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

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. 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