no single magic way of doing it, you know.Participant 6:  Yeah.Participant 7: Concerns with the language and so on are, you know, very kind of literary fiction why do you put what you’re doing into crime fiction?  What is the attraction for you about crime fiction?Declan: The attraction for crime fiction, look that’s quite a loaded question (laughter), if we were at a crime fiction convention now you’d probably be hounded out of the room and thrown into a pond to see did you float. Participant 7: Well Graham Greene is a major American writer  ...Declan: Pardon?Participant 7: ... well Graham Greene is a major American writer, much better than Michael Herr for instance.Declan: Well he is, he is.Participant 7: So I mean I don’t think Graham Greene started off with crime fiction but it just ...Declan:  He did.  I think Graham Greene is part of the problem why crime fiction is not taken as seriously, in my opinion, as it should be.  I mean he referred to his crime narratives as his entertainments (laughter) which is a rather dismissive term I would have thought.  And to my mind his entertainments are far more interesting than his more heavy handed theses on whether, you know, God cares about Graham Greene or not but I don’t see absolutely any problem or any ... it’s not a juxtaposition for me, crime fiction and quality of language, I mean I really don’t ... you know I write crime narratives.Participant 7: No sorry could ... my question isn’t to justify why you’re in crime fiction but what the attraction of crime fiction is for you ...Declan: For me?Participant 7: ... rather than make you justify why you’re attracted to it.Declan: The attraction of writing it or of reading it or ...?Participant 7: Yeah, the attraction of doing it, yeah.Declan: Right, well the attraction of when I first set out was that I thought it was easy to do (laughs), that’s what I thought at the time.  I suppose it is easy to do.  I mean it’s easy to do any kind of book, you know, it’s difficult to do a good book but that’s neither here or there.  Crime fiction tends to follow a fairly ... well, you know, it’s a time honoured narrative art, there’s usually three acts, you know, and it’s that whole order/disorder/order generally and it runs all the way back to classical Greek tragedy, for example.  And if it survived 3,500 years then there’s probably not an awful lot wrong with that basic structure.  So once you have that structure that’s fine but that’s just a framework, you know.  It’s what you do with that and for me what crime fiction and implicit in what I’m saying is well written crime fiction, James Lee Burke that you’ve mentioned is a very good example of a guy who really knows his way around a sentence, you know.  Cormac McCarthy, for example, has turned to writing crime narratives.  James Ellroy is superb.  Elmore Leonard in his kind of more conversational vernacular style is to me as good a writer as any of the literary path.  So what crime fiction that, you know, implicitly embodies great writing does is that it tends to broach subjects that are taboo quicker than literary fiction does.  It tends to get to topics sooner.  It tends to be more timely and relevant.  It tends to be an awful lot more exciting than the literary fiction.  Now a lot of crime fiction tends to sacrifice language for example, it tends to sacrifice aspects that literary fiction would hold sacred.  Crime fiction tends to concentrate on plot, character much more than language we’ll say, there’s a different primacy given to each level.  But then, you know, to go back to John Connolly’s 95% of everything is shit to me the great writers, the great crime writers, are on the same par as the great literary writers, past and present, you know.  Like I think Hemingway, for example, I think Raymond Chandler is a Hemingway with a sense of humour so I mean I don’t know if you’ve read Raymond Chandler or not but ...Participant: Yes.Declan:  Hemingway is a wonderful stylist but he’s dry as a bone, you know, you’re not going to ‘oh I’m really in the mood to be entertained now I think I’m going to read some Hemingway’ (laughter) no, you’re not, you’re going to pick up a Chandler, you know, and you’re going to get a really good story, you’re going to get a fascinating insight into a time and a place, you’re going to get a connection between low level criminality and the highest levels of marbled justice and you’re going to giggle at least once a page and that’s not a bad average.Padraic: Okay folks we’re going to have to leave it there.  Thanks very much for coming along and thanks to Declan for coming in and talking to us.Declan: Well thank you everybody for coming along as well.  (clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

There is something very comforting about whodunnits.  Unlike real life, there are never any unsolved mysteries or loose ends; the murderer is properly unmasked, Scooby-Doo fashion, at the end; and the whole thing is a gentle exercise for the old brain cells as we get to play along, working out clues and chasing red herrings. They’re the television equivalent of toast: warm, cosy, and easy to digest. A whole host of detective series is available on DVD in libraries now, including a pretty hefty set of Miss Marple that would make an admirable murder weapon in itself. MorseGood old Morse: the jag, the crosswords, the ale, the classical music, and of course the long-suffering Lewis. Brilliant!  A Touch of Frost D.I. Jack Frost solves crimes the old-fashioned way, while battling with bureaucracy incarnate in the form of his boss, Superintendent Mullet.  Foyle’s WarD.I. Foyle, and his two assistants, Sam and Milner, solve not just the usual murders but also crimes involving profiteering and the black market, relevant to the WWII setting. Great props and costumes, very authentic. Midsomer MurdersThe chocolate-box pretty county  of Midsomer is somewhat overrun with gruesome crime, and by this stage there can’t be many villagers left. Nonetheless, Inspector Barnaby and his various sidekicks manage in each episode to find another body and another murderer.

Dublin is famous for many things, not least its nightlife. While many people imagine that Dublin’s international profile as a night spot only began with the establishment of Temple Bar, this selection of images from the Special Collections of Dublin City Public Libraries demonstrates that the fun didn’t start then. Fairs and taverns provided venues for entertainment from the Middle Ages and in the eighteenth century Coffee Houses were dens of political dissent and gossip. During that same century the theatres often saw more action in the pit than on the stage, or if throwing oranges at the actors was not to your taste you could while away the evening with a trip to a Charity Sermon. During the nineteenth century thrilling melodrama and wild vaudeville graced the Dublin stage and organisations such as the YMCA hosted lectures on the new advances in science. Going to “the pictures” became an important part of a Dublin night out in the twentieth century, but the city also played host to international luminaries such as Laurel and Hardy and The Beatles. And in the Dublin of the early 1980s you could get to a U2 concert for just £1.20!View images from A Great Night Out! image gallery.Further ResourcesThe following online resources can be accessed free of charge at your local library (access links via our NetVibes portal). Ask library staff for information and assistance.Libraries and Archives Digital Repository: Digital records relating to Dublin, including photographs, postcards, letters, maps and ephemeral material. Highlights of the collection include the Fáilte Ireland Photographic Collection, Wide Street Commission Map Collection (1757-1851), the Irish Theatre Archive and the Birth of the Republic Collection, which comprises material from the period of the foundation of the Irish state.Irish Times Digital Archive: This online archive service gives access to contemporary editions of the Irish Times from the mid-nineteenth century until the present.Irish Newspaper Archive: This online archive service gives access to contemporary editions of the Irish Independent and a range of other newspapers.The Ireland-JSTOR Collection: This online archive of academic articles can also be accessed free of charge at your local library.For further reading, consult the Library Catalogue.

Dublin City Libraries plans to digitise some of its early books and manuscripts, in order to bring the history of the city before a wider public. Many of the proposed works are hard to find and are very expensive to buy. The Picture of Dublin 1811 is the first in the series and it is being used as a pilot project to assess the value of the project.

The Commissioners for making Wide and Convenient Ways, Streets and Passages in the City of Dublin was established by an Act of Parliament in 1757. The Commission had extensive powers with the authority to acquire property by compulsory purchase, demolish it, lay down new streets and set lots along the new streets to builders for development.

'Aisy, aisy, mind the chisler’. Brendan Behan, The Confirmation Suit (1953). This gallery consists of images of children going about their business in Dublin from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present day.

'The Jacks Are Back' image gallery celebrates the greatest sports team this city has produced. Up da Dubs! These images were taken from the Dublin City Council Photographic Collection and The Reading Room's extensive collection of GAA match programmes. The images taken from contemporary programmes featured in this gallery are copyright of Cumann Lúthchleas Gael/Gaelic Athletic Association.

Dublin City Public Libraries and Ireland Literature Exchange presented a series of talks and readings, 'Dublin Revealed' in the Central Library in May 2011. Three of these talks and readings are available to listen to here.Right: Paul Murray, Carlo Gébler, Kevin BarryCarlo GéblerBorn in Dublin in 1954, Carlo Gébler was brought up in London and studied at the University of York and the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield. His novels include The Eleventh Summer (1985), Work & Play (1987), Malachy and his Family (1990), Life of a Drum (1991), The Cure (1994), How to Murder a Man (1998) and A Good Day for a Dog (2008). He collaborated with Patrick Maguire to write the 2008 memoir, My Father's Watch: The Story of a Child Prisoner in 70s Britain, imbuing it with a "quiet emotionalism" (The Guardian). His books for children are well-known: Caught on a Train (2001) was short-listed for a Bisto prize. In addition, he has written articles and short stories for many national publications and a libretto for opera. He is a film-maker, producer and director of television documentaries. Carlo’s work has been supported by ILE in Italian and Hebrew. Carlo Gébler is a member of Aosdána and lives in Enniskillen, where he currently is writer-in-residence in HMP Maghaberry. Browse Carlo Gébler books in the library catalogue.Listen Carlo Gébler reading from his new novel The Dead Eight, followed by questions and answers. Introduction by Sinéad Mac Aodha (13th May 2011).Carlo Gébler talk transcript.Kevin BarryKevin Barry was born in Limerick in 1969 and now lives in Sligo. His first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2007. Fellow Irish short story writer Philip Ó Ceallaigh praised them as 'vibrant, original, and intelligent short stories that deserve to be read and reread and to outlast the strange years that made them'. He has written about travel and literature for The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. His debut novel City of Bohane (published last month) is set in 2054 in the fictional city of Bohane in the West of Ireland, which is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. Irvine Welsh has described Barry as ‘the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years’. Check the availability of City of Bohane and There are Little Kingdoms in the catalogue.Listen to Kevin Barry reading from City of Bohane, followed by questions and answers. With an introduction by Aoife Walsh (20th May 2011).Kevin Barry talk transcriptPaul MurrayBorn in Dublin in 1975, Paul Murray studied English Literature in Trinity College. He later completed a postgraduate degree in Creative Writing at East Anglia University. His riotously funny début novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003), was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies (2010) was long-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Neil Jordan is set to direct the film adaptation. Skippy Dies has been supported by ILE in Italian, German and Norwegian. "Skippy Dies is so appealing and surprising that the pages pass with ease", The Guardian. Check the availability of Skippy Dies and An Evening of Long Goodbyes in the catalogue.Listen to Paul Murray reading from Skippy Dies, followed by questions and answers. With an introduction by Paul Murray (27th May 2011).Paul Murray talk transcript. Jennifer JohnstonJennifer Johnston also read and took questions at the Central Library as part of Dublin Revealed on 6th May.Jennifer Johnston (1930) was born in Dublin. She is a novelist and a dramatist, her most recent novel being Truth or Fiction, published in 2009 by Headline Review. Foolish Mortals (2007) was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2010. She has received many awards: the 1979 Whitbread Award for The Old Jest; the Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio play (1989) and Shadows on our Skin (1977) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She was short-listed for the Daily Express Best Book of the Year 1992 for The Invisible Worm. The Irish Independent has called her "one of Ireland's finest writers". With support from ILE, her work has been translated into French, Slovene, Croatian, Czech, Romanian and Bulgarian.  Jennifer Johnston lives in Derry and is a member of Aosdána. Browse Jennifer Johnston books in the library catalogue. Subscribe to literary readings and talks in a reader

Listen to Paul Murray talk and reading.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode author Paul Murray reads from his novel ‘Skippy Dies’, and takes questions from the audience. Recorded in the Central Library on 27 of May 2011 as part of its 'Dublin Revealed' series.Rita McCann: My name is Rita McCann and on behalf of Irish Literature Exchange I just want to begin today by extending our thanks to the Library, to Dublin City Central Library, for their cooperation in organising this four fiction Friday series of readings and especially to Padraic and to Bernadette for all their help and for making this lovely venue available to us.  I want to say a special thank you to everybody who is here in the audience and to all the people who came to the last three events, for really making them such enjoyable and memorable occasions so thank you all.  Now before we get underway I’m just going to take a moment to introduce our organisation and to tell you a little bit about our work.  Ireland Literature Exchange or ILE is the national organisation for the promotion of Irish literature abroad.  So we do that in a number of ways but primarily by awarding translation grants to foreign publishers to help make great works of Irish literature available to readers right around the world.  So we actually have a couple of examples, we have the German translation of Skippy Dies and the Italian translation.  Now these are just two of over 1,500 works translated into over 40 languages with the help of ILE.  In addition to this ILE supports the participation of Irish writers at events and festivals around the world and we host some literary translators here in Ireland.  So at the moment we have a Russian translator of Irish literature and the Turkish translator of Flann O’Brien who I’m delighted to say is joining us today and they’re here to research and work on their translations.  To complement these what we call core programmes ILE also attends some of the major world book fairs, we organise events here at home and abroad and we produce a range of promotional materials which are aimed at highlighting the remarkable breadth and quality that exists in Irish writing.  I’m sure that you all know that Irish writers are renowned right around the world and really it’s ILE’s job to make sure that the current generation of Irish writers is just as well known as the canonical giants and it’s for that reason that it gives me particular pleasure to introduce today one of Irelands most acclaimed young writers Paul Murray.  Paul is a native of Dublin.  He studied English Literature at Trinity College and also completed a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.  He is the author of two novels, An Evening of Long Goodbyes was published in 2003.  It was short-listed for a Whitbread prize and also nominated for a Kerry Irish Fiction Award.  His second novel, Skippy Dies, was published to great critical acclaim in 2010 and was long-listed for Man Booker Prize in that year.  It was also number 3 in Time Magazine’s top 10 works of fiction from 2010 and if I can read for moment in her review in the Irish Times Eileen Battersby writes "Novels rarely come as funny and as moving as this utterly brilliant exploration of teenhood and the anti-climax of becoming an adult.  Skippy Dies is intuitive, truthful and one of the finest comic novels written anywhere."I think that says it all and I don’t think much further introduction is needed.  Just to say that we are really delighted and honoured that Paul has agreed to be here today and so without any further ado I will hand you over to Paul Murray.  Thank you.  (clapping)Paul Murray: Hi everybody.  Thanks for coming.  Thanks to Padraic and the Ilac Library for hosting us today and can I say thanks to Rita for the lovely introduction.  The ILE does really good work.  Translation is really expensive and my books tend to be really long and the publishers go like “Your book is costing us so much money Paul I don’t know what we’re going to do” (laughter) so it is very helpful to have the ILE there just because otherwise I don’t think they would get published.  I had a great German translator, he didn’t do this book but he did the last book, called Wolfgang who was this very sort of depressive guy who would call up and he always sounded like he just about sort of 6 inches away from killing himself and my book wasn’t helping (laughter) so he’d go "okay Paul, page 10, Charles is on the ball, is he standing on a ball?" and you’d go "no, no that means he’s sort of you know" ... and he’d go "okay, okay page 12  blah, blah, blah, page 13, blah, blah, blah, page 14, blah, blah, blah, blah, ah page 16", and so on and so on through the book, like blah, blah, blah was basically the meaning of the book for Wolfgang, you know.  The only time he got excited was when we started talking about the Rolling Stones “Have you ever seen the Rolling Stones play Paul?  I’ve seen them play three times.  Once on a very big stage, once on a medium size stage, once on a very small stage”.  (laughter)  I’m rambling.  I’m going to read.  Because it’s quite early in the day for me I’m going to read sort of the one less maniacal parts of the book.  The book is set in Seabrook College for boys.  Most of the characters are 14-year-old boys but there’s also a teacher, there’s a history teacher called Howard, who is sort of an old boy of the school who has come back.  He’s failed.  He went to London to work in the city and he failed disastrously so he’s ended up coming back to the school to teach in the classic sort of those who can’t do teach style.  So he’s quite a bad teacher.In Our Lady’s Hall, hormonal surges have made giants and midgets of the crowd.  The tang of adolescence, impervious to deodorant or open windows, hangs heavy, and the air tintinnabulates with bleeps, chimes and trebly shards of music as 200 mobile phones, banned during the school day, are switched back on with the urgency of divers reconnecting to their oxygen supply.  From her alcove a safe elevation above it, the plaster Madonna with the starred halo and the peaches-and-cream complexion pouts coquettishly at the rampaging maleness below. ‘Hey, Flubber!’ Dennis Hoey scampers across Howard’s path to waylay William ‘Flubber’ Cooke.  ‘Hey, I just wanted to ask you a question?’‘What?’ Flubber immediately suspicious. ‘Uh, I was just wondering - are you a bummer tied to a tree?’ says Dennis.  Brows creasing, Flubber - 14 stone and on his 3rd trip through 2nd year - turns this over. ‘It’s not a trick or anything,’ promises Dennis. ‘I just wanted to know, you know, if you’re a bummer tied to a tree?’‘ No,’ Flubber resolves, at which Dennis takes flight, declaring exuberantly, ‘Bummer on the loose! Bummer on the loose!’  Flubber lets out a roar and prepares to give chase and then stops abruptly and ducks off in the other direction as the crowd parts and a tall, cadaverous figure comes striding through. Father Jerome Green:  teacher of French, coordinator of Seabrook’s charitable works, and by some stretch the school’s most terrifying personage.  Wherever he goes it’s with two or three bodies’ worth of empty space around him, as if he’s accompanied by an invisible retinue of pitchfork-wielding goblins, ready to jab at anyone who happens to be harbouring an impure thought.  As he passes, Howard musters a weak smile; the priest glares back at him the same way he does at everyone with the kind of ready, impersonal disapproval so adept at looking into man’s soul and seeing sin, desire, ferment that he does it now like ticking a box.  Sometimes Howard feels dispiritedly as if not one thing has changed here in the 10 years since he graduated.  The priests in particular bring this out on him, the hale ones are still hale, the doddery ones still dodder; Father Green still collects canned food for Africa and terrorises the boys.  Father Laughton still gets teary eyed when he presents the works of Bach to his unheeding classes.  Father Foley still gives ‘guidance’ to troubled youngsters invariably in a form of an admonition to play more rugby.  On bad days Howard sees their endurance as a kind of personal rebuke - as if that almost-decade of life between matriculation and his ignominious return here had, because of his own ineptitude, been rolled back, struck from the record, deemed merely so much fudge. Of course this is pure paranoia, the priests are not immortal, the Holy Paraclete Fathers are experiencing the same problem as every other Catholic order: they’re dying out.  Few of the priests in Seabrook are under 60, and the newest recruit to the pastoral programme - one of an ever dwindling number - is a young seminarian from somewhere outside Kinshasa; when the school principal, Father Desmond Furlong, fell ill at the beginning of September, it was a layman - economics teacher Gregory L. Costigan - who took the reins, for the first time in Seabrook’s History.Leaving behind the wood-panelled halls of the Old Building, Howard passes up the Annexe, climbs the stairs, and opens, with the usual frisson of weirdness, the door marked ‘Staff-room’.  Inside, a dozen of his colleagues are kvetching, marking homework or changing their nicotine patches.  Without addressing anyone or otherwise signalling his presence, Howard goes to his locker and throws a couple of books and a pile of copies into his briefcase; then, moving crab-like to avoid eye contact, he steals out of the room again.  He clatters back down the stairs in the now-deserted corridor, eyes fixed terminally on the exit - when he’s arrested by the sound of a young female voice.  It appears that, although the bell for the end of the school day ran a good 5 minutes ago, class in the Geography room is still in full swing.  Crouching slightly, Howard peers through the narrow window set in the door, the boys inside show no sign of impatience; in fact, by their expressions, they’re quite oblivious to the passage of time. The reason for this stands at the head of the class.  Her name is Miss McIntyre; she is a substitute.  Howard has caught of glimpses of her before in the staffroom and on the corridor, but he hasn’t managed to speak to her yet.  In the cavernous depths of the Geography Room, she draws the eyes like a flame.  Her blonde hair has that cascading quality you normally see only in TV ads for shampoo, complemented by a sophisticated magnolia two-piece more suited to a boardroom than a transition year class; her voice, while soft and melodious, has at the same time an ungainsayable quality, an undertone of command.  In the crook of her arm she cradles a globe, which while she speaks she caresses absently as if it were a fat, spoiled house cat.  It almost seems to purr as it revolves langorously under her fingertips. ‘... just beneath the surface of the earth,’ she is saying, ‘temperatures so high that the rock itself is molten – can anybody tell me what it’s called, this molten rock?’‘ Magma’, croak several boys at once.  ‘And what do you call it, when it bursts up onto the earth’s surface from a volcano?’‘ Lava’ (laughter) they respond tremulously. ‘Excellent! And millions of years ago there was an enormous amount of volcanic activity with Magma boiling up over the entire surface of the earth nonstop, the landscape around us today’ -  she runs a lacquered fingernail down a swelling ridge of mountain – ‘is mostly the legacy of this era, when the whole plant was experiencing dramatic physical changes.  I suppose you could call it earth’s teenage years!’ The class blushes to its collective roots and stares down at its textbook.  She laughs again and spins the globe snapping it under her fingertips like a musician, plucking the strings of a double bass, then catches sight of her watch.  ‘Oh my gosh! Oh, you poor things, I should have let you out 10 minutes ago.  Why didn’t someone say something?’The class mumbles inaudibly still looking at the book.  ‘Well alright ...’She turns to write their homework on the blackboard, reaching up so that her skirt rises to expose the back of her knees; moments later the door opens, and the boys troop reluctantly out.  Howard, affecting to study at the photographs on the notice board of the hill-walking club’s recent outing to Djouce Mountain, watches from the corner of his eye until the flow of grey jumpers has ceased.  When she fails to appear, he goes back to investi-‘Oh!’‘ Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’  He hunkers down beside her and helps her re-amass the pages that have fluttered all over the gritty corridor floor.  ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you, I was just rushing back to a ... a meeting ...’‘That’s alright,’ she says, ‘thank you’ as he places a sheaf of Ordinance Survey maps on top of the stack she’s gathered back in her arms. ‘ Thank you,’ she repeats, looking directly into his eyes, and continuing to look into them as they rise in unison to their feet, so that Howard, finding himself unable to look away, feels a brief moment of panic, as if they’ve somehow become locked together, like those apocryphal stories you hear about the kids who get their braces stuck together while kisses and have to get the fire brigade to cut them out.  (laughter) ‘Sorry,’ he says again, reflexively.‘Stop apologising,’ she laughs. He introduces himself.  ‘I’m Howard Fallon he says, I teach History.  You’re standing in for Finian Ó Dálaigh?’‘That’s right,’ she says.  ‘Apparently he’s going to be out till Christmas, whatever happened to him.’ ‘Gallstones,’ Howard says.‘Oh,’ she says. Howard wishes he could unsay gallstones.  ‘So,’ he re-begins effortfully, ‘I’m actually on my way home can I give you a lift?’ She cocks her head.  ‘Didn’t you have a meeting?’‘Yes,’ he remembers.  ‘But it’s not really that important.’‘ I have my own car, thanks all the same,’ she says. ‘But I suppose you could carry my books, if you like.’‘ Okay,’ Howard says.  Possibly the offer is ironic, but before she can retract it he removes the stack of binders and textbooks from her hands and, ignoring the homicidal looks from a small clump of her pupils still mooning about the corridor, walks alongside her to the exit. ‘So, how are you finding it?’ he asks attempting to haul the conversation back to a more equilibrious state.  ‘Have you taught much before, or is this your first time?’ ‘Oh’ -  she blows upwards at wayward strand of golden hair – ‘I’m not a teacher by profession.  I’m just doing this as a favour for Greg, really. Mr Costigan, I mean.  God, I’d forgotten about this Mister and Miss stuff.  It’s so funny.  Miss McIntyre.’‘ Staff are allowed use first names you know.’ Howard says. ‘Mmm .... yes actually I’m quite enjoying being Miss McIntyre.  Anyhow, Greg and I were talking one day and he was saying that they were having problems finding a good substitute, and it so happens that once upon a time I had fantasies of being a teacher, and I was between contracts, so I thought why not?’‘ What’s your field normally?’  He holds open the main door for her and they step out into the autumn air which has grown cold and crisp. ‘Investment banking?’ she says. Howard receives this information with a studied neutrality, then says casually, ‘I used to work in that area myself, actually.  Spent about 2 years in the City.  Futures primarily.’‘ What happened?’ she says. He cracks a grin, ‘Don’t you read the papers?  Not enough future to go around.’ She doesn’t react, waiting for the correct answer.‘Well, I mean I’ll probably get back into it someday,’ he blusters.  ‘This is just a temporary thing, really.  I sort of fell into it.  Although at the same time, it’s nice, I think, to give something back? To feel like you’re making a difference?’  They make their way around the 6th years’ car park, a series of Lexuses and TTs – and Howard’s heart sinks as his own car comes into view. ‘What’s with the feathers?’ she says.‘ Oh it’s nothing.’  He sweeps his hand over the car’s roof, ploughing a mighty drift of white feathers over the side, they pluff to the ground, from where some float back up to adhere to his trousers.  Miss McIntyre takes a step backwards.  ‘It’s just a ... ah, sort of a gag the boys play.’‘They call you Howard the Coward,’ she remarks, like a tourist enquiring the meaning of a puzzling local idiom.‘ Yes.’ Howard laughs mirthlessly, shovelling more feathers from his windscreen and bonnet and not offering an explanation. ‘You know, they’re good kids, generally, in this place, but there’s a few that can be a bit, ah,  high spirited.’‘ I’ll be on my guard,’ she says. ‘Well, like I say, it’s just a small percentage.  Most of them ... I mean, generally speaking it’s a wonderful place to work.’‘ You’re covered in feathers,’ she says judiciously. ‘Yes,’ he harrumphs swiping his trousers summarily, straightening his tie.  Her eyes, which are a brilliant and dazzling shade of blue custom-made for sparkling mockingly, sparkle mockingly at him.  Howard has had enough humiliation for one day; he’s just about to bow out with the last shreds of his dignity, when she says, ‘So what’s it like, teaching History?’‘ What’s it like?’ he repeats. ‘I’m really liking doing Geography again.’ she gazes dreamingly around at the ice-blue sky and the yellowing trees.  You know, these titanic battles between different forces that actually created the shape of the world we’re walking around in today ... it’s so dramatic ...’ She squeezes her hand sensually, a goddess forging worlds out of raw matter, then fixes The Eyes on Howard again. ‘And History - that must be so much fun? It’s not the first word that springs to mind but Howard limits himself to a bland smile. ‘What are you teaching at the moment?’‘ Well, in my last class we were doing the First World War.’ he says. ‘Oh!’ She claps her hands.  'I love the First World War.  The boys must be enjoying that.’‘ You’d be surprised,’ he says. ‘You should read them Robert Graves,’ she says. ‘Who?’‘ He was in the trenches,’ she replies’ then adds, after a pause, ‘he was one of the great love poets as well.’‘ I’ll take a look,’ he scowls.  ‘Any other tip for me?  Any other lessons you’ve gleaned from your five days in the profession?’ She laughs.  ‘If I have any more I’ll be sure and pass them on it sounds like you need them.’.  She lifts the books out of Howard’s arms and aims her car key at the enormous white-gold SUV parked next door to Howard’s dilapidated BlueBird.  ‘See you tomorrow,’ she says. ‘Right,’ Howard says. But she doesn’t move and neither does he: she holds him there a moment purely by the light of her spectacular eyes, looking him over with the tip of her tongue tucked in the corner of her mouth, as if she’s deciding what to have for dinner.  Then, smiling at him coyly with a row of pointed white teeth, she says, ‘You know, I’m not going to sleep with you.’ At first Howard is sure he must have misheard her; and when he realises that he has not, he is still too stunned to reply.  So he just stands there, or perhaps totters, and the next thing he knows she’s climbed into her jeep and pulled away sending white feathers swirling about his ankles.I’m just going to read this last little coda out which sort of explains the nickname.Howard the Coward: yes, that’s what they call him.  Howard the Coward. Feathers; eggs left on his seat; a yellow streak executed in chalk, on his teacher’s cape; once a whole frozen chicken there on the desk, trussed, dimpled, humiliated.‘It’s because it rhymes with Howard, that’s all,’ Halley (that’s his girlfriend) tells him.  ‘Like if your name was Ray, they’d call you Gay Ray.  Or if it was Mary they’d call you Scary Mary.  It’s just the way their brains work, it doesn’t mean anything.’‘ It means they know.’ Howard says.‘Oh God, Howard, one little bump, and it was years and years ago.  How could they possibly know about that?’‘They just do.’‘Well, even if they do.   I know you’re not a coward.  They’re just kids, they can’t see into your soul.’But she is wrong.  That is exactly what they can do.  Old enough to have a decent mechanical understanding of how the world works, but young enough for their judgements to remain unfogged by anything like mercy or compassion or the realisation that all this will one day happen to them, the boys - his students - are machines for seeing through the apparatus of worldliness that adulthood, as figured by their teachers, surrounds itself with, to the grinding emptiness at its heart.  They find it hilarious and the names they give the other teachers seem so unerringly right.  Malco the Alco? Big Fat Johnson? Lurch?Howard the Coward.  Fuck!  Who told her.I’ll stop there.  Thanks. (clapping)QuestionsRita: Paul if I could start by just asking you a really basic question just about where the inspiration for the novel came and why you decided to set it in a school and especially an institution like Seabrook, that’s quite unique?Paul It was going to be a short story.  (laughter)  It started off as a ... the short story was that chapter I just read like was going to be a two hander, it was going to be the history teacher or he was going to be a biology teacher originally, a teacher and this kid Skippy in his class who had some sort of a problem and it was just going to be a two hander.Rita: Yeah.Paul And really just when I started writing that chapter basically as soon as Howard stepped out of the classroom, as he does like at the beginning of the bit I just read there, it just kind of kept rolling and rolling and I was just really enjoying writing, you know, just describing that environment and describing the other boys and describing, you know, these strange freakish teacher that are working there and I kind of very quickly realised that writing about a school it’s very liberating ...Rita: Okay.Paul ... because the teenagers are, you know, if you’ve met a teenager or been a teenager they’re unhinged like they’ll do anything or they’ll say anything.Rita: They are.Paul So it meant the story could go to all kinds of quite strange places but also because everyone has been to story it meant that no matter how weird the story got that sort of prism that all the stories were sort of defracted through was one that like readers would be familiar with so it made ... because that setting was so familiar it meant like that the story could go to stranger places and people would still feel anchored by that.Rita: Relate.Paul: Yeah.Rita: Yeah.  I have to say it certainly took me back to the horrors of being a teenager, you know, all that self doubt ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... and, you know, on some level you think you know everything and on other levels nothing makes sense but actually I think the character of Howard is really interesting because he’s in some ways more like the teenage boys than some of the older adults.Paul: Yeah, yeah.Rita: And I think is it one of his friends talks about it being ‘the age of the kidult’.Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Rita: Could you talk about that a little bit? Paul: Yeah.Rita: About these kind of younger generation of adults who are somehow caught between being proper grown-ups and being teenagers somehow.Paul: Yeah. Like sometimes people ask me like was it difficult to sort of project myself back into the mind of a teenager when sort of writing the book and I think that there’s much less of a gap between today’s teenagers and today’s adults than there was.  Like I’m 35 now and there’s much less of a gap between myself and sort of a contemporary teenager than there would have been like in my father’s time between like a 35 year old man and a teenager.Rita: Absolutely.Paul: Because ... well I mean I went to see Kevin Barry read yesterday with John Butler and they were talking about the same thing just about how your 20s nowadays are sort of kind of a lost decade in which people spend kind of 10 years just sort of tooling about and kind of going what do I want to do with my life, you know, I’m not really sure.Rita: Yeah.Paul: (laughter) Where do I go?  And your sort of unfortunate parents are kind of funding this very slow voyage of self-discovery.  So ...Rita: I think Howard is very much on that voyage and he’s sort of at the point, isn’t he, where he’s looking for some great meaning in life.Paul: Yeah, yeah.Rita: And he seems to be constantly getting disappointed I think.Paul: Yeah I mean I think that that’s sort of ... that yeah, basically sort of adolescence is a much more attenuated affair than it used to be and you’re encouraged to just the way that we’re encouraged to think of ourselves in a modern world, you know, you sort of think of yourself as like the star of your own little film which is a very sort of narcissistic way of thinking ...Rita: Absolutely.Paul: ... and it means that you’re sort of ignoring a lot of the real things that go on around you so on the one hand it’s sort of a gag that this teacher is like equally or even more immature than the students but also like it has very, you know, it has serious consequences because like no-one is looking out for these kids like the adults in their lives are preoccupied with, you know ...Rita: With their own stories.Paul: ... just going on like ridiculous like Howard is sort of hung on this like beautiful geography teacher ...Rita: (laughs) Yeah.Paul: ... and his friend Farrelly who is like also a teacher in the school.Rita: On their own quest I think Halley goes it, doesn’t she?Paul: A quest ... yeah, but it’s a quest of false grails ...Rita: Absolutely.Paul: ... like everyone in the book is pursuing these like romantic ideals which is again like a very sort of idealistic teenage way of seeing the world and like ultimately like adulthood is like a massive process of disillusionment (laughter) wherein you realise that like all the kind of crazy dreams you had of like marrying Beyonce or being a Ninja or whatever (laughter) none of those things are going to happen, you know.  If you’re lucky you’ll be a dentist and you’ll have a nice house in wherever – Sandycove – but that’s, you know, ...Rita: That’s about it.Paul: ... yeah.Rita: It’s what I suppose Eileen Battersby said, the anti-climax of adulthood.Paul: Yeah and learning to deal with that and learning to actually live in the real world and take responsibility for the people that are around you, you know, instead of living ... instead of just being self-absorbed and, you know.Rita: Expecting things to come to you that may not I suppose.Paul: Yeah sure, yeah.Rita: I suppose the counterpoint to that is that like you said these teenagers are sort of left alone and not being watched a lot ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... particularly, you know, boys in a boarding school.Paul: Yeah.Rita: I think as well while maybe adolescence is going into your 20s there’s also a lot of more adult influences on teenagers these days than say for our generation.Paul: Yeah, yeah.Rita: You certainly notice in the book that some of the teenagers have really serious issues like, you know, drug abuse or anorexia ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... do you think it’s harder to be a teenager now, you know, than say when we were in school?  Or is it a different thing?Paul: I think the teenage years are always really hard because I just think your mental state is so ... just the way, the lens through which you see the world is so, you know, dark and clouded that wherever, you know, you could be on like, you know, I mean yeah wherever you are you will be miserable I think (laughter) but I do think like the challenges that this generation of teenagers face are ... yeah, they are less protected than they used to be in some ways, yeah.  I mean I say that with a certain amount of, you know, I mean you look at sort of the disastrous way that like the teenagers of the 50s and 60s and 70s were treated ...Rita: Sure.Paul: ... in this country, you know, teenagers from a certain class but yeah I mean there are like very dangerous ... and also like it all seems kind of interrelated, like it all seems ... teenagers are now fair game in a way that they weren’t before like teenagers are the marketing man’s dream, like everybody wants to be able to sell their stuff to teenagers because teenagers are so vulnerable and so lost that they’ll buy anything like if you dangle it in front of them like if you get, you know, whatever like Britney Spears to put it on her head or whatever they’ll buy it, you know.Rita: And they have the money now, that’s the difference isn’t it?Paul: And they got ... exactly yeah, yeah so there’s like a real cynical sort of exploitation of teenagers to make them feel like unhappy in their own bodies and like dissatisfied with themselves which they already do anyway, you know, but just sort of just grown up people who are making a lot of money out of like exploiting teenagers it’s really just very, very cynical and I think like certainly what happened in Ireland in the Celtic Tiger was that their parents, the parents of that generation, were also like lost and confused and being exploited by, you know, the dudes, like people who were waving the property section of The Irish Times in front of them ...Rita: Sure.Paul: ... going this is how you define yourself and ...Rita:  Absolutely and with things and with money ...Paul: ... exactly so ...Rita: ... and I think that’s part of what affects the kids in the book but also adults like Howard ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... is that the way we define ourselves is very different these days.Paul: Yeah and we don’t ... like the parents don’t really know what to tell the kids because they’re so, you know, they’re equally kind of ...Rita: Yeah, equally messed up in a way. (laughs)Paul: ... yeah in some senses yeah, yeah.Rita: There’s obviously like we said there’s a lot of kind of heavy issues and so on in Skippy Dies and, you know, the kind of tragedy that you expect from the title.Paul: Yeah, yeah he dies, yeah.Rita: Yeah, you give that one away very early on (laughs) but actually one thing that’s really commented on a lot in, you know, reviews and interviews and I’m sure by readers ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... is that the novel is very, very funny.Paul: Yeah.Rita: What strikes me is that, that comes as a surprise, that we don’t expect to find humour in a literary novel.Paul: Yeah.Rita: Do you think that’s in some way telling, you know, does it tell us something about where the literary novel is at the moment?Paul: Yeah, yeah it does, yeah.  I mean the book that won the Booker this year was called The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson and it’s sort of a ... I haven’t read it but it’s a comic novel and he’s spoken quite openly about comedy in the novel and like historically the novel has been, like in days of yore when the novel started it was sort of like the antidote to like epic poetry so you’d like, you know, Milton or Homer or whatever writing epic poems in a very lofty style about like heroes and gods and goddesses and so forth and then the novel came along and it was all about just ordinary punters just, you know, eating their dinner or, you know, getting sick or finding their wife sleeping with whoever it was so like it was very prosaic that’s what prose means, you know, it’s all about the ordinary and the ordinary is what I want, like it can be tragic, it can be harrowing but it’s also somewhat ridiculous, you know.Rita: Absolutely.Paul: So like the novel through the ages like into like whatever Ulysses until very recently has kept that kind of comic strain going through it but recently it seems to me comedy has become sort of unfashionable and I think the reason is that comedy is done so well by other forms now ...Rita: Yeah.Paul: ... like it’s done so well like on, you know, you’ve got so many, we’ve got so much TV and so many DVD box sets and like so many YouTube videos of cats playing like ping pong (laughter) ...Rita: Yeah.Paul: ... that people get their laughs from elsewhere and people look to the novel for this like rarefied experience.  They want the novel to be ...Rita: Elitist.Paul: ... yeah they want it to be posh, they want to be a posh art form and what is posh?  It is sort of grand descriptions of human misery (laughter) so there’s a strange elevation like literarily, you know, it’s like I’m reading like a really beautiful book about the Holocaust, god it’s so moving and it’s so, you know ...Rita: Yeah.Paul: ... I find that stuff ... I’m very, very cautious of stuff that sets itself up as serious and doesn’t think that the ordinary life is worth writing about or doesn’t think that ordinary life is funny, you know, because it is funnyRita: Yeah or even that, you know, by putting humour in it you may get less high literature if you like.Paul: Yeah sure, yeah, yeah.Rita: Actually you talked about Kevin Barry earlier ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... and he was here last week for one of our events ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... and he mentioned actually that I mean sales of literary novels continue to plummet I think was the word he used ...Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Rita: ... do you think that it’s time for ...Paul: Getting another job?  (laughter)Rita: ... well yeah maybe getting another job (laughter) or for the literary novel to be reinvented in some way to kind of reconnect it with popular culture so that it’s not seen as this elitist thing that ...Paul: Yeah, yeah.Rita:. ... it becomes part of just people’s lives and they can connect to it.Paul: Yeah sure.  I mean I think literature really suffers from this kind of like ivory tower because it means that, you know, the majority of people who don’t want a posh experience (laughter), you know, feel like that it’s not for them, you know, so like for instance getting teenagers to read your book like because I mean I’ve done a few readings and like it’s really great when teenagers come up and say oh wow I really like your book, you know, it felt authentic.Rita: Yeah.Paul: Just teenagers reading books at all is really exciting and kind of a relief as well.Rita: Yeah.Paul: But I think like yeah writers like need to obviously like you don’t want to ... it’s not a question of dumbing down but I do think like you can’t write like you can’t ... I don’t think you can be Virginia Woolf any more, like I really don’t think you can, like I don’t think you can write sort of high modernist text, I don’t think the writers are sort of a figure on a mountain anymore delivering wisdom down to the people like I think on the one hand like writers are now sort of public figures in a way they never were before ...Rita: Yeah.Paul: ... so you’ve got like folks, you know me and Kevin, coming out and doing our juggling and you know whatever and meeting readers in a way that’s all quite new, you know.Rita: That’s new.Paul: And by the same token, you know, you write what you want to write but at the same time you have to be aware that your reader if she gets bored is going to have a lot of other things to distract her, you know.Rita: To do.Paul: And I think that reading is something that is to be enjoyed so yeah I think that writers need to get that message out there that books are ...Rita: It’s funny you mentioned you know about getting teenagers to read books ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... because I have a nephew who is 18 and he doesn’t read a lot and I actually handed him Skippy Dies and said okay just read this bit and it’s the bit about the Robert Frost poem.Paul: Oh yeah. (laughter)Rita: So he was in stitches and he said okay can I take this which is really great ...Paul: Okay yeah.Rita: ... and I think it’s because he could actually connect to the humour.Paul: Yeah.Rita: But he obviously then gets to experience all of the rest that’s in the book ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... all of the rest of the themes and the messages and the characters.Paul: Yeah.Rita: So I think that’s a really good thing and also that if you ... because in your book obviously there are mentions of, you know, popular music, of things that teenagers are interested in so that kind of connection to other media makes that novel ... the novel may be seen like it’s part of wider culture rather that something separate.Paul: Yeah well I mean it’s really interesting time to be alive and writing like I mean the Celtic Tiger was such a, you know, it was like Aesop’s Fables (laughter) like you know there was just such an interesting ... just that transition was so huge on such a comprehensive level that it was gold for a writer (laughter) and on a wider like sort of a macro global level like the whole transition into like the digital world it’s ... I mean I saw William Gibson read - god about 10 years ago - and I asked a question at the end like I said like how important do you think the invention of the computer is and he said after sort of sniggering he said I think it’s as important as the founding of the first city ...Rita: Wow.Paul: ... and I think we’re living in this time like the last whatever 20 years has been like just the most ...Rita: It has.Paul: ... and the next 20 years are probably the most seismic era in ... one hesitates to say the history of civilisation but ...Rita: Yeah or human evolution in a sense.Paul: ... like it’s just the way that we conceive of reality is changing so drastically, you know.Rita: YeahPaul: The relationship we have with our own bodies, a bit like places, you know, in 10 years time maybe no-one will come to readings like this because we won’t go outside everything will be virtual and, you know, it’s such an interesting time and I really think that the novel ... because the novel is such a capacious form like you can do so many things with a novel.Rita: Absolutely.Paul: And you can sort of ... I think it’s really interesting to try and capture that like fragmented reality that we’re living in now like I really think that the writer has sort of a responsibility to try and catch that as opposed to looking backwards all the time and writing about ... because it’s sort of one of the kind of corollary of the posh literature thing is that writers write about the authentic and the authentic secretly means the beautiful and the beautiful is basically the old, the unthreatening, you know ...Rita: The past.Paul: ... it’s swans floating over a lake full of donkeys and ships versus kidnapping maids. (laughter)Rita: There’s a lot of thing in ... like Irish writing especially that there’s a lot of memoir there’s a lot of childhood stories ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... but in a sense you’re avoiding kind of examining what’s going on now and things are changing so much so ...Paul: Sure yeah, yeah.Rita: ... it will be interesting to see how that develops.Paul: Yeah definitely.Rita: Another interesting thing recently is I heard that there’s going to be a film maybe of Skippy Dies can you tell us about that or is it ...?Paul: Yeah I mean Neil Jordan optioned us which is really exciting because he’s a great director and he’s also a great novelist and he’s from Dublin ...Rita: Yeah.Paul: ... so he sort of ticks a lot of ... like if you were going to have someone, you know, making a film of your book which like writers are sort of wary about but they need the money (laughter) but he’s the guy you’d want to do it.  That said I don’t know what’s happening with it right now.  I think that he’s a busy man, you know.Rita: He is, he is that’s true.Paul: So he just ... when I met him, I met last year and he just finished shooting The Borgias, this TV show about the Borgias which hasn’t ...Rita: Okay.Paul: ... has that aired?  I don’t think it’s aired yet here.Rita: I don’t think so.Paul: It’s like the Tudors except it’s about the Borgias and he was filming it in Hungary and then he was bringing out his own, Mistaken came out at Christmas time.Rita: Yes, yeah.Paul: And then he was going to start working on the screenplay.Rita: Great.Paul: So fingers crossed, yeah, but they don’t tell me anything, yeah.Rita: Yeah.  Are you particularly interested in seeing how like, you know, your characters translate to the screen?Paul: Yeah, it’ll be really hard because like it’s mostly sort of 14 year olds (laughter) so I don’t know where you’re going to find like sort of 10 gifted 14 year old actors, that would be hard to do.  (laughter)Rita: Yeah.Paul: But yeah I mean like it’s sort of scary because like when I met him like because it’s such a long book and like all novels you tend to have to cut a lot out of it.Rita: For the film.Paul: And he was going, yeah, I mean like it’s 660 pages so I mean this whole part we’d probably cut all that out (laughter) and cut all that out (laughter) and I’m just there going Jesus man what is this?  (laughter)  So I figure like I mean ...Rita: It would be an amazing experience.Paul: ... it would be an amazing experience that you sort of watch through your fingers, you know.Rita: Yeah.Paul: And as a writer I think he’s quite ... I was watching what’s it called, The End of the Affair, he made a film of The End of the Affair, a Graham Greene novel with Ralph Fiennes plays a writer and Julianne Moore is his beautiful lover and at one point they go to a movie which has been made of Ralph Fiennes book and he’s just watching it through his fingers like that, you know, (laughter) and I figure that’s Jordan going, you know, sorry mate, that’s what I have to do.Rita: (laughter) It’s my turn.Paul: Yeah, yeah.Rita: I think I’ve probably abused my privileges as compare quite enough so does anybody in the audience have a question for Paul?  Yeah?Participant: Just President Obama was here last Monday and there was 100,000 people in College Green and a lot of those were young people ...Paul: Yeah.Participant: ... and I remember when President Kennedy came, all young people were inspired by him.  What is your take on the young people who went to see Obama?Paul: My girlfriend works in a school just off Parnell Street and 5 of the kids from school or maybe 10 were chosen to go and meet Obama and I was really, really envious of them (laughter).  I think firstly like I mean if you ... it was kind of I was pleased that the kids in the school knew who he was, you know, because they live in a strange world sort of Justin Bieber is sort of like the president in that particular world (laughter) but yeah I thought it was really, really ... I mean I was incredibly moved to see Obama like I was down on the Quays, I happened to be in the Morrison Hotel and I came out on the Quays and everyone was standing along the keys and I saw the motorcade go by and I think I saw his hand at the window of the car (laughter) so I went home and I watched his speech and I found it really, really moving and, even though his star seems to have kind of faded somewhat in the States, it’s really hard to understand, I think he’s like an incredibly inspirational figure.  My friend Claire Kilroy was telling me that he was presented with some children’s books by Enda Kenny and he said “Oh if you want a well-written book go to Ireland”, I’ve been inflicting my Barrack Obama impression on everybody (laughter), which I found like very, very moving but I think that yeah he’s a really inspirational figure and I found it really fantastic that there was so many young people there. I think, you know, because you sort of ... like teenagers are really demonised a lot, you know, in this ... like in most societies I guess and you forget like that they are very ... they’re idealistic people, you know, and they’re waiting for someone to inspire them and unfortunately like this place has been so depressing for the last sort of couple of years and it was so cynical for the few years before that like that I think there was nobody telling them that, you know, yes you can, you know, so I thought it was a really wonderful occasion on so many different levels.  Did Kennedy speak in College Green or ...? Participant: Yes.Paul: He did?  Did you see him?Participant: Not Kennedy, sorry.Rita: Clinton.Participant: Clinton.Rita: Yeah.Paul: I saw Clinton yeah.Participant: He spoke down in New Ross.Paul: In New Ross.  Ah okay, yeah of course, of course.Rita: Yeah.Paul: Yeah, no, it was great, it was really great, a great day, yeah.Rita: Anybody else?  Yeah.Participant: Yeah just to say I read your book and I really do love it.Paul: Oh thank you very much.Participant: I absolutely did, I thought it was fantastic.Paul: Great.Participant: Really I thought it was very comical.  And we’re reading it for our book club as well, a whole gang of us.Paul: Okay, brilliant.Participant: I just wanted to say how long did it take you to write it and did you have crises of confidence along the way?Rita: That’s a good question.Paul: Yeah, it took 7 years to write it and it was, yeah, I mean you’re always going to have ... that’s the writing game, that’s the hard part, is the constant battle against doubt, you know, because there’s no-one like it’s very nice when the book comes out and it gets good reviews and, you know, but that doesn’t happen until 2 years after the book is finished, you know, when you’d really like someone to give you good reviews when it’s like a rainy Tuesday and you’re sitting alone in your house and you’ve just written a sentence and you’ve no idea whether it’s any good or not.  It would be great if Eileen Battersby came along (laughter), weird, it would be weird if Eileen Battersby then came along and said that’s a really good sentence, you know, but that would be very helpful.  No the book, like it took 7 years to write, it got to about well over 1,000 pages.  It was so complicated, there were so many plot strands I really wondered if it would ever coalesce and if I’d ever finish it, you know, and on top of the usual writing related doubts and anxieties of just like is this any good but you just don’t know 7 years is a long time, money was running out, no money coming in and also book number 1 starting to vanish from the bookshelves.  You’d go in the bookshop and they didn’t have it anymore, you know, because like it’s sort of, you realise that it sort of doesn’t take long to slip from the public consciousness, you know.  So you sort of stop thinking of yourself as even being a writer which is really scary, you know, so you feel like am I just some crazy person in a basement, you know.  (laughter)  So yeah it was a long haul but as I say like that’s what you unfortunately, not unfortunately at all, it’s a great job to have but that’s the strength you need to develop like just to keep showing up at your desk every day no matter how doomed the project can feel, you know.  And it can feel doomed on bad days, yeah.Rita: Yeah?Participant: Just I haven’t read the book yet ...Paul: Yeah.Participant: ... but I will do.Paul: Great.Participant: I’m looking forward to reading it.  What else have you been working on?  Have you got book number 3 coming out?  Looking forward.Paul: I’m working on a screenplay right now which is quite interesting.  I haven’t done a screen play before so it’s a strange ... I like writing dialogue but I’ve never ... that’s something that’s just dialogue so it’s quite a porous medium in that like it feels quite light or ethereal or, you know, you realise that there’s so much that isn’t there that has to be put in there by someone else, you know, by the director or by the actors.  So it’s kind of a nice experiment but I’m looking forward to getting back and writing a book hopefully later this summer.  I’ve been saying that for a while now but hopefully later this summer I’ll get back to it and start into the new.Rita: Great.  Do we have ... yeah?Participant: The extract that you read reminds me of John Irving an awful lot, or of Tom Wolfe, so I’m wondering are those influences or other people that influence you in your writing?Paul: I haven’t read John Irving actually.  My agent is a really huge John Irving fan and says the same thing so it’s good to hear.  Tom Wolfe, I don’t know, I read Bonfire of the Vanities years ago.  Like David Foster Wallace was a big one for me, he wrote a big book set in a boarding school so that was a big touch down like all those like American guys I was really obsessed with when I was in my 20s like Pynchon and Don Delillo and like Lorrie Moore.  I like funny writers, there aren’t that many funny writers but those guys are funny.  There’s a writer called George Saunders he writes short stories, an American again, who is really, really funny, a really wild imagination and he’s fantastic, yeah, I like him a lot.Rita: As I said earlier we have Goulden who is the Turkish translator of Flann O’Brien ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... and she’s started reading Skippy Dies ...Paul:  Oh cool.Rita: ... and think she can see some influence there, are you a fan of Flann O’Brien?Paul: Yeah, no I really like ... yeah all of those guys who are ... I really admire writers who just ...Goulden: For example Professor Tamashi and De Selby.Paul: ... yeah, yeah, yeah.Goulden: ... are obvious I would imagine.Paul: Yeah I mean he’s ... well it’s sort of a tragic story, the Flann O’Brien story, you know, but just like writers who just did what they wanted like the same with like Joyce and Beckett like just really wild days.Goulden: Well then the death of Skippy at the very beginning of the novel if Flann O’Brien was alive today it was the kind of death he would definitely choose to ... must write (laughter) ...Paul: Yes, yeah.Goulden: ... it was tragically comicPaul: Yeah.Goulden: It’s just I held a special connection between you and Flann O’Brien and ...Paul: Well he went to the same school as me as well, yeah.  He went to the school that I went to, it’s called Blackrock, and it’s a very famous school and Seabrook College, the school in the book, sort of looks a bit like Blackrock, it’s not the same school but it looks a bit like it but Flann O’Brien went there whenever he was a teenager a guess.  (laughter) So I mean like there is like some kind of a connection there like South Dublin, you know, what it does to a person’s mind, you know.  (laughter)Rita: Okay.Paul: Yes Sir, yeah?Participant: Can I ask during this long period of gestation, through the 7 years, I’m curious as to how you paid the rent and the bills during that time did you teach or do anything else?  And what are your disciplines, the habits of writing Paul, is there a set period each day and a number of words or ...?Paul: Yeah, yeah.  I’m a firm believer in Woody Allen’s line that 80% of success is showing up, I think that just ... Norman Mailer said a similar thing like he said that if you turn up at your desk at the same time every day no matter how hungover or sick or disaffected or whatever, how just not like writing you happen to feel if you do it every day eventually he said your unconscious will start to trust you and you’ll be able to produce even on those days when you think that you won’t be able to.  So the routine would be ... I mean everybody works in different ways but the routine would be very, very important for me and in terms of sort of the anxiety of it as well like it is kind of quite a strange chaotic process when you don’t have the things that like most other people have to give you structure.  Like you don’t have a boss going, you know, where are you? you don’t have like, you know, you decide your own lunch break, you know, you don’t have like a pay cheque coming in at the end of the week, you don’t know if it’s every going to be finished, you know, so the routine becomes quite important like the structure that you give yourself becomes quite important to keep you sane, you know, and to make it feel like a job, sort of demystify it, like I think like de-romanticising it and demystifying the process is quite important otherwise like if you’re sort of waiting for inspiration you could be waiting a long time.  As to how I pay the rent, yeah, I was living in kind of a big shared house full of hippies so the rent wasn’t that much (laughter) yeah it was okay.  It got tight towards the end.  I definitely needed to finish it, you know, (laughter) but yeah I survived, yeah.Participant: Did you ever teach yourself?Paul: No I didn’t, no, no, no.  It scares the Christ out of me, teaching.  I’ve got a couple of friends who are teachers and they would tell me stories and my girlfriend works in a school now and again like just amazing stories but I’ve a huge amount of respect for anyone who can, it’s a tough job, definitely yeah.Rita: It’s a vocation isn’t it?Paul: Definitely, yeah, no question, yeah.Rita: Do we have one last question?  Yeah?Participant: Just wondering either for yourself or Rita how long does it take for the translation to be completed into German or whatever other language?Paul: Well we can ask...Rita: Yeah as far as I know I mean it really depends but there’s actually often a lot of commercial pressure on translators so sometimes they are, you know, that’s a very large book but sometimes they are pressurised to get it done in maybe 6 months or even less because obviously the publishers need to get it out. The English language version is usually so predominant that, you know, say especially in countries like Germany or the Netherlands where people read in English, where people might read reviews in English, be very aware of English language culture, that if you wait, you know, give a translator a nice leisurely year to translate a book you’re going to lose a lot of your potential readers so I think it probably sometimes has to happen very quickly so I’m sure that for Wolfgang and people like him ...Paul: Yeah.Rita: ... being able to contact the writer is a big help for, you know, idiomatic phrases that they might not know and things like that, yeah.Paul: Yeah.  Wolfgang is the only guy who called me.Rita: Oh really?Paul: Yeah.  He always seemed so sort of unhappy to be calling me, like he’s the only translator who actually did call me up.Rita: Right (laughs) yeah that’s ...Paul: Oh it’s Wolfgang how’s it going?  (laughter) Not so good actually.  (laughter)Rita: Page 16.Paul: It’s very long.  (laughter)  Yeah it varies, it varies yeah.  I mean they are ... there was two translators working on this in German so ...Rita: That’s right.Paul: ... but yeah I think it took them about 6 months to do it yeah.Rita: Yeah.  What do you think Goulden, is it how long?Goulden: It depends on the translator I guess.Paul: Yeah.Rita: Yeah it can do as well.  A bit like writing I suppose.Paul: Yeah.Goulden: Well it’s me writing, it’s not him, so it’s me writing it.Rita: Yeah, with a whole new set of challenges.  (laughs)Goulden: Again it depends on whether the translator is working at another job or if he or she devotes all this time totally to the translation.Rita: Yeah, absolutely.Gould: So it depends.Rita: Ah, another vocation.  (laughter)Paul: Yeah.Rita: Alright well I think our time is up but once again thank you to everybody for coming and especially to Paul for his time. Paul: Thanks.Rita: Thank you.  (clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.