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Listen to Kevin Barry talk and reading.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode author Kevin Barry reads from his novel ‘City of Bohane’, and takes questions from the audience. Recorded in the Central Library on 20 May 2011 as part of its 'Dublin Revealed' series.

Listen to Carlo Gébler talk and reading.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode author Carlo Gébler reads from his novel ‘The Dead Eight’, and takes questions from the audience. Recorded in the Central Library on 13 May 2011 as part of its 'Dublin Revealed' series.Sinéad Mac Aodha: Good afternoon everyone and thank you for coming to the second of the Four Fiction Fridays.  My name is Sinéad Mac Aodha I’m the Director of Ireland Literature Exchange an organisation which has a function similar to that of the Literary Department of the British Council, we promote Irish literature abroad.  Occasionally we run events here in Ireland.  We’re very to the public library system for hosting us, for allowing us to run the series of events here, and also for taking our books which are available in 50 different languages, we’ve 1,500 titles of works of Irish literature in translation and these books are available through the public library system through a list called the Rosetta List so if you ever are interested in reading a book of Irish literature in another language have a look at the Rosetta List within the public library system and books will be sourced for you and you can read and compare and check if the translators have done a good job.  It’s my great pleasure to welcome Carlo Gébler here today.  Carlo is a novelist, a playwright, a biographer, a man of many parts, a writer who has produced so many books in different genres. He has been described as a sensitive talent.Carlo: Yes.  (laughter)Sinéad: He has a talent for setting a scene and filling in the character in a few adept strokes according to Penelope Lively.Carlo: Yeah, she should know.  (laughter)Sinéad: Will Self has said of The Cure, one of Carlo’s books, "it is both edgy and exact, haunting and serious, it’s also the best historical novel I have read."  So that was some compliment Carlo.Carlo: Yeah.Sinéad: Carlo was born in Dublin in the 50s and brought up in London.  He has a degree in English from the University of York and the practice of film making at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield.  Amongst his books, and I’m not going to list them all because there really are so many, The Eleventh Summer, Work and Play, Life of a Drum, The Cure, How to Murder a Man, A Good Day for a Dog, his collection of stories W9 and other lives was published in 1996, he has written for children and young adults, August ’44 and The Bull Raid are some of the books that he’s produced.  His non-fiction works include Driving through Cuba:  an east-west journey – sounds like he may have actually done that journey, I have read that book.Carlo: I did.Sinéad: And The Glass Curtain:  Inside an Ulster community.  He lives in the North of Ireland.Carlo: Someone has to.  (laughter)Sinéad: And works in Maghaberry Prison ...Carlo: Yeah.Sinéad: ... as a writer of residence.Carlo: Member of Special Branch.  (laughter)Sinéad: So please welcome Carlo Gébler.  (clapping)Carlo: Good afternoon.  Thank you for very much for coming.  Translation is a very good thing.  When you leave go home will you write, all of you, letters to your TDs saying we believe in translation, please give the translating people lots of money.  (laughter)  Actually it is a really good thing and it should be supported by the State more because what we are best known for – I know this is going to come as a shock to you – in the world is our literature.  I know you thought I was going to say our sex appeal (laughter) and our fashion sense (laughter) but it’s our writing and the fact that there isn’t more support for the translation of books written by people on this island into other languages so other people can read them is really one of the curious facts about modern life. I’m going to ... this is a book called The Dead Eight which was published ... I think it was published this morning or tomorrow morning, anyway it is being ... nothing is published in the way that it used to happen which is that there was a day when it arrived in the book shops.  You may be able to get it in a bookshop today or you may have to wait but it is sort of out.  The book is called The Dead Eight and the titled refers to what people ... the way that people describe the end of a shot gun when they look at it.  Some people describe it as a dead eight and this book involves the use of a shotgun. I’m going to read you a bit from early on in the book and it’s about a character called Moll McCarthy, she’s red-haired, she’s in an orphanage, everyone calls her Foxy Moll and she is being preyed upon/seduced/paid court to by the gardener who is a man called Willie Garrett and the date is 1914.  And he gives her a present.  He gives her a barley sugar and she takes it up to the dormitory and she puts it inside the pillowcase of her bed and then later she goes to bed. Come in, come in.  There’s a seat down here.  It’s the audience participation seat.  (laughter) Sit yourself down.Thank you sorry I’m late.Don’t worry.  Do not worry.  So I’m just reading about a 14-year-old girl in an orphanage called Moll and a much older man has given her a barley sugar. That night in bed she listened to the breathing of the girls around her, their breathing was normal but as time passed it became slower and more regular. After a while the point came when she felt sure that everyone was asleep. She pulled her barley sugar out from inside the pillowslip and undid the ribbon with care. She put the ribbon back inside the pillow slip so that she could use it in the morning and now at last came the moment she had anticipated all day.  She slipped the end of the barley sugar, not the crook but the straight end, into her mouth and began to suck.  At first the barley sugar did not taste of anything. The sensation she had was of something cold and glassy and hard in her mouth but within seconds she was graced with the new sensation, a moist and extraordinarily sweet taste that spread through her mouth and down her throat. It was the nicest taste that she had ever tasted in her whole life. In the morning after she had brushed her hair she remembered the ribbon in her pillowslip.  She fetched it and tied her hair at the back.  Claire Corrigan, who is another of the orphans, saw the new coloured ribbon.  “Where did that come from?” she asked, “It was a present” said Moll.  “Who gave you a present?  You don’t know anybody.”, “Willie Garrett” she said, “the new man in the gardens”.Hello come and sit down.“Oh!” said Claire Corrigan her eyes wide, what Foxy Moll recognised was a mixture of surprise and anxiety and envy.  Envy she thought as she ran downstairs, envy, no one had ever envied anything of hers before.  The very idea made her feel giddy and powerful.  After breakfast Willie, the man who has given her the barley sugar, the gardener, came and found her in the little kitchen garden.  Her job in the orphanage is to go and collect the eggs in the morning which are in the little kitchen garden.  “I like the ribbon” he said, “Do you?” he touched the ribbon.  It was only a gentle touch but her whole scalp tingled.  She had never known anything like these feelings before they were strange and powerful but not unpleasant.  “There’ll be more where that came from” he said.  We walked off and filled with elation she went on with the work of egg collection.  Over the seasons that followed Willie brought her several ribbons of different colours and widths as well as buttons and cakes and coloured thread and a woollen shawl.  All of these things which she had never owned before gave her the same giddy powerful feeling that the barley sugar ribbon had.  She was also gratified that Willie liked her enough to give her these things and before long she decided that the very fact that he gave them certified his ardour and guaranteed he felt the way he said he did.  The gifts also affected the other orphans and how they treated her as news of Willie’s generosity spread she was treated with a respect that she had never known before.  She, who had been a nobody, had become a somebody, somebody known as Willie’s girl, Willie’s Foxy Moll.  The next thing that happened was that she no longer looked forward to the gifts alone as he had done, and rather than wonder what he would give her, she began instead to look forward to when she might see him.  What was more, when he spoke to her and called her Foxy Moll or asked her if she was Foxy Molly or used the other endearments that were part of his repertoire her heart raced and she felt a great bubble of happiness fill her up inside.  Then the anxiety set in, it was almost like jealousy, she had to see him.  She had to see him and it hurt when she did not as much as it thrilled her when she did.  Then she began to wheedle, she wanted his assurance that he liked her most out of all the girls in the orphanage and in the town and in Munster and in the whole of Ireland.  She asked and he gave her the assurance time after time and at first it satisfied but then it was enough, it had to be more, he had to say that he loved her and her alone and no one else and what was more that he had never and he would never love anyone but her.  For a long time Willie Garrett would not tell her this, all he would say was that he liked her.  Then all he would say was that he adored her.  Then at last the day came when he told her that he loved her.  From the moment he spoke the words strange surges of feeling darted through her stomach, her legs trembled and she felt odd between her legs.  It was in some measure an ache and also to see degree something else that she had never known before and in her small nascent breasts she felt needles of pain.  Every Sunday afternoon the orphans were allowed to leave St. Brigid’s and walk out into the country for an hour.  The Sunday after that she met Willie by arrangement and they walked out to a little wood.  Here she let him kiss her.  They walked out to this wood on more Sunday afternoons after that and many times he kissed her.  Then came the time when he gave her the ring and promised to marry her.  She had never felt so happy in her life and she let him lift her skirt.  Then he did what he had been on at her to do for quite some time and even though she knew she should not let him she felt that she could not deny him now.  When he was finished they walked back to the orphanage arm in arm.  She was 14.  The next day was Monday but Willie did not turn up for work nor was he there on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday.  On Friday a parishioner told a priest who told Mrs McSauley who told several of the orphans who passed through her kitchen one of whom was Claire Corrigan what had happened.  In the classroom Claire Corrigan’s desk was behind Moll’s, the Master wrote on the blackboard, the chalk scratched as he did.  ‘Did you hear?’ whispered Claire Corrigan.  Pale and white and heavy with ache she knew at once that what Claire Corrigan was about to tell her must concern Willie.  She was desperate to have news of him and at the same time she surmised that whatever Claire Corrigan had to tell her must be bad.  ‘Willie was seen on Monday going into an army recruiting office in Limerick and then he was seen at the station getting on a train,’ said Claire ‘he’s joined the army, he’s going to France so he is, to fight.’  Foxy Moll bolted from the classroom and into the garden, she doubled over and out it flooded, the bread and dripping and tea that had been her breakfast and the kipper she had eaten for dinner at mid-day.  The mess of undigested food formed a puddle at her feet.  The Master sent Claire Corrigan after her.  Claire found her outside and went to Mrs McSauley in the kitchen, the cook had greasy hands and was making meatloaf with sausage meet.  ‘Foxy Moll’s sick.’ said Claire.  ‘Where?’, ‘On the grass around the side.’ ‘That girl’ said Mrs McSauley, ‘I’m only busy making a supper and now I have to stop because of her’.  Though nothing had been said everyone in St. Brigid’s blamed her for Willie’s disappearance and the adults complained it was a terrible nuisance to lose him.  Mrs McSauley brought Foxy Moll back into the kitchen.  She found a bit of cloth in the rag box.  ‘Wipe your face with that’ she said ‘then throw it in the fire’.  It was a scrap of old green curtain.  The material very rough. She wiped her mouth and threw the rag into the open fire.  ‘Here’ Mrs McSauley handed her a tin cup, bubbles floated on top of the milk inside.  ‘Drink that, that’ll settle you.’  She sniffed the milk, it smelled of cow and pasture, it was heavy and rich and buttery and she knew impossible for her to swallow.  ‘I can’t, it will make me sick again.’  She put the cup on the table.  ‘I’ll take a cup of water though if you have it.’  Late that night she began to shiver and sweat, her teeth chattered and then ground against one another, then she started to murmur and before long she shouted and her yells woke Claire Corrigan who got out of bed and lifted her nightdress so she would not trip on the hem and went to the annex. There’s an annex in the dormitory where the woman who looks after – who sleeps there at night sleeps.‘Mrs Johnston?’, ‘What’s the matter now?’ said Mrs Johnston in her bed.  ‘It’s Foxy Moll.’  Mrs Johnston climbed out of her high wooden bed and threw a shawl around her shoulders and padded out into the dark dormitory.  She heard Foxy shout and thrash under the blankets as she approached.  Mrs Johnston put her hand out in the darkness and found her head and clamped her hand onto her forehead it was both hot and wet.  ‘At the side of my bed there’s a candle’ she said to Claire Corrigan who stood beside her ‘Light it and bring it here’.  Claire Corrigan went away and returned by the pale fluttery light of the candle Mrs Johnston and the orphans saw that Foxy was red faced and she streamed with sweat.  ‘She’s boiling said Mrs Johnston, I’ll need a basin of cold water and a flannel and we’ll have to get the doctor.’  The next day the doctor came in the afternoon and diagnosed a fever and prescribed isolation in case whatever it was that Foxy Moll had was contagious.  A bed was made up for her in the attic under the eaves and she lay up there for a week and sweated and wept and slept and was tormented by a terrible feverish dream that repeated over and over again.  She was out on a dirt road that snaked across flat boggy ground under a sullen filthy black sky.  Willie was there in front of her, he hurried on and she called to him to wait and tried to catch up with him but he did not listen, he moved faster and faster.  She tried to catch up with him but it was useless, no matter how hard she struggled and how much she shouted and wailed and cajoled he got further and further and further ahead of her until, in the end, he vanished and she was left alone in the middle of the endless bog.  In the odd hours that she was awake and conscious she would lie in her bed and stare up at the slanted slope of grey slates just above her head.  She sometimes heard the scratches made by the claws of birds as they walked out on the roof outside.  At these times she felt a pain in her chest more or less in the region of her heart, it was a powerful feeling, it excruciated and exhausted in equal measure.  In comparison to this she found that on balance she preferred her awful dream.  At last her temperature returned to normal and she was allowed to return to her dormitory.  The first thing she did when she got there was to go to her shelf in the press where she kept her clothes and pull out the buttons and the ribbons and the shawl hidden under her things.  At the sight of Willie’s gifts those awful sharp stabs of pain that had tormented her when she had been awake in the attic hit her again.  They hit her so hard that she felt her legs shake and she knew she needed to sit.  At the same time at the sight of all she had left that connected her to Willie she felt something like relief.  She grabbed it all, the ribbons and the buttons and the shawl and carried them to her bed and sat and cradled them on her lap.  For a long while great gusts of pain and joy flowed through her, the feelings were terrible, they also comforted her.I said that she is an orphan but in fact she’s not an orphan because the next chapter concerns her mother.  Her mother is a prostitute who decides that she doesn’t want to look after her daughter Moll anymore so she arranges for her to go into the orphanage and she goes back to Dublin and she resumes working as a prostitute and she then eventually ends up with a man, an ex-soldier, called Horace Conway and they live in a little house in Drumcondra and he supports her and she doesn’t take clients anymore and she thinks that he’s going to leave her his house, this little house in which they live, but as he’s dying his sister gets in touch and he changes his mind at the last minute as people so often do.  (laughter)  And he doesn’t give the woman who he has been living with for several years the house as he’s promised, he gives it to his sister and his sister’s husband and their children.  So she has to leave – her name is Mary.  Mary has to leave the house and so she decides to go back to where she comes from which is a village, New Inn in Tipperary, to a little tiny cabin – a two roomed cabin – that she’s inherited from her parents and she decides to get her daughter Moll out of the orphanage and bring her home, which she does – she brings her home.  And the two of them start living together and gradually due to the mother’s influence Moll, the daughter, becomes a prostitute but a different kind of prostitute.  She doesn’t walk the streets, she just has relationships, some of which of last for several months – very long relationships, only one at a time – and then, when it ends as it always does with the man going back to his wife or his family, she gets something in return.  She gets a winter’s worth of turf or she gets all her bills paid at the grocers or she gets all her dispensary charges settled and over the years this goes from 1917-1918 all the way through the 20s and the 30s.This character, who I’ve been reading to you about, Moll, has a number of children.  She has 6 children and now she’s met the man that she’s going to have her 7th child with and I’m going to read you – she hasn’t got pregnant yet but she’s – well she may actually just have got pregnant because I’m going to read you the bit where she’s just been with him for the first time.  Obviously it’s very difficult for her to be ... sometimes she goes to people’s houses, it’s very difficult for her to be intimate but there’s a dug-out, there’s a pillbox a few fields away from her little cabin at the bottom of the farm that surrounds her small holding and it’s a Free State pillbox, a big Free State pillbox, built in 1921 for Free State soldiers to hide in and wait and shelter from when they’re out looking for republicans, for irregulars, and it’s very large, very substantial and that’s where she goes and so she’s just gone with this man called JJ to the pillbox and the act has occurred and now they’re walking back.  It’s 1938.They started to walk and followed the exact route they had taken on their way to the dug-out.That’s what the pillbox is called locally.She could tell because of the way the grass had been ruffled by their passage through it.  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ he said.  ‘Tomorrow?’ He was keen, he must be desperate.  What was his wife’s name?  She had been told it.  Could she remember it?  Oh yes it was Nancy, yes, Nancy Spink, Mrs Nancy Spink, or to be precise and to use the proper title Mrs Jimmy Spink.  ‘Tomorrow?’ she said again.  She tried to think, would she be doing anything?  Did she have any plans?  Was it not just another day like the one she had just had?  ‘At about this time,’ he said, ‘what will you be doing?  Will you be at home?’  ‘I should say so’ she said.  ‘I suppose you’d always be there when the children come in from school.’ ‘I would.’ She said.  ‘That’s the time then, to come and find you, at this time.  It would be in the week but of course Saturday and Sunday, well, those days I’m not usually free’ he said.  ‘Of course’ she should have thought of that.  That was doubtless when he went home to see his wife.  Did he have children?  She tried to remember if she had been told when she had been given the wife’s name.  Yes, she probably had been.  Her mind was like a sieve.  Why did it not hold these things?  Or perhaps it did but she had put the knowledge somewhere in her head where she could not locate it, like putting something in the back of a drawer and forgetting you had put it there.  Perhaps.  How old was he?  Mid 40s she guessed, maybe a shade older, 50.  If he had any children then they must be grown up, if that was the case they would surely be out in the world at this stage in which case why did he go home on Saturdays and Sundays?  Ah, perhaps he had another woman somewhere and that was when he saw her.  No, no that was wrong, the pants she had heard in the dug-out told her that he had not had a woman in a while, on top of which he wants to see her again.  No, he had no woman, not at the moment, not of late.  She was sure of it.  ‘Look at that, will you? he said.  They both stopped and he pointed at a vixen ahead of them.  She scrambled at the earth with her front paws, she was dark red and her long tail looked heavier and bigger than her long lean body. ‘What’s she up to?’ she asked.  The vixen heard her voice and glanced back.  The vixen stared at them and she did not move, as she stared at them she stayed quite still.  Foxy Moll was struck by the animal’s stillness as it gazed at them and gauged how far away they were and whether they were a threat and how fast she would have to scurry off if they approached.  The vixen stared for several seconds and then as they did not move towards her she judged they posed no threat and resumed digging in the turf with her front paws.  They watched as she worked, first she dug, then she snapped at her quarry, whatever it was her jaw worked in a furious fashion and her teeth showed for a moment.  What was it she was after, Foxy Moll wondered.  Perhaps it was a mouse.  Did they burrow in the earth?  She had no idea.  The foxes jaws stopped, what she was after had evidently escaped.  She pushed her snout down in to the turned up earth and scrabbled with her paws.  ‘She’s going for worms.’ JJ said.That’s the name of the man.‘She must be starving.’ ‘Well she better not come near my birds,’ said Foxy Moll.She keeps chickens, sells the eggs.The vixen lifted her head and started to move away, she dragged her left hind leg behind and moved with an odd twisted gait.  She was lame.  ‘She wouldn’t be hard to shoot in that condition.’ said JJ.  ‘I’ve no gun,’ she said, ‘get Badger to do it.’Badger is the farmhand on the farm beside her.‘He shoots these fields with Old Caesar’s gun doesn’t he? ‘Yeah he does,’ she said, although she thought that Badger would more often than not be after something for the pot and not on the hunt for vermin when he took the gun out.  ‘Right,’ he said ‘Badger can give her the dead eight then.’ ‘The dead eight?’ she was unfamiliar with the phrase and shook her head mystified, ‘I don’t follow’ she said.  ‘When you look at the end of the shot gun’ said JJ ‘ the two barrels side by side, what do they look like?  She pictured the end of a shot gun, the two circles touching. ‘An eight.’ ‘But it isn’t standing is it?’ he said ‘it’s lying down, it’s dead, the dead eight.’ ‘Ah.’ The vixen was still in view and she watched it now as it dragged its bad hind leg and she wondered, shoot a creature that could just about walk, that did not seem right.  Besides, would it not die of starvation soon enough anyway?  She shrugged and wished she had not said ‘She’d better not come near my birds.’ That had been stupid and if she had kept her mouth shut there would not be any of this foolish talk about shooting and guns.    ‘So,’ he said ‘will you ask Badger?’.  ‘Maybe’, ‘You won’t ask Badger’, he said in a shrewd way ‘because you’re female, you’re sentimental and you think it’s wrong to shoot a wounded animal, am I right?’.  Her face went red.  ‘I have my answer I see’ he said.  The vixen squeezed under a hedge with three legs.  She said ‘She’s not going to harm my birds’, ‘Ah, there speaks a true woman who only a moment before was worried this vixen might come for her poultry.’  The vixen was gone, they started to walk on again.  ‘If you think something won’t harm you you leave it alone, don’t you?’ he said.  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’, ‘I’ll tell you, one, never assume anything.  Two, never predict because you’re going to be wrong.  Three, don’t make excuses just do the correct thing.  Those have been my watch words and they’ve served me well.  I leave nothing to chance.’  She nodded as if she was interested but she was not, lists bored her and besides her thoughts had turned to money and what she needed and what she would do if JJ gave her money.  She had seen some stockings with clocks on them in the haberdashers that she rather wanted, then she rebuked herself, she was not to think like this, he would not give her any money, he would give her something for the children perhaps but not for her, not yet.  He would give her things like potatoes and flour and butter and tea and maybe whiskey, he would buy what he knew she needed for the house.  Then after the end to assuage his conscience he would gift her something very big like a winter’s worth of turf and if there was any money it would come then.  They moved on.  Their steps were slow and neither talked.  She did not mind because without speech she was free to listen to the sounds around her.  The swish of her feet as they tramped along and the winds that moved through the bushes and the bray of Caesar’s donkey and the bleat of a sheep somewhere and the rumble of a lorry as it ground down the public road in the direction of Knockgraffon National School.  Some minutes later they reached her cottage.  ‘Will you take a cup of tea?’ she said, he looked at his wrist watch, it was a good one, the face was black and the numbers in white and the strap was leather and brown and sturdy, it looked military, perhaps it was army issued.  After the British Garrisons had gone the new powers in the land, the victors, and JJ at that point was one of them expropriated much of the stuff they did not take away with them.  ‘I won’t,’ he said ‘I have to be somewhere.’  He pulled a purse from his trouser pocket, unzipped it, counted out 5 silver sixpences and a florin ‘For the children, they can buy some sweets, sixpence should get them something decent.’  She nodded.  ‘The florin is for Daniel.’Daniel is her oldest son who has started working.He put the money into her hand.  Yes if she wanted those stockings she would have to find the cash from somewhere else.  ‘Until tomorrow’ he said.  He got into his car.  He drove away.  She went inside.There you go, that’s 20 minutes of reading.  (laughter)The book is about somebody who really existed whose life – because it’s called a novel – I’ve made up but this woman really did exist and the person that she – she was murdered.  She really was murdered on the 19th of November 1940, a couple of years after these events, and the man – come in, hello.  The man that she refers to, that is referred to, Badger, who is a local, he’s a ... well he’s ... I refer to him as the farm hand actually by this stage he’s the farm manager on the farm beside where she lives.  He is the person, he was the person, who found her in real life.  He had a greyhound, he was a great hare coursing man, he liked his greyhounds and he used to exercise his greyhound, a particular greyhound, every morning following exactly the same route.  He didn’t vary it, apparently with dogs that’s what you have to do, and he was training this dog and he followed his route and it took him past a gap in a hedge and that’s where he found her – she’d been shot with a shot gun – lying on the ground.  So he went back to the farmhouse to Mr. and Mrs Caesar who were his employers and he said he’s just ... he knew who it was but he didn’t tell them that he knew who it was which was probably a mistake.  And they told him to go to the police station and he went to the police station and reported her, reported the body.  Brought the police back, that was on the morning of the 20th of November 1940 and on the 7th of April 1941 the Irish State hung him for killing her which he had not done.  She had to have been shot either that morning or at some point in the course ... well actually it was raining all night and the body was dry so she had to have been shot, you know, quite recently.  And, you know, he was with ... I mean he had an alibi, he was with people, but the police, the guards decided that the 7th child – remember I was reading you a section when she only had a 6 – the 7th child who died they decided was his.  I mean she was a woman with what they called a certain pedigree, he was an unmarried farm labourer/manager, she’d had a child, the child had died and their case was that he was being threatened by her.  She was going to go to the authorities and say that he’d fornicated and that she’d had a child and look for compensation.  The compensation, whether or not she would have got it would have been small but it would have destroyed him.  He was in his 40s, he worked on Mr. and Mrs Caesar’s – Mr. Caesar, John Caesar, was his uncle and he’d worked on his uncle’s farm for nothing all his life on the understanding that when they died he’d get the farm.  So the police case was well obviously he didn’t want to lose the farm so he arranged to meet her at the dug-out and shot her and then left the body in a hole in the hedge and then went home and then got up the next, morning and found her and that way he covered up his case.  And that essentially was the case against him and it was regarded as a very convincing case for all sorts of reasons and so they hung him.  His defence counsel, junior defence counsel, was Sean McBride and the reason the case is interesting at least in Irish legal circles is that McBride until then wasn’t really fussed about capital punishment one way or the other but this was so flagrantly a miscarriage of justice he changed his mind and this was what really started him on the road to Amnesty International and all the things that he did much, much later in his life because I mean he was ... at that point in his life he was probably quite reactionary, not politically but socially and culturally reactionary.So this is a novel, it says it’s a novel very clearly at the beginning.  I mean certain things are known – when she was found, how she was shot – all sorts of things but there’s a great deal more information about the case much of which I’ve taken from a book by a man called Marcus Bourke, a sort of forensic account of what the police case was and how they constructed the case, the police constructed the case against him.  I mean they did things like they went into the fire arms, they went and got the fire arms register from the local shop where Caesar bought his cartridges and inserted – but on the 5th of October – Caesar or Harry Gleeson the man who was hung, Badger, bought 50 Eley 5 Grand Prix cartridges, which were the cartridges used to shoot her.  They actually wrote it in and you can go and look at this book.  They did all sorts of things like that.  I mean it was what’s called a fit up, it was more complicated than that.  So I’m very interested because of the work in the prison I’m very interested in crime, I’m very interested in miscarriages of justice.  I’m also very interested in the way when things go wrong in the criminal justice system it’s always the least – usually it’s the least powerful, the smallest, the most insignificant and the most blameless who cops it but what’s interesting about this case is this applies to both the victim and the man who was hung.  This woman lived a very difficult life as a sort of marginal excluded woman who exchanged love and affection and sexual favours for economic support.  She got a little tiny bit of assistance from the State, I think they gave her a few shillings a week and a little bit of milk.  The State also tried to take her children off her twice – that was their main intervention in her life because she was immoral.  The priest – the church had nothing to do with her.  Nobody had anything to do with her, except for the men who slept with her, and she had one line of support and it was a very, very strange – the local landlord was a Catholic not a Protestant and the daughter was a woman called Miss Cooney, and Miss Cooney who had driven ambulances on the Western Front in the first World War was the only woman to visit her and gave her food.  There was a college nearby, arranged for the college to send her food, gave her a pram, gave her clothes, gave her money, paid her medical bills as well.  So with her clients and Miss Cooney’s help Moll McCarthy, Foxy Moll, survived very, very, very, very – with enormous difficulty, a two-room cabin, no water, no electricity, no means of support but the State tried twice to take the children off her but they couldn’t because they couldn’t prove that she was a negligent mother because the evidence was that she was the reverse.  And Harry Gleeson, the man who was hung, was similarly an absolutely blameless ... he was just a bloke who, you know, worked and played the fiddle and was very keen on hare coursing, some people nowadays might think hare coursing is, you know, sort of unacceptable but, you know, this is 1940 and they both got it.  Some years ago I wrote a book on somebody called Maguire, Patrick Maguire, who was the youngest of the Maguire Seven, seven people who were sent to prison for the Guildford Bombings and, you know, he was just a bloke.  We actually he wasn’t even a bloke he was a child, well he and the other six people were just ordinary people and there does seem to be something in the way in which States, all States, not just the British State, act in relation to people who are very small and tiny and powerless.  The little people as Laura Helmsley called them (laughter).  But it is somewhat bizarre.  So I read Marcus Bourke’s book and I had a long correspondence with him and I told him because obviously he doesn’t say who he thought killed her but I read his book very carefully and I decided who I thought did kill her and who it was and how they did it and why they did it and I can only write that as fiction so I had to write this sort of strange novel that very, very carefully explains at the back what bits of it are true and what bits of it are made up.  Basically up to when she’s taken away to be killed I made up because there is no evidence of how – I mean she had 7 children and she lived in the cabin and, you know, Miss Cooney is a real person but a lot has to be imagined and that’s one of the things that novels can do, they can go well we know these things so if we invent these things that will get us from a-z and well there we go.  I’ve been spieling now for 50 minutes and I was told 50 minutes was my limit.  (laughter)QuestionsParticipant: Who killed her?  Or who do you think?Carlo: The father of the 7th child.Participant: Ah yeah, yeah.Carlo: The actual father of the 7th child. Participant: JJ?Carlo: Yeah.Participant: JJ yeah.Participant: And of course they would have known?Carlo: Yeah, what’s very interesting is everybody knew.Participant: Yeah everybody knew.Carlo: Everybody knew but of course nobody was going to say anything because as soon as you started speaking about what had happened then you’d have to explain, well, okay so if it wasn’t Gleeson, known as Badger, who did it then who did?  Oh right, well how many children did she have?  And how many different fathers?  And how many different relationships?  What?  This woman was living in the village how many men did she sleep with?  You know, I mean it would have just ... everything ...Participant: Everybody would have been implicated.Carlo: ... yeah everybody would have been implicated so sort of collective omerta, nobody wanted this discussed.  But Miss Cooney, she found out, she wrote to the Minister of Justice, her uncle was a judge, she was very well-connected.  She found out and wrote letters and tried her best and she failed.  Sean McBride tried very hard and failed.  I haven’t really gone into that, he failed because the defence case was conducted in completely the wrong way but you can’t ... they conducted on the strength of ... they honed in on the ballistics and so forth and that was the wrong thing to do but you can’t blame them for that, they thought that was the best way to demolish the State case.  But the State, you know, had a very persuasive argument which was 75 acres, of course he killed her.  But it’s a great book (laughter) and I’d recommend you all rush now to a bookshop and buy it.  (laughter)Participant: What’s the name?Carlo: It’s called The Dead Eight.  Yeah, you’ll enjoy it.  It’s great.  It’s a laugh.Sinéad: It’s published by New Island Books ...Carlo: Yes.Sinéad: ... and New Island is a local Dublin-based publishing house.Carlo: Yes, of great genius (laughter) selecting me, yes.  (laughter)  Yes?Participant: RTE did a series a number of years on famous murders ...Carlo: And that was in it.Participant: And that was in it.Carlo: Yes.Participant: That was the one where two school boys were fighting in the yard and a third school boy said "What are you fighting him for he’s your brother?"Carlo: Yeah.Participant: And one of the boys went home and said it and that seemed to be ... sparked off ...Carlo: There is that, there is that ... I’ve actually ... I mean there were ... what the police did was they got her children to perjure themselves and then wrote it down and used that as evidence.  They basically got one of her children to say that, the boy in that scene, I haven’t seen the film but I’m aware of it, they got her son to say that his mother and Badger had arranged to meet on the night that she disappeared.  Miss Cooney then got hold of the children and got statements from them saying that the police had paid them and inveigled them into making these statements.  But yes, I ... in fact that playground scene is also invented so I’m not the only person inventing but yes I know about that but I didn’t deliberately look at that because I didn’t want to plagiarise, I have a tendency (laughter), if you plagiarise it’s anonymous at the moment, I’m trying to get on top of it.  Nor did I read ... there’s a ... Evelyn Conlon wrote a book about Gleeson, really about capital punishment, called Shadows on our Skin – Skin on our Shadows, Evelyn Conlon did it, published a book about 5 or 6 years ago and then Una Troy, the judge who refused to take her children away, was a man called Sean Troy, who was the District Justice in Cashel or ... yeah Cashel I think, he wouldn’t take the children away and he had a daughter called Una Troy and she wrote a book.  She wrote a novel also about this case called Now we are 6 or Now we are 7 – Now we are 7, which I haven’t read either, which I will read but ...Participant: But you’ve written your own book.Carlo: ... yeah I’ve written my own.  All I read was, you know, the trial stuff and newspapers and Marcus Bourke’s book and I’ll just end by saying what Cormac McCarthy says which is that literature’s dirty secret is that books come out of books.  (laughter)Sinéad: What’s your question there?Participant: We met coming up in the lift.  I had no idea you were ...Carlo: We were ... we were ... yeah.  I counted to 10 though.  (laughter)Participant: To listen to you talk about yourself and how you write and about the publishing industry and the need for translators and stuff I’m impressed by this light mischievous sense of humour, you’re somebody looking on the bright side of life and just when read from dead ...Carlo: The Dead Eight.Participant: ... Dead Eight, yes, you seem fascinated certainly in this book with the darker side of the human condition, absolutely no question about that.  Is that consistent in your writing or is it just this particular novel?Carlo: I like to think of myself as kind of like Danny Kaye, you know, light and frothy (laughter), do you know, if I could write funny like, you know, like Perlman (laughter) if I could write wittily and lightly that would be fantastic but every time I get behind the f-ing typewriter or qwerty board it all comes out gloomy and doomy.Participant: Not every time.Carlo: Not every time.Participant: One of my questions was so many books have many happy endings ...Carlo: Yes.Participant: ... there’s an inevitability about them ...Carlo: Yes.Participant: ... but you deliberately want to lift your readers’ spirits, I think in a Good Day for a ...Carlo: A Dog ...Participant: ... for a Dog.Carlo: Yes.Participant: And Life of a Drum which were both very uplifting so did you decide to do this?Carlo: Yeah, no, I ... this is true.  What happens when you write is the imagination is a sort of cinema in your head with a screen and you go into the cinema and the characters appear on the screen and you sort of see what they’re wearing and where they are and you sort of write it down and they have autonomy so they tend on the inner fill in my head to be on the melancholy side but occasionally it’s cheerful like in these two books that you’ve mentioned.Participant: Does the prison make you depressed?  Does the prison zone in on the darker side?Carlo: The prison has ... I mean I was pessimistic about human behaviour before but now, you know, I used to think when I was young that the man on the money was Mr. Tony Chekhov, you know, now the man on the money is Mr. Jonathan Swift, I mean he is absolutely ... he tells it like it is.  But in prisons you also do see things that give you grounds for optimism, a few, not many but a few. Some people do change and transform their lives.  And the novel that you referred to, A Good Day for a Dog, which is about a career criminal, he is going to go back to his wife at the end, he is not going to get involved in a vendetta but he is also a bastard.  I mean he is ... if he has to he will kill somebody, if it’s them or him he’s the one who is going to come out but he also has his own curious moral code.  He doesn’t want to necessarily harm people but he will if he has to.  The men who attack him in ... he’s attacked in Amsterdam, he would have killed them if he had to.  Can I answer any more questions?Participant: Could you recollect some of the ... just stories from the prison, like you’ve seen people ... you said you saw people change?Carlo: Yes.  The point about prison, no.  When you are in prison even though you might mix with other prisoners and share a cell you’re forced to have a relationship with the last person you ever expect to have one with, namely yourself.  In the outside world we can avoid having a relationship with ourselves, you know, we can smoke marijuana or go to the gym or, you know, whatever – watch TV.  There are ways of avoiding it.  When you get to prison you can still avoid it by smoking marijuana or taking heroin or going to the gym or watching TV but it’s more difficult because you are going to find there are periods of time when you are locked and there is nothing but you and your unconscious, you and your history, you and yourself.  When that happens it’s a very painful disagreeable process but the brain starts to work because the brain is a self-regulating mechanism.  Every prison, no matter how much heroin they take to block the thoughts, starts to think, why am here?  What did I do?  Was it my mother’s fault?  Was it my father’s fault?  Is it my fault?  I must be mad!  And out of that interrogation/communication/conversation come things – word streams, thoughts, that’s why so many people write in prison, it’s all bubbling up – all this stuff, they don’t know what to do with it so they write it down or they turn it into songs or they block it, you know, they go to the gym a lot and, you know, they take narcotics.  And with some of the people, I’ve been working now since 1993 so I’ve done 18 years so some of the people I’ve been working with maybe for 10 or 12 years and at the beginning basically they just are not very sort of interested.  They’re never unpleasant to me but just they’ve got better things to do like smoke Jazz Woodbines or, you know, look at pornographic magazines or play grand theft auto – a huge in the prison.  (laughter)  But gradually it starts, the work dream starts, the brain starts working and then they start doing education and then they start working and now with some people, you know, there’s one man I’ve been working with for about 6 years, he’s written a novel, we might get it published.  Another man has written a kind of memoire, a football memoire, just as ... honestly, I mean I know you’re going to think he would say that but as good as Nick Horny.  We’ve had ... I’ve got prisons to write plays that have been performed, then there’s the Koestler Foundation.  Do you know what the Koestler is?  Arthur Koestler, the great sort of ...Participant: Novelist.Carlo: ... yeah.  He set up the Koestler Foundation to ... it’s kind of competition for prisons in Britain and Ireland.  Prisoners submit work – anything, you know, virgin Marys made of matchsticks at one end of the spectrum to novels in three volumes at the other and they get judged and awarded prizes and money and it’s a very, very good thing, the Koestler Foundation.  And the Listowel Writers’ Week runs something of a literary nature only here for prisoners as well, which is also very good.  So anyway people, yeah, so you know I’ve got people to write things for Koestler but I’m not really interested in the end product, I’m interested in getting people to stop ... I’m going to swear, stop fucking up and start using their brains.  I don’t always succeed.  Actually usually I fail but occasionally I succeed so that’s good.  So I’m a little bit optimistic and quite a bit pessimistic.  (laughter)  Does that answer your question?Participant: Yeah.  Well I thought you might talk about something specific.Carlo: Something specific?  I have to be careful because they get paranoid ... I can’t talk about the individual prisoners.Participant: Oh that’s okay, no.Carlo: But yeah people do, people are transformed yeah.  I mean some of the people that I’ve worked with RTE did a programme with them last year, interviewed them about writing and stuff, yeah.Participant: Okay thanks.Carlo: Any more questions?Participant: How old did you say Willie was in the novel?Carlo: Oh, the man who seduces her?Participant: Yeah?Carlo: Oh I can’t remember, I think he’s 20 or 22.Participant: If he’s going into the army he must be quite ...Carlo: Yeah, yeah.Participant: ... not old and not young.Carlo: Yeah.Participant: No it’s just when you said an older man I thought he was ...Carlo: Oh I see.  Oh he might ... actually I don’t know.  Do you know I can’t remember.  I’ve forgotten this book!  So much has happened since I’ve written it I’ve forgotten it.  He must be in his 20s, yeah.  He’s not 16.Participant: Did you find when you were writing this book that the research that you had done interfered with the book or did it just take off because I know you’ve written other historical novels and I just wondered ...?Carlo: No, I try not to do any research before I write the book.  I only do the research afterwards.  (laughter)  Yes it’s true.Participant: How strange.Participant: Yes, and you don’t want it to influence you.Carlo: No, I mean I knew, I’d read Marcus Bourke’s book Murder in Marlhill ...Participant: Yeah.Carlo: ... so I knew, I knew what ... I had these fixed points, you know, when she was going to be killed, when he was going to find the body, when he was going to get arrested.  I’d read the statements that the police had taken from him without obviously a solicitor present, of course, they had to have no solicitor present because they were fitting him up.  You know, leading questions like "So you receive no salary from Mr. Caesar do you?  You’re understanding is you’re going to inherit the farm?", "Yes", "Have you ever had sexual relations with Moll McCarthy?".  I mean the police ... that’s the way they did it so I’d seen those sorts of things but I didn’t do any research, the kind you’re talking about, social, earlier but what I did have – I did have and I always have – was a map.  We have a map!  As long as you have a map and you know where people are in space as soon as you have a map then you can work out how long it takes to get from places and suddenly you think, oh, ah, ah yeah, I see exactly, and it was by looking at the map that I decided ... I knew she’d be killed in an outbuilding and I decided ... I picked the building that she was killed in.  I don’t know it but I’ve decided and I’m not the first person ... I’ve stolen this thing about using the maps from Georges Simenon – Maigret.  Yeah, great writer, he used to do ... he wrote these roman durs, these hard novels, just about crime and punishment and they were psychological, they weren’t like the Maigret, they weren’t thrillers, they weren’t detectives, they were just accounts of people’s miserable lives and Simenon would decide ... he’d have a story, he would pick a town, he would pick a district, he would decide where the victim lived.  He’d go, he’d just pick the flat, get into the flat, he’d make a plan of it.  He had the space, the three dimensional built environment completely worked out, he might give the town a fictional town but everything in terms of where people were and how they moved was all clearly worked out.Sinéad: Are there any more questions?  Well all that remains for me to do then is to thank you very much Carlo, it was excellent what you said Carlo.Carlo: 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.

This image gallery incorporates a selection of material dealing with childhood in Dublin from the 18th century onwards.

Almost 2,000 pictures compose the collection known as the Dixon Slides. The varied contents include photographs taken by Frederick Dixon in the 1960s and 1970s, book illustrations, postcards, advertisements and older photos of events around Dublin. The main focuses of the collection are Dublin city and its buildings.

The Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association (RDFA) was established in 1996 to commemorate all Irish men and women who volunteered, served and died in the First World War 1914-1918. The RDFA fulfils its remit by organising public exhibitions, lectures, seminars, visits and the publication of a journal, Blue Cap. In 2005, the RDFA decided to place its archive with Dublin City Library and Archive, where it is available for public consultation in the Reading Room. The RDFA Archive is managed by Dublin City Archives.Note: The RDFA collects personal papers of individuals who participated in the First World War. Service records for the Royal Dublin Fusiliers are held in The National Archives, Kew, London.ExhibitionsDublin City Archives has generated a travelling exhibition based on the RDFA Archive, called Letters from the Great War.  For further information, and to book this exhibition, e-mail [email protected]/001: Monica Roberts CollectionRDFA/014: Moriarty CollectionRDFA/017: The Keogh Collection PostcardsRDFA/020: Irish National War Memorial CommitteeDownload the various catalogues of the collections.

This series of photographs is taken from the report of the Departmental Committee appointed to inquire into the housing conditions of the working classes of Dublin. The pictures give great insight into the miserable life in the overcrowded and poverty-stricken tenements and courts of Dublin in 1913. Published by the Local Government Board for Ireland, the inquiry was prompted by the collapse of two tenement buildings at No. 66 and No. 67 Church Street on the evening of 2 September 1

This image gallery depicts the working lives of Dublin Corporation/Dublin City Council Staff. This short selection of images show  staff at work and, also, how things have changed over the years. It reflects the challenges they encountered and the diversity of skills required by staff in the performance of their everyday duties.

The following is a transcript of the fourteenth Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture by Dr Christopher Fitz-Simon, at Dublin City Library and Archive on 24 January 2011. AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, 'Mr J. Kennedy Miller's very capable company of Irish players', Christopher Fitz-Simon details Miller's successful Irish theatre company which toured Ireland and Britain during the period 1889 - 1906.  The fourteenth annual Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture, was recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street on 24 January 2011.My Lord Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen, in December 1891 the critic of the Irish Playgoer magazine expressed this opinion: “The play A True son of Erin by Mr J W Whitbread, at the Queen’s Royal Theatre, was presented by Mr J Kennedy Miller’s very capable company of Irish Players, who each and all seem to know the pulse of the particular audiences invariably to be found in this theatre…”During most of the 19th century and well into the 20th the big Dublin theatres relied exclusively on what were known as ‘cross-channel attractions’, whether it was for opera, musical comedy, the latest west end plays, major productions of Shakespeare with starry names, music-hall variety and even the Christmas pantomime. Indigenous productions were a rarity though Irish ‘acts’ were to be seen in some variety programmes and Irish comedians and chorus were usually engaged for the London-produced pantos, to give a bit of local colour. The big Dublin theatres – the Royal, the Gaiety, the Queen’s Royal Theatre, the Empire Palace (later known as the Olympia) the Tivoli and the Lyric – were what was known in the trade as ‘receiving houses’, mostly owned and managed by Dublin business people such as the Gunn family at the Gaiety or the Figgis’s (of bookshop fame) at the Empire Palace: but they did not produce their own shows.Dublin was simply another city on the ‘British’ provincial touring circuit: what we saw this week in our theatres, Glasgow, Leeds, and Stockton-upon-Tees had seen last week in theirs. Yet a trawl through period copies of ‘The Era’, the weekly paper that gave details of all productions on the road, shows an interesting difference between Dublin and other cities: touring managements tended to allocate longer runs to Dublin than, for instance, Manchester. This strengthens the view, strongly promoted by the Hibernian press, that Dublin was more ‘appreciative’ of the theatre than other ‘British’ cities. The French actor-producer Constant-Benoit Coquelin gave seven performances at the Gaiety in 1899 of (on alternate nights) Molière’s ‘Les Précieuses Ridicules’ and ‘Le Tartuffe’ and Rostand’s ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ – in French! – when he only gave three nights in other ‘British’ cities outside London.We all know about the fringe theatres that developed towards the end of the 19th century in Dublin, out of which in 1904 emerged the Abbey; several thousand books and learned magazine articles have been devoted to this phenomenon: its playwrights, its actors, its associated personalities and its impact abroad, which was considerable in literary and artistic circles before becoming an international industry. My subject this evening is not the Abbey or the grubby ateliers of Camden Street and Capel Street, but the Dublin metropolitan or boulevard houses with their dress-circles, parterres and boxes, and especially of one of these, the Queen’s Royal Theatre in Brunswick Street just a quarter-mile from where you are now sitting. More particularly, I’m looking at one Company that was based there for seventeen years and produced, exclusively, major productions of Irish plays with Irish players. This company was known as Mr J. Kennedy Miller’s Combination and it flourished here and on tour throughout the British Isles from 1889 until Mr Miller’s untimely death in 1906.The Queen’s, as it was popularly known, was a receiving house like all the others. At the time of which I’m speaking its lessee was Mr J.W. Whitbread, an English entrepreneur who had settled here and rescued the Queen’s from its apparently deplorable condition. ‘The Graphic’, a London weekly of arts and fashion, said of the Queen’s “the plays were low, the actors vile, the authors rough exceedingly. Mr Whitbread… by main energy, patience, wisdom and expenditure, dragged all out of the mire.” (laughter) The Queen’s visiting attractions were no different from those at the Gaiety or the Royal, though on a smaller scale: it was a ‘No.2 house’ on the circuit and did not have the space to stage the most crowded dramatic and operatic productions. Typical were plays with titles like ‘A Woman’s Revenge’ or ‘Lost in New York’; F.B. Gilbert’s Grand Opera Company was a regular visitor in ‘Maritana’, ‘Satanella’ and ‘The Daughter of the Regiment’. Medium sized rather than grand I would have thought. Whitbread was an unusual manager, for he was more than a businessman: he fancied himself as a playwright, and indeed in 1886 he wrote a play called ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ which he produced with a touring management, first in Limerick, before allowing the same company to grace his own stage in Dublin. Clearly the out-of-town opening was a precaution; had it failed in distant Limerick it certainly would not have proceeded to the bright lights of Brunswick Street, and Mr Whitbread may have been prudently questioning his own dramatic talent.Whitbread gave his next play, ‘The Irishman’, to the touring management of Kennedy Miller who brought it out in 1889 in London at the Elephant and Castle Theatre. Why there? The answer is quite simple: Kennedy Miller’s company was rehearsing the play while performing other works on the road in England and it was apparently deemed to be ready by the time they reached the splendid new suburban house seating 2,203 patrons, and designed by the leading theatre architect of the time, Frank Matcham. A largish number of seats to be filled for a week, you will be thinking, especially for an Irish play by an unknown author. It would appear from the reviews that Kennedy Miller’s staging was particularly impressive, especially the multiple setting of castle interior, exterior and adjacent lakeside in the final act, and a spectacular visual occurrence earlier in the play when a battering ram is used to demolish a cottage from which the inhabitants are seen to be cruelly evicted.Who was this Kennedy Miller who was to have such a fruitful 17-year career as a director of Irish plays? Well, he was a Scot who claimed Irish ancestry. His first name was actually Andrew though he never used that professionally. His initial employment was as bit-part actor and assistant-stage-manager – there was nothing like Drama School at that time. His apprenticeship was at the Grand Theatre, Glasgow. In an interview with the ‘Irish Playgoer’ after his own company was well established Kennedy Miller modestly declared that his early experience had been ‘very varied’, travelling with “operas, comedies, dramas, pantomimes …and the band belonging to His Majesty the King of Siam.” It was typical training-on-the-job. He found himself engaged more and more frequently as ‘acting manager’ – we would now use the term ‘director’: the person who directs the actors in rehearsal and is responsible for the interpretation and co-ordination of the piece. He came to Whitbread’s notice when productions he’d directed visited various theatres in Dublin.It would appear that the two men, now in their enterprising thirties, saw the potential for writing and producing specifically Irish plays. The Irish melodramas of Dion Boucicault were still very popular through Boucicault was no longer active on the circuit – he died in New York in 1890. As well as this there appeared to be a distinct vogue for Irish topics on the London stage – and also, indeed in the rest of Britain. Why was this? Certainly for English theatregoers Ireland was near enough to be the scene of patently credible, if bizarre, incidents, but yet removed enough for these not to impinge too heavily on the tranquil minds of the bourgeois theatregoing public: agrarian disturbance, rebellion, prison escapes, evictions, courtroom reversals, political assassination, such things did not happen in Tunbridge Wells. (laughter) There was also, for the English theatregoer, the “engagingly humorous way our brave neighbours across the Irish Sea have of expressing themselves in the English language – if you could call it English my dear though I don’t think I would”. This ‘humorous’ Irish mode of speech was especially prevalent when stage characters were attempting to climb out of tricky situations, whether domestic, legal or military. Of the six stage productions that grossed the most money in the British Isles in 1895, no less than three were on Irish topics: revivals of Boucicault’s ‘The Shaughraun’ and ‘The Colleen Bawn’ and Buckstone’s ‘The Green Bushes’. There were 160 professional theatres and music-halls in Greater London and about 380 on the provincial circuit – which included Ireland. So there was consumer partiality for Irish work and ample accommodation.Whitbread and Kennedy Miller would certainly have discussed the vexed question of English actors portraying Irish characters – this always raised the hackles of the Dublin critics, from Frank Fay who wrote acidic reviews for the ‘United Irishman’ to Joseph Holloway who wrote sweet ones for the ‘Freeman’s Journal’ and the ‘Irish Times’. A company of genuine Irish actors was the obvious solution.Kennedy Miller did not produce anything as pretentious as a manifesto – that would have been more in line with the work of the théâtre-à côté on Abbey Street. Nor was he given to expounding dramatic theories. I’m reminded of a character in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ who says disparagingly of the parish priest, “What would he be doing with a theory?” (laughter) Well, Kennedy Miller was not a theorist, he was a practitioner. It’s clear from the few hints we have from the press that he required complete authenticity from his actors, as he did from his scenic and costume designers. It is also clear that he required absolute discipline.The Whitbread-Kennedy Miller collaboration had begun tentatively when Kennedy Miller obtained the rights of the Limerick-originated ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’. After that Whitbread penned a succession of plays, mainly on patriotic themes, all of them presented by Kennedy Miller’s company and most of them opening at the Queen’s in Dublin before touring ‘across the water’. Ireland was not populous enough to sustain a production on tour for more than a couple of months. Furthermore, only Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Limerick and Waterford – and Wexford and Derry at a squeeze – could provide theatres with adequate stage facilities. These Kennedy Miller productions were patently not ‘fit up’ shows, though one American scholar has recently and ignorantly described them as such – the fit-up companies played in their own booths or in parish halls and latterly in provincial cinemas. Companies like Kennedy Miller’s required an orchestra pit, a spacious stage and most of all flying facilities for the elaborate scenic effects.Some theatre historians have been confused by the arrangement between J. Kennedy Miller and J.W. Whitbread. Because most of Whitbread’s plays were seen in Dublin in his own theatre, it has been erroneously assumed that he directed them himself: but there is in fact a clear distinction between the House and the Performing Company. The Queen’s ‘received’ Kennedy Miller’s company; it just so happened that his company contained in its repertoire an increasing number of plays by Whitbread, the manager of the Queen’s. Later, certainly, there was a fusion of talents when in 1899 Kennedy Miller became Whitbread’s deputy and took up residence in Dublin, but there was no alteration in his company touring independently in Ireland and Britain for the greater part of the year.Now the notion of touring exclusively Irish plays in England, Scotland and Wales worked very well. Kennedy Miller mounted new productions of Boucicault’s ‘The Colleen Bawn’, ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and ‘The Shaughraun’, Buckstone’s ‘The Green Bushes’, Travers’s ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, Falconer’s ‘Peep O’Day’ and Tyrone Power’s ‘Born to Good Luck’. By 1904 the list of Whitbread’s plays which Kennedy Miller produced with the same leading and supporting actors amounted to twelve: the original two, ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ and ‘The Irishman’; then ‘The Nationalist’ – also known as ‘A True Son of Erin’ (you get the picture); then ‘Lord Edward’, initially presented in 1894 in anticipation of popular ferment leading up to the commemoration of the ’98 (1798) Rising. Next, Whitbread’s only historical play that does not have an Irish setting (but there is a leading comic part for a leading Irish actor, in this case Frank Breen), it’s called ‘The Victoria Cross’, a tale of derring-do in India’s sunny clime was brought out in Dublin and toured successfully; then ‘Theobald Wolfe Tone’ hard on the enormous commercial success of ‘Lord Edward’. Next came ‘Rory O’More’, a weak adaptation of Lever’s novel which did not do good business; then ‘The Insurgent Chief’, a clumsy melodrama with the Scarlet Pimpernel figure of Michael Dwyer at its centre. Very much in the same mode is another 1798 play without a famous figure in the title role and not Whitbread’s best (‘The Sham Squire’); and then ‘The Ulster Hero’ who is of course Henry Joy McCracken; and finally, in 1904, ‘Sarsfield’, which probably is Whitbread’s best. ‘Sarsfield’ opened at the Queen’s in Kennedy Miller’s production on the night that Yeats' ‘On Baile’s Strand’ and Lady Gregory’s ‘Spreading the News’ were dress-rehearsing across the river at the Abbey prior to the formal opening of that house on 27th of December 1904.It would be convenient to be able to say that the recherché literary theatre put an end to the popular Irish melodrama, but such was not the case. Melodrama – the Irish version of which J M Synge generously referred to as “the traditional drama of the Irish stage”, it continued until it was superseded throughout the Western world by the motion picture which could present its high-flown sentiments and exotic scenic effects so much more effectively.Isn’t it remarkable that not only did a commercial touring company manage to play forty eight weeks of the year in large metropolitan houses throughout the United Kingdom in Irish plays, but that it also gave permanent employment to upwards of two dozen actors and technicians. (The stagehands, flymen and orchestra were provided by the receiving house, as were the crowd extras who were recruited locally and rehearsed on the afternoon of the particular show in Aberdeen or Watford or wherever it happened to be.) In an almost entirely free-lance profession there is nothing like the confidence occasioned by a regular pay-packet to give a feeling of company solidarity; this, with a regular director in rehearsal, one might argue, would create a company style. Clearly the actors came to know one another very well indeed: how would they not, sharing cramped dressing-rooms and equally cramped digs in the lanes between Brunswick Street and the river; sitting up all night on the Princess Maud out of Kingstown and waiting for LMS train connections on Sunday afternoons at Crewe or GSR trains at Limerick Junction. Some were married couples and some entered into that state when employed with the company (laughter). Some, indeed, died while in service. Certainly one gathers from the reviews that there was an ‘ensemble’ rather than an ‘ad hoc’ feeling, more like what you’d expect to find in the D’Oyley Carte Opera Company, or in Henry Irving’s Celebrated Troupe of Shakespearian Players. After all, like the D’Oyley Carte and Irving productions, Kennedy Miller had a particular product packaged in a particular way.What was this ‘Irish melodrama’ and was it any different from any other? Well at the time I’m speaking of, ‘melodramatic’ was not used as a term of disparagement for cheap sensational effects. Later, in the theatre and cinema, it did come to be synonymous with plays – or films – of excessively dramatic content containing exaggerated episodes of horror, violence or domestic strife. I suppose the tern originally meant just what it suggests: Music Drama, with music as background to the spoken passages, or separating incidents, or emphasising mood: the violins – the brass – the timps – depending on the emotional pitch of the scene. In true melodrama everything is larger than life and in these productions assisted by the musical background.Kennedy Miller was adept at contriving, for example, the action-packed and sentimental finale, as we read from reviews of his productions, rendering them credible to the theatre audience in the heightened atmosphere created. At the close of Whitbread’s patriotic play ‘Theobald Wolfe Tone’ our hero is about to embark from Brest for Bantry Bay in charge of a vast French fleet and army. The final words in the script take place in the camp where Tone has caught up with two spies, Rafferty and Turner, who are in the pay of the English government and are intent on betraying him and his expedition. (‘Betraying’, because they are Irish.) Both spies die dishonourably in the final scene, though Tone generously pleads for their lives for “are they not my countrymen!’ Turner blames Rafferty for their capture and shoots him, while a French firing squad swiftly disposes of Turner. Tone remarks, ‘So perish all traitors!’ and that is the end of the play as we read it in manuscript – but not the end as Kennedy Miller directed it. According to the review in the Dublin ‘Evening Telegraph’ there was an additional scene on the quayside. There was no dialogue, but the Brass Band of the Dublin Workingmen’s Club, Wellington Quay Branch (by kind permission) was on the stage playing for all it was worth dressed in habiliments of the French army, its strains joined from below by the pit orchestra. Mr Alfred Adams as Wolfe Tone mounted the gangway of his vessel, amid the waving of nautical banners and the firing off of muskets, shortly to be joined by none other than the Emperor Napoleon and his charming wife Josephine. (laughter) ‘Vive la France! Vive l’Irlande! Vive La Liberte!’ cried the crowd. – So the painted ship cast off to cheers without even the slightest hint of what might be in store at Bantry. Bantry is not in the play. The ship sails, as the curtain falls. This is not the ship of history, but the ship of theatrical illusion; and that is what Kennedy Miller, with his company of Irish actors, musicians and scenic artists, evidently supplied, for none of it is in the script.What distinguished Irish melodrama from English and American was the covert – you may well think overt – nationalistic feeling. The lovely Irish heroine was something other than a young girl wronged like Maria Marten in ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ or Elizabeth in ‘East Lynne’; she, the Irish heroine was the very embodiment of Ireland, a kind of aisling gheal except that in these plays she was usually quite witty. The hero of Irish melodrama, if not taking the purple path to the gallows in order to assuage his country’s wrongs, was at least striving by direct or subversive means to achieve a measure of reform. The Irish villain was far more than a stereotypical mustachio-twirling toff intent on securing the hapless beauty for his own social or sexual gratification – he was the conniving agent of an absentee landlord or worse, an informer against those of his countrymen who were seeking justice. The servants who support their masters in Irish melodrama are, as a matter of course, aiding the national cause by clever stratagems and by means of their sharp tongues: their use of language is far more allusive and colourful than that of any rustics I’ve yet come across in English or American melodrama.The actors who appear to have been most popular with audiences happen also to have been those who stayed with the Kennedy Miller Combination the longest. There may have been a way in which theatregoers came along to see what their favourite player was appearing in tonight. I certainly remember a vestige of this in the 1950s at the Queen’s, when the Abbey Company was in residence there, people going to see what Harry Brogan was as this week, or Eileen Crowe or Ray McAnally. The actors went in for wonderful make-up disguises so they looked different even if they didn’t sound very different to what they had been portraying last week – and certainly the parts doled out to individual actors were inclined to be stereotyped – there was the Dashing Hero, the Pretty Heroine, the Comic Servant, the Infamous Villain etc. etc. – but often audiences were pleasantly surprised when one of their favourites came up with something quite unexpected and accounted for him- or her-self very well in a different kind of part.We’ll now have a sos beag for a short slide show. Most of these pictures appear in my book ‘Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment’ which I learn was delivered from the printers today to my highly regarded publishers, the Carysfort Press, and, I’m told, will be available in the foyer in just a few minutes! (laughter) I’ve seen it but I haven’t opened it. Very few images of the actors in Kennedy Miller’s company have survived and most of those that have are of poor quality. Generally only the very famous and well-to-do – like Irving and Coquelin – had production pictures taken of themselves, and there was no theatrical repository in this country to house such material. Fortunately we now have the Dublin City Library and Archive, gradually building up an impressive collection of theatrical memorabilia. All the following pictures (except the photograph of Kennedy Miller which is from the ‘Irish Playgoer’ magazine) are from the archive here in Pearse Street, or Brunswick Street if you like:The first is not a photograph but a caricature of Frank Breen drawn by his colleague Ion Ireland. He’s seen here as Feeney in Boucicault’s melodrama ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’, a revival of which is now, as it happens, running at the Abbey Theatre: (The strange noise you may have heard was Yeats and Lady Gregory turning in their graves (laughter) at this class of buffoonery taking place in their theatre.). Frank Breen was from Co Down. He played in many stock companies all over the British Isles before joining Kennedy Miller where he was in revivals of Tyrone Power’s comedy ‘Born to Good Luck’, and he created the parts of Flynn in ‘The Nationalist’, Rafferty the spy in Wolfe Tone, Brander Byrne in ‘The Insurgent Chief ‘and Niblock in ‘The Ulster Hero’. The Evening Herald said Breen was “the most interesting villain on the Irish stage”. Another reporter drew attention to the fact that Breen seemed to enjoy the hisses and catcalls as “tributes to his talent.” Comments of this kind emphasise how much these melodramas were considered to be entertainments: the villain’s presence was relished. This is something recent scholars – particularly those from the New World – fail to understand.Here is Kennedy Miller’s leading comic actor, James O’Brien. Were it not for J M Synge’s visit to the Queen’s in 1904 O’Brien’s name would be unknown to students of theatre history. Synge wrote in a magazine article that “Some recent performances of The ‘Shaughraun’ … as they were played the other day by Mr Kennedy Miller’s company, had a breath of native humour that is now rare on the stage. Mr James O’Brien especially…put a genuine richness into his voice… and in listening to him one felt how much the modern stage has lost in substituting impersonal wit for personal humour…” Synge used the term ‘comedians’ in the French manner, meaning ‘actors’ – ‘les comédiens’. One senses that Synge would have liked O’Brien to be cast in The Well of the Saints over the river but of course that was an impossibility. James O’Brien created Danny O’Hea in ‘A True Son of Erin’, Hogan the Raparee in ‘Sarsfield’, Patsy Dooligan in ‘The Old Land’, Thady McGrath in ‘Lord Edward’ and many others.This is Ion Ireland. He was known among his colleagues as Harry so Ion must have been a stage name. For Kennedy Miller he created the parts of Squire O’Hanlon in ‘The Old Land’, Captain McMurrough in ‘The Sham Squire’, Captain Ellis in ‘The Ulster Hero’, General Talmash in ‘Sarsfield’ and he also appeared in strong supporting roles in revivals of other plays, generally as officers or members of the landed gentry. After Kennedy Miller’s death in 1906 he and James O’Brien formed their own company called the O’Brien-Ireland Combination. Among the very young members of their company were Anew McMaster and Cyril Cusack.H Somerfield Arnold was an English actor recruited by Kennedy Miller to play smart young gentlemen and romantic heroes. Here he is as Phil Hennessy, in ‘The Nationalist’, the landlord who sympathises with the leaders of agrarian reform. He played the lead in ‘The Victoria Cross’. He was Hardress Cregan in ‘The Colleen Bawn’, Beamish MacCoul in ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and Captain Molyneux as you might expect in ‘The Shaughraun’. He died shortly after this picture was taken. The obituarist in the ‘Playgoer’ stated that his “greatest triumph was as Lord Edward Fitzgerald”, and that he “had been in constant ill health which he had managed to overcome several times, always returning to the stage. Thus ended the life of one of the most promising actors we have ever met.” Terribly sad.Next we have Annie Hylton. She tended to be cast in the straight roles. She created Eileen O’Moore in ‘A True Son of Erin’, Kate Kearney in ‘The Irishman’, Mary Doyle in ‘The Insurgent Chief’ and Lady Rose de Burgh in ‘Sarsfield’. Frank Fay, when theatre critic for the ‘United Irishman’, said that he preferred her Anne Chute in ‘The Colleen Bawn’ to her Fanny Power in ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’, but he didn’t bother to tell us why which was rather remiss of him I think.Here is Monica Kelly. She usually excelled as spirited peasants and outspoken ladies’ maids. She created Kitty Malone in ‘Lord Edward’, Peggy Ryan in ‘Wolfe Tone’ and Eilly Blake in ‘Sarsfield’ – and several other vivacious servant parts so similar one wonders how she managed not to confuse the lines. According to an anonymous columnist in the ‘Playgoer’ “her style is very natural, and she can be pathetic or humorous as occasion demands; while her love-making is always racially droll and mirth provoking” (laughter) – whatever racially droll love-making may be. Monica Kelly was Moya in ‘The Shaughraun’ of which Synge wrote so appreciatively; as you might expect, she also played Eily O’Connor in ‘The Colleen Bawn’ and the title role in ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’.Mrs Glenville was the third in the trio of Irish actors, tantalisingly briefly noticed by Synge, in ‘The Shaughraun’ in which she played the mammy, Mrs O’Kelly. She seems to have been with Kennedy Miller for his entire period as a director of Irish plays on tour, that is, 17 years. She created The Widow Moloney in ‘The Old Land’ which Joseph Holloway described as “a real gem of a performance… she is a genuine Irish humourist and her sayings and doings seem to be nature itself…” She had already played the very similar part of Molshee in Kennedy Miller’s revival of Edmund Falconer’s extravaganza ‘Peep o’ Day’ which had been a continuing hit in London since it first came out in 1863 at Covent Garden.I’ve included this photograph even though it’s unnamed because it’s such a striking image. My guess is that it is either Maude Tremayne as Lady Rose in ‘Sarsfield’, or, Clara Russell as Kate Maynard in ‘The Victoria Cross’. I don’t know which lady I’m insulting. The carved chair in the photographic studio keeps reappearing.This is the only picture I was able to find of the man himself – Kennedy Miller. It’s from the ‘Irish Playgoer’ magazine. You’ll agree that his is an unprepossessing face – someone you might pass in the street without remarking. (The same might be said of many directors.) (laughter) You would hardly imagine that this was the man who selected and directed the large and ‘capable company of Irish players’ and not only that but also organised the complex touring schedule, making sure that this year’s visits to thirty cities did not repeat plays seen there last year or even the year before, and seeing that the actors were well rehearsed before their opening in unfamiliar houses.Here is a Queen’s Theatre poster for a revival of ‘Theobald Wolfe Tone’ in 1901, with Frank Breen billed as the villainous Rafferty, a spy, and Tyrone Power as Tone’s garrulous manservant, McMahon. It’s significant that billing is given to the comic characters and not to the actor who played Wolfe Tone (laughter). Incidentally, the Tyrone Power here was the nephew of the actor-playwright of the same name who was so popular on the London and New York stage. Confusingly, a third Tyrone Power was a Hollywood actor in the mid-20th century. The director Tyrone Guthrie was a great grandson of the first Tyrone Power.This is an advertisement for a performance of ‘Lord Edward’ by ‘Kennedy Miller’s Powerful Irish Combination’ at the Metropole Theatre, Glasgow, in 1898, “Depicting the Vivid Scenes, Episodes and Vicissitudes in the Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald” – an entirely adequate description. The orchestra, as well as supplying the incidental music to the play, entertained the audience in the intervals with selections from Donizetti, Suppé and ‘E. Strauss’. E Strauss -who was E Strauss I wonder? Do you think it’s a misprint for J? This was a week-long run – but in some cities of smaller population the programme was changed nightly, so that you might see ‘Lord Edward’ on the Monday, Saturday and Saturday matinee, ‘The Green Bushes’ on Tuesday and Thursday, ‘The Colleen Bawn’ on Wednesday and Friday. You can imagine the amount of effort needed to alternate the stage settings, and also to travel them.Leading players were allowed an annual benefit performance in a favourite role, from which the profits went entirely to that performer. Kennedy Miller was not an actor, so he did not appear in his benefit which was made up of a play supplied by members of its own company, and as his name became more and more celebrated in the profession, actors, singers and musicians from other companies in town that week gave of their services in a kind of enormous variety show. In this one, on February 23rd 1903, his own players gave the main item, Tyrone Power I’s Sheridanesque ‘Born to Good Luck’. It was a very long evening, as the ‘Telegraph’ reported next day, with sixteen supporting items. The ones I would like to have seen were ‘Curtis, Leo and Noblesse, mystifying illusionists’ and the ‘Gibson-Henry Celebrated Comedy Cyclists’ (laughter) – not to speak of ‘The Misses Kinsella and Gorm, Irish Jig Dancers’, no doubt precursors of Miss Lily Comerford. The Edison pictures is an announcement for next week.Of the contributions of so many participating artistes, the ‘Evening Telegraph’ continued: “It shows the high appreciation in which Mr Kennedy Miller is held in the profession… Mr Miller has been willing, at all times, to give the benefit of his time, labour and experience gratuitously to those anxious to serve laudable, charitable and popular objects in the city…”To revert for a moment to J M Synge, I think it’s significant that he picked out for praise three comic actors from the company when writing of Kennedy Miller’s ‘Shaughraun’: Judging from other reviews, the preponderance of actors in the company who possessed a highly developed sense of comedy is very striking. I think it’s not at all farfetched to suggest than in melodrama, where the actors constantly addressed the audience, even, where necessary, surreptitiously gesturing their feelings about other characters, or about the situation itself, a sense of comic irony about the very nature of the play is manifest; and an actor’s ability to convey their subliminal thoughts without upsetting the balance of credibility, would have been a godsend. Nor, I think is it farfetched to add, incidentally, that all the truly great Irish actors of the 20th century possessed this inner sense of the comic: Barry Fitzgerald, FJ McCormick, Maureen Delaney, Maire Kean, Cyril Cusack, Donal McCann; yes, they certainly excelled in many grave and unsmiling roles, but an underlying sense of fun – wicked fun, at times – often lent a touching dimension.Frank Fay wrote in the ‘United Irishman’ that Mr Kennedy Miller’s company is “too good for Mr Whitbread’s pieces.” This all-too-brief evaluation is fascinating. From it we gather that Miller was responsible for achieving exactly what one of the chief jobs of a director is: making the audience suppose that the weak play they are observing is something else – through judicious casting, attractive design, striking choreography, variation of mood and pace, and sheer comprehension of stagecraft; but when the director has the advantage of a first class script, as in the Irish melodramas of Boucicault, or in Power’s farce ‘Born to Good Luck’, clearly Kennedy Miller’s work moved into a higher dimension.In 1905 Kennedy Miller was stated to be ‘in failing health’ and so he took a three-month sea voyage on his doctor’s recommendation. He died at his home, 1 Belvedere Avenue, North Circular Road, on March 4th, 1906, only a week after his annual benefit presentation. He was buried in St George’s cemetery, Drumcondra, when the chief mourners were Mrs Kennedy Miller, his daughter Miss Kathleen Miller and his friend the actor Mr Dane Clarke. There were representatives from the Queen’s and Gaiety Theatres. The impression is of a small attendance and one wonders why. Certainly he was a man who did not court publicity for himself; this can be seen from the posters – with the exception of those advertising his annual benefit – where the actors and author are generally given much greater prominence.Certainly J – or Andrew – Kennedy Miller soon joined the legions of the forgotten. This happens to theatre directors, unless they’ve also worked in film or have published influential books. Who, among today’s jeunesse dorée of the theatre, knows anything of Hilton Edwards? And were it not for the great theatre in Minneapolis that is named after him, Tyrone Guthrie would hardly be remembered outside the profession. Once the curtain falls, what has been created on the stage vanishes forever. That is why it is a real honour for me to be given this opportunity by the Dublin City Library & Archive, in the presence of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, of recalling to mind the forgotten director and some of the forgotten actors who entertained my grandparents – and your great-grandparents (laughter). My Dublin grandmother used to refer to the Queen’s Theatre as the place where you saw ‘the real Irish plays’. Thank you for your attention to the story of ‘Mr J Kennedy Miller and his very capable company of Irish players’.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 Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin's talk Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin talks about his career publishing high quality translated books for the Irish market, while working in co-operation with international publishers.  Recorded at the Central Library on 24 November 2010, as part of the series series 'In Other Words . . .Irish Literature in Translation in Your Library'.Go raibh míle maith agaibh.  Tá sé go hálainn stóir mór a fheiceáil. This is what I consider a big crowd so I’m delighted that so many of you came out when the country is falling on our heads to talk about publishing.  I know that this series of talks has been about Irish writers kind of reaching out into the world and in a way I kind of think that’s what we do as well but in a different way.  But just to explain where Futa Fata came from as Sinead mentioned I was involved in television for many years and before that I worked as a primary school teacher.  I worked in a Gaelscoil in an Irish medium school and my first book was published during those years which was a re-telling of a story about Cuchulain called 'Flea Bhricriu' and then I moved gradually into the world of television.  I began on a part-time basis presenting a children’s preschool television called Dilín ó Deamhas and then I went and worked in RTE for 13 years full-time as a presenter on a programme it was kind of a catch-all magazine programme called Cúrsaí and I was always dealing with kind of the cultural end of it and then it became its own sort of Arts show.  It was in the Irish language but kind of de facto bilingual Arts show called Cúrsaí Ealaíona and that ran for 5 years and that was a great education really, it was a great chance to kind of meet all sorts of interesting artists and so forth. But parallel to this I also had this kind of moonlighting career as a Gaelic rock star. I was writing songs in the Irish language and I was recording music and then when my children started to arrive I started writing songs for them and I had kind of come up with a bunch of songs in a kind of an organic way making them up with my kids as we went around in the car and that sort of thing and I decided to record them.  So I did the first children’s record in 1997 and that’s where the Futa Fata label as it were were born.Then in the year 2000 I left RTE and I went to live in Spiddal in County Galway, Connemara, where I still live, and I began to kind of freelance and I began to kind of explore various ways to keep my children fed and I was doing some television work which I still do but I began developing more the children’s music and one of the most successful ones that I’ve done is this collection of traditional rhymes from Connemara called Gugalaí Gug and it’s a CD and book illustrated by Cartoon Saloon who were nominated for an Oscar this year for their film The Secret of Kells and the book has been also successful, it’s sold 8,000 copies which isn’t Harry Potter but in an Irish language context is Harry Potter. (Laughter) It’s a significant success. So I realised then that I had access to funding to do this kind of work and it was the work I loved and it was kind of work which was related to all sorts of things I’d done in my life up to that – teaching and working kind of with the visual and working with children and all that sort of stuff. So I decided that this was something I could pursue. I could probably dip in and out of the television world now and again but this is something I could pursue and that it would be kind of a regular income. So I realised very quickly that I couldn’t really live on making one kind of quite complex production like Gugalaí Gug which would almost be a year’s work so I would have to find titles to kind of build a catalogue fairly quickly. So I began going to the Bologna Book Fair in 2006 and I began meeting publishers from other parts of the world and the first kind of fruits of that kind of adventure was two books we did that were originally published by a small publisher in Los Angeles called Kidwick Books and this was called in English ‘Frog Thing’ and we called it in Irish Frog sa Spéir and you would kind of know to read the book that it’s about a Californian frog because it’s the story of Frank Frog and when he was little his parents said Frank when you grow up you’ll be able to do anything.  So then Frank kind of became older and he decided what he really wanted to do in the world was to fly and he went back to his parents and they said well, you know, when we said, you know, you could do anything we really meant you could do anything as good as any other frog but that wasn’t good enough for Frank.So it was kind of a halfway house for me I suppose in terms of the way I’d worked up until that point was that there was a CD with the book and the thing that I liked about it was that there were children actually on the CD there were various children, different voices playing the roles of the characters in the book and I thought that it was a lovely natural kind of production and I felt that I could kind of re-create that in Irish because I already worked with a whole cast of young talent in Connemara and I could find children who could do that sort of acting and indeed I did. So we published Frog sa Spéir and we published another title from Kidwick at the same time called Eileanór an Eilifint Éagsúil, and they went down very well.So I began kind of looking further afield to find other books and I found other books.  This one, for example, was on the short list for the book of the year this year, this was originally published in French in Belgian ‘Le Loup Magicien’ and in Irish it’s ‘Mac Tíre na Draíochta’, the Magic Wolf and it’s the story of a wolf who in Irish his name is Maidhceo which is a nice Connemara name and he kind of discovers his kind of more vulnerable side.  He comes home from a walk in the woods one day and he smells a strange smell and this isn’t the first time it’s happened so he decides the next day that he will go and he will hide and see what intruder is coming into his house and when he does that he finds that the interloper is a rabbit and a very tasty looking rabbit at that and he decides to jump out and eat the rabbit for dinner.  But the rabbit persuades him not to that and persuades him to check out the magic tricks he can do and he does card tricks and so forth and they become very friendly and he really shortens the winter for Maidhceo because he’s able to do all sorts of very entertaining tricks and then when the spring comes his new friend the rabbit Coinín becomes quite lonely because as you know rabbits are a very amorous species and he feels that it’s time to settle down and get married which indeed he does with quick results (laughter), they have loads of babies, and Maidhceo becomes very involved in this new family because he’s feeding them and he tells them stories and they change his life and he becomes, you know, ...Person1 That’s very Californian too... (laughter) it is Californian in a certain way but then the other wolves find out and they’re not too impressed with Maidhceo’s new direction and so they approach him and Maidhceo of course is devastated that all the wolves will find out what’s going on.  So the ending is really good.  (laughter)  So that’s Mac Tíre na Draíochta. We’ve also worked with the same company Mijade in France, I think this was actually the first one we did with them is ‘Nina et le Chat’ which became ‘Neilín agus an Cat’.  The lovely thing about doing these versions is that you can make up whatever, any name you want, in the translation.  That’s a chance to make a kind of an important point about story book or picture book translation is that it’s generally and I think this happens in every language really is that it’s generally kind of an adaptation that you’re trying to achieve because just the way the whole thing works is that when you go to an international fair like Bologna or Frankfurt you will be presented with an English version of the book because English is the international language of trade. It doesn’t matter where the publisher comes from if the publisher is from Germany and they’re discussing a book with a publisher from Korea they will be showing them an English version of them book and the meeting will be in English and that’s generally how it works.  So then you’re really free to kind of adapt the book to your own kind of country and your own culture so it’s quite a creative business actually because when I tell translators who work with kind of adult literature they’re absolutely horrified that, you know, we’ve had such freedom but that generally is the way it is with picture books.But anyway this one I think is one of my favourite books of all the ones we’ve translated in from other languages. This is the story of an elephant family and they have a little baby Nellie who is the absolute apple of their eye and she is so cute and she can do so many really clever things but then the day comes when the maternity leave is over and mother elephant and father elephant have to go back and work in the woods and there is nobody to look after Nellie and they’re obviously very worried. But a kindly cat comes along and says well I’ll do the job, I’ll look after Nellie, so they decide to give it a go. So the cat actually turns out to be a great success and Nellie completely bonds with this new childminder and is very happy and she also learns lots of interesting new skills from the cat.  She learns how to creep up on birds and she learns how to do all sorts of stuff. So when the parents come home they think things are actually going really well but then at the weekend they are going to a birthday party and mom is brushing Nellie’s hair there, you see, but when they get to the party Nellie completely lets them down by not taking part in the fun and by doing all sorts of strange things that elephants shouldn’t do like washing herself with her tongue (laughter) and climbing up in a tree and doing all sorts of stuff and the elephant community as you would expect are absolutely horrified that this has happened and mom and dad decide that the cat has to go and Nellie is absolutely bereft and mom says I’m going to take a day off and I’m going to re-bond with you and she brings her down to the waterhole but Nellie won’t go in because she’s afraid of the water (laughter). And then she won’t walk in line as she used to do and then she won’t eat with her trunk like she used to do and the parents are reaching for Dr. Spock at this stage they are so horrified and they don’t know how they’re going to get this poor child back on track.  But then that night when they’re all asleep they hear a strange noise and mom elephant is terrified and dad elephant is terrified by this little visitor, it was a mouse, but Nellie isn’t terrified, she’s well on top of the situation (laughter).  She takes the mouse outside and then she comes in and she gives those irresistible elephant eyes and says the cat taught me how to do that, can he stay? And of course he can and they make friends. So I finished that story myself.Anyway that’s Neilín agus an Cat, and the lovely thing about this work is that well I believe that, you know, in time to come I think there will be children who will look back on those books and will have a real kind of a, you know, special memory of those books and I think that’s really important work and I know I have four children myself and sadly they’re all beyond the picture book stage at this point but the other thing I really feel strongly about picture books is that there’s much more to a picture book than reading the book it’s actually this wonderful opportunity to bond with your child over a book and it’s a whole kind of a ritual at bed time.  I mean my eldest son Marcus is now 19, I remember there was one book that he was kind of fixated on for about 2 months, every night for about 2 months we had to read this book and he still remembers it (laughter).  This is another one we did with Mijade ‘Béiríní ag Troid’ about Anna.  For her birthday she gets a present of two little bears, two little teddies, but then they begin to fight over her so she has to figure that out.  And we also did one with another Belgian publisher but from the Dutch speaking area of Belgium and that was the Dutch version ‘Mauw En Mol Mol Is Jarig’ and it’s about this little character called Méig agus Cóilín, an lá breithe who was trying to figure out what sort of a birthday present she would get for her best friend.The other thing we do in terms of translation in words is ... yeah, before I move on to that I’ll just show you these new ones and we have noticed as well that even though we were doing quite well in terms of picture books which would be generally 3 to 6 that there was a bit of a kind of a lull in terms of the amount of just the range of material that was available for children from 0 to 3 so this year we have kind of tackled that and we found a series in Quebec in French Canada which was called in French Caillou and in Irish Cathal.  And these are different because generally picture books and it’s the reason why a picture book would work internationally is that they’re generally about animal characters and they are written deliberately in that way.  The reason for that is that when you write something about animal characters you are immediately taking out all the kind of cultural references or references to a race or all those kind of things that would make a book possibly less attractive to be bought, for example, by a Chinese publisher or by a South African publisher.  But these are slightly different because they are definitely about human characters and they are just kind of very well done because even though they look very simple it’s very difficult to write a book that is as well targeted as these books.  This is one about Cathal, and this is little Cathal here, and it’s about his friend Liam coming to play with him and it’s about Cathal struggling with dealing with Liam playing with his toys and just kind of having to get it around his head that, you know, he has to share and I think it’s done very well.  I think the artwork is simple but I think it’s really stylishly done. This book has been hugely successful, this series.  There are ... I don’t know how many titles there are in this series but there are a lot and it is has sold in 40 countries worldwide so it’s a big success for a publisher from a relatively small base, I mean there are about 5 million French speakers in French Canada so it has a worldwide reach and I think it’s going to work very well for us.  We’re just launching them now this winter in Ireland and they have this sort of thing as well which is a kind of like a dictionary picture book, you know, first words book and also a nice features is that as well as seeing the pictures individually you can kind of relate them to the picture and so there’s a slight interaction.There have been books that I initially thought would work or initially was kind of attracted to but when I looked at them in more detail I felt that they wouldn’t work in an Irish market and they are ... well that happens for a number of reasons but this book when I saw the cover and I’ll you’ll agree that that is quite a stunning cover and I saw that in Bologna and it’s a Korean book and I was just so curious like who is this girl, what has happened to her because it’s just I think that cover is just so full of character. So I was sent a copy of the book and I was sent a translation and when I went through the translation I felt that it was probably a book that would work very well in its kind of traditional context in the same way as the Children Of Lir, for example, is part of our culture. It’s a very dark story when you look at it objectively and there is very little kind of redemption or kind of hope in it but it’s kind of part of our culture and it’s a story that is kind of passed on but no more than this book I’m not sure that the Children Of Lir would travel very well when it’s taken out of it’s kind of original context. But anyway when I went through it I just found that it was a very dark story about this princess who was ... it’s a bit like Moses she was thrown out into the weeds and she had to kind of fend for herself and like a lot of kind of traditional stories that have evolved over hundreds of years it’s quite a kind of a rambling affair.  So I decided not to go for it.I found this book as well, this is by an Italian publisher, and again the artwork I think the artwork is really important in terms of when you’re looking for a book because it’s the first thing that would draw your attention and it’s quite a kind of a poetic ... when you look at it it’s quite beautiful, aesthetically it’s a beautiful book, it’s quite a poetic kind of a story but I think it would be difficult, I think it would be hard to sell in Ireland to be honest and it’s pitched at a kind of an older age group and we don’t have much of that here in Ireland.  I mean that’s not a good reason not to do it but it has to work commercially at some sort of level and I think it would be difficult.  It’s kind of a love story and I think it would be difficult to sell it even though I would love maybe to work with the illustrator at some point but that’s a book I didn’t go ahead with.The other thing we do which again is sort of just to kind of a reach a critical mass because I mean you see I just gave out those catalogues you go through the catalogue and you see we have built up since 2006 quite a few titles and that has been done mainly if not nearly all through translation but as well as doing this kind of fiction stuff which is supported by Clár na Gaeilge / Foras na Gaeilge we also do stuff which is a bit more educational but at the same time we’re trying to find stuff which we feel would work for families and would work in book shops and would work for the general community as well as being ... we don’t want to go kind of too schooly as it were.This book was very successful for us this year and again it was shortlisted for the book of the year and it sold very well and this is a book about a garden and it’s about things that children can do in the garden and it’s kind of like a ... it’s nearly like a cookbook in a way, it kind of presents you with all sorts of projects, gives you information about food chain and about the interconnectedness of all living things in a very practical way and then it suggests things that you can do.  To make a little pond, for example, and all the various steps you can take.  It talks about the seasons in the garden and how to plant a tree, how to plant a natural hedge, how to make compost and so forth, and sunflowers.  So it’s a very practical interactive book and myself and my youngest daughter Róise have done a few of these projects in the garden and again it’s just a lovely thing to do and I know they’re using it at school because she had me pestered to finish a carton of milk because she had to bring it into school to make teach ui féileacáin. So it’s a very useful book but it has sold very well for us. So there’s that sort of thing.These are kind of for younger children and they are about the circle of life and about various animals grow and the photography is beautiful, it’s beautifully illustrated, and it’s a lovely insight into the cycle of life and so forth.  So we have the panda and we have one about apes, ápaí, féileacán, butterfly and frog, frog.  And we have four more of those in the pipeline for next year.  This is a book ... I mean this is kind of in a way it’s very ... I really like this book because I think in a way that there is this kind of image of the Irish language that it’s very insular and very inward looking and very kind of nationalist Catholic, you know, play Irish music, play Hurley, that sort of thing and there’s actually a lot more than that and this book is about religions of the world.  It’s about introducing children to the religions of the world and through the eyes of children and this is like the last few books I’ve shown you was originated by Dorling Kindersley which is one of the biggest publishers in the world of non-fiction books and it goes through various religions and faiths from traditional beliefs and gives you maps of where the religions are, how many of them are there, for example.  I mean I was surprised to find out that whereas there are 1 billion Catholics in the world, not Christians Catholics, that there are only 5 million Jews.  I was quite surprised to find that out.  There’s Hinduism and again it introduces the material from the point of view of a child who explains, you know, what’s going on in her life and so forth.  I remember I showed it to my son who is 11, well he’s just 12 now, and it’s an area he’s very interested in himself but I remember he said “tá rudaí ag eiteann liom chomh haisteach agus tá meas acu faoi na rudaí ... a bhfuil tá sé sin chomh haisteach céanna” which means the things they believe in are so strange and if they heard about the things that we believe in they’d think they were strange which I thought was a great comment.  It’s about Buddhism and so forth.  It was very interesting to work on this book because in a way we were kind of really at the coalface of kind of stretching the kind of borders, the outer borders of the Irish language, we had to work with the Coiste Tearmaíochta the Terminology Committee of the Department of Education because there were certain words that there was no Irish for but there’s a lovely glossary at the end so you can ... Martin Luther did the same thing with the German language didn’t he?  He invented words.  So there’s Sikhs and so forth and I translated this book myself and I just learned so much from it, I really did.  So that’s that one.We did another big one this year as well, it’s a history of visual arts from the cave paintings of Lascaux in France, that’s where it starts right through the whole story of art right through to Damien Hirst and it’s actually a very inclusive book because it includes things like aboriginal art and all sorts so it’s not just Western art it’s quite wide and again we have a nice big glossary.  So those are the more ... they are kind of slightly more even kind of slightly  more educational books.  This book in English when it was originated by Dorling Kindersley was called the Children’s Book of Art but I took out the world children in the title because I really felt that there was loads of adult Irish speakers would be interested in this book.  That it did definitely have a crossover theme and that’s the kind of feedback we’re getting, people are very taken with it. So the final thing I want to say is what Sinead mentioned at the beginning of the talk is that what we are trying to do now with Futa Fata is to kind of go to the next level and that is to see if we could begin to originate books and we’re starting in the area of picture book and if we could originate books here in Ireland, work with Irish writers, Irish language writers and Irish illustrators, and originate those and develop them here in Ireland and then bring them to the international market.  And that’s what we’ve done this year for the first time and we have more in the pipeline for next year and we did this in an unusual way because I felt that getting the story right is key in a picture book.  If the story is strong and if it works well, the story is kind of like a little engine, if it works well and everything is kind of, all the pistons are kind of working in the right order it’s going to really work as a piece.  So what I did was I had worked in the past in children’s animation and television animation and I had worked quite extensively with a woman called Barbara Slade who is from Los Angeles and writes mainly in animation and she’s written like feature films based on the Winnie the Pooh character for Disney, for example, she created the television series of books called Angelina Ballerina so she’s very experienced and she does a lot of teaching and I met her actually through a course that was run about writing for animation and we’ve become very friendly.  So I got her to come and we advertised that we were going to have this workshop and we were looking for six writers and well I’d say nearly twenty people applied and they had to apply with story ideas and we went through the story ideas and we picked six people and from those six people then we developed the stories in the workshop, jointly – myself and Barbara, it was a bilingual workshop which we did in Connemara.  So between the two of us we developed the stories and then we published three this year and we brought them to Frankfurt and so far I have to say the results are very encouraging.  We will soon be signing a contract with a publisher in Beijing to publish this book which is a new original Futa Fata picture book in Chinese it is written by Bridget Bhreathnach from Rosmuc and maybe the first time a Rosmuc writer has been published in Chinese.  We’re proud of that.  And also this morning I got a very strong email of interest in another one of our titles from a publisher who publishes in Afrikaans in South Africa and we are also going to be publishing three of the new feature books that we’ve done this year in Scots Gaelic so that’s an interesting geographical spread if nothing else.  (Laughter)  So we hope to work and we hope to kind of build on that for the next few years I think that we’re going to be originating our own picture books.  We’ve identified some fiction for older children that we will be translating and we have identified a series originally published in French by Bayard who are a very well respected publishing house in France and we are going to kind of work on that basis and I think it’s a very good way for us to work because when you translate a book and when you put it out there and when you kind of get feedback from it you really get a really good picture of the genre and of the age group and so forth, you get a really kind of good feel for it and we’re going to do that with various different age groups in different segments.  We’ll publish, we’ll translate, we’ll publish the translations and we’ll work with children because the important thing about this and one of the nicest parts of it is actually getting out there and reading the stories for children and working with children in that kind of group basis and just getting their reaction.  So it started with music and sort of that’s the journey it has taken since 2006 and that’s all I have to say.So we want to thank you very much Tadhg.  (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 Hugo Hamilton's talk and readingWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, author Hugo Hamilton talks about his 'Strange life in translation' and reads from his novels ‘The Speckled People’, ‘The Sailor in the Wardrobe’ and 'Hand in the Fire', before answering questions from the audience.  Recorded at the Central Library on 17 November 2010, as part of the series 'In Other Words . . .Irish Literature in Translation in Your Library'.I think Sinead said it perfectly; I live in translation because as a child it was very complicated, you know, because we spoke German at home and Irish and then we migrated out onto the street but it was a different language altogether and then back again, you know, and we were not ... my father refused to allow any of this language from outside, the English language was barred from our house, so effectively we couldn’t go back and bring that country back in with us into the house so that caused a lot of trouble for us as children. And you know, what age am I now, I mean I’m an adult finally and I still have this feeling that, you know, there are certain words that I just think of in a particular language.  For instance, lobster, I always think of it in Irish, gliomach and then it goes through the other languages and gets translated back into whatever language I’m speaking so there’s a bit of a time delay constantly and you probably don’t notice it now but in my twenties there was a very, very obvious kind of delay and sort of a hesitancy with language and I describe myself as, you know, in this constant state of atranslation where I always have to look over my shoulder to see what country I was in before I could speak.  You know you can imagine like we were not allowed English in the house and often you’d have uncles coming up from Cork, West Cork, and I describe it in my book as, you know, suddenly like the house was full of smoke and English and there was nothing my father could do about it because these were his people. But then like they’d ask me a question and I’d have to look at my father and look at my mother and then see like, you know, which language do I even speak now so there was almost this kind of a prevarication, you know, in anybody who has three languages there’s some kind of hesitancy and prevarication in that before like you finally get to talk.And then you could notice that with my family even still, you see us kind of, you know, starting a sentence in one language, you know it sounds right, but then it ends with sort of a German syntax, you know.  So there is a sort of constant translation going on and, you know, it’s funny my brother Franz, you know, he should be here tonight, he’s a living example of somebody who has kind of learned the language second hand, it’s a foreign language, English is a foreign language to all of us in our family.  And so my brother ... like I concentrated when I was growing up I kind of rehearsed English to myself and, you know, like speak to the wardrobe in English, you know, I’ll batter you and all those kind of terms that I heard on the street, I would rehearse them to myself because I wanted to get the colloquial version of English and I wanted to fit in with the people on the street.  But my brother has a different version, his English is very formal and when he’s talking to me in English he will say things like yes I could commence that next week, you know, it’s terribly formal language like that he has, it’s almost like sort of letters from the bank or you know business letters and so his language was always kind of, you know, he wanted it to be perfect in that way like with sort of very formal expressions, you know.  With regard to, like he’s always saying that, you know, with regard to next Sunday (laughter), you know, yeah and, you know, complete – all those kind of words, you know, words that I don’t use, I just say start and finish but he uses commence and complete, you know.  It’s bizarre, you know, but he sounds great.  But it’s a demonstration that like we are actually speaking a foreign language, you know, it’s still ... okay, we’ve been speaking it for 50 years but, you know, we’re still catching up, you know.I wanted to read you a small passage that illustrates that in The Speckled People.  It’s a description of a coal delivery.  We were actually quite a privileged household.  I mean my father was an engineer and we had central heating but it was never on, you know, (laughter) like there was just like a, you know, he would put on three or four, he would count the coals going in, you know, and that would heat one radiator.  Alright.A truck stopped on the street outside and because they couldn’t go round the back the men with black faces and black hands had to come through the house.  My mother was afraid the wind would slam the doors shut in anger so we had to hold them open, Franz at the front door, me at the in between door and Maria at the back door.  She told us to count the bags as they came in.  In Ireland people count in their heads she said but in Germany people count out loud.  So out loud we counted, eins, zwei, drei, vier, funf – all the way up to fifteen.  The men walked in stooped over with heavy sacks leaving long black marks with the sacks scraped along the wall on their way through and where they went down the three steps towards the kitchen and out the back door they put a black hand up every time to hold onto the door frame.  One of the men winked and made me forget what number I was on.  (laughter) I didn’t know if I should be counting the sack that was coming or the sack gone by but then I heard Franz counting the next number at the front door and I was able to catch up.  When the shed outside was full and the coal was spilling out across path the men got back onto the truck.  One of them counted the empty sacks as if he couldn’t trust us to count right.  He came back inside with a pink piece of paper covered with black fingerprints and asked my mother to sign her name, that was to make sure she agreed there was no mistake in the counting and that nobody ran away with one of the empty sacks.  But there could be no mistake because we counted out loud in German and the man counted the empty sacks in English and it was the same number no matter what language.It’s a funny thing as well like my mother spoke in this German accent always, you know, and I think she misunderstood Ireland, you know.  She learned English and her English was fairly good but she didn’t understand nuances and the way Irish people spoke, you know.  I think, you know, it’s not just about language but it’s a matter of expression and it’s what people say and what people leave out, it’s the silences between their sentences that matter as well so even if you understand a language it’s still ... you have to translate an entire culture and I think my mother had difficulty doing that.  I think the best way of describing it is the fact that, you know, she would always tells us, you know, to be honest, if somebody ask you a question you just answer it you don’t invent something you just tell them the way things are and like I kind of realised after a while that’s completely the wrong thing to do in Ireland (laughter) because the Irish have a completely different sense of truth and all those kind of little spaces in between the truth and my mother never could get to grips with that, she was constantly, you know like she just couldn’t get to grips with it, you know, and just the kind of whole dance thing, the detours around language here in Ireland and I actually happen to think that that’s the great source of the power of invention in language, I mean it’s what brought Joyce and Synge and Beckett and all those writers, I mean that’s the source of the great lrish literary tradition.  Even today I think, you know, that whole sort of ambiguity of language is what sort of marks Irish literature out.But my mother had sort of difficulty translating those kind of ambiguities into concrete German understanding, you know, and I think I have the same problem in German even though I kind of grew up speaking German in the house I still have ... but I never went to school in Germany, I mean I’ve read a lot, but I’m still missing a sort of a freedom in the language that, you know, the people who went to school in Germany would have, you know.  And it’s also because of the prohibition of the English language in our house I speak a very, very clean pure German and it doesn’t have any words in it like super or in Germany a mobile phone is called a handy, you know, there’s a million words, English words, come into the German language but I never used them because just I think, oh yeah, my father is still behind me, you know, I’ll get a clout on the back of my head even though my father is long gone now, you know, you have that sort of instinctive hesitancy.  So people who listen to me speaking in German, you know, and I do tours in Germany and I talk about my books in German and then think I come from another century sort of pre-war (laughter), just hasn’t got old yet, you know.And I mean I remember when we were children we would always be asked on the street by old woman God you have three languages that’s brilliant isn’t it, you know say something in Irish or say something in German and we’d be standing there like thinking what will we say, you know.  The same thing happens in Germany, the old woman will all ask us say something in English, say something in Irish and they had a feeling that our German was very much pre-war, you know, and they called it German without chewing so chewing for them only came in with the Americans, you know, and also the American language came in.  So I mean all those kind of lovely influences that sort of, you know, change language all over Europe we missed out on completely.I’d love to read you another passage from ‘The Sailor in the Wardrobe’, it’s the second memoir and it’s not directly to do with language but it’s interesting maybe for Ireland now because we have all these different languages on the streets, you know, that’s the one thing I notice now that, you know, the whole phobia about the Irish language I don’t know if we have that anymore because we have all these people speaking other languages on the streets so like what’s so odd about speaking Irish then?  I don’t think we have that quite healthy kind of self hatred that we had when I was growing up, you know, and the kind of, you know, I grew up in, as I call it, this language war and where my father was trying to get rid of everything British, you know.  So anyway this:My father is not the kind of man who keeps a stem of grass between his lips, even with his shirt open he looks like he’s thinking about something that still has to be done to improve Ireland to keep this landscape from disappearing.  We climb halfway up a mountain and look back at the small grey Opel Kadett parked like a toy car along the road, we see the houses and the small people of Ireland working in the fields below us, my father holds his arm stretched out in front of him and tells Stefan to look across the landscape with his eyes open because there are certain things that can only be seen in the Irish language.  In English my father says you can only see as far as the eye can see.  On the way home he’s looking for a place called Echo Gate, driving up and down the country roads for a long time saying it can’t possibly be gone away.  My mother points at lots of gates and tells him to stop so we can shout over them to see if we can hear anything coming back but he drives on with a determined look on his face until he finally comes to the right place and we all stand shouting across the gate towards the ruins of a monastery.  The echo is very clear.  We count how many seconds it takes for the word to come back.  We shout in German with the sun going down and the cows looking up wondering what we’re saying.  It’s a perfect echo each time as if the fields know our language, a whole family shouting back at us with great excitement as if they’ve been waiting for centuries and this is the first time somebody has come to the gate who understands them.  Our voices come out from under the mossy stones and start calling back hoping we don’t leave again.  How are you all over there and how did you know we were coming, my father shouts in Irish, when the echo comes back my mother says you must be Irish because who else would answer a question with another question (laughter).  The sky changes in layers of yellow and purple and deep grey.  We can see the dark outline of the ruins fading against the land.  Stefan is barking like a dog, Ciaran climbs the gate and Maria stands behind him singing a ‘do, re, me’ ladder of notes that stands up against the sky and we’re like the family laughing at ourselves in the mirror even when we get back into the car and drive away my mother’s voice is still laughing around the ruins after it gets dark.So that’s a real place, Echo Gate, I’m sure some of you might have seen it or have been there, so if you go there and shout over in Chinese it will come back in Chinese, you know.  Any language you like and you don’t need a translator.Yeah I’d love to answer any questions you have about strange life in translation. I think the other thing that’s possibly interesting to say about my writing is just the fact that, you know, I suppose I have to admit in some ways like that Irish writing can be very lyrical and I’ve always kind of rejected lyricism, I don’t know why, you know, none of my books have any kind of strong lyricism in it, you know, and it’s probably exactly that rule that my mother had set, you know, she said look, you know, don’t tell any lies, don’t embroider anything just tell the truth the way it is and I think that’s still a rule I have as a writer even, that any excessive colouration well she would sort of think like that’s fake, you know, that doesn’t stand up to her scrutiny, you know, and it’s part of this Irish way that she kind of resisted in some ways, you know. That’s always ... I’ve been talking to German people a lot about their experiences here in Ireland and it’s often mentioned by them that whole way of talking is different. So I think my writing in a way has this very deliberately plain direct way of presenting facts and I think writers have also commented on that, you know, that my writing is also terribly careful because I’m handling and this is a foreign language to me and I have to be correct in it, I don’t know.  I was talking to a writer recently and he said to me just quite in passing he said, you know, Hugo I love my mistakes, you know, it’s a great admission to make isn’t it?  I wish I could say that, you know, but that’s part of the development of the literary culture in Ireland, it’s actually based on beautiful mistakes, you know, this transition between the Irish language and the English language, you know, once the Irish transferred everything across into the English language they produced this extraordinary ... yeah, it’s a very colourful language that we invented here in Ireland, you know, and I think it’s interesting what John Banville says about it he refers to language and the literary traditions here as something that’s more like a stain glass window, we don’t really want to see what’s out there we just want to see the colours, you know.  Okay, that’s probably boxing Irish writing in too neatly but, you know, that’s interesting to me in terms of language and where I stand as well as a writer, I’m still translating my mind onto paper as I write, you know.  I try to recreate some of those thoughts in the mind of a migrant who is just now coming into Ireland and at the beginning of the book I kind of describe his linguistic problems, you know he’s just not a ... he’s just trying to pick up the local language:What does it matter where you come from?  (This man’s name is Vid Cosic.)  What does it matter where you come from?  You could say it’s irrelevant.  I wanted to forget about my own country and start again.  I wanted to get a foothold here, get to know the place and the people.  I already knew some of the most famous names like James Joyce and George Best and Bono and Bobby Sands.  I knew the most important landmarks like the GPO where the Easter revolution took place and Burgh Quay where the bus to Galway leaves from right next to the immigration offices.  I was beginning to understand the way things are done here, the way you have of saying how’s the man and what’s the craic.  I was starting to pick up the jokes trying not to take everything so seriously.  I was working on the accent learning all the clichés – at the end of the day, 9 times out of 10, only time will tell.  I was eager not to be misunderstood or misled so I stuck to the expressions that would give me least trouble.  I was reluctant to abbreviate, I never allowed myself to use puns or play with people’s names, I tried to limit the amount of times I used the words without meaning such as like or you know, I was cautious with terms like mega and sketchy and legging it and literally glued to the television. But, you know, I’ll just read you another extract, which actually describes my brother in how he speaks.  His first job was working in a nursing home so:The nursing home was administered by nuns in brown habits but they didn’t take part in the caring anymore, those duties were carried out by the lay nursing staff.  The few nuns that were left over came out from their residence early in the morning to walk the grounds with their headgear blowing vertically in the wind.  I got to know one of the nurses on night duty, her name was Bridie, she had red hair, she was much older than me, in her 50s, but she kept winking and calling me the love of her life.  She would laugh out loud and repeat a few things I said, not just the accent but the vocabulary.  She said I sometimes sounded like a letter from a bank using words like complete and commence and with regard to, words I picked up from newspapers and which were not suited to everyday use.  I’m going to commence laughing she would say.  It took me a while to get the hang of the ordinary words.  At first I could see no difference between start and commence.  My sentences must have sounded like translations asking people if there was any room of work going for a carpenter.So I’ll just read at the end of that chapter about his observation of this woman Bridie:When I stopped working there she said she was not surprised that I would break her heart and walk away it was the story of her life.  She invited me for a farewell drink.  We met in a pub close by and she seemed older out of uniform or younger, it was hard to say, more motherly perhaps and also more fragile and more like a girl.  Sitting with her coat on and her handbag beside her she stirred her vodka and tonic with a plastic stick and did all the talking because I had nothing to say and didn’t know what questions to ask.  She placed her mobile phone on the table beside her drink and watched it for a while to see if it would ring.  She started crying.  Now I could not work out what to do in a situation like that where she was not my mother or my sister.  She ended up putting her hand on my arm to comfort me instead.  She opened her handbag searching for a tissue to wipe her tears but then she produced a letter and asked me to read it.  Dear Bridie, it said, it is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter.  It was written by her fiancé around 30 years earlier.  I read it slowly all the way through moving my lips across every word.  He was breaking it off with her so I gathered.  They intended to get married; the date had been set for the wedding and the families notified.  At the last minute he changed his mind and explained that he was not ready for it because he was still drinking too much.  He was not fit to be married to her, he didn’t deserve her love and the only thing left for him to do was to leave the country and emigrate to America.  I suppose each country has its own rules for love and dishonesty, different ways of disappearing and walking away from the past, different measurements of loneliness and happiness.  I wanted to track down the man who wrote that letter and tell him that he made the biggest mistake of his life but it was no longer possible to intervene because time had turned us all into distant observers.  She told me she had a baby shortly after that, after he left, that she had been persuaded to give it up for adoption.  She had tried to make contact with her son in recent years but he had not wished to meet her.  She asked me if I thought he would be good looking and intelligent so I said yes of course.  She wanted to know if he might have red hair like her and then she answered all her own questions assuring herself that her boy was happy in his new family and better off not looking back.  Even though he was grown up by now living his life she still spoke of him as a baby.  Staring right into my eyes she said she hoped he turned out a bit like me in fact which made me think of myself as her son promising to do my best.  She’d been holding on to the farewell letter ever since refusing to get off the bus at the terminus, dreaming back and forth along the same route wherever.  Go for it she said to me, putting the letter back into her handbag.  I wondered if these were the exact same words she had spoken to her fiancé just to be big hearted and to make sure they parted as friends with no hard feelings.  She pushed me with her elbow unable to sit beside me any longer.  Then she stood up to embrace me.  Come back and see me some time, she smiled through red eyes then she sat down and looked at her phone to see if anyone had left a message.  She waved with both hands and told me to take care of myself so I walked out the door away across the street not even watching for the traffic on the wrong side of the road as though it was impossible for me to get killed.So there you are that’s Vid Cosic trying to get a foothold, and trying to understand the country, and trying to understand the history of the country as well and what the people are like, what their backgrounds were like.  I don’t know if you have any questions?QuestionsParticipant 1: Can I just ask you something please?  I’m reading ‘The Hand In The Fire’ at the moment, I’m about halfway through, and so I was very anxious to meet you to see if you spoke the way you write (laughter) and I’m struck by the way the sentences in your book are very short sentences, simple sentences, and at first I felt ah, you know, it’s not doing anything for me but gradually as I went through the book I realised it created its own atmosphere, these short sentences, and also something you said this evening about your mother I felt ... I realised there wasn’t the lyricism in the story as you said but yet the observations of small things and very true things about the city and about the country and about the people I really said yeah you’ve got a handle on it alright, you know, it’s very true.  But I was wondering about the short sentences did you write them in that book for a particular reason or was it unconscious?Hugo: No just very much because just saying all that ... no I mean I like the structure of sentences and I like the writers who do that. Participant 1: So do I, yeah.Hugo: I mean I think I kind of possibly liked Ernest Hemingway too much, you know, but I mean I like some writers with long sentences.  You know, one of my favourite writers is an Austrian Writer, Thomas Bernhard, who just can do a page with one sentence, you know.Participant 1: Yeah.Hugo: And they all, you know like they’re all kind of often the same sentence just turned around in different ways.Participant 1: Yes.Hugo: So he repeats the sentence in kind of a musical way.Participant 1: Yes.Hugo: But I think all writing also has kind of a musical form at the back of it, you know.  Like lots of writers will tell you that, you know, Colum McCann in particular who will talk at length about sort of how important the musical cadence of the language is for him, you know, and that’s very much the same for me, you know.  I mean probably, you know, I just have three chords and doing everything with just the three chords on a guitar but, you know, for me that’s sort of rhythm in the language, is that’s what is important for me to create and I do that with short sentences, you know.Participant 1: Yeah.Hugo: The other answer would be, you know, it’s just that’s part of my upbringing my German/Irish/English upbringing.Participant 1: Yeah.Hugo: And that’s the way I thrust myself.  I suppose, yeah, I mean there are lots of other answers to it as well.  I mean I think short sentences sometimes allows you more room for ambiguity actually, you know, I think the Irish writers are good at short sentences, you know, I’m not the only one.  I think McGahern as well I mean there’s lots of writers with ... I think it allows more space between what’s being said, you know.Participant 1: Right yeah.  Thank you.Participant 2: I just want to ask did you learn to write in German or just ...?  No?Hugo: No I never ...Participant 2: Yeah.Hugo: ... I mean I’ve written in German, I’ve tried to do that, but it’s not easy, you know.  I mean I would have to live there. Participant 2: Yeah.Hugo: Maybe I’ll start now.Participant 3: Do you see the character in Hand In The Fire as a big departure following on from the books that have been largely autobiographical you’re suddenly stepping outside?Hugo: In some ways yes I mean it’s very much a fictional character but, you know, I’m not sure I completely get away with it, I think too much of myself is on view in this book, you know.  In fact, you know, I mean some of the reviews remarked on that, you know, that I show my hand with this fiction, with this story.  And then in some ways they are. My experience as first generation immigrant in Ireland is actually very similar to that of a migrant coming into the country except that a migrant can always walk away, you know.  I speak to migrants about this and they say, you know, I don’t have that problem that you have, you know, of trying to fit in and trying to kind of be like the Irish, be truly Irish, because they come from somewhere else and they just say well, you know, to hell with it.Participant 3: I’m different, yeah.Hugo: Yeah, I’m different, you know, and if it doesn’t suit me if people don’t respect me in this country I’ll just walk away, you know.  And I don’t have that luxury.  I grew up here in Ireland and I felt the inadequacy of growing up as a German-Irish child, you know.  I’ve always felt I’m not quite Irish enough, that I’m not getting away with it and that’s what I’m trying to describe with this book that it’s, you know, the story of a migrant trying to kind of fit in and not ever catching up, that sort of disadvantage.  For instance like I think it’s very interesting like the landscape and the way that Irish people have of sort of mapping the landscape, basically the Irish map for Ireland is not just a piece of paper with sort of roads and train connections and towns, the Irish map of the country is a very, very intricate and sensitive and, you know, elusive thing where it’s a grid of connections between families and friends and sort of memories of the country, you know, and for a foreign person to understand that I mean I watched my mother trying to understand that map and she failed, you know.  My mother never made the transition to Ireland quite fully, you know, even though she had six children.  So she is the story of a migrant who hasn’t made it in Ireland, who hasn’t quite understood the Irish map because the Irish map is quite a fluid thing in a way, you know.  It’s made up of all these kind of conversations rather than anything specifically on paper and we all know that about Irish people like as soon as you get into a conversation you start talking about families, you know, people that you know, connections, towns, you know, street names – all kinds of things, it’s actually a sort of conversation full of social fact checking and I’ve heard people say this.  A film maker in Cork recently said that to me he comes from a small town in West Cork and he said to me – a lot of English people living in the town, you know, but he said you often get the impression that there’s no point in talking to them because there’s no electricity, you know.  They talk to you about very sort of specific things but they’ll never get into that sort of fluid electric conversation that Irish people have that goes back three centuries in time and that sort of connects up all our people, you know.  So that’s one of the things I try to describe in Hand In The Fire and that’s one of the things that I sort of feel even as a sort of grown person living here most of my life, you know, I still feel I’m not quite connected into that Irish map, that Irish social map and, you know, it could be my fault but still I feel it’s a formative thing, you know, in my childhood somewhere I kind of understood that I’ll never get to grips with this map, you know, but I’m still trying.Participant 4: Can I ask, you know, in Hand In The Fire Vid has this I suppose quite dark history so that he’s been in an accident and he’s lost a lot of his memories and he wants to escape that history, did you do that so that he wouldn’t have that option of wanting to go back or knowing that he can easily go back and ...?Hugo: Yes I mean it’s very deliberate.  I think really I’m showing my hand here again because with a German mother I lived most of my life trying to kind of pretend I wasn’t German.  In fact there are episodes in my memoirs where I describe seeing my mother coming down the street and I run the opposite direction.  Okay like a lot of teenagers may do that (laughter), you know, you don’t want to see your mother because like she kind of, you know, let’s the cat out of the bag, you know, but I mean I think it’s exaggerated in my story because, you know, who wants to have a German mother in the 19 ... you know, she was a lovely mother, you know.  That sort of burden of history was very, very difficult for me to understand, possibly more difficult than it was for a lot of German people because, you know, they weren’t being called Nazis on the street every day, we were, we were put on trial.  And I have the feeling now ... and that’s why I chose a Serbian character because he has the same history behind him which he is trying to forget, trying to walk away from, and with which he has nothing to do so I am echoing that sort of very personal experience through his story.  And I suppose it also allows me to examine this immigrant without going back to his country, without constantly referencing his own country, you know.Participant 5: Do you think that ... you talk about like an Irish identity, about mapping and so on do you think that sort of the American influences and English TV has changed since you were ... if you were a child now in the same situation?  Do you think it’s more international now?Hugo: I think so I mean that’s an interesting question, you know, I mean I’d love to talk to sociologists about it and linguists about it and, you know, we’re constantly translating ourselves into an American way of saying things and I mean the way people talk in Dublin now is very, very different to the way people talked, you know, in the 70s even, you know.  In fact if you want to hear somebody talking real Dublin language the way it was spoken in the 70s and even further back you should listen to Paula Meehan, I mean she is like the real Dublin, the way it was, you know, and she even says, you know, she’s afraid that it will completely disappear, the Dublin dialect.  So we are constantly imitating the American way and, you know, those faces, like the inflections of people, we talk now ... the tail of the sentence is almost up now, you know.  But then again like I mean I talk to some young people and they say yeah my parents do all that social mapping, they kind of do all the rounds, you know, like they say oh yeah his father was a butcher oh no, no he was a chemist, you know, and all those kind of things like that’s really important even still and young people say like I mean we don’t do that anymore, you know, but will they?  I think they will when they get to thirty or when they have babies themselves, they’ll start doing it because it then becomes important, you know, and they have the skill for it, they’ve inherited the skill, you know.  So I think a lot of the Irish ways of doing things are still there even though we kind of speak with accents that we picked up from friends and whatever, you know, I think we still do things with a very kind of distinct way.Participant 6: Hugo can I ask you about your mode of working, say that you speak carefully and I think you probably write carefully as well, but do you work carefully?  Do you work slowly?  Do you do several drafts of a book or ...?Hugo: Oh I do lots of drafts of a book, you know.  Yeah and I kind of re-write things constantly, you know, that’s ...Participant 6: And do you wait a long time before you put pen to paper?  Do you think about the idea a long time?Hugo: No I don’t because like you can’t think about what you’re going to write, you can only find out what you’re going to write when you’re writing it, it actually kind of just comes out and it’s because you have this terror of not finding anything to say, you know, it produces this something, you know, particularly when you’re kind of constantly writing and you’re writing every day and that’s the great freedom you have, you know, just writing uncarefully, you know.  But then I go back and re-write and, you know, change things a lot but the basic burst I mean I like things to be written in a burst because they’re honest and then they kind of have a bit of magic to them when they’re written in a burst because like, you know, you have to think on your feet, you know.  And then you can go back and sort of pare it down.Participant 7: This is a question about your translations, your novels into German, I’m guessing from what you said that because you don’t write German you don’t translate them yourself.Hugo: No I don’t no.Participant 7: Well are you involved in the choice of translator or not?  Like does the translator need to have a background in that kind of knowledge of Ireland, coming from a kind of dual knowledge, from a knowledge that kind of dual.Hugo: Yeah well that’s very interesting because, you know, my German translator has never been to Ireland, you know, and he did a fantastic translation of ... well I started with The Speckled People and he’s been working on all my books since then and he rarely ... I mean I show him the manuscript each time and he has about five questions each time and then I look over the manuscript and I have about five changes that I ask him to make, you know.  But he’s a poet himself, you know, and a writer so he just has a feeling for language and I’m often sort of worried that the German version is better than the English. (laughter)  So there is only one thing that I had to kind of change at one stage, in The Speckled People I had this phrase, you know, this man at some stage stands up and tells my mother, you know, Hitler was a great guy, you know, like he fought against the British and his phrase in it is he said, Fair play to the Germans, and he didn’t understand what fair play was so he looked it up and fair play in the dictionary sounds like justice so he just translated it like that, justice to the Germans, and it was a completely different meaning so things like that I was able to kind of catch but, you know, I can’t spot those things in French or in Spanish or Italian so there’s probably some wonderful mistakes in those translations, you know.  (laughter)So listen thanks very much for coming and thanks for all your questions.  (Clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. 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