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Listen to Simon Carswell's talk.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode Simon Carswell, the Irish Times Finance Correspondent, talks about Anglo Irish Bank and the part it played in Ireland's economic collapse. This talk, one of a series on the Irish Economy, was recorded in front of a live audience in the Central Library on 29 March 2012.Thanks very much.  Sorry for the delay.  I actually was at an Anglo results presentation just there where they said that they are going to issue legal proceedings against Michael Fingleton today so they’re issuing a plenary protective summons which is, which seems to be a ... they didn’t explain what it was about but it’s a block that they’ve put in that gets around the statute of limitations.  But anyway they’re going to issue proceedings later today and they’re obviously trying to get around the statute of limitations which is a 6 year block, as far as I understand it, with regard to contractual issues so they’ve obviously found something that they can try and sue Michael Fingleton on but they need to issue proceedings today so hopefully we’ll find out later today, hopefully we’ll be able to read about it in The Irish Times tomorrow.So as Padraic said I am author of two books and I am a Finance Correspondence in The Irish Times so I’ve been covering the banking story for 4 years now and prior to that I worked in the Sunday Business Post where I was News Editor.  And I guess the timing of the book is interesting because the first book over there was written in 2006, published in 2006, I finished writing at the end of 2005 so it kind of somewhat predates all the crises that happen and all that’s emerged with the banks since then.  So I suppose the scandals in that book are in a ha’penny place to the scandals in this book but there you go.So just I want to give just a brief history of Anglo, it was founded in the 60s and later emerged into City of Dublin Bank, both kind of fairly small banks, Anglo was a pretty tiny minnow in the market and then it kind of developed and really only became ... Sean Fitzpatrick only became involved in it in the late 70s.  He was originally in a bank called Irish Bank of Commerce, it’s kind of confusing, the structure, but in the late 70s Fitzpatrick, who as an Accountant, was put in to run Anglo Irish Bank in ’78 and he had been moved in from Irish Bank of Commerce which was itself a subsidiary of City of Dublin Bank so, and he really allowed him to kind of steer his own ship and he developed Anglo as he saw it really into a ... what started off as a lender that would really do various small time lending in trade finance and guarantees and exports and bridge financing, so if you were moving house and you wanted to sell your house and get a loan to buy the next house without the mortgage being drawn through, he would provide that.  And then gradually he got more and more into property lending and it was specifically secondary properties or investment properties for professionals, the likes of doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, for those kind of people who wanted to buy their own office space or to have buy to let properties and he saw a niche in that market and really developed that.  And then I guess as a sign of Anglo’s strengths and how it rose under Fitzpatrick it actually took over its parent in the mid 80s and it’s around ... it was in 1987 that the Anglo name appeared in the stock market and then a short time later it took over the bank that Fitzpatrick originally worked in, Irish Bank of Commerce, and that acquisition actually was very much instrumental in Anglo getting into property developers and the property development space and Irish Bank of Commerce would have had a lot of clients whose names you will be familiar with today.  They had Paddy Kelly, Gerry Gannon and the Bailey Brothers.  So Anglo was kind of in the property space but its takeover of Irish Bank of Commerce really pushed it into the space of lending to developers, builders, many of the names who became very wealthy in recent years and then bust in the current time.  And the bank was also very active in the early 90s I suppose that given that it was in the property space it became very active in developing pubs and hotels and it lent to the likes of the O’Dwyer brothers who are behind some of the pubs and the super pubs, like Cafe En Seine, Break for the Border and some of those properties.  But Anglo really spotted a niche in the 90s when the property market started rising, it saw that it would support developers and builders from its relationship through its relationships in Irish Bank of Commerce and at a time when AIB and Bank of Ireland didn’t really want to have anything to do with the property market, they still thought it was very high risk.  And I guess AIB and Bank of Ireland would have been regarded in the 90s as quick sleepy to react to big changes that were taking place in the property market whereas Anglo had these guys and there were a lot of developer clients who were sitting on very large undeveloped land banks, again very familiar names now given what the property market went through and the boom when through, so it was kind of bank rolling the likes of Gerry Gannon in North Dublin and West Dublin and Sean Reilly, a Cavan developer, in South Dublin, Joe O’Reilly who went on to build the Dundrum Shopping Centre and then Gerry Barrett in Galway and then eventually got into major investment properties, the likes of Derek Quinlan and all the money that he gathered from his clients and property investors and then internationally the likes of Sean Mulryan’s company Ballymore which develops ... it is very prominent in the UK and in Eastern Europe and Treasury Holdings which is Europe, China, Sweden and France – its developments are very international.So I guess when Anglo spotted this market and saw how much money there was to be made in it and the property value started rising that’s when AIB and Bank of Ireland started to react.  They saw Anglo making very big profits and there’s a famous quote from Michael Buckley where he said, you know, ‘Anglo joined us for breakfast but now they’re eating our lunch’ and so they had wanted to fight back and get back some of that business.  So 2003/2004 you see AIB starting to react and Buckley set up what he called a ‘win back team’ where he said ‘I want you to find out what Anglo are doing to get all this business that’s making them so much money and their investors so much money from the stock market.  And I want you to replicate that’.  So AIB set on a course under Michael Buckley to start taking in more of the property business than Anglo was doing.  So in hindsight there was a bit of a race to the bottom, bankers were willing to lend more and more money on riskier and riskier projects and I think the influence of the foreign banks in Ireland, the UK owned banks or the Scottish banks as it’s really known, you’ve the likes of Bank of Scotland Ireland which was run by Mark Duffy and it was owned by Halifax Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank which was owned by Royal Bank of Scotland became more and more aggressive, like AIB, to compete with Anglo.  And Bank of Ireland was a lot slower to move into that space but the current Chief Executive of Bank of Ireland, Richie Buckley, would have been quite proactive under Chief Executive Brian Goggin to actually get some of the property business that Anglo had.  So really you had what Peter Nyberg who investigated the banking crisis, he described it as ‘herd mentality and group think’ and the other banks were trying to keep up and so Anglo was leading the herd and the others followed.  Nyberg used these terms to describe not just how the banks behaved but how many different aspects and people in Irish society behaved as well, where we were all kind swept up in the boom that was happening and the money to be made from it and certainly people would take issue with that and a lot of people now who are struggling to pay for their homes and their residential mortgages didn’t get involved in the investment property and didn’t get involved in speculative lending are now having to face the pain of that, this group think and herd mentality created.So to give you an idea of just the level of borrowing that took place and that was a heavy concentration in property, at the peak of the boom for every 5 euros that the banks had lent out 3 related to property, so I think that that statistic on its own really describes the bubble that was created in Ireland by the likes of Anglo and the others following them, there was a huge concentration, there was far too many eggs in one basket and as we’ve seen now the crash is as a result of that.  And one of the areas that the banks got involved in they were frantically trying to lend money out they created what they call the dreaded equity release and this is where Anglo and the other banks what they did was well they said to the developer ‘You made so much money on the last development, you know, all of the houses sold out in the sales weekend’ I mean we all remember the queues of people and people camping out and sleeping in their cars to try and buy a property, so the banks said ‘Well you’ve made so much money from selling those properties that you haven’t even built let’s take those paper profits and assume that that’s the cash element of the next deal.  So there’s no cash in from that but don’t worry they’ve all been sold so it’s fine.  So let’s put that money into the next deal.’   And so the next deal had no cash in it at all and if you do that a number of times and you do that across your book and the banks had a huge concentration amongst a very small number of developers that you’re really piling debt on debt on debt and the cash element is never taken out, there’s no cash ever taken off the table, so you create this house of cards really and that practice in banking explains the ghost estates that we now have, the 2,000 odd ghost estates, where you have half built derelict houses that have not been sold but the banks felt well the market isn’t going to collapse, it’s going to be soft landing, everything will be fine.  So they felt that well it’s not an issue, the money would always come off the table at some point.  So this left the banks kind of terribly exposed in the event of a property crash.I just want to describe a little bit more about Anglo’s culture because I think it really does point a lot to the kind of bank it was and also how it worked with customers.  They had what they called this relationship banking model where it was staying close to your customer, you know exactly what they want, if there’s problems on their building sites or with their property investments, you know before AIB would or Bank of Ireland would because you’re a small team of people, you’re kind of in the customer’s face all the time, so they actually thought that they’d broken the banking mould and this invariably meant that they would work with them by day and entertain them at night and in corporate hospitality trips and I think it’s kind of significant the culture of the institution because bankers themselves in Anglo liked it because it gave them an idea as to what kind of customer they were  dealing with and, you know, everything from how they would hold their drink, how they would behave when they were having a good time, if a good looking waitress walked by, all of these things, you know, really played on the bankers’ minds as to whether they were a good or bad customer and whether they should be lending money to them.  And also access to clients was crucial as well and this is where we had this massive spending on golf, apart from the fact that Sean Fitzpatrick was a golfing fanatic, golf put Anglo in a position where it could meet its customers and get to know them well and some of the figures that I have in the book, I mean the bank spent more than 2 million euro on golf in 3 years between 2006 and 2008 and also they got involved in golf competitions and this expenditure on golf balls alone was 208,000 euro which is an astonishing figure.  And aside from that they also did trips, there was ski trips, there was a famous trip on the Orient Express where they brought developers from Paris to Venice and brought their partners as well.  And again to give you an idea of some of the expenditure on corporate entertainment the bank would engage in, in 2008, this is the year of the bank guarantee, Anglo spent €21,000 on Manchester United tickets, €19,000 on Chelsea Season Tickets, €42,000 on tickets for Six Nation away games, and €9,000 to take clients in the US to the Boston Red Sox baseball game, so that’s the kind of spending they were doing.  And then gifts to customers, in Christmas 2008, 3 months after the bank guarantee, they spent €53,000 on hampers and wine and they used to do an annual thing where they’d bring some of the valued customers, a lot of the valued customers, and their kids to the panto in the Gaiety and they spent 24,000 euro on panto tickets in December 2008.Participant 1: Can I just ask you was there a psychological profile on what were good developers based on what you’re talking about, apart from the entertainment aspect, but just ...?I think it was very simply based around whether they could work with the individual or not and if they made demands of the developer that the developer would meet their demands and the problem was that the relationship banking model was seen to be well, you know, you can make a lot of money from customers by staying close to them but as we’ve now seen they got too close and the relationship model was far too close.  For example, in the Quinn case, we’re now seeing in the courts that the bank lent more than 2 billion to Quinn to allow him to meet the margin calls in this investment that he made on the shares so his investment was collapsing in value and the bank was lending to him and it was that incredibly close relationship between senior Anglo lenders.  I don’t know whether there is a psychological profiling done in the bank of developers but it’s just who they knew who they liked best and who they could get on with, I think it was that simple.So this is an older picture of Mr. Fitzpatrick and Gerry Murphy, who was Chairman until the late 90s in fact he was there, this is the chap who ran City of Dublin bank through the 70s and 80s, really Fitzpatrick was his protégé of sorts.  This picture I think is around the time of ‘88/‘89 after the bank had listed on the stock market.  So just to describe what happened in the market, I’m not going to spend too much time on the graphs and the slides in relation to economic data but I think where the lines go will give you an idea of what happened, so you had the boom in house prices with house prices quadrupling and Anglo had many clients in development so they did exceptionally well and as I said earlier a lot of the developers would have had land banks dating back to before this graph in the early 90s, so they would have been sitting on options on land as well as land itself that they would have bought from farmers and ready to move and when then property market went where it went, these figures in comparison to Spain and the UK, they made a lot of money and as a result the Anglo share price soared.  Anglo share price rose by 2000 per cent in 7 years.  So just to explain it in kind of simple money terms, if you invested 5 grand in Anglo in 2000 you’d be sitting on 100 grand in 2007.  So if you go back to the herd mentality and the group think and the naysayers in the early noughties coming out  saying this won’t last after  7 years of growth with that amount of money to be made I think it would convince even the most sceptical that this was a bank that had done things and was doing things differently and given where the share price went the value of the bank went from about 600 million in 2000 to 13 billion in 2007 I think people felt that well they’re on to a winner here and I’m going to put my money with them, both in terms of depositing with them and buying their shares. Here you have ... this slide is to do with house completion, so again it reflects the increase in prices and this would be all of the new builds by developers and builders and the figure reached ... 2006 is the peak of the market where there was 90,000, just over 90,000 new houses built, and just look at that in comparison, that’s twice what would be built of new buildings that would be build in the UK which is 14 times the size of Ireland’s population so it gives you an idea of the level of the ... we talked about the lending boom or the credit boom in Ireland and the banking boom well this is the construction boom, this is the slide that shows that.  And again, you know, everyone felt that we’d hit a new paradigm and things would change with immigration and that there would always be a demand for houses so 90,000 new houses in one year was not regarded as a bubble it was regarded as something that was simply responding to the needs of the country and people needed homes. This is Anglo’s profits, as you’ll see, this is their own from their own report so this is what they reported every year so again the figures, this is 2007, so you can see through the noughties it really soared and this would have been David Drumm’s first year as Chief Executive and that was ... he took over from Fitzpatrick, so again once he took over he said he wanted to double profits in 5 years and he did it, it soared up, that’s 1.2 billion.  So they reported that figure in November 2007 after the credit crunch so again the figures show that the profitability of the bank followed the other markets and followed the growth in the share price as well.  So this is David Drumm and Tom Brown, Tom Brown was Head of the Irish Business, so this is them presenting the results and Tom Brown would have been instrumental in doing all the property development in the Republic and David Drumm really put the accelerator down, the pedal down, and took the bank to new places in terms of growth.  So this is the boom in Irish bank lending, you can see the increases, the light blue is the Irish banks and the dark blue is the IFSC banks, so again huge increase in lending by the Irish banks where total assets to balance sheets, assets or loans and other ... mostly loans, the balance sheets of the Irish Banks was 700 billion in 2008.  And there you have Anglo’s loan book, it’s soaring again, the last three are David Drumm’s years, so you’re seeing a massive increase in lending by the bank.  Sorry it goes back to that figure there.  And it’s a massive increase, the lending, it goes from 6 billion in 1999 to 33 billion in 2005 and 73 billion in 2008, so it’s massive increases; that’s the credit bubble there. So where does the money come from that they lend out to customers?  The Irish banks traditionally in the late 90s you would have had for every euro you had on deposit you’d have roughly about a euro out on loan and that was the traditional banking, you pay for deposits and you charge for loans, it was very simple.  And that changed, so what you say is the cheap and easy access to funding through the bond markets and borrowing from other banks and it allowed banks here to lend out money more cheaply and freely.  Being in the Euro after 1999 it removed the currency risk from the banks own borrowing and it gave them access to vast pools of borrowings across Europe so the main banks in Europe that would have been lending to the Irish banks were the UK banks and then you would see the French and German banks and then the Italian banks, but mostly the UK.  So we hear about bondholders, those are the people lending money to the banks when Ireland entered the Euro and Anglo would have borrowed from those banks to lend on to customers.  So the gap between loans and deposits which didn’t really exist in the late 90s change completely and it rose to 2:1 so for every euro you had on deposit you had two euro on loan, so that gap was filled by borrowing from bondholders in other banks.  And in Anglo’s case it was extraordinary growth in borrowing reflecting the growth across the other banks, they had borrowed 100 million from bondholders in 1999 and this reached 23 billion by the peak of the bank in 2007, so borrowing from other banks soared and the other problem for Anglo was they thought that the deposits that they had were very sticky, in other words they wouldn’t be withdrawn in a hurry, but they left pretty quickly when the crisis hit and those corporate depositors would have been kind of multinationals here, insurance companies, pension fund companies and the like.  So that’s the increase in Irish bank borrowing. And then you have the crash, so property values start to fall from 2007/2008 and they really start to nosedive in 2008 and 2009 and this is the Anglo building, some of you know, in the North Quays, it’s kind of become a symbol for the crash here, it was built by or half built by property developer Liam Carroll who actually wasn’t a long term customer of Anglo but he won the competition to build the building and Anglo provided 60 million to do that, that cost 60 million, what you see there.  It kind of stands as this post-Apocalyptic monument to Irish excess.  I saw ... I remember a columnist I met from the UK and we were discussing it, it was kind of like the monument in Hiroshima where you have the hall under the site of the bomb site so perhaps it’s a pretty crude and unfair analogy to draw but it’s kind of become our symbol of the crash. So property prices falling, they’re down, Anglo said there an hour ago at their presentation that the market is down 65 per cent so it’s quite a drop.  This is a slide from the Department of Finance.  House prices are down about 60 per cent and commercial property down 70-80 per cent but the development land which is much riskier for the bank is down about 90 per cent and in many cases, particularly outside the city, it has reverted back to agricultural values.  And when you think about it that Anglo had 80 per cent of its loan book in property, more than 20 per cent, a fifth, more than a fifth of their book was in this high risk land and development so if you think about the bank at the peak of the market, 73 billion in loans in 2008, it just had 4 billion set aside to cover potential losses which isn’t enough.  And I mean you could argue well whose fault is that?  Well if you look at the Basel rules which are the rules that all international banks follow in terms of how much they need to set aside in capital, the Basel rules have been changed so they’re now saying that the minimum is four times what it was originally.  So if you think about if you were to apply that, go back in time and apply that, the banks should not have grown more than a quarter of their eventual size so the banks just got too big and it wasn’t just an Irish problem it was across Europe and indeed across the world, particularly in the US.  So we kind of get to the nub of the talk which is the cost to the State of all this and Anglo’s role in Ireland’s economic collapse.  I suppose the best way to describe what happened and to look at Anglo’s role in it is what actually triggered the economic collapse and whether Anglo is responsible.  I spoke earlier about how it led the race to the bottom as we can now see what it was and it drove all the other banks down with them.  But on the night of the guarantee itself, September 29th/30th 2008, Anglo had run out of money that day and the share price had collapsed almost in half so that’s kind of like a megaphone, the market saying this bank is gone, really it’s absolutely tanked and it had run out of cash and it had gone to the Central Bank looking for money.  So if you look at what happened on that night the government didn’t think it was dealing with a solvency crisis, they didn’t feel or weren’t told by the Regulator that the banks hadn’t enough cash in reserve to meet the possible losses from the property cash and they felt they were dealing with the liquidity prices, the collapse, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in Wall Street caused the markets where the banks borrowed, as I said half their money, those markets froze.  So Anglo was the trigger for the government’s decision to do something on that night and as we seen Brian Cowen said that they needed to give kind of one signal, a big signal to the market that they were fixing this problem.  So Anglo would need more the following day after running out of cash and after getting the 3 odd billion from the Central Bank on the 29th so the government felt well Anglo has run out of cash, the other banks are going to run out of cash if we don’t do something because there was this domino effect and investors weren’t really discerning between good and bad banks, they were kind of painting the Irish banks as too exposed to property and also heavily borrowed in the international wholesale markets, money markets.  So the government went too far, the government wanted the silver bullet solution to ease market concerns and most people who know about this kind of thing in official circles have said that a guarantee was required and you have the likes of Patrick Honohan, his report, the OECD saying ‘yes use a guarantee’ and certainly a guarantee is one of the tools in the toolbox you take out when you want to repair a banking system that has gone bust.  But it was far too broad this guarantee, it pushed the liabilities covered by the State, insured by the State, to 440 billion and the State was only ... our economic output at that stage was in the order of 170/180 billion, so clearly it was a lot to put on the shoulders of the State.  So if the government had instituted a more narrow guarantee it could have given the government now more options to burn other bondholders, senior bondholders, because the guarantee is place they’re protected and we’re protected under the extended guarantee as well, so this increased the cost to the bailout to the State. So this slide shows the holes in the Irish banks in what we’ve ... how we filled them.  As you see the biggest is Anglo, it’s lumped in with Irish Nationwide under IBRC, Irish Bank Resolution Corporation as it’s now known.  So the biggest hole was at Anglo, it was 29.3 and they’ve said that it will rise to 34 if the market doesn’t recover for 10 years.  Just earlier there today at the presentation the bank said again that it expects the figure for Anglo to be in the order of about 25-28 billion.  And then other figures AIB, which is I suppose the next worst in terms of absolute numbers, is the order of about 20 plus the 20 billion we’ve pumped into them and Irish Nationwide 5.4, Bank of Ireland 4.2, EBS 2.4 and Irish Life and Permanent as of yesterday has gone to 4 billion from 2.7.  So of those we own AIB, EBS, we own Irish Life and Permanent, we own Anglo, Irish Nationwide and we own 15 per cent of Bank of Ireland and the bailout is 63 billion.  The situation with Bank of Ireland is again as I said earlier they were slower to get into the property market and that maybe saved them from government control because they required less from the State and they could manage to get these US investors in last year who took 35 per cent of the company.  So if you look at the guarantee on the night of the guarantee a 700 billion banking system compared to the economic value of the State 170 billion, and that’s down to about 150 now, really the guarantee put the State on the hook for the banks’ losses and the State couldn’t cope with those losses.  When the size of the hole at Anglo emerged in 2010 which was a month before the blanket guarantee ended it was really a case of the markets got very concerned and said well what is the figure for Anglo we don’t know, it seemed to be rising all the time and the government were unable to put a figure on it until September 2010 and by that stage the banking guarantee, the 2 year guarantee, had ended and under the guarantee the Irish banks had borrowed 30 billion so when they couldn’t borrow to repay that 30 billion the only place they could turn to is the Central Bank, two places – Frankfurt and Dublin – the Irish Central Bank and the European Central Bank.  So what you saw is the banks borrowings for the European Central Bank and the Irish Central Banks soared and that really spooked the ECB and they said we didn’t expect it to go as high as this and although the authorities here would say well we warned them, we let them know from the Greek crisis blowing up in May 2010 that there was a problem coming down the tracks and when that bank borrowing soars the top line there shows how much it increases by, in two months Anglo’s borrowings from the Central Bank went from about 14 billion to 34 billion and that was really ... that had the alarm bells sounding in Frankfurt, they said we need to do something here, and that was the trigger for the ECB coming in and putting the government under pressure and the view in the ECB was there is more black holes in the Irish banks that you haven’t identified because clearly you’re just grappling with Anglo and you’ve been dealing with that for a time.  So again that spike, that was the trigger, we talk about another trigger, that’s the trigger that prompts the bailout of the country, so you had the bailout of the banks in 2008, the State couldn’t cope with that, and ultimately the next trigger then is this, the increase in the Central Bank borrowing.So the government feared at that time that the ECB could increase the rate it was charging on emergency loans to Anglo, that was the one it was most concerned about.  You hear talk now about Trichet, Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank President, threatening Ireland and some say the fear was that they would withdraw the funding from the Irish banks.  I’m not sure they could have done that but what they could have done is put pressure on the government by increasing the charge and increasing the interest rate on that.  So this is what led to the bailout programme and the decision to provide 67½ billion in bailout loans to the Irish government.  So again Anglo really was the trigger for that, the other banks were following in as well, like AIB had borrowed on emergency loans from the Central Bank as well.So unrelated to property lending Anglo did some wild things.  This is Mr. Fitzpatrick leaving the Garda Station in Bray after his first arrest.  He’s been arrested a second time.  So Anglo, some of you have been following know now that the issues around that are loans to directors which were provided mostly by shares in the bank, they were initially non-recourse which meant the directors didn’t have to pay the loans back, now they’ve been changed to recourse and a lot of those directors are in severe trouble.  David Drumm has applied for bankruptcy in the US.  Sean Fitzpatrick has applied for bankruptcy in Ireland or filed for bankruptcy in both cases.  And then Sean Quinn, their biggest borrower, has filed for bankruptcy as well.  He tried to do it Belfast but he was blocked by the bank and he’s now bankrupt here.  Then the issue of Fitzpatrick’s loans hidden in Irish Nationwide at the time, Anglo wrote up its annual accounts and then I suppose one of the most incredible aspects of that is that emerged in December 2008 and even though the government had stepped in to guarantee the bank it left Fitzpatrick and Drumm in place and in their jobs after the guarantee.  So the scandal about Fitzpatrick’s loans increased the pressure on the bank and on the government and it eventually led to pressure on the deposits and that’s when the government had to step in and nationalise the bank in January 2009.  So since then investigations and arrests have arisen over things that the bank did in 2008 when its back was against the wall.  We’ve now discovered that Anglo was cooking the books with dodgy deposits from Irish Life and Permanent in 2008 to make their balance sheet and make the books look better than they actually were.  And that was – now talking about triggers – another trigger for the nationalisation of the bank back in 2009 and now we’re seeing through the courts this week and last and in international courts the battle with the Quinn family.  They owe the bank almost 2.9 billion.  They’re the biggest, after the loans have been transferred to NAMA, they’re the biggest borrowers at what is now Irish Bank Resolution Corporation and the bank is pursuing them internationally and here to try and recover as much of that as they can.  And again most of those loans relates to his decision to invest in the bank in the period up until ... he was buying right up until 2008 when the share price was collapsing.  And the fear at Anglo was that if he couldn’t afford to meet the losses on his investment that would force the brokers who held the shares to dump them, the share price would fall, depositors would see that, they’d get spooked, they’d pull their money out, then you have a run on the bank and then the bank collapses.  So the bank in 2008 decided to get ten customers together when it couldn’t sell Sean Quinn’s shares in the markets it got ten customers together, it gave them 450 million in loans, got them to buy 10 per cent of the bank in a secret deal and that 450 million is gone now.So this is the fallout and the end of the bank, the name, a kind of symbolic day in April 2011, an Anglo signage being removed from the bank’s branches and this is a photograph taken of the building in St. Stephen’s Green.  I think it says a lot.  It doesn’t take away the anger that people feel towards the bank because we’re still paying for it and the current talks are about trying to push out the cost of that so these promissory notes, these IOUs, that have been written up by the government back in 2010 when we didn’t have the cash to pay for Anglo, they said well here’s a promissory note, it’s an IOU, we’ll pay you over a long period.  The cost of that is very high every year and the government wants to reduce that because it needs to get to this target deficit by 2015 to show the markets that we’re getting back on our feet again.  So it’s a small amount of the debt that the country had, the debt problems the country has, but it’s kind of trimming at the edges but it should ... it seems to be ... Patrick Honohan has said that it’s likely to be successful so the payment is due on Saturday for 3.1 billion and they’re saying well instead of paying that in cash which would be a drain on the State let’s do another IOU, we’ll give them a government bond, and say this is 2025, we’ll pay you back in 2025 and IBRC takes that instead of the 3 billion in cash and goes to European Central Bank and exchanges it for cash.  So that’s the whole exercise that’s being done in private at the moment and then the longer term exercise that’s being done is to come up with a whole new system to restructure the rest of the 30 billion that we have to pay.So to summarise I’d say that Anglo drove the other banks into reckless lending because they say the spoils that were to be made from that and I think they’re as guilty though on reckless lending charges because they followed Anglo.  And also Anglo was the trigger for the decision to guarantee the banks and also the trigger, or at least the biggest reason, for the ECB forcing the government to take the bailout from the EU and the IMF.  So this was a bank that started out as a small Dublin lender and it soared on the property market in the property boom.  It eventually became too big to fail and then too big to bail and ultimately too rotten to save.  So you can see here in front of you but it’s a gratuitous plug for my book (Anglo Republic: Inside the bank that broke Ireland) which you can either buy or borrow from here, hopefully, there’s loads of copies in the library.  I can take some questions if anyone has anything they’d like to ask me?Q & AParticipant 2: I’ve two questions, just go back to 2008, the banks came in to see the government.Yeah.Participant 2: The first question is did the banks actually lie to the government?  And the second question is in 2008 could the government have burned the bondholders?In 2008?Participant 2: Yeah?I’d say did the banks lie when they came into the ... I mean that’s a question I’ve asked when I ask any bankers now who were there and I say “Were you lying or were you just deluded?” and I think it’s a bit of both.  I think in Anglo’s case there was an element of deceit about it.  Certainly from my research in the book there were managers within Anglo who could see in June 2008, there was a big board meeting in June 2008 Anglo did down in Cork and there was a presentation made to the board how bad is our property book and certainly at that point they knew they had major problems.  And I mentioned there about equity release, the other issue that was a real signal that there was problems was… is interest roll up, they weren’t even paying their interest bill through 2008 and that was widely known.  Some of the big developers were just not paying back the loans at all.  So I think that in Anglo’s case they probably knew they had major problems in the loan book but again as was widely felt in the marketplace was that this was a blip or a soft landing, it wasn’t going to be a major crash, so I think they were deluded as well.  So I think it’s a bit of both.Participant 2: Right.They were lying, they were deluded.  I think in the case of AIB and Bank of Ireland who went in to government on the night and said ... I mean they went in to say you need to nationalise Anglo and Irish Nationwide, we’re not the problem here, but we will be, we will have a major problem if you don’t take these out because international investors who give us money, who lend money to us, are saying ‘What’s the story with Anglo and Nationwide, we know they’re bust, they’re exposed to the property market. 80 per cent of their loan book is for the property market why aren’t you doing something about that?’ but I think AIB, in particular AIB, did not know the extent of the problems within that bank and when you look at the figures back in that chart in terms of the bailout, I mean AIB is not far behind Anglo in terms of what it’s cost and in fact during the boom years developers would say you could get a loan from Anglo in a week but you could get it in 2 weeks from AIB so a lot of them went to AIB so I think AIB knew they had the problems there and I think they were deluded, I don’t think they were lying I just think they were deluded as to the extent of the problems.  Could they have burned the bondholders in September 2008?  Yeah they could have.  If you apply a guarantee like this kind of throw a massive blanket over the system and say ‘We stand over everything that the banks have and we will pay their liabilities no problem’ you immediately limit your options as to what you can do with those bondholders.  I mean I think people ... the issue of bondholders and who owes what it’s like a queue, if you can imagine it like that, who is first to take the losses, shareholders take losses because they take a punt and the view is as well who is next in the queue to take losses if the business goes bust, the subordinated bondholders who get paid a bit more than the senior, so they’ve taken a higher risk in this regard, they’re next.  The decision on the night of the guarantee to include some of them in the guarantee is astonishing, absolutely astonishing from my perspective.  Look they decided to guarantee the date and subordinated bondholders and what that means is those are guys who have a loan note or an IOU from the bank saying they’ll get paid at a certain point, they get paid a good interest rate, they get 10/11 per cent in some cases, so those guys should have been burned and yet they were included.  Now if you look at the advice that Merrill Lynch gave on the night in the run up to the guarantee they raised a possible problem, they said well there’s what they call cross default and what that is is that somebody could have a subordinated bond and they could have a senior bond, if I have a subordinate bond and you burn me on that I can call you in on this so Merrill Lynch warned it’s not as easy as that so I think that that might have influenced the thinking on the night.  But yeah you could have, what you could have done on the night is you could have said, right, we’re going to take out Anglo and Irish Nationwide and nationalise them, we’re going to put a guarantee in place but only for the depositors at AIB/Bank of Ireland and we’ll only guarantee any new bonds you issue and you apply all sorts of terms and conditions to those bonds but and as we’ve seen Brian Cowen had said in this lecture that he gave in a university in the US he said ‘We wanted a big bang solution’ if you don’t know the extent of your problems in your banks you can’t do that and what surprised me is there was an admission by Kevin Cardiff who has now gone off to that job in Europe, he was Head of Banking in the Department of Finance, he was asked after the crisis they said ‘At what point did you realise you had a problem here or that you didn’t know the extent of your problems in the banks?’ and he said “When we could no longer rely on the Financial Regulator for information we had to rely on the banks own advisors” and that was Goldman Sachs in the case of Irish Nationwide and in the case of ... I can’t remember who it was in Anglo Irish ... but for a senior government official to admit that and that was prior to the guarantee they were calling on Goldman Sachs, we did not know the extent of the problems because the Regulator didn’t have the information available that we had to turn to their own advisors, knowing that  now and even knowing that then if you had realised that then why then would you have agreed to a guarantee?  Granted Cardiff isn’t making the decision but he’s there on the night.  So yes you could have burned senior bondholders on the night.Participant 2: Yeah.Would the ECB have let you?  That’s another question.Participant 2: That was my ... Brian Cowen in that article that he gave in the States a few days ago or whatever recently he said that’s the common factor that you could even now, he was saying right across from 2008 to now ...Yeah.Participant 2: ... you’d have a problem burning the bondholders.And the senior bondholders are what count because we burned subordinate bondholders but it’s not nearly enough to cover this bill, so the senior bondholders were really the only ones that could have been burned to save on that and no senior bondholder in a Euro zone bank has burned.Participant 2: Yeah.They refused to allow it because they feel if it happened it would unravel, it would lead to another Lehman Brothers type tsunami across the European banking system.  The one country that has burned senior bondholders is Denmark, they allowed it, but in that case they only allowed it for a couple of small banks.  Like as I said we had six banks and three of them got far too big, much bigger than the State could cope with when the crash came, so the Danish model is interesting, the markets did react and they did ask for more money when they were lending to the Danish banks after they did that.Participant 2: Right.But that calmed down again.  But we haven’t seen a major bank in Europe both ... well definitely not in the Euro zone but outside the Euro zone, I haven’t seen a major European bank burn senior bondholders.Participant 3: Thank you very much.  Going back, Lehman Brothers collapsed in the middle of ’07.September ’08.Participant 3: Yeah, okay yeah, but the market was beginning to down from the middle of ’07.Yeah.Participant 3:  It was the 15th of September ’08 but I’m bringing it up to date, last weekend there was a big debate in Frankfurt on the sovereign debt debate and the whole issue of sovereign debt and on the bailout of countries, now we’re one of the three countries in an IMF programme, Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the IMF, when asked just on the day of the signing of the austerity, the new ...the latest from Greece, was asked do you think you’ll come through and she said yes on condition that private investors, pension funds and bankers take a haircut.  What I’m picking up since and that was only a few weeks ago is that a lot of the pension funds lost 75 per cent of their money, some of them had credit default swaps, now is this not, you know, the sovereign debt, we’re now producing an IOU into sovereign debt with 25 years, we’re now introducing sovereign bonds to go into pension funds and annuities now are we not just, you know, switching credit around and no real money, you know, are we not doing exactly the same as what’s been going on in the last five years?  If you even listen to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae exactly the same debate and language is around the property in the States as it is here, you’re now hearing it also from China, so I don’t think anyone has learned anything and I don’t think ... I think all of this is going around and nobody knows what’s going on.Well yes is the answer, it’s all paper going around, like it’s credit again.  The difference being it’s sovereign borrowing rather than private borrowing or company borrowing so yeah it’s to do ... like the whole restructuring, the promissory notes, is just you know if you have a mortgage and it’s 30 years if you push it to 40 years you’re going to pay more over 40 years but you’ll pay less every year, that’s what they’re doing, it’s that simple and they’re doing it with paper, with IOUs with loans, there’s no cash to pay for this and the whole aim is that they need to separate the decision on the night of the guarantee, State banks one, they need to separate it again.  And this is that process that they’re trying to do, they’re trying to take out a chunk of this, so half this figure, take it out and get it off the State’s balance sheet and do something else with it.  Now the ideal situation would be to go and get agreement from the European authority and say listen just give us a loan from EFSF and instead of giving it to us just give it to IBRC or give it, you know, or better still let private investors come in and they take it but that’s not going to happen so really you’re right it’s the ...Participant 3: But I gather ... sorry for crossing over, I gather the small print on the Greek deal that hardly anyone found out until the end of the day was that the priority orders is such that the IMF get 100 per cent in that, the ECB get 100 per cent, even the EIB gets 100 per cent, the sovereign doesn’t, it’s on the very end, so who would actually put money in a sovereign debt considering most of the Central Banks actually do have ... most of their balance sheet is in sovereign debt.Well not in Greece, they wouldn’t do it at the moment, but that’s what they’re trying to do in Ireland, if they separate the State and bank debt they’re trying to get people in to start lending to the State again but people don’t want to, investors don’t want to come and buy Irish debt just yet because they want to be sure that Ireland will recover by the time it says it will recover, if we get the deficit down by 2015, so Honohan, Noonan and the rest of the government are saying well if we do this with the Anglo promissory note it will ease some of that burden and show those investors that Ireland is recovering and that you can lend to us and that you will get it back.Participant 3:  They’re saying there’s a 60 per cent change of default when you look at the risk assessment.Well it’s a high risk yeah absolutely it’s high risk but I mean you know the talk of a second bailout, is there going to be a second bailout for Ireland? I mean I wrote a piece in the paper today saying you could argue that what they’re trying to do with the Anglo loan is a second bailout because they’re trying to get money from a different fund or more money from the same fund in terms of the ESN, the longer term bailout fund, over a much longer period, so it kind of is a second bailout.  But yes is the answer, with paper, have the learned a lesson?  I’d hope so.  They’re doing the same thing but it’s with sovereign paper instead of bank credit.Participant 4:  Would it not be better to accept a second bailout if you’re getting a better interest rate?  I mean obviously if you go back to the market you’re going to have to pay a higher rate to attract private investors or new investors into buy Irish sovereign debt, would you not be better off just accepting the bailout because it’s at a lesser rate?Well no and what they’re doing is and again we don’t have the full details of what they’re doing in the background right now both in terms of the payment due on Saturday and the rest of the payments due until 2031 but Honohan said at the Oireachtas Committee the other day he said it’s got to be less than the bailout fund money or otherwise we’re just going to take the bailout fund money but they were saying that they would.  Sorry, yeah?Participant 5:  Just in relation to the IBRC does it have like a time span that’s allowed exist for the end of it and it has to wrap up or what is its objective?Well it’s a topical question because we were just asking Mike Aynsley, the Chief Executive of IBRC, that and he said on their briefing notes they hand it said 2020 is the day they have to be gone but one of the things they’re doing in the background is tracker mortgages are sitting on the books of AIB and Permanent TSB and they’re loss making, they’re making no money and burning money for those banks, so there’s talk now that as part of the restructuring of the promissory notes that they take out the promissory notes out of Anglo and Nationwide and put in trackers because it’s both their assets and funny enough the trackers at AIB and Permanent TSB are about 34 billion so it’s kind of a neat match between the figures involved and the issue with the tracker mortgages is that they don’t make money but they’re not bad, they’re being repaid so there’s money coming in off them, it’s just that the reason they’re not profitable is that the banks borrow at a particular rate and they charge at another and instead of being like that they’re like that so they’re making any money but they are ... they could be used as a way of both fixing the IBRC problem and also fixing the AIB and Permanent TSB problem, if you get them out of those two banks you may encourage investors to come in.  To answer your question the debate now is well if IBRC gets tracker mortgages some of those won’t fall due to be fully repaid until the 2030s so IBRC will be around for a lot longer.Participant 6: The different talks we’ve had, people had different kind of analysis of why we have a crisis, let’s say Conor McCabe seemed to think it was a particularly Irish version of capitalism and Ronan Lyons said that it was kind of a classic property bubble.  A lot of people would put it down to Anglo an when you look at Anglo you think the failing was their relationship banking model, was it just people being a bit reckless, was it a lack of regulation, why did it blow up so much?  I mean it’s happened in every country at the same time, similar things but not to this extent, but what was it uniquely about Anglo?Well it is depressing that it’s a kind of classic property bubble, it’s not that complicated what happened here, I mean there’s no kind of derivatives or CDOs or CLOs or any of the stuff that’s taken down like a few of the American banks, it’s just a plain old property crash.  I think in terms of the scale of the problem here Patrick Honohan has said the scale of the problem is four times worse here than in other European countries, and I suppose leaving Greece aside for different reasons, but the scale of the crisis here was four times worse than the market or the average and for that reason, you know, it’s much more of a domestic issue and you can’t blame Lehman Brothers or international factors for what happened here.  But I don’t really ... I don’t kind of buy into the whole is it a particular type of capitalism I think there’s one type of capitalism and there is extremes within it in terms of, you know, how government sets up a regulator to regulate capitalism in your country and I think what happened here was a variety of factors, I think if you’re asking legally who is to blame you could lay the blame first and foremost at the door of the banks and then I think at government before regulator because I think the government should have oversight over the regulator and I think that if you only give the regulator certain tools then you’re kind of tying one hand behind their backs in terms of what they can do with the banks.  Also I think the regulator was too close to the banks just like Anglo is too close to its customers the regulator was far too close to the banks and this light touch regulation of principles based regulation or a better way of describing it is regulation for grown-ups, we’re going to have a little code here on the wall we want you to go and look at it every week just to tell you what you should and shouldn’t be doing, that’s the extent of our involvement as a regulator, I mean that’s no good either.  But I think what the banks and what particularly Anglo did here is it convinced people that it had established a new secure form of banking that was incredibly profitable and others believed it, the other banks believed it and then everyone else believed it because of the money they were making.  And I think that that kind of turned Irish banking on its head a bit but again like if you look at the UK, RBS and HBOS, and there was a report into what happened in the commercial banking division of Lloyds which is primarily HBOS they say all the same things happened in Anglo, too much lending to a very small number of people and you were too close to them and that’s the problem, the concentration.  I mean concentration just kills in banking and you spread your risk, you know if you’re an investor you don’t buy 28 per cent of Anglo Irish Bank and that’s why the losses are so great for Sean Quinn.  Just as investor you spread your risk; it’s simple, simple so.  But I think we had ... we took it to a different level in this country.  Sorry?Participant 7: Do you think it struck me down your last point there about taking it to a different level, could it have been a large part or one major reason why it happened was Anglo wasn’t a retail, a high street retail bank I mean it didn’t deal with customers off the street, it dealt with basically investors.  I remember when they used to have a little ad in The Irish Times front page, you know in the left hand corner and nobody knew who they were just that it was a nice picture.  Surely if they had been watched more closely or supervised from outside more closely if they had been retailers or somebody would have heard earlier what was going on and maybe the regulator might have had more experience maybe to observe what was going on there before, could that have been part of it do you think that they weren’t doing anything?  I just remember that you were talking about lawyers earlier on, in the beginning of my career I worked in the merchant banking liquidations and I was very junior but people used say that he ran that bank, the person involved, as his own private bank, the profession at the time around Dublin, and ...This is Patrick Gallagher, yeah.Participant 7: ... it seems that they had been doing something fairly similar; I don’t know what you want to do comment on it at all or give an opinion on what they said?Well I think that the regulator was certainly hands-off when it came to Anglo and it was too late when it did react.  The two things that the regulator did that I would say now oh we did these things, and you know we attempted to take the heat out of the market, they told the banks, regulators and principals of debt regulation they really only measure their ‘can dos’ say well if you’re going to do that kind of lending we want to force you to put more aside in reserve in case those loans go bad.Participant 7: But would you trust an Irish government to supervise the regulator properly as you had said, would it not be better to have Mrs Merkel do it, she doesn’t trust us to do it or any other government probably either, be regulated from abroad in terms of the regulator?Well there was talk of this kind of European wide regulator and the European Banking Authority which is supposed to be doing a stress test is coming into all sorts of trouble and it’s woefully understaffed, I think there’s only 40 people working in London.  So you know people said things in the crisis and what we need to do but I mean they’re not following through and responding.  I mean there’s talks now, you know, people saying at conferences and privately people saying we can’t have a knee-jerk reaction, we can’t have over regulation, well I think we can, I think 63 billion is an awful lot, a big price to pay for Ireland.Participant 7:  How many are there are working in Dublin?  So maybe they have it everywhere, because they are civil servants they’re appointing that they appoint someone they know won’t to do anything anyway so they can get on with the government themselves.Yeah I think you’ve got to establish a proper regulator and you know regulation is set up by legislation, government legislates.Participant 8:  Yes, thank you very much Simon for your presentation, it’s so technical and everything, and I liked your tone.  I was just wondering do we know who the ten golden circle are?Yeah we do.  If I can name them now I’d be doing well.  Paddy McKillen is one of them, who is being sued by the Barclay brothers over in ... sorry he’s suing the Barclay Brothers over in London at the moment, he’s one.  Gerry Gannon.  Sean Reilly.  Joe O’Reilly, the Dundrum Shopping Centre guy.  Other names on it ... there’s an auctioneer up in Malahide I better not ... because this is being recorded.  (laughs)Participant 8:  No that’s fine.It’s in the book somewhere.  They were described as kind of the loyal customers, or longstanding customers.Participant 8:  And did they actually pay physical cash or these paper trails again?No loans.Participant 8:  Loans.Just loans.  They got loans to buy the shares.  Brian O’Farrell is the auctioneer.  He owns the Northside Shopping Centre in Coolock.  Gerry Maguire who owns the Laurence Shopping Centre in Drogheda.  Patrick Kearney, a Belfast-based property developer.  Seamus Ross, Menolly Homes.  John McCabe.  Gerry Gannon, I said that.  Yeah that’s them, that’s ten.Participant 8:  Thank you.  And are they being followed, you know, in terms of those loans?They, as I understand it, are witnesses not suspects so they are not the focus of the investigations but in other words it’s not viewed that they did anything wrong.Participant 8:  But they haven’t repaid the loans?Well the loans were given on a non-recourse basis meaning ... well a quarter of the loan was recourse which is so you’re on the hook for a quarter so each of them got about 45 million so just over ten.Participant 8:  On the securitisation you’re saying that it just so happens 34 I presume is that million or billion?Billion, all billion.  No more millions anymore.  (laughter)Participant 8:  Billion.  Okay, it’s just that I ... yeah, 34 billion it matches another one – not to do double entry yeah.... that’s just I mean it’s a neat coincidence but it could possibly help the solution.Participant 8:  Yeah but two questions on that is it was securitisation and the collateral that was behind it that caused the financial crash around the world, in other words people kept on sending mortgages to mortgages to third parties etc.,Yeah.Participant 8:  The assumption here is that securitisation of the tracker mortgages we’ll actually produce what is supposed to be on paper producing, so that’s question number one, so there’s a risk there but number two why do the banks or the lenders on tracker mortgages not allow an individual to pay off these 25 year loans if they so ... say they won the lottery without ... at a proper discount or the net present value on it?Yeah well I think they’re going to come around to that, like some of the banks have been saying ... some of the banks were offering deals to customers privately case-by-case and ...Participant 8:  But only if you’re in trouble not if somebody just wanted to get out of it.... yeah well I think that eventually they’ll come around to that.  I think that if you have a tracker mortgage the banks don’t want to do it because again it’s an admission of a problem and a mistake that they made by selling these things, they would say well we’re going to lose 100 grand on your mortgage, tell you what, we’ll pay you 25 grand if you come off the tracker now and go to another institution or we will help you find a loan elsewhere.  I think those deals will eventually have to come about.  It’s 34 billion of loans that have a much longer life than some of the property development loans so you have to deal with them.  In terms of the securitisation question, I don’t think it applies here because you’re talking about swapping loans around three institutions that are already owned by the State so if they weren’t owned by the State I’d say that’s a relevant concern, oh securitisation got us into this trouble, why are you shuffling from one institution to the other, we own them all it doesn’t matter.Participant 9:  Yeah just going back to the early part of the lecture, thanks I enjoyed it, with turnover developments and wasn’t that related partly to the Capital Gains tax, why they did that?  Secondly just the savings to lending ratio, what was the impetus that changed that which was back in the end of the 90s or the beginning of the new decade?  And then in relation to the type of capitalism here, isn’t there a particular type in the sense of like the closeness of Fianna Fail and developers and so on, some of the motivation in there, a culture of poor regulation and also in terms of being a what would you call it like not offshore but low tax rate and so on.  And finally, it’s a bit too much, in terms of Europe the sense of because they made mistakes both politically and economically and they don’t want contagion, they don’t want the banks to fail so essentially then they’re going to make the ordinary people, and particularly in Ireland, pay for it.Yeah that’s basically it, that we have to pay for it because we borrowed it. Participant 9:  Could I just ... sorry for cutting in, does that make not the political arrangement corrupt really?Corrupt?  I don’t know about that word but I guess you know if you think about the European Central Bank is largely influenced by German policy measures both Central bankers and again the view of how the crisis should be worked through is based on the fact that you pay back everything you owe unless you can’t, and this is the whole debate about debt sustainability and whether we can or cannot repay it, and this is why the restructuring of the notes are going ahead.  I think that ... is it corrupt?  I don’t think it’s corrupt I think that there’s a fear that we could go back to a point where the crisis would start to kick off again and the contagion can’t be stopped, that’s the fear, that if you start saying well okay Ireland can burn senior bondholders and then suddenly a French bank blows up and say well they’re going to burn senior bondholders and then suddenly when the banking market is kind of trying or on the verge of recovering it can’t recover at all if that happens.  I mean I think you’re talking about ... you’re looking at the whole kind of fabric of capitalism.Participant 9:  Oh yeah but it’s sacred.Well I think that if you assume that you can only fix the system with the system you have you do everything to protect the system and that’s why they’re not ... Sorry?Participant 10:  What effect did the rating agencies have in the whole crisis?  Did they have any effect on the Irish system?Oh absolutely, they would have given Anglo a AAA rating in the early noughties, I think 2003/2004 and with that Anglo went to the banks in Europe and said we’ve a AAA rating, Ireland has a AAA rating, we’re good for it, we’ll get your money back, can you give us the money to do all the lending we want to do and they played a key role and then I suppose it’s more international the issue with credit rating agencies that they didn’t ... I think the credit rating agencies did point to the fact that Ireland had a big exposure to property much like the Central Bank did although you’d need a degree in Central Bank speak to understand what they said sometimes but I think the credit rating agencies did point out some of the potential land mines in Ireland with property, internationally they didn’t, they gave AAA ratings to bundles of loans, that they’d no idea what was in those loans.Facilitator:  Okay folks I think we’re going to finish it up there, thanks very much Simon, we appreciate that.  (clapping) (recording ends here)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 Gregory Connor Talk.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode Gregory Connor, Professor of Finance at NUI, Maynooth, talks about the effect of Ireland joining the Euro, and how things may have worked out differently if our banking regulatory system had been stricter. He also addresses the housing situation, mortgage arrears and how Ireland might get out of debt. This talk, one of a series on the Irish Economy, was recorded in front of a live audience at the Central Library in March 2012.Great thanks so much Padraic, thanks for having me, I hope you all get something from this talk and thanks for coming, so I really wanted to cover three things here.  I want to talk about the Eurozone that’s the currency we are in, along with 16 other European countries not including the UK and as you know it’s in a bit of a crisis at the moment, so I’ll talk about the Eurozone, what’s wrong with it, how the crisis evolved, then I’m going to talk in particular most of what I want to talk about is the Irish situation in particular, how the Irish banks got Ireland into so much trouble and where things stand at the moment from the perspective of Ireland in the Eurozone crisis and then last thing I’ll talk about the future, is Ireland and is the Eurozone on a path to get out of this and what are the likely outcomes I’ll just briefly discuss on that. So I want to start with a picture of John Kenneth Galbraith, he’s a late 20th Century witty Canadian American economist.  Actually coming back into favour now, but he talked a lot about fads, social fads and the influence of social delusions and business fads on the economy and he did a lot of work in particular about how the 1920’s, roaring 20’s led to the Great Depression and it has a lot of resonance now in fact in what happened in the noughties as they call it, the 2000, the 2008 period and how that led to the current crisis, but in particular as I said he was quite witty, one of his witticisms was “The great thing about being an economist is the more you screw up the more they need you” and it’s true the last few years as an economist, you get more and more attention to what you are saying, whereas people always ignored you during the noughties.  All of a sudden we are very stylish in giving talks like this okay which is a bad thing okay and maybe that needs to go away.  I want to lay my cards on the table and say I’m not one of the economists who’s going to come in here and say I told you this would happen, I missed it okay, I screwed up, in fact I do risk modelling, financial risk modelling so I just say, I am not one of the people who can claim I saw it coming.  What I say about the past is with hindsight and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.Okay so first I want to talk about the Euro, okay the Euro is this currency zone, now in seventeen countries which is a locked in set of exchange rates where these basically all the countries are in the same currency and as you know it’s causing enormous dislocation problems in many of the countries, really throughout the zone from Germany to Portugal the Euro is problematic.  Why did we do it? What was the reason for the Euro?  Okay, let’s look in particular the financial reasons, because there are successes associated with the Euro.  This is one of the big reasons for the Euro and if you understand this graph, you will understand not only the reasons for the Euro or one of the reasons for the Euro but the problems in the Euro.  This is the relationship between the Italian Lira and the German Deutschmark from 1980 till 2009, throughout that period Italy, the Central Bank in Italy and the Italian Government had one goal with their exchange rate policy, this graph was not to slope downwards, okay that was their goal that was their overriding goal.  This line was to be straight okay and that was what they tried to do for 20 years, did they succeed, no they failed and they failed and they failed and they failed and they failed.  It just went, it continued to slope down for 20 years as they fought and fought and fought to keep it strong, to keep the Lira strong, a hard money policy and they just couldn’t do it okay.  The political system just didn’t allow them to do it.  The Union said ah we know they are not credible, we know they are going to relax the exchange rate, so we are going to bid up our wages okay, because we know they won’t go through with it.  The pensioners as well said we need more pension money because we know they are going to, they are going to inflate away any gains, everyone the political system, everything worked against what was their key motivation and it failed, except at the end, once they locked into the Euro it worked, okay all of a sudden Italy had a hard currency, note at the end once it’s in the Euro, because they are the same currency as Germany, they now have a hard currency relevant to Germany, so in fact there’s a success, Italy now has a hard currency, as does Ireland, as does Portugal, as does Belgium and even France because France had the same desire and the same though not as dramatic the same failure throughout this period.  So all these currencies which wanted hard money now have hard money okay so there’s your success, now there are other issues of course.  There’s the issue of trade and the no need to exchange currency as you move across borders, but this is really from the financial side, the key motivation for the Euro and in a sense it worked, we got what we asked for, okay but many people see why did it have to be such a brittle system?  Why did this Euro system have to be so inflexible and brittle, that was not a bug in the Euro design, that was a feature you know the term, the joke that programmers say, when you say there’s a bug in your programme, your computer programme that’s not a bug it’s a feature okay, that’s true of the Euro.  Its brittleness was intended, it’s a feature of the Euro that it’s brittle, okay that was how the Italian State was able to lock in a hard currency by forcing the system so that it cannot leave.  If the Euro were a system where Italy could be in the Euro but it can leave any time it would never have had a hard currency, it would have lasted three months and then the demands of the system for a soft currency would have overwhelmed it, so the locking in is part of the success of the Euro, and this is actually a very old strategy.  This is a third century mosaic and that is Odysseus and if you remember the story of Odysseus what does he do, he locks himself onto the ship’s mast and I have a quote here about this is from Homer’s Odyssey okay, okay it says this is Circe telling Odysseus how he can listen to the siren’s, the siren’s are these lovely singing magical creatures on two sides of the straight and they are sailing through the straight and anyone who hears the sirens is so enchanted by the beautiful singing that they are drawn off the straight and narrow path and into the rocks okay so what does Odysseus do?  “He must drive straight on past but melt down sweet wax and honey and with it stuff your committed companions ears so none can listen, the rest that is but if you yourself are wanting to hear them, then have them tie you hand and foot on the fast ship standing upright against the mast with the ropes ends lashed around it, so that you can have joy in hearing the song and the sirens but if you suffocate your men and implore them to set you free, then they must tie you fast and even more lashings.”  This worked too okay.  Odysseus got to hear the sirens and he sailed safely through the straights by locking himself onto the mast okay and that’s what we’ve done, we now have a hard currency, so does Greece, so does Italy.  We didn’t matter in that sense but Italy mattered and France mattered, so one of the key motivations is to lock in, create a brittle currency system where we have to have a hard currency system okay. This was not really the key issue for Ireland.  For Ireland why did Ireland go along?  Well Ireland was very I’m sorry where’s Ireland, okay I want to talk about Germany, then I’ll talk about Ireland, what about Germany?  Why did Germany go along with such a system?  Okay well you probably remember Fawlty Towers, there’s a running joke on Fawlty Towers, they have German guests come in and Basil Fawlty would say don’t talk about the war okay, don’t talk about the war with the Germans and then of course you would end up talking about the war because he would put his foot in his mouth okay.  Well I worked in the city in the late nineties, in the city of London and I used to visit clients, I was selling risk management systems okay, and I’d visit clients and client support would always whisper to me, don’t talk about the Euro as a problem, they are German clients, don’t talk about problems with the Euro, so I’d stand up here and I’d have to make sure I didn’t say anything negative about the Euro, because the Germans just had this emotional commitment.  It was really the same thing, it was basically liberal anti-nationalism, the Germans just felt we are good Europeans, we want everyone to be one body, so it’s actually a good thing, but it did make them blind okay, the Belgian’s, the German’s, the Dutch, the hard currency countries were blind to the failures of the Euro, why?  Basically for good motivation they believed partly it’s not the whole story but partly, they believed in liberal anti-nationalism, they wanted to take the hard currency, the Deutschmark and share it okay to bring Europe together, so the German’s are partly to blame but partly their blindness was in a sense motivated positively to a good extent okay, so there isn’t really just goodies and baddies, there’s blindness for good motivation, okay that’s another thing that happened.  They certainly were blind, the Germans allowed Greece into the Eurozone.  Now looking back at that, that was a ridiculous decision, again with hindsight the idea that Greece, Italy coming in is marginal and it seemed to possibly work, but Greece coming in was clearly you know grossly in error, so they clearly were blinded okay by something okay. What about the Irish?  Well the Irish didn’t really matter okay they didn’t matter much but they were welcome okay Ireland was welcomed, why did the Irish join?  Well it wasn’t so much the hard currency, Ireland did not have the same experience as Italy with a constant depreciation of its currency, it didn’t manage in many cases to keep a peg for instance to the British Pound but Ireland was also enthusiastic.  Most financial economists in Ireland and it was basically because they saw it as the chance to lower their cost of investment.  This is their cost of investment under a small more peripheral currency like the Punt.  Joining a big currency area like the Euro okay was going to lower the cost of investment and that was going to increase investment.  This was what many Irish economists, myself among them and someone who is at this point interested in visiting Ireland okay, this is what we believe, we are going to lower our cost of investment and increase investment because the cost of the funds was going to decline when we move from being a small peripheral currency with all the risk associated with that, to a member of a big currency block okay locked in at hard currency rates.  What did we get?  Well something worse, something that we didn’t really predict which was over investment a credit flood okay, Ireland got a credit flood.  In fact looking back we realised there was so much investment for bad reasons, bad business decisions, bad regulatory decisions, that in fact many of the investments were negative in their returns, so we were actually getting, we were throwing money at investment projects okay with negative return.  When I see we there, that’s the business interests and the business community in particular the banks and property developers together, were taking German money and poor money and throwing it away because of self managerial, self interest okay. I’m going to look in a little more detail what happened in Ireland but basically this is the key thing, it was essentially a credit flood, we had a flood of foreign credit when we joined this big currency zone and had bad financial regulation, okay let’s look now in more detail of Ireland, sort of work out the steps of where this, how this affected our banks and one in particular happened.  This is the asset side of the Irish banking system, keep in mind with banks assets and liabilities, it’s like my right side is your left side, the same with banks, their assets side is your liability side, so you have mortgages you think on them as liabilities, for a bank mortgages are assets.  Credit card debt we think of them as liabilities, those are assets to banks.  You might have a savings account, to a bank that’s a liability, but that’s an asset to you.  You might have a checking account that’s your asset, their liability, so this is their asset side business and individual’s liability side and let’s look at what happened to these banks.  The red bar is the key thing here, this is property development.  In traditional commercial banking it should be zero.  Property development is not considered an appropriate activity for a commercial banks, they are only supposed to lend for property in the traditional view, where they already have the red one locked in, so short term last minute banking otherwise it’s supposed to be equity.  And what we can see is that exploded over the noughties period, so the red part just grew enormously okay, so on the asset side you had a big growth of property development which is in fact not even an appropriate activity for banks and as we now know there was some very bad investment decisions.  There was also a lot of growth of mortgages okay, so on the asset side way too much property development growth and also quite strong, probably too strong growth in mortgages.  What about on the liability side?  Where was the money coming from?  It was coming from foreign borrowing, the banks were paying for these very risky investments by borrowing from foreign mostly Eurozone banks okay, so they were taking short term money from foreign banks and using it for very speculative investment so this is if you follow kind of you know the entrails of what happened in the crisis this is a little bit old news but that’s the key thing and here again this red area is the key one along with the yellow one this is foreign borrowing okay.  Now the yellow one is a little bit less bad because it is not coming out of, it’s all going into foreign lending okay, whereas red is actual foreign borrowing being used recycled back into the domestic lending.  Note this borrowing is what’s called “Hot Money”, these are quickly reversed okay and note here you can see it climbing down, this is the hot money drifting out of Ireland okay.  A lot of these are very short term institutional deposits and short term bonds that the foreign banks can you know liquidate at their pleasure okay. Well what we do in economics, to look at policy and sort of understand what went wrong is what’s called counter factual policy analysis.  What we do and you know a standard tool is we take a decision in the past and we want to think about was that a good decision or a bad decision, what were the implications of it, we remove it and then we create a new history.  We say let’s change an old decision and let’s see how key it was because we know how the decision feeds through the system, let’s change that decision and see what the system would look like okay.  It’s just like, I like the picture of Gwyneth Paltrow Sliding Doors okay, that is basically the same idea.  There’s this movie where Gwyneth Paltrow is running onto a train and in one reality she makes it onto the train okay and then she gets home and she finds her boyfriend cheating on her with another girl and her life goes one way, okay and the other reality she hesitates and misses her train and her life goes another way okay well that’s basically counterfactual simulations.  Now I’m going to do that for a minute this was work with Brian O’Kelly on the Irish banks.  What would have happened if we had been slightly more sensible in financial regulation during the bubble period okay, well in fact with a little bit of a change in bank regulation okay most of the Irish problems would have gone away okay.  Most of the crash would have gone away and thinking through that reality, so now we are in a different reality, we are in a made up reality, where the Irish Central Bank and the Irish Financial Regulator prevented the banking sector from taking these extremely risky bets on property development funding by net foreign borrowing okay.  Just make them more sensible, reasonable regulation it’s called prudent regulation, that little change would have really changed the outcome okay, so here’s the asset side when we enforce the condition that property development cannot be more than ten per cent of stable liabilities which are domestic deposits which are on the other side okay.  So you can only have ten per cent property development assets relative to domestic deposits okay and we also put in the condition a note you change the, you drastically reduce this scary red part okay, which caused the problems on the asset side.  We do the same thing on the liability side here we forced the net foreign borrowing to be cut.  Again this should have been controlled by the financial regulator and it wasn’t, so let’s control it okay, so this is our simulated reality which is allowing the system to be more prudent in its behaviour okay and those things go away, what would happen to the Irish economy?  Well you would have much, you know obviously by construction you would come into the 2008 Lehman Brothers cut crash with a much more stable banking system, so you are coming along here, here’s the crash, the system is much more stable, than in that reality in terms of your exposures to property risk and for hot money foreign borrowing okay, you would also have a more stable borrowing okay.  This is the borrowing side, so here we have our net foreign borrowing, the GDP that’s both on the asset and liability side a much more stable environment okay.  It actually would have after the 2008 crash eliminated a lot of the ... we would be just like most other European countries with just a little bit of a change in our financial regulation, you will see this has implications as we think about whose fault it is and what needs to go, happen going forward okay.  With this obviously there would be a big change in net foreign borrowing right, by construction, so we wouldn’t have this big overhang that the banks all of a sudden as you remember in September 2008 the banks all went bust, they effectively all went bust, because all that “Hot Money” all that net foreign borrowing left and the Government was how are we going to replace it?  Well first it put in the guarantee, that didn’t work and then it went into an IMF Programme okay, because it had to replace all that “Hot Money” which disappeared in a flash okay.  But here’s the interesting thing, it wouldn’t have been such a lovely period for you all okay, you remember those years they were wonderful growth years, why were they wonderful growth years?  For false reasons, it was fake income okay, it was generated by imprudent borrowing of the domestic banks from foreign banks, so all that wonderful 2003 to 2007 growth was phony okay and if we eliminate, if we bring in prudent regulation a whole lot of growth disappears okay, so in a sense this was already spent okay and now we have to in a sense pay it back and that’s where the ECB, that’s where the you know European Commission and even IMF were telling us you already had the good times, now you have to pay the cost okay, that’s one way to interpret it.  Right in fact if we look here this is your GDP, there’s your extra GDP you got by having bad decisions.  Note it’s only negative at the end okay obviously you continue here, it’s got to in a sense if you believe in you know a just universe, all of this has to be balanced on the negative side right, that would be the Greek tragedy solution right.  If Homer did this, that would all go away so we would pay it all back right.  In fact here it is just graphically, there’s Ireland if we would have done things right.  Now again this is a simulated reality and what do we see in the purple line, this purple line here is Ireland without imprudent banking regulation which allows this credit inflow right, a lot less growth and in fact you know it’s sort of you are losing more than you are benefitting so far, so obviously this has to continue for quite a while, right this yellow line to make it equal because the yellow is the reality, the purple is the simulated reality.  Well if you are going to get rid of all that growth, that fake growth, you know it’s going to be paid back and it clearly is right because something you know, we are in a sense going to pay all that back one way or the other okay.So that’s sort of a review of the Euro, a little bit about Ireland, now I want to just for my last little bit, I want to talk about the future and where things stand and what it looks like going forward okay, well we had this big party really.  Right Ireland had a party based on phony money that was poured in via the Euro currency from foreign banks okay.  Now we have to pay it back or some feel we don’t have to but the standard view at least by the ECB and the IMF is we do have to pay it back.  Can we pay it back?  Is it feasible?  That’s the question, well this is the key number okay which is Government debt relative to GDP, if this number is more than about 120 per cent, so you have more debt than you have national income right, annual national income most people feel it can never be paid back.  The reason is what happens it grows with interest and your income doesn’t grow and you can never get to equilibrium, you can never get out of debt, you can never get yourself out of debt as a country.  Okay so above 120 it’s normally considered not feasible and you can see well Ireland are just about hopefully maybe going to miss that, right we will look at some of the other detail.  This is just a generated problem, note this is not the original problem, this debt is generated by poor bank regulation okay, it was not even high when we started back here in 2008 when the problem started the debt wasn’t even high, so this is all coming out of bad decisions in our banking system okay. Let’s look at the banking system it’s just another big problem, when all the net foreign borrowing disappeared it had to be replaced, it had to be paid off with cash.  Banks don’t have cash, a lot of people think when you give cash into a bank, they put it in a big you know drawer in the back, that’s not what happens, the cash goes out immediately.  You put money into your savings account, the next day or the same day they paid it out into someone’s mortgage okay, your savings account isn’t in the bank, it’s in a mortgage okay, so what happened when all these foreign banks say oh give us our money back, they didn’t have any money, in fact their assets were collapsing at the same time right.  They had to get money as extraordinary liquidity support from the Central Banks, that’s one of the roles in the Central Bank, it provides liquidity when banks assets are illiquid okay and an enormous amount right, Irish banks have like 110 billion Euro’s of this emergency liquidity support both from the European Central Bank and in the case where the assets aren’t good enough for the European Central Bank from the Irish Central Bank, okay so these are the assets which aren’t even good enough quality for the ECB to accept them, right and that has to be changed.  That’s supposed to be quote “short term”, that’s supposed to be the Central Bank providing short term liquidity, well it’s already been five years, how many more years is it going to be right, probably five or six.  These are backed by assets, right these are backed by mortgages, property development assets, business loans but they are illiquid right and some of them are of dodgy value, so this is a big problem too.  It isn’t just the Government debt, it’s also the banking system becoming liquid again okay, somehow getting rid of this overhang of emergency liquidity support right.  How can it do that?  Well it’s pretty hard it has to shrink, it has to shrink its asset size to generate cash as people pay off their mortgages and business loans it has to use the funds to pay off this big overhang, to remove this big overhand of emergency liquidity support from the ECB and that’s a really slow process.  You can see here look at how slowly the assets are declining, even though this red line is the stock, the flow of new lending is shrinking drastically, but the stock of outstanding lending is only very slowly inching down and of course it builds on itself as they shrink lending the economy contracts and that feeds back into itself, because of the whole sector you get this aggregate affect.  If they all try to shrink, all that happens with the economy shrinks and it’s very hard for them, so it’s really difficult, there is a difficult problem, so I’m not claiming things are easy here okay, obviously property prices which bubbled up have also you know gone down and that hits banks, right now I’m not going to talk too much about that, I know Ronan Lyons talked about that a week or two ago, but we know property prices have gone down sharply and that’s an issue for banks as well.  More seriously okay, oh yeah and of course another thing about getting back this big overhang of assets, it’s hard for look at here how they’ve caused ,they’ve shot down and this is affecting property prices, the flow of new housing lending, mortgage lending has collapsed, but that isn’t really affected very strongly the assets of the bank, because it’s hard to make property shrink by not building them, because they last for eighty years okay, so this overhang is a very slowly solvable problem, getting into debt is easy and quick, okay getting out of debt as a sectoral system is slow and difficult okay. Now here’s another really serious problem and again I’m just, at this point I’m speculating about the future, this might sink the banking system, this is the increase in mortgage arrears, right mortgage arrears are continuing up and there’s an enormous supply of mortgages, if you go back to those balance sheets and you look at mortgages and you look at the sliver of banking, equity capital, mortgage arrears coming out of those assets any fall in mortgage payments has to come out of that tidy sliver of equity capital and if it overwhelms it the banking system is broke, right and there is a risk here, so this is a real serious risk going forward.  Do I have a solution and do I have an answer?  No but it’s certainly something that is trouble okay.Okay what about you know this is something I put here because just as I finish up, Colm McCarthy who isn’t here but would certainly want this slide, what are we paying for with all this debt?  And we have this big supply of Government debt, you know we are swimming in Government debt, we are approaching sovereign insolvency, where’s it coming from?  Well a lot of it is coming from these bank repayment costs.  This grey line, these green slashed lines here, note that huge chunk in 2010, there was also a big chunk in 2009 and another big chunk in 2011, if it weren’t for these bank repayment costs, even though Ireland would have suffered a big recession, the debt overhang wouldn’t be serious, it would be very you know feasible.  This is making the system close to or possibly insolvent right.  Now this is questionable Colm McCarthy says a lot of that was us paying back foreign banks, it was their fault, they leant us money when they shouldn’t have okay, so it’s partly their fault and we paid them back when we were a State, this is the Irish State, it was private banks, it was Irish Nationwide and Anglo in particular and the other banks making bad decisions, those are private institutions.  What are we as Irish tax payers paying them back okay, well partly to help the other European countries because it’s European banks that lent that money, well that’s questionable and Colm McCarthy feels and it’s very much in the news now we don’t have a responsibility as tax payers for those privately taken on debts okay and that’s a lot of the problem, right I’m not going to take a stand there, you can see it’s a mixed case, we spent that money right, we spent it on ourselves, but it was private money, so you can decide what you think is right or wrong about it, Colm McCarthy thinks we shouldn’t pay it back or maybe not all of it, it’s in the news even now we are fighting with the ECB saying a lot of this money should be paid by the ECB indirectly with money creation, because it isn’t really Irish and the Irish are doing their part let’s have some help and there’s talk about pushing big chunks of it out far into the future using ECB money creation.  So will we make it?  Will Ireland make it as a sovereign through this crisis?  Well this is what’s called a fan chart where you have some possibilities right and the answer is maybe okay as an economist right.  If things turn out well, if growth is reasonable Ireland is going to muddle through this crisis okay, if things turn out badly and growth is poor and the debt goes up there’s going to be another programme and another restructuring and more difficulty, so I don’t feel I’m strong enough and wise enough to make that call.  I do want to finish on an up note, there are good things in Ireland, what’s going to save Ireland if there’s a saviour it’s going to be our export growth, pharma, tech in particular and other export industries.  I know a lot of people talk about agri-food industry it’s had very good years but it can’t generate, it doesn’t have the scale potential to deal with 120 billion debt overhang, whereas tech and pharma and the other export sectors which are actually doing very well at the moment okay, can spin off into the domestic sectors and might make a difference, so if we can get growth and this is a picture of a bunch of techie type people, if we can get growth in the key future industries and this is something that Ireland has done well over the last ten years it’s got lucky, it has picked some good industries okay, it picked a lousy industry in the fifties when it went very heavily on agriculture as the key industry, that was the big mistake we now know okay, but now it seems to have picked some good industries so that’s the hope, it’s the export growth and the possibility that might make the difference and making us coming out on the right end of this painful but feasible grab.  Okay that’s it so let me see if there are questions or comments?  Go ahead.Q & AParticipant 1: My question is multi-pronged, one of them is we know the banks have lent the money and what happens if the banks now have so much mortgages, say for example they have say 20 million mortgages and all of those 20 million, say 10 million comes back and says listen we can’t pay here, how can we pay back, now we have a huge chunk of houses that we can’t offload.Yes okay.Participant 1:  So how do they work through that, that is 1, and, 2, if they don’t lend how does liquidity recycle within this?Yeah that’s absolutely, I mentioned that and that’s very true, one of the problems with the banks is they all want to shrink, so how do they want to shrink, oh they want to stop lending, but if they all stop lending house prices fall, no one can buy houses and then their assets which are effectively the houses, also the client who are they going to sell these repossessed houses to, yeah that’s a very difficult circular problem.  When one bank is in trouble it can just repossess houses and sell them and the whole banking system is in trouble yeah there is an issue that they can’t all sell the houses and not worth, you know not generate new houses, so that just had to be mulled through and there’s no simple solution to that.  Of course there’s no repossessions in Ireland anyway, effectively none, so it’s not a live issue.Participant 1: Finally this is based on the assumption of what if, what is instead of having invested heavily into the mortgage, you know the construction industry, if they had passed the investment onto the production and other sectors, what would it have been like going by the graph?Yeah we didn’t do that, we have put it into business investment and we didn’t do that, I don’t think that was feasible, it was such a flood of credit, it was going to go into, you know it was going to go to speculative property and that’s quite standard if you look around the world, credit flows tend to go into speculative property, because business investment is slow and difficult and you have to establish relationships, it doesn’t tend to have as volatile behaviour that the property development does, so most of the big bubbles generate property related bubbles.  Yes a question here…Participant 2: How do you see financial regulation changing your response to events in the last couple of years, especially when for example when the Euro say in the late nineties, we had the example of the Asian crisis which showed that you know if you liberalise financial markets it might lead to a bubble so how come we didn’t see it then and what makes it different now that we might see it again?Yes well financial regulation in Ireland was particularly bad okay, particularly bad, so if you go back to 2003, 2002 in Ireland you know it wasn’t even at the state as it should have been at that point.  Now of course you know it’s going much, obviously we’ve learned from that mistake and where everyone is tightening including Ireland.  Others made mistakes, the US made huge, you know more globally, more damaging errors in their financial regulation, so there were many errors and the Greek situation which was not on the financial regulation side, rather a national income fraud okay, where they actually fraudulently created their Government debt accounts.  There was a whole another situation, where do I see the financial regulation going?   Well I think probably there will still be problems as there always has been, you know people will find ways around the rules and create problems so that will never disappear.  There will always be smart operators who sneak around the system and create occasional crises, but I don’t think in my lifetime, you know my working life or even my mortal life that will see another financial crisis of this type, however another side which is the regulation of Government borrowing, now that’s changing fundamentally as you know and now we have this fiscal compact that’s just absolutely changing, you’ve heard the word austerity, it’s absolutely the rules are going to change fundamentally, in ways which are not all good alright there’s no one who is going to be flexibility about ah we really ought  to have a new anti-poverty programme and build some new hospitals this year and even if it costs a little more than we have, we will borrow it, that is going to go away okay, it’s going to be a very tight rein on Government spending in the Eurozone.  That’s part of the brittle system, we have locked ourselves on the mast and we made that decision and now we’ve realised part of that decision is we can no longer spend money unless we have it and that’s just locked in now and my opinion.Participant 3:  Is that not a good thing fundamentally for us, I mean we needed to grow up?Yes I think a lot of the economists are now thinking yeah in the long run probably we actually maybe in our mindset, we think about the German’s back you know when they were not talking about the Euro, Germans to characterise them unfairly but you know they do have a little bit of a mindset, a, b, we go this way, we are making, we are walking this way okay and I think they realised that was part of the deal.  The part of the hard currency zone was also you know fiscal austerity that you don’t spend what you don’t have, so that’s what we bought into.  We didn’t know we bought into it but now yes that’s what we bought into okay.Participant 3:  Can I just ask you that wasn’t my question, it’s just I haven’t had the time to read the paper yet, the other day and Mr. Osborne or somebody like that said in England announced that because the banks were not doing their part of the bargain and they were not lending to the small and the medium sized business over there even and we are crying out for that here even more probably, they were going to do a Government level a kind of scheme that they are putting millions in that can be lent to bypass the banks and get this money out to the businesses that need it to run.  We obviously do need our small businesses to get going again to get, if we are to get any to do that curve that they are talking about.  Could we borrow the same thing here?Again we have no funds.Participant 3: But how are they doing it?Well see they have funds because they are an accountant and they control, they can borrow freely to some extent, I mean there are limits even for the British but we have locked ourselves in now to this hard currency system, which means that we don’t really have borrowing opportunities.  The ECB though there is in fact, you know potential the ECB still has flexibility and they have, the ECB to give them credit have recently generated a lot of new credit flows to the banking system, but the banking system is still in an unstable situation, a lot of that has just been transferred effectively to Germany where there’s no need for new credit, so it’s still not flowing properly but the ECB has forced money, forced credit into the banking system through this long term refinancing operation so that and a lot of money like a trillion Euro’s worth of credit over the last few, you know in their programmes will be forced into the Eurozone banking system, but it isn’t a solution a Government programme, no Ireland cannot do that under the fiscal, I don’t think it’s feasible.  Question here.Participant 4: A consequence of the austerity that is sweeping through the Eurozone and the world it seems to me is huge unemployment and can that be countered?Well that you know that’s part, you’re right and a lot of people Paul Condron is a major commentator in the US is very against austerity because of that, it does cut back your budget deficit but at the same time in recessionary times it forces up unemployment.  No there’s no you know, you can Paul Condron thinks we should just go ahead and continue borrowing and there’s a probably a middle ground, I don’t have a solution for you but no they are linked, you can’t spend money to raise employment and at the same time lower your budget deficit, no you can’t get both, you can’t have your cake and eat it too question.Participant 5:  I was under the impression that the Celtic Tiger era began roughly around 1996, 1997 and finished around 2007.  When you were speaking about credit flood you focused on the years 2003 to 2008.Correct, yes there’s the good credit, there’s the good Celtic Tiger and the bad Celtic Tiger, there’s phase one and phase two and Morgan Kelly has a good paper on that.  The first phase was based on productivity growth, so 1997 to 2000, he says 2000 but it might be 2002 okay, 2002 is the date when the Central Bank actually became more liberal in its policies but maybe he claims it’s about 2000, so there was a good Celtic Tiger and a bad Celtic Tiger.  The first one was based on real productivity gain and the second one was based on hard credit influx and you might look at Morgan Kelly’s straight forward paper you know.Participant  6:  They always said before the “R” word was admitted or used there would be jobless recovery, not just in Ireland and America, everywhere they said. Is that the case?In recessions the jobs of the last thing to come.Participant 6:  But will they come eventually, nothing like they were obviously?No I am a financial economist and you really need to ask a labour guy you know, so I won’t answer that question because if someone found out I was claiming I knew about employment you know trends I’d get in trouble yeah.Participant 1: In relation to what you said about unemployment now, I know countries like Japan, China and even Germany at a certain time had to say okay we are in this mess now, what if we just look inwards instead of having to say okay we actually have ... because yeah  I understand this metric thing and the Eurozone policies but if Ireland as a nation is also looking within these walls, shut the doors and let’s see what we can make from home here.Small open is Ireland’s solution, I really think small and open, if we are small and open and small open is the future, in fact that’s the future small and open.  I mean what are these guys doing you know, they are selling around the world that’s the key thing.  Little technologies that are not particularly hot, not particularly fancy sold everywhere.Participant 1:  Reduce the imports.Reduce the what?Participant 1:  Imports rather than...Oh no because they need imports, no, no I don’t think that’s the solution for Ireland, no I have to say, I’d say absolutely not, absolutely not yes.Participant 7:  Just there recently, you know a couple of months ago you had the Government basically calling the banks to reduce the interest rates, you know for the lending like, how can the banks get the money to lend, to try and increase their profits, if they are brought in and say look you can’t do that.Yeah that’s true, yeah that was a very, you know they want bank profits because how are you going to get the banks back to decent situation by having them generate profits, but at the same time you want lending and you don’t want it to be too high cost, yeah you know this whole system is nothing but a balancing act of difficult interlinked problems, that’s what debt, you know unravelling the debt problem is a difficult but when it’s aggregate in this whole economy is a difficult and slow process and whether we will get there is you know, going back to your point you know unemployment Government debt, we have a huge Government debt problem and we have an unemployment problem, how do you solve an unemployment problem?  Government expenditures.  How do you solve a debt problem?  Not having Government expenditures, you know what do you need to get your debt low, you need growth.  How do you get growth?  Spend more but that’s also how you get debt, so yeah there’s all these difficult decisions at the margin, right that’s where we have to hope these guys, you know do a good job selling whatever they are selling.  Go ahead, I better just take two more and we’ve got to stop go ahead.Participant 3:  Tell me you said part of the problem is a kind of what they call a political class, do you see younger political groupings coming up of people in their thirties or forties who are ready to take power or are they all just leaving?  I don’t see anybody new in the media that seem ready to go into Government and replace but when our present crop retire as they will have to eventually and are there people there, are they coming in? Are there people there who could give leadership? Are they coming in? Do you meet people...?That question is beyond me, I do, I didn’t mention but the political class in the noughties, in the second half of the Celtic Tiger did fail in a really spectacular way in financial regulation and property, I mean the Mahon Tribunal issues they are also related to property, so there was a very corrupt system for a developed western economy in the early years of the 21st Century, but how can we replace, sorry I’ve only lived in this country 20 years I’m not old enough, go ahead.Participant 8: Actually similar to what this gentlemen was talking about, I’m just wondering about competitiveness, I mean isn’t that a big issue in terms of the price of everything went up in Ireland and we became less competitive.Correct in the second part of the Celtic Tiger.Participant 8:  Tied back into vested interests and the political class is the sense that there’s still like doctor’s fees, like dentist’s, professional fees are still much higher than they are in the rest of Europe and this is still obviously an issue in terms we obviously have to pay for it, professional fees and we ... the Government has to pay for them.  So I mean it’s tackling that problem.Yes absolutely, I think that absolutely is really you know one of the things to get the economy continuing to, it has had a big improvement in competitiveness over this terrible five year period, but at the same time that has to not stop, but that’s something where they are making progress, there is some slow progress I think on that one, you know.  Okay so thanks very much and I hope you enjoyed and got something.  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 Ronan Lyons talk.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode economist Ronan Lyons talks about the Irish property market, the changes over time to house prices in Ireland and what might happen in the future. This talk, one of a series on the Irish Economy, was recorded in front of a live audience in the Central Library on 15 March 2012.Thanks very much.  I’ve got a good bit to get through and because obviously it’s a topic we are all very interested in, but I also am conscious that it’s a topic that everyone has a lot of opinions about.  So what I might suggest is that if you have questions do put up your hand.  I’ll try and avoid getting into very detailed discussions during the talk, but I do want to let you guide the talk as well as obviously my own thoughts on Ireland’s property market, and how we got here and where to next. In terms of what I hope to cover today, really there’s just a few simple rules that I want to get out into sort of the general discourse when we think about the property market.  And this is from the point of view of buyers or sellers of property, or renters of property, but also from the point of view of policy makers.  If we can get these types of rules or stylised facts as the social scientists like to say, if we can get them in to government thinking, it’s unlikely we’ll find ourselves in the similar situation again.  So the four stylised facts that I’m going to base the talk around, the first is that real estate is a bad investment.  The second is that the property market is imperfect.  Third is that a combination is a service and we need to remember that.  And then the last is that governments actually can have a proactive role in managing the housing, the property market.  But it needs to view itself as an organisation or a regulator that is managing a market rather than I suppose, intervening for the sake of intervening, or not intervening for ideological reasons. The context of this, given that it’s the Dublin City Libraries, the context of this is that we’ve seen it all before.  If you look at the price of a Mountjoy Square townhouse after it was built in the 1790’s, in all its grandeur before the Act of Union, it would have sold for around 8,000 pounds, back in the day.  Less than a lifetime later, it had fallen by 94 per cent, to 500 pounds.  So, we’re not living in unprecedented times from the point of view of the property market.  Certainly the crash that we’re seeing in Ireland now is among the biggest in the developed world at a national level, and it’s certainly in the top tier, the premier league of property market crashes if you start counting for example, cities or states within US as their own economies comparable to Ireland.  Ireland is certainly mixing it among the countries that have had the most violent bubble and crash.  But certainly if you keep your perspective long enough, this is not something that is unprecedented.  Property prices rise and property prices fall, and we’ve seen pretty dramatic episodes of that in Ireland in the past. So going back to the, sort of the four, this will be the sort of an outline of the talk as well.  So real estate is a bad investment.  It’s sort of odd and particularly if you associate me with a sort of a daft.ie hat on and for me to be coming up here saying, you know, don’t get your hands on property, it’s not a very good asset to have.  And particularly when you see the conventional wisdom if you go online you’ll see either Mark Twain said this buy land they’re not making any more, or occasionally you’ll see either attributed to a Don at an Oxford college or a Cambridge college, saying well we’ve done pretty well, they’re not making any more land, let’s just hold that.  So that’s the sort of conventional wisdom around property and around real estate, is they’re not making any more of it, grab it now because the price is going to go up.  But I suppose an economist would say, well if everyone knows that, then surely the price would already reflect that rather than nobody realising this and you’re sort of ahead of the curve.  And in fact, we can have a look at it over the long run, I’ve already mentioned something from the 1800s and this is the Herengracht which I think means the gentleman’s canal in Amsterdam.  And this was built just in the heyday of the Netherlands, I suppose the early heyday of the Netherlands in the 1620’s, just after it had broken with Spain and it was the global financial centre.  And they built this canal and one of the reason that I mention it is, that they have every transaction ever on the Herengracht, they have recorded in the archives.  All the way from 1628 right through to 2012.  And in the 1990’s an economist did a study of transactions on this one street, so you know you’re not comparing sort of, different cities or you know you’re not comparing different house types.  You’re actually looking at sort of 50 properties traded over and over again for hundreds of years.  And at first glance you could make the case that you know, property prices seem to go up and there’s ups and downs there, but definitely if you look and this is indexed so, the price when it was built, when these houses were built is set to 100, and you can see that it goes up and it seems to go up albeit with a wild swing, it seems to go up there towards the end of the period.  And if you actually extend that a little bit, that goes to 1962.  If you extend it a little bit more to 1972 you’ve to reset the scale and you can see, well actually you know, those final twenty years prices did seem to rise dramatically.  So what am I here saying that you know, property prices don’t go up over time, it’s not a good asset to have.  Well, this guy who did the study, what he also included was, this is nominal prices and this is just what you see on the accounting ledger.  But he also included real prices, so controlling for inflation.  And obviously general inflation comes and goes, and it’s also sort of swings and roundabouts.  But when you adjust for inflation this is property prices in the Herengracht in Amsterdam over almost, well certainly 350 years.  And soon when they update this it will be nearly 400 years.  And you can see there’s certainly ups and downs and there was a long period there where it was above the average and then there was a long period, that’s about a lifetime, this is about a lifetime as well, but it was below the average.  But certainly that red line is the average for the whole period and as of 1972 you can’t really see any difference from the long run average.  There’s a little bit but not a lot.  And in fact if you were to just take a simple trend and say what’s the trend in this?  the trend is actually down.  And the real price of property goes down.  Now clearly it’s not a line, there’s sort of peaks and troughs.  So there are property market cycles.  There’s certainly no evidence from this one street in Amsterdam for which we’ve really just information that real property prices, once you’ve accounted for inflation are that they go up.Participant 1:  Sorry Ronan, a very quick question.  Are you including rent in that?That is property prices relative to the cost of living.  Now the cost of living as you measure it going back into the 1600’s it is probably going to be based off a simple basket of goods.  I don’t think rent is in that.Participant 1: No, no, no what I mean is, this is an investment on which somebody was getting a rental return on.Oh yeah, let me come to that a bit later on, yeah, yeah.  So this is, this is just the conventional wisdom that if you buy your own property that you can make lots of money out of that.  And that when you die your property will be worth an awful lot more than when you bought it.  And what this is saying is that, well certainly you can make the case that house prices match inflation.  So your house is a good store of value.  So if you were to get all your savings now, let’s say you have 100,000 in savings and you put it all into property now, what this is saying is that at any given point in the future, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but our expectation is that in 20 years time or in 50 years time or 100 years time, that 100,000 would have kept its value.  So if we’ve switched to the new Irish punt or if we’re in a Euro 2 or if we’re in the Euro or whatever happens that property will more or less keep its value.  But it certainly won’t increase its real value.  And if you look at the literature, there’s not a big literature on this.  Studies like the one for Amsterdam are kind of rare.  And one of my research ambitions is to construct something similar fore Ireland over the same period.  But certainly there’s evidence from the US over a shorter period, say 100, 150 years that the same thing happened.  If you look at, there’s one on commercial real estate in New York and there’s one on house prices in Boston.  And again and again on these studies, you find that property is very good at matching inflation but never really beats inflation.  And by contrast, if you have a savings account that will typically beat inflation.  Now this is obviously not taking into account any explicit rents.  If you’re a landlord rather than an owner/occupier, a landlord will get rents and that might change the calculus.  But certainly if you’re just looking at it for capital gain, you’re unlikely to get it in property. But surely Ireland is different? And this is, you know, what if this would be the slide I would have shown in 2007.  You know, is Ireland going to be any different? And it looks there, you’ve got this very nice sort of expediential curve of house prices.  This is based off the, I should have put the source at the bottom, this is based off the Department of the Environment statistics, merged with later data points like the Daft index and the CSO index.  So that gives us one index going from 1975 to 2007.  But again, this is just without correcting for inflation.  And also, it’s ignoring what happened after 2007, which we’re obviously all very familiar.  So if you do both those adjustments, if you add in the extra couple of years, but more importantly if you correct for changes in just everyday crises, what you see is a very different picture emerges.  This is in current euro terms.  So the figures there are what, 100,000 euro is now or what 400,000 euro is now today.  And you can see that the average house price was about 100,000 euro in 1975, got up to sort of 375,000, and has fallen right back down to about 175,000, as of the last quarter of 2011.  And what’s particularly interesting in this graph, we can come back to this bit later on, is the first bit.  That looks a bit familiar, doesn’t it? That looks exactly like the Amsterdam picture.  Up to 1995 you had sort of bubbles and crashes, or booms and busts maybe if we want to have a boom to be a small increase and a bubble to be a big increase.  We had sort of booms and busts here.  But certainly the overall trend is flat.  So again, I don’t want to be too repetitive on this, but from a policy maker point of view and from our everyday lives point of view, we shouldn’t be expecting anything more than house prices to match inflation.  And this has big implications if you bought during the bubble.  If you bought in 2004, 2005, 2006, what is your expectation about the value of your property in 10 years time or in 20 years time or in 50 years time.  Typically, certainly up to 2006, 2007 people would have said well property sort of increases at 5 per cent a year, we’re a bit above that now, but that’s what we think property prices do.  That’s sort of the conventional wisdom.  But what I’m saying to you is really we should be thinking more like 2 per cent a year.  Because that’s what the rate of inflation is, well that’s what we’re targeting as the rate of inflation.  So that’s what we should be targeting as the rate of increase in house prices.  It also has an impact for everyone in Ireland in some sense.  If you bailed out a bank, which we all have, and if you took over some of these loans, and if you now manage these loans, as we do through NAMA, what is our expectation for the value of property in 10 or 15 or 20 years time.  What’s our expectation about long term economic value which is NAMA’s watchword.  Well, really you know, if we’re thinking 2 per cent a year growth in property prices, that’s very different to perhaps what Brian Lenihan envisaged originally when he introduced the NAMA legislation.  I think he had, sort of a 5 per cent a year model in his head. And this graph just takes a scenario where property prices fall by about 60 per cent to 150,000, in next year, and then increase by 2 per cent the year after that, nice and smoothly.  Now obviously we know there’ll be future bubbles and future busts, but we don’t know when they’re going to be.  So without knowing them, let’s just say okay 2 per cent a year.  And it’s a useful exercise because it tells us when we might see property prices reaching their peak level again.  And they reached their peak in 2007 and by this stage I will be hopefully retired in the 2050’s.  We don’t know how long people my generation will have to work before we get to retire.  But I hope to be retired by the time we see prices reach the same level again.  And that’s important for policy, as well as important for our own everyday lives, when we buy property. That’s the first sort of bullet point.  The second one is that the property market is imperfect.  And here I’ll talk a little bit about, sort of economic theory.  In a way I was implicitly giving out about policy makers, for the last few minutes, saying what their plans were about NAMA, and so on.  Now I get to give out about economists.  So economics is about assumptions in a way.  That might sound like a bad thing, but obviously we need to make assumptions.  If we want to make any sort of model of the world around us.  If we want to understand how the economy works, without actually just replicating it completely, we need to make some sort of assumptions.  The issue around assumptions is that, some assumptions are made just to simplify, to strip out unnecessary detail we don’t need to know every last little bit of, so we’ll just simplify and assume that, whatever it might be.  The other category of assumption is made not out of simplification, but out of necessity.  We actually don’t know how something works, so in the absence of knowing how it works, we’ll just assume that this happens.  And the danger in economics is when you mistake one for the other.  When you say for example, that oh well there’s no mark-up that producers when they sell their goods don’t enjoy any mark-up.  You might think that’s just stripping away unnecessary detail and there is going to be some mark-up, but let’s say it’s 10 per cent, but that 10 per cent doesn’t matter.  When we want to understand markets, we’ll just assume that there is no mark-up that producers enjoy.  Well maybe the mark-up matters in a way that affects the outcome.  So if we’re looking at equilibrium or if we’re looking at disequilibrium or a market in flux, maybe these things matter.  And, I think a lot of what went wrong in economics was this mistake.  Mistaking a simplification out of necessity for one out of luxury.  We don’t need to worry about this detail, but actually if was detail that was crucially important, we just don’t understand it.  And an obvious example of that in sort of very big macro models is that most models, this is going to sound funny, but most models in economics, most macro economics models don’t have any money in them.  Because money is regarded as an unnecessary detail.  And that you can express prices in something else.  Money is just a form of wealth or a unit of account.  Let’s just say there’s something over here called wealth, and we know how to express the price of goods and services anyway, so we don’t need money.  That’s all well and good until you’ve got a crisis in your financial system, until banks stop lending to each other and to households and to businesses.  In which case, understanding how money works is very important.  And that was a classic mistake that macroeconomics in particular made, over the sort of period up to 2007.  And it’s really just sort of getting on top of all this now.  Realising, one guy in Oxford has a paper called, putting Goldman Sachs into a model of the economy, you know it’s this idea about how do you put investment banking, how do you put liquidity crunches and liquidity traps in credit crises, when do you put these into a model of the economy? That’s all very highfalutin.  How does this relate to the Irish property market? Well, one of these expectations that economists like to make is called rational expectations.  And rational expectations means that people aren’t stupid.  That’s its motivation and that sounds like a reasonable assumption to make.  But de facto what it means is that consumers and firms, but in particular consumers can process all the information that’s out there, and come up with a completely balanced judgement out the other side.  And this might be the case 30 years from now when we’ve got super computers that can take all these market signals and give us an answer whether to buy or sell.  But certainly now and definitely 30, 40 years ago people didn’t have little models in their head that were crunching these types of regressions and coming up with out with coefficients, we just don’t do that.  And the question is do we not do this to an extent that affects the outcomes? And the argument that I would make is that in property, yes.  In property what we tend to do, not just in Ireland but generally in property is take the last 5 years, or maybe a longer period, but certainly the last 5 years, and use that as the basis of our expectation for the future.  And this obviously gives the property market some sort of like, it’s an extrapolative path.  That because we buy now, based on what we think prices are going to be in the future, that has an impact in terms of the prices today.  So if you think property prices are going to go up by 5 or 10 per cent a year, over the next 5, 10 years, you’re going to pay a lot more now than if you think prices are even going to maybe stable or even fall.  So our expectations are hugely important in the property market.  And if our expectations aren’t rational in that economic sense of the word, if they’re adaptive that has a big implication for boom and bust cycles.  Boom and bust cycles will tend to be amplified if we have rational expectations.  That’s really just that point there in the headline.  In terms of, I suppose one of the questions in the title was how did we get where we are? We got where we are, we got such a vicious bubble and crash cycle by managing to tick every box in the sort of theoretical bubble.  There’s a book by a guy called Kindleberger (Manias, panics, and crashes: A history of financial crises), I presume there’s copies in the library and it’s a classic text and it’s reissued every sort of 5, 10 years to update with the latest bubbles.  And the start it outlines what is in a crash, what’s in a bubble and what’s in a crash.  And one of the first things that happens in a bubble cycle is something comes along, some shock comes along.  It could be, traditionally it was you know, a new king is put on the throne or maybe a new government is elected.  More recently we tend to think of technological shocks that we discover something we didn’t know before and this changes peoples’ expectations about the future.  Ireland’s sort of favourable change in conditions was moving from 1980’s stagnation to 1990’s growth.  This sort of changed the path of the economy.  If you asked people in 1987 what they thought the economy would be like now in 2012, they would have had a very different answer than if you asked people in 1997 what they thought 2012 would be like.  So that was an initial change and that gave us an initial momentum in the mid 1990’s both in terms of economic growth and employment, but also in the property market.  Now, that in and of itself is not enough to cause a bubble.  To sustain a bubble you need an increase in the supply of whatever you’re having the bubble in, be it tulips or property or shares of a particular company.  And you also need some way of getting credit.  Because really prices only get crazy when people can borrow, otherwise there’s only a limited amount of income.  If people are borrowing and leveraging up, so that they’ve got savings of 20,000 and they can borrow 200,000.  That’s really what adds fuel to the fire of a bubble.  And in Ireland we managed to tick both those boxes really, really well.  So entering the Eurozone gave Irish banks which had a history of never really being able to get credit on international capital markets.  They found it very difficult to borrow because Ireland was a small economy and was quite volatile and susceptible to attack by speculators or the markets in general.  All of a sudden these Irish banks are in the Eurozone and had access to, in particular German savings, but just generally access to credit.  So that was the accelerant and then to really seal the deal, to suck everyone into the bubble you needed a fresh supply of houses because if there was only a set amount of houses then not everyone would have been able to take part in the bubble.  It might have been bad in a price way, but wouldn’t have been bad in terms of sucking in as many people.  So they suck in as many people as possible you need an increase in supply.  Typically bubbles are about shares, so the company issues new shares.  What we did in Ireland was we managed to have a huge increase in the supply of property.  And that brought a lot more people in, and when that ran out we just brought property abroad.  So there were all these factors, there were all these boxes we were ticking about the stereotypical bubble and crash cycle, but as of 2005, 2006, 2007 all these factors were here - that’s not the clearest is it? there’s three different shades of grey there - but it’s analysis of the ESRI and IIB, which is now KBC.  They did consumer sentiment surveys.  And they did them every month.  But in January they asked them, what were their expectations about the property market.  And you can see it doesn’t really matter which group you look at, long term owners, recent owners, people who want to but, people who are looking to invest, people who aren’t in any way interested in buying property.  They all didn’t see the end of the bubble.  They saw a slowdown, particularly optimistic were the people who wanted to buy.  They said no I think property prices are going to increase by just 3 per cent rather than 7 or 8 per cent.  But all of these factors that I mentioned on that slide, they were there throughout this period, and yet people just looked at the last five years and said, what happened over the last five years is the best guess for what will happen over the next five years. Participant 2:  Sorry could I just ...Sure.Participant 2: ... is there one factor that might be left out, an important factor.  Because of the sort of hierarchical or inequitable nature of the society, that a lot of people both in the media and in the economics area had a vested interest also in speaking up the market.  And sorry I don’t want to mention because taxes and, you know, everybody’s getting cut.Yeah.  I think the weakness there is not so much that they wanted to talk up the market knowing that they were talking up the market, I think it was a blind spot.  So they were talking up the market because they honestly believed it.  I think if you were ... let’s say you’ve got the sort of, when things go wrong, it’s either because people were evil or people were stupid.  So either we didn’t see something coming, or we saw it coming but still went that way anyway despite knowing the consequences.  And I think of it as a stupidity rather than the evil.  Yes there was a vested interest, but I think it was blindness, that the people who were or had a vested interest couldn’t see any weakness.  And if they were able to see the weakness, they would have got out of it.  They would have kept talking it up but they would have got out of it.  But all these people, and you still meet them.  I meet people now and they, some of them saw a bubble in property but sold their house and bought bank shares.  So instead of seeing a 60 per cent fall they saw a 99.9 per cent fall.  You know, it wasn’t that, and it wasn’t that no one saw it, Morgan Kelly turned his attention in 2006, but David McWilliams had been saying it since 2001.  The people who were talking it up honestly believed it.  Otherwise they would have sold out and they didn’t sell out.Participant 2: So that seems, you know, there were so many could believe so strongly in it, where does that come from?  It sounded like a mania, a madness or fanaticism attached to a particular idea.Yeah, and maybe that’s a bullet point that’s left out of there.  I don’t know if it’s fourth on that list or if it’s just a separate point that needs to be made, but part of what makes a bubble and a crash so bad, is its intoxication.  Is that if everyone is seen to be making money then everyone does start believing that this time it is actually different.  And the best example I can come up with for that is Isaac Newton wrote about this bubble, I think it was the South Sea bubble in the 1720’s.  My timing could be all off, he could have been long dead by that stage.  No, but I think it was the South Sea bubble of the 1720’s.  And he wrote about how stupid it was in 1721 and said he couldn’t believe that everyone was being sucked in by the South Sea bubble.  And in 1724 he took his life savings and invested in the South Sea because he thought maybe he was wrong.  And in 1725 he lost all his money and for the rest of his life you weren’t allowed mention it in his presence.  So if it can turn really, really smart people stupid that just shows the power of the bubble.  And it also shows why we should be so vigilant in doing the best we can to prevent, as bad a bubble from happening again.  And a lot of that was at an EU level, but also at a domestic, regulatory level it was about getting used to life within the Eurozone.  We prepared for entering the Eurozone, but we never prepared for life in the Eurozone.  And what it would mean for our Irish banks to have access to practically infinite credit.  And what would it mean for the Eurozone, for all these banks to be able to deal with each other without any currency risk.  Nobody really prepared for that.  And certainly if you could have tackled that, you could definitely have tackled this.  And you would have taken the sting for the last five years out of the bubble.  You wouldn’t have been able to prevent the bubble entirely.  That was, there was always going to be some element of increasing credit, increasing property and increasing growth that would have led to a, some sort of bubble.  But perhaps maybe no more than, sort of this kind of bubble.  Maybe a little bit bigger, but that kind of bubble and crash. Participant 3: Sorry, there didn’t seem to be an analysis or study of the situation that had changed, like they didn’t go in and analyse the situation, the people, say government?Yeah, so government should have been aware of Kindleberger’s book for example and should have been saying rather than, obviously Bertie has his famous quote about how he doesn’t know how people don’t go off and commit suicide.  But there was another quote where he, in 2006 said because of all these experts telling us house prices are going to fall people didn’t buy in 2005 and now house prices are even more expensive in 2006, and I hope those experts you know are ashamed of themselves, basically.  You don’t want that kind of attitude among your elite.  You don’t want them for whatever reason, to be just picking some bizarre, arbitrarily picking some asset and telling people to buy it.  And that’s not the kind of country you want.  You want a country where if there’s dissent, that dissent is factored into policy making decision.  And that wasn’t the case and, if not for this talk but a broader talk about public service reform would be getting dissent into the system.  If someone disagrees, get them in, get them to explain why they disagree and see if you need to strengthen your policy proposal on the basis of their disagreement. So people didn’t see the end of the bubble and currently people find it hard to see the end of the crash.  So recently, this is with my Daft hat on, we surveyed 2000 users of the site about their expectations of the property market.  And they perhaps correctly, feel that average prices are going to fall by about 10 per cent in 2012.  But then you ask them about the next 5 years, what do they think, where will house prices be in 2017 relative to now.  And only about 1 in 6 saw house prices being any way higher in 2017 than now.  And that’s only slightly bigger than the proportion of people who thought house prices would be at least 35 per cent lower in 2017 than today whereas than January when they were doing the survey.  So there’s a, that works on the upside and the downside.  As prices are increasing people find it hard to see the end of prices increasing.  And when prices fall, people find it hard to see the end of property prices falling.  And we are going to, we’re going to turn around one day and realise that the crash is long over.  We won’t turn around and realise the crash ended yesterday.  It’ll be a situation where only after a year or 18 months do you realise, do you know what actually, the crash ended about 18 months ago.  And that’s the way it works because the statistics are murky.  It’s difficult to know exactly when things turn.  And also because of adaptive expectations people find it difficult to change their sentiment towards the market.  So a combination is a service.  So I’ve said that, you know, when we think about the property market in our day to day lives, don’t think of it as investing in real estate, think of it as buying accommodation and accommodation is a service.  This is, for those of you who know your national accounts, we calculate our GDP by adding up consumption, investment, government and trade so leave out the government and trade for the moment, housing is consumption it’s not investment.  Building houses is investment, that’s fine.  But we need to think of property as a service not as an investment.  And I would caution against, you know, sort of we talked about Newton there a few minutes ago, I’d caution against Newton style economics, what goes up must come down, it seems appealing but in terms of what we should expect in terms of house prices I’m not saying that real house prices necessarily have to go back to 100,000, that’s what we did see in Amsterdam and that’s what the literature generally points to but we shouldn’t just think that is always going to happen.  If we go back to that Amsterdam graph there were periods when the average was higher and periods when the average was lower.  So economics is not what goes up must come down economics is supply and demand and we can pretty much take supply as fixed.  The sort of urban economists and housing economists tend to do this anyway, the supply of housing is quite slow to move, even if people start building now it takes a number of quarters, maybe even a number of years, to get a real change in the supply of housing but specifically in relation to Ireland there’s so little construction activity at the moment and that’s unlikely to change any time soon that we pretty much know the supply of housing in Ireland for the next 5 years.  So if supply is fixed then we need to look at demand and typically people look at sort of the income to house price ratio, that’s the easiest for an individual household to do because they know their income and then they just multiply out and say okay well let’s say four times our income and then we get a house price and that’s our budget for housing.  And that’s about affordability and if we look at house prices relative to incomes we can go back to 1988, I haven’t yet found good income data before 1988, but if you look at 1980 to ’95 and ’95 is sort of that cut off before things changed the average house price was about 3½ times household income.  And household income is different to the average industrial wage, household income is if you’ve got let’s say 12 jobs for every household that means every fifth household has two people working in it you need to factor that in and that did change a bit, we went from sort of every sixth house having a second income to every third house having a second income, a second full income, between 1990 and 2005.  Now that’s sort of a ...  that’s just for your own ...  that’s more sort of like a postscript or a footnote that when you’re calculating your household income we’re looking at the country you don’t get sidetracked by the average industrial wage, you do actually know that you’ve to multiply it up by something.  Anyway that’s for the mathematicians among you.  The point of this slide was that up to ’95 you were talking about 3½ times household income was the relationship between the average house price and the average income.  In 2005/2007 we’d gone to twice that, we’d gone to about 7½ times the average household income.  And what you can do is you can actually do a nice exercise and say well if we had never gone above sort of this long run average what would house prices have been in Ireland.  And that’s the dotted line in here.  So how should house prices have evolved if you believe that this income ratio is the best way of calculating house prices?  And you can see that it was roughly right up until about 1996 and then house prices increased a lot faster than they should have but the fall has been a lot greater because the fall of income hasn’t been as large as the ... even taking into account unemployment, it hasn’t been as large as the fall in house prices and perhaps optimistically we can see that the gap here in 2011 quarter 4 is actually quite small.  Now if you believe this house price to income ratio is what matters.  What I would say is that we need to be careful with the income ratio, it’s a symptom, as I say its affordability, it’s not actually the route of what gives a property a value, it’s not the cause it’s the symptom.  And some of the increase in house prices may actually be due to the fact that Ireland went from a high interest rate environment to a low interest rate environment.  Suppose incomes never changed but we went from Ireland having an average interest rate, as you can see there of, say 12 per cent to Ireland having an average interest rate of let’s say 6 per cent, 12 per cent and 6 per cent, then you would expect house prices to possibly double because the affordability ... banks ultimately go by what you can afford on a month-to-month basis and if the interest rate is half of what it was then those first few mortgage repayments are going to be, roughly speaking, half, not quite but something like that.  So maybe some of the increase we saw in house prices is just to do with the fact that we’ve gone from being our own economy battling against all the odds to being a bit like one of the US States safe in the comfort of the Eurozone, of course we all know it’s not as straightforward as that, but let’s say safe inside the comfort of the Eurozone.  And really when we think about the value of property ultimately it comes from rents, it comes from the value of the service that someone is enjoying.  So, for example, income multiples won’t tell you why two houses next door to each other are very different in terms of price or why one city is more expensive than another city.  So when we’re calculating the GDP figures and we’re adding up consumption and investment and government and trade one of the most important services is what’s called imputed rent and this is what owner occupiers enjoy as they hold some of their wealth in property.  They enjoy a rent that they never have to pay.  But what is that rent?  Can we understand what that rent is?  How much it would be if you were to try and rent out the same accommodation you currently own, if you own accommodation.  And in that sense the ratio of rents to house prices is much more fundamental to what property is worth than the ratio of incomes to house prices.  This is just a summary of some of the academic research I’m doing, it’s trying to figure out what gets capitalised into house prices and there’s all these different services that we have that are reflected in the price of houses but how to read this is if this is going from one kilometre away from a particular property to 100 metres away so if you move a property from a kilometre away from the coast to a 100 metres away from the coast the effect is about 10 per cent, you increase the value of the property by 10 per cent.  These are the different services.  Coast is one.  If you’re close to a polluting factory or facility you get like a 1 or 2 percentage point penalty for being close to a polluter.  Being close to a primary school seems to have a big negative impact which is about counterintuitive, you know, why would being close to a primary school be ... it’s noise, it’s congestion, it’s the lack of parking spaces.  These things get factored in.  Part of my next phase of research is to separate out small schools and big schools and with secondary schools progression rates to third level education, see if people are willing to pay for good schools rather than schools which have a poor record or which are maybe large classes or whatever it might be.Participant 4: What’s the second one the list?That’s bathing, that’s actually beaches and bathing facilities, so being close to a beach rather than the coast or in addition to the coast has a huge impact especially in the bubble but also in the crash.  And then there’s a comparison of urban versus rural and then prices versus rents as well.  So as I say a lot of the detail here is superfluous in today’s talk but the point of this slide is to show that an awful lot of things get factored into house prices and into rents because these are services that we’re paying for and the value of a property is the number of bedrooms, it’s the type of property it is, it’s the size of the garden, it’s the amenities that it has access to and that’s, if we can think in those terms we’re much less likely to ever get caught out with bubbles and crashes in the future.  We will never be able to prevent them entirely but we certainly won’t accelerate them as we did in the past. So this is maybe if there are any potential first time buyers in the crowd this is maybe the most important slide, think like an investor.  If you have a property that rent for 800 euro a month that’s annual rental cost or annual rental income, if you’re the tenant or the landlord, of about 10,000 euro and what’s happening in the fire sale auctions at the moment is people are looking at these 10,000 euro rental income apartments or houses and saying right okay that gets me 10,000 a year I will give you ten times that, I’ll give you a 100,000.  In a healthy property market they may say I’ll give you fifteen times that.  I’ll give you 150,000.  But they work it out as a multiple of the annual rent and that’s a very sensible way for a first time buyer to think.  It’s easier to think in terms of your own income because you know what your own income is and you can multiple that by four pretty easily but if you lose your job how much is someone else going to be prepared to pay for that property, it’s nothing to do with your income it’s to do with how much it would rent for, the services that that property offers you.  Yeah?Participant 5:  What about the effect of Rent Allowance on it?Yeah, yeah that is ... it was the ... if I had an hour and a half I would have gone into Rent Allowance.  So the Rent Supplement Scheme is potentially keeping rents higher than they otherwise would be in most parts of the country with the sort of honourable exception of Dublin, south of the Liffey it seems, if you look at the thresholds for Rent Supplement and you look at prevailing rents they seem very close and Minister Joan Burton is actually reducing the thresholds for Rent Supplement and the idea there is to try and let rents determine themselves naturally.  Find out what people are willing to pay and then give people assistance based on what the natural price is rather than the tax payer footing the bill and keeping rents higher than they otherwise would be.  And that obviously has an impact of competitiveness as well if accommodation costs are higher than they need to be.  But it’s a very good point; it’s something to be aware of.  If you are looking at a particular property is Rent Supplement keeping the rent higher than it otherwise would be?  We should find out in the next 6 months.  But, I don’t know where I’m going with this, is that you can also look over the last sort of 50 ... not 50, would it be 35/40 years and see well what is this relationship between rents and house prices look like and does that tell us anything about the bubble. So this is the ... the yield is just the annual rent for the average property relative to the house price, the purchase price, that’s the blue line.  And the interest rate is the prevailing interest rate for mortgage borrowing in Ireland and these go from 1978 so that’s why we start then.  And you can see there seems to be, I don’t know, something weird happening in 1978, the CSO is just getting on top of its various indices, I wouldn’t worry too much about that, but what you can see is generally speaking particularly the crucial period, comparing say the 80s and the early 90s with the late 90s and noughties, you can see that the yield is very closely related to the interest rate and in fact maybe rising house prices in 1996 were actually justified by Ireland being in now instead of this 12 per cent interest rate country by being something like a 6 per cent interest rate country and that’s what you’re seeing here.  Interest rates go down significantly and house prices rise but you can see there with ... you can’t really see it easily with the yield but we know from the last graph that house prices start rising in ‘96/’97.  The damage was probably done, in my own opinion, when interest rates were kept lower than would normally have been the case because the German and French and Italian economies were anaemic when Ireland was booming.  So this, I would argue, the 6 per cent is where interest rates will probably be in the Eurozone in the long run but we had interest rates of sort of 4 per cent rather than 6 per cent and that lured the yield down from where it seems to have been quite comfortable, down for at least a couple of years.  But then people said well hang on a second it looks like we’re going to have really low interest rates, not 6 per cent we’re going to have 4 per cent interest rates, so that then sucked the yield further down.  And the problem is as soon as interest rates when back up to normal levels, this is the green line going up here, the property market was hugely exposed because prices had increased relative to rents far more than they should have.  And you can do a ... you can add in a third column, not just the income ratio and actual prices, you can add in a third column which says what should house prices have been sort of since 1978 or whatever, what should they have been, and you can track that and you can see that yes quite a good bit of the good bubble mightn’t actually ... certainly when you think back to should they be at 100,000, quite a good bit of the bubble was probably just Ireland changing from a high interest rate environment to a low interest rate environment but certainly there was a substantial chunk of the bubble left over that was pure bubble, it was nothing to do with incomes, it was nothing to do with rents.  I could go ... if anyone is interested in the mechanics of exactly how it’s worked out I can do that, it’s probably well beyond what we’ve got time for today. Okay so this is maybe why you’re here, some crystal ball gazing, I don’t know, when is it all going to end in terms of price falls ? Well asking prices are down by 52 per cent certainly they were down by 52 per cent on average by the end of 2011 from their peak in mid 2007.  And that sort of hides an average of ... it masks difference between Dublin and the rest of the country, Dublin is something like 56 per cent and the rest of the country is something like 48 per cent and there will be a Daft report actually - get the plug in - a new Daft report in the first week of April which will have the figures for January, February and March.  But let’s say that house prices have fallen by a further 5 per cent since the end of 2011 and let’s say that when people actually trade, when you go and you buy a house, now you don’t go ‘I’ll give you your asking price’, you say ‘I’ll give you your asking price less 10 per cent’ and there is some research that I’ve been doing with the Central Bank that says this is roughly accurate and certainly up to the end of 2010 the average discount between the asking price and the closing price is about 10 per cent.  I mean if those two things are the case then the average price is down actually 58 per cent and this, for those of you who were avidly watching our news yesterday, Brendan McDonagh the Chief Executive of NAMA was in to an Oireachtas Committee and he used the same figure, he said 57/58 per cent is what he thinks house prices are actually down, property prices are actually down at the moment.  I know there was another report that said more but that was based only of cash sales and mortgages are still an important part of the market.  So that means based off the ...Participant 6: Was the transaction price in 2007 not actually higher than the asking price?  And wasn’t there a trend in ’05, ’06, ’07 auctioneers put houses in the paper at 250,000 ...And got more.Participant 6: ... and then people starting bidding 260,000, 270,000, 280,000.  That would suggest the fall is even bigger.Yeah that is certainly ... certainly in 2005/2006 that was the case.  2007 you have period where you’ve got the transaction prices started to fall but asking prices don’t realise this and asking prices go up to where transaction prices were and stay there for a while and then come down.Participant 6: So in 2007 there was a 10 per cent.Yeah, so, sorry so as of ... really asking prices were completely static throughout 2007, technically the peak was the middle of 2007 but you’re really talking about very small differences throughout the whole calendar year but transaction prices had already got to that level and had started to fall so it was taking time for sellers to realise that buyers weren’t paying as much.  So there may be a small element of that but I’d argue that, you know, 58 per cent is roughly right.  So that means the average transaction price which has as you can see peaked there, at whatever, 365,000, so it’s down at about 155,000 now, so now meaning April, May, June this year maybe.  Well 155,000 doesn’t look too bad at all relative to these income multiples or if you don’t like income multiples rental multiples, both of those would suggest that we should be in or around that.  So am I saying that, you know, house prices are going to level off as early as April, May or June?  Well I think I’ll give the typical economist answer the two hands, on the one hand I think yes, I think prices are quite close to the fundamental level, there’s a caveat there about Rent Supplement, if rents go down a lot that will affect this red line here and there’s obviously a caveat about incomes.  Yeah?Participant 7: Just with prices stabilising, if you’re looking at say just the best job security and then in the public sector where there is job security there’s no income security.  Almost everybody expects to be earning less in 2 years time than they are now one way or the other.  Surely it’s going fall due to that.Yeah.  So it comes down to statically we don’t look like we’re too far away from fundamental property values.  There’s a caveat about Rent Supplement and that would affect the red line and then there are people’s perceptions of what their income is going to be and that affects the dotted line here, so if you feel that your income, if you feel that incomes in general are going to be maybe 10 or 20 per cent lower then that’s the correction we still need from where we are.  Or if you feel that rents are going to fall, for example due to Rent Supplement revisions by 10 or 20 per cent, well then there’s further downside.  Perhaps the more important thing that whatever happens say on incomes, I actually don’t think incomes are going to fall, I don’t think this figure, the dotted line, is going to change by too much.  I think on average like we are where we are, you know, on average I think incomes are going to be roughly the same, they’re going to maybe plus or minus 2 or 3 per cent on the average but I don’t think they’re going to change dramatically.  I think the big correction in incomes has already happened.  I think there is scope for rents to fall and that will probably have an impact but I think much more important than that is that whenever we get to ... I think we’re there now and we may have to move as the fundamentals move, but I think we’re close to fundamental value.  But the problem with housing markets is they’re boom and bust and they overshoot on the way up and they overshoot on the way down.  I would never recommend trying to gain on market and find out when it’s overshooting on the way down and buy really low in the hope that you’ve got quick gains, I’d recommend looking at the fundamentals but I do think we are going to have a situation where property prices overshoot relative to the fundamentals, they go down just because of that momentum because people look at the market now and say I couldn’t possibly see prices increasing over the next 5 years so I’m going to hold off and that has an impact.  So in terms of the crystal ball gazing, you know, are we close to fundamental value?  Yes.  Does that mean property prices have bottomed out?  Probably not.Participant 8: Isn’t there some rational in the sense that there’s no great confidence in the economy because of the debt, money being taken out of the economy and the state of the banks, you know, so there’s no great sense of, you know, that you could base that, you know, because if there’s money taken out it’s probably there’s going to be less jobs and, you know, they’re going to be cut back in spending power which is a vicious circle.Yeah and that’s ... yeah, and that is sort of affecting these fundamentals.  If people’s income is cut it will actually be reflected in the red line as well, that rents fall when incomes fall, and it will also obviously affect this line here and the more you believe or anyone believes that our fundamentals are going to be affected, it’s not just a cyclical thing, that we are actually going to have to step down then that is going to get reflected in the property market.  So just because I think they’re close to fundamentals doesn’t mean that anyone has to, the fundamentals can easily move, as things get worse the fundamentals obviously are getting worse.Participant 9: I think there’s a big difference between rural and the city in Dublin, urban, like people say that in Dublin they seem to be getting help from their parents like with mortgages, down the country there’s not as much money there, prices are probably half of what they are in Dublin.The interesting thing is that when you look at how far they’ve fallen from the peak prices in Dublin have fallen by a lot more than prices in say Tipperary.  Prices in Tipperary and in Limerick and Mayo and Kerry I think are the most reluctant to fall, they have fallen by perhaps 48 to 50 per cent, whereas ... no sorry, 40 to 42 per cent, whereas prices in some parts of Dublin are down by 60 per cent.Participant 9: But perhaps on a bigger figure is it, no?Yeah now I actually would be of the view that the cities are going to recover first for a number of reasons, (a) they seem to be further down the adjustment process but more importantly over supply is tiny in a relative sense in the cities compared to some counties.Participant 9: That would be true yeah.Yeah and that’s going to have an impact on the supply obviously and an impact on the price.Participant 9: Yeah.The other side of the demand, people want to live in cities because cities are better job creators than small towns and villages so if you are young now and you’re looking at setting up your future you’re unlikely as you were ... we’ve sort of got a buy, we got like a 10 year pass on the economic laws of gravity about cities, cities suck people in.  During the sort of last 10 years of the Celtic Tiger we got a reprieve and people were able to live wherever they wanted and work but that’s not going to be the case over the next 10 years and that’s going to mean that demand in the cities is greater than demand rurally.  And supply is worse, the oversupply is worse rurally.  So I actually think if I were to map it out I would see Dublin and Cork city levelling out first and remember recovery is levelling out not increasing, if you go back to the very start.  I’ll just go over to the ... yeah go to that slide and then we can ...Participant 10:  Can you clarify on your income graph there a lot of people that work their salaries are frozen at the ’07 level and so in absolute terms they’re still receiving the same amount but in inflation terms they are short by about 4½ per cent, how is that income graph factored and is it absolute or is it inflated?I was aware of this point and the short answer is one of them (laughs) ... the first graph was actually inflation adjusted but the second one wasn’t because it’s harder to do when you’ve got rents in there as well.  So for ease and comparability I ... so you can see that it doesn’t really matter when we’re looking at 2011, the gap doesn’t really change, the inflation thing is certainly relevant when you’re looking at the past and it might be relevant in the future depending on your belief about inflation.  But it doesn’t really change the conclusion too much about where we are now if you use nominal or inflation adjusted. I know I’m pushing quite close on time so I’ll ... I mean you’ve got a sense of my overall view on, you know, getting these ideas into the policymaking system so this doesn’t happen again.  Very briefly, in terms of quick ideas for what the government can do proactively, one thing is to be aware that intervention was part of the problem and the Irish property market was one of the most intervened property markets as of 2006.  The tax incentives were so skewed that’s not what that’s ... intervention for the sake of intervention is not a solution but you can do things.  The market does need to be managed because it’s not a very good market, it’s got boom and bust cycles because of adapted expectations.  Sensible land use you can promote via site value tax, that penalised people leaving land banks empty, penalising bad or inefficient or socially unrewarding use of sites and it encourages people to use the land as best as possible.  You could encourage sensible lending by requiring banks to do covered bonds, this is what the Danish system does, if you want to lend over 30 years you’ve got to go out and borrow over 30 years and when you go out and borrow over 30 years you find out pretty quickly what people believe the interest rate over that period is going to be and therefore you pass that on to your consumers and it means that we’d be a lot less susceptible to what happens in the ECB in terms of month-to-month decisions.  And the last one is sensible borrowing, and this is softer, this is about sort of the information  infrastructure that people have but the publicly available house price register will be a large part of that, giving people the information to make the decisions.  So that’s where I’ll leave it because we’ve used up all our hour but I’m happy to deal with questions as well but I know some people may have to get back to work.Participant 11:  Just one question, it’s not mentioned in any of your slides, but do you not think our problems really began in 1977 when rates were abolished?  Local councils had no money, they did build houses.Yeah.Participant 11: Now I know there’s a lot of people saying they couldn’t get a house but if we had continued the way we were going they wouldn’t have been forced onto a market so inflating the price of houses.  I know I worked in the bank and I was told before I left, thanks be to God, I thought that the way they were managing the thing was wrong and I was told politely from my boss if you don’t want to do it Teresa there’s 1,500 out there who will and I was telling them that it’s wrong to add that into somebody’s ... they tried to bring them up to the mortgage rate, they were bringing in their bonus and overtime and every little ha’penny they could get, and I fundamentally disagreed and I was told very politely if you don’t want to do it somebody else will.  Well I was leaving so it didn’t matter but to me I think back in 1977 was when we made the first mistake because then they took no taxes on any house even.Yeah.Participant 11:  We’d no rates.  The local economy had none and now we’re complaining about 100 euro tax on houses or the thing, which is minimal.  And it’s just to keep our roads clean, the grass cut in our parks and keeping libraries open and I’m quite sure the 100 won’t cover it.Yeah I completely agree and it comes back to the second last slide there about intervention and one of the interventions, one of the worst interventions was removing any form of taxation.Participant 11: Yeah.Because then it became a vote winner.  You could get elected by saying ‘I’ll abolish whatever last tax there is in the property market’ we saw that right through to 2007.  If you go back to the ... there was the table with all the different amenities, other research has shown that if you’re close to a park your property price is higher.  But if you have a tax, like a site value tax, that reflects the value of your land you’ve got a direct way of funding local authorities to maintain parks, to build new homes, to do whatever it might be to maintain the amenities that they have.  Yeah?Participant 12: Ronan, an excellent presentation.  Thank you very much, I really enjoyed it and learned a lot from it.Thank you very much.Participant 12: I agree with you generally but I don’t think you should be making a bald statement in its own silo investing in property is a bad investment, I think you have to say property compares to cash bonds and equities as follows.Yeah.  No that’s fair enough yeah.Participant 12: I think you have to look at the two of them.  I mean you said for example that cash has kept up with inflation but you didn’t apparently but in the rent of property so if I had 20,000 which I think was the average price of a house in 1975, in a house, today it’s worth 150,000, if I had 20,000 of a deposit it’s still worth 20,000 in nominal terms so ...Yeah, no that’s a fair comment.Participant 12: ... I think and, you know, I defer to you but I think property has outperformed cash over the last 30 or 40 years and I would say historically it has outperformed cash as well.  I don’t know what a few Dutch Guilders were worth in 1640, you know, but I would imagine it’s the same over there.  I would imagine whatever price you could buy a house on the Herrenstrasse or whatever it would be a lot higher now.Yeah, no that’s ... I mean that’s a fair comment and really the point I was making was it was trying to bring some contrast to the sort of stylised idea that people have.  As you say it is true that if you bought a property in 1970 and it was whatever it might have been, 20,000, and now it’s 150,000 or 200,000, you know, that is true but I am ... I guess the point of my slides was that don’t expect that to happen again.  It might happen if inflation does it so they were real ... well they weren’t even real values but let’s say you go to real values and you say you’ve got an increase in the real value of housing that mightn’t ... we shouldn’t be expecting that to happen again but I complete take it, I’m going to ... if I give this I’m going to be adjusting and in fact I wanted to include a point about equities but I had a data source but I didn’t have the time to crunch the numbers.Facilitator: Folks maybe we’ll finish up there.  So thanks very much to Ronan for coming along.  (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 Cormac Millar's talk and reading.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode author Cormac Millar reads from his novel 'An Irish Solution' and comments on the nature of crime and crime writing, the paradoxes raised when society attempts to control criminal activities and the failings of the political establishment. Recorded in front of a live audience at the Central Library in September 2011 as part of its 'Crime and the City' series.I work in a university which is not that place because King’s College Dublin is very badly run.  It has its own website but it’s a bit out of date now.  King’s College Dublin is a very questionable type of institution.  The plot concerns the horrible murder of the president and I must say my own colleagues were very warm in their reactions (laughter) whether it was the loss of our boss of whether it was just the literary qualities of the book I couldn’t say.  So today I’m mostly going to draw on An Irish Solution, which Penguin published in 2004 and basically I’m talking about crime and the city and drugs.  Well I think that the city has got something to do with crime.  City has a whole as being suspect places every since the prophets in the Old Testament said that Sodom and Gomorrah were bad places or the City of Nineveh had to do penance or be destroyed by God or even Jerusalem on occasion is given fairly bad press.  When St. Augustine went to Carthage he described it as a cauldron of unholy loves and he would have known.  So the idea of the city is a great exciting place, it’s where all things are possible but it includes some disreputable, less admirable activities and therefore cities in general have got this sort of negative image.  However, what’s that got to do ... well it’s nothing got to do with crime but it’s also got to do with I suppose the nature of crime and especially a capital city.  A crime is in one sense a private thing, you know, I injure you, you suffer but in another sense it’s a very public thing because society has to try to protect itself and protect its members, even its dead members, and this is one of the strange paradoxes.  I mean the ultimate crime in crime fiction is murder and society is very, very interested in investigating murder.  In fact a society that didn’t try to do justice to its own members who had been wiped out wouldn’t be a society at all, to quote Michael Connolly the American crime writer ‘it’s a city that is lost if it doesn’t care for its dead citizens’.  So in one sense it’s the public, it’s the community, it’s the State that has to take notice of crime and not just the victim.  Say in murder there is no victim, there was a victim but the victim has been taken out of the equation and yet society needs to react.  So really the State comes in, the State which has the monopoly of violence, the State which has to have policies that protect us and ways of putting things right when they go wrong and in English at any rate policy and politics and police all sound very similar and I think for a good reason.  We depend on the police to enforce the laws and protect us, guardians of the peace as we call them in Ireland.  But there’s always that very old question who is going to guard the guards, who is going to police the police, who is going to keep an eye on those people who keep an eye on us?  So there’s a possibility for a crime story.  All stories arise in a gap, a gap between what should be and what is.  So once you have that possibility of a mismatch, fiction but also the criminal can find a way to flourish.  For example, if you ban betting on horses but people still bet on horses now you’ve got a lovely illegal business.  If you ban alcohol people still drink alcohol you’ve got a possibility of wonderful business.  And prohibition, people actually drank more during prohibition in American than they drank ever before or since and it certainly did wonders for organised crime.  So once you’ve got a mismatch and all societies have got a bit of double take, stuff that they say they don’t do but they really do a bit, that’s the opening both for the criminal and for the writer.  So crime and society and the State and the police and so on, they’re all mixed up in some sort of ... they’re locked together in some sort of necessary relationship.  We’ve heard from great talks in the last 2 weeks really of a factual kind and you’d wonder what right has anybody got to write fiction when you see people like Johnny Connolly and John Lonergan actually telling you the facts about what goes on and how you would know whether you were doing right or doing wrong.  And, you know, I’m a quiet citizen living in Blackrock, I don’t get involved in an awful lot of crime on a daily basis and yet I can write about it. But how?  And what does the author, a person of authority, do when they’re writing about something they don’t know that much about?  Well you read the papers and you imagine what might be.  You ask what if?  What if the guards weren’t really protecting you all that well all the time, you know, if you came from Donegal this could be a problem on occasion.  What if the courts didn’t ensure justice?  What if some criminals had good sides to them as well as bad sides to them and were more interesting characters?  There’s all kinds of what ifs that you can ask.  Fiction then will personalise, it will individualise some of these questions.  There’ s a very powerful Dublin based writer Gene Kerrigan whose novel, The Midnight Choir, does this very well and rather painfully.  He has a guard who is basically a good man but he does have the unfortunate habit of making up evidence and although he normally does this in a good cause and he thinks he’s doing right eventually his credibility is destroyed to the extent that he cannot protect those who has to protect and a horrible, horrible tragedy ensues.  So I mean that kind of paradox is gold dust to the writer.  It may not be very nice for society but the idea of the sinful preacher, the wounded surgeon, the corrupt judge, I mean as a fiction writer you’re really winning when you’ve got a character like that particularly if they’re not just one dimensional.  So what drives people to write crime fiction?  I mean you can have all kinds of ideas, most people will have an idea for a good story once a week.  My latest one involves a car wash with a bank robber going very slowly through the car wash and wondering if he’s really lost the police who were following his car (laughter) and he’ll know when he gets to the far end.  That could be a good story, if it was well told it could be a good story.  But what actually drove me to my first novel, An Irish Solution, was really a sort of a public type question, a policy type question.  I have to say I understand nothing about politics, policy, society – anything like that.  I’ve got friends who do so it becomes painfully obvious if I say something factual they kind of smile.  But at the same time even as an ignorant citizen you can ask yourself whether it was right for Mr John O’Donoghue, a great fighter against crime, to launch a policy saying that anybody caught with drugs worth more than £10,000, as it then was, would be given a minimum sentence of 10 years, okay.  That’s £10,000 worth of something in a bag and of course you immediately think what if, supposing I’m a guard and I’ve got this person and he’s got a bag with something in it and it could be worth 10,000, it could be worth 11,000 or it could get valued at 9,500 which wouldn’t be so bad ‘So now would you like to tell me whether your aunt was involved in that bank robbery last week?’ you see immediately that you’ve altered the scales of justice, you’ve corrupted the level playing field of investigation.  For some reason this law, which has now been struck down, made me completely furious.  I have to say the judges generally speaking found some reason why it couldn’t, in this particular case, be applied but it was an extremely bad law.  And that is enough to get some people writing because they think what if, what if the State were not doing what the State should do?  What if there were guardians of the peace who were no more saintly than the rest of us?  What if there were bureaucracies like FÁS or the HSE or in my case the Irish Drugs Enforcement Agency, IDEA, and these were more concerned with protecting their own positions and buttering their own toast than actually doing the job that you’re supposed to do?  So I invented this special agency. That saved me a lot of research because if you want to write a police procedure well you have to know what the police actually do.  I set up a special agency so that I wouldn’t have to know what anybody does, you know, these people have their own procedures, I can make them up as I go along, that was one big advantage.  I also put in a civil servant to run it, Mr Séamus Joyce, who is a very unlikely hero of a crime story because he’s a rather timid, quiet creature who is more interested in administration than in the pursuit of wrong doers but his other half is Billy O’Rourke and Billy in this book is a violent man who, as it turns out, has got one powerful obsession which is the protection of children.  You find out at the end of the book some of the reasons why that should be so.  But he will do anything to prevent people from abusing or maltreating children.  So that is his sort of good side which as in all fiction doesn’t necessarily always lead him to do good things and the other side of him is that he is a violent man who believes in settling things via the direct method, he doesn’t wish to involve himself always in the niceties of procedure.  So here he is talking to a journalist, Trixie Gill, who is interviewing him off the record and asking him why is Séamus Joyce, a quiet, dull civil servant who has been working in Europe for years, been put in charge of this anti drugs agency whereas a handsome fellow like yourself would be much more appropriate.  So that’s the sort of implicit question that she has asked him.  I’ll read a little bit of a scene there.“Frankly he’s a joke”, said Billy O’Rourke.  “So why did Fry appoint him?” Trixie repeated.  “Don’t think of Joyce as a human being, think of him as a bespoke suit.”  “But why should Fry appoint him over you”,[ that’s the Minister for Justice], she insisted, “Why aren’t you the head of the IDEA?  And was it Joyce who chose that poncy name?”.  “God knows” said Billy, “That was the Minister himself, wanted the Yankee effect.  Drugs Enforcement Agency with a small little ‘i’ for Ireland.  Our people on the switchboard have instructions not to pronounce it idea but to spell out all four letters ‘I-D-E-A how can we help?’ it’s all part of the image.”  Billy was such a hunk, big rough but with a touch of gentleness, one of those sources you want to be close to.  “And the head of the agency” Trixie asked “Why was it Joyce?”.  He considered her question “Okay, this is how it went, Paddy Goldsborough has his heart attack, Finance as usual were trying to shut the agency down.  Fry wants me but I’m an animal plus I’m too young, only a boy, a bit of a thug, I couldn’t be director so he parachutes in Séamus Joyce, committee star, performing seal, fresh from Europe to be our bishop and sit on his arse in the back office drafting policy documents with fancy titles like ‘ Europe Without Drugs’ while I’m out in the rain playing action man.”  Trixie refilled his glass “And the sole purpose of the IDEA is to hoist Richard Fry into the European Union Narcotics Directorate?”, Billy nodded, “We’re here to line up photo ops, preferably heroin because who cares about hash, and cocaine is for yuppies but heroin rots your teeth and makes gougers from council flats come and clean out your des res to feed the habit so we capture a few working class heroes, one or two big pushers, the odd dago master criminal and Fry is winning all the way, at last a Minister who is hitting the drug barons, meting out Dublin justice to the godfathers.  “If we screw up it’s all Séamus Joyce’s fault.  If Joyce personally screws up bad enough he doesn’t even get confirmed as head of the IDEA but if he’s a really, really good boy Fry brings him back to Europe and Joyce knows his way around Brussels.  He’s well regarded.  Half of them think he wrote Ulysses and if he does get back his stint with the IDEA will stand him in good stead because when that European juggernaut finally hits the road it’s going to be run by diplomats, negotiating with greasy foreign governments over drug supplies without sending in the marines because Europe won’t be doing marines.”So that’s the sort of set up then of how it comes that this agency exists, it’s set up by the Minister for Justice in order to create good publicity and to show that we’re making progress against crime and he actually is making progress against crime on the ground.  So the little story at the centre of the big story concerns an out of work – not out of work – but an intermittently working language teacher who is a nice respectable man, the sort who would wear a tweed suit or a tweed jacket, and he is, however, not very successful.  He’s been dismissed from one job and he’s not getting very many teaching hours in his job in London and he’s asked if he would ever deliver an envelope over to Amsterdam in connection with a planning application.  And it all seems fairly respectable but not quite because they’re paying him far too much to do this.  They have a story as to why they need him to bring this envelope over to Amsterdam but really if you were applying your critical faculties you wouldn’t believe it.  But this poor man, Jerome Fennessy, does believe it.  He goes over to Amsterdam and is given another envelope to bring back and in the other envelope we have a little package which contains a plastic bag with something white and powdery inside it.  The object of the exercise, which it later turns out that some people in the IDEA are concerned, is to trap a much bigger drug dealer because the idea is that Mr. Fennessy, when he is arrested, will be offered a better deal and a lower valuation on his drugs if he will just name the person who sent him to Amsterdam.  And he’s been told that this person is in fact this drug dealer.  And he’s being difficult about doing it, however, at the same time and coincidentally, it’s a very coincidental novel, Mr Joyce, the Director of the agency, has been to see his Minister and the Minister is getting frightened because he’s being asked why they’re getting no convictions out of their grand new policy of mandatory sentencing.  So after a rather testing interview the Minister says to Joyce ...“I know we’ll crack this legal problem.  We will show the judges who is in charge here.  And we’ll strike a blow against the proliferation of stinking plague rats who infest my country and contaminate it with their little doses of poison and drag out good name down with their internecine feuds”.  Such emotion was surprising in this disciplined man.So Séamus leaves this interview in which he’s being threatened with non confirmation in his job, because he’s not a very effective person basically, he leaves this interview and goes to the headquarters of his organisation where the drug courier, ‘the mule’ Jerome Fennessy is being interrogated.  So I’ll read a little bit from that scene as well.In his smooth grey suit and sober patterned silk tie the new arrival [ that’s Séamus Joyce] made a meek impression.  He was carrying a walkman and wearing a large headset around his plump neck.  “Aren’t you going to introduce me?” he asked in a mild voice.  “Mr Jerome Fennessy, language teacher and occasional drug smuggler” Billy asked, “Mr Séamus Joyce, Director of the Irish Drugs Enforcement Agency.  I am negotiating with Mr Fennessy here to see if we might be able to get him off the hook.  We want to follow up his contacts with the people who sent him.  If he plays ball we might be in a position to help.”  Joyce sat down heavily on a chair beside the prisoner.  “They call me Director” he confided “but I’m just the Acting Director, a civil servant by the by, not a policeman.  Apart from the enforcement side we look after legislation, policies, schools – all sorts of stuff.  I see you’re wearing a wedding ring.”  Oh, oh.  Jerome clasped his hands hiding the ring,  “she wants to remarry.”  “My wife is seriously ill” Séamus Joyce said.  “I’m sorry” Jerome said “What’s wrong with her?”.  Before Joyce could answer Billy O’Rourke got into this exchange, “I’m trying to get this man probation Séamus, he could nail one of Dublin’s ...” Séamus Joyce held up a soft hand, “Sorry Billy, I’m afraid there’s no probation”.  Billy was incredulous “Not even if he can snaffle the snowman for us?  Jerome would make a lovely witness, not your average gangster.”  Joyce looked embarrassed “No, no deals.  The agency is fighting an all out war on drugs, that’s what the Minister wants.  We must fight every case.  On what evidence did you arrest Mr. Fennessy?”  Billy looked blank for a second then he stepped out of the room returning almost at once, like a magician at a children’s party he shook Jerome’s overnight bag upside down on the table.  Out tumbled the padded envelope, Jerome’s pyjamas, his toothpaste and toothbrush, his postcards and catalogue from the Rijksmuseum, the tin of cigarillos and a second padded envelope that Jerome had not seen before.  Billy opened the second envelope, drew out its contents, another plastic wallet of white powder and a glossy magazine showing a naked child, perhaps 2 years old, holding a toy alligator. Well now they’ve got him in serious trouble, you’ve just noticed that the value of his drugs has increased by 100% and moreover there’s an association with child pornography which I think if you were heading into court to defend yourself against some crime would not be a welcome addition to your image.  However, we know that even if his name is blackened in this way, and by the way he’s totally innocent on this – both the drugs and the pornography have been planted in his bag – we know that when it comes to court, you know, there is a court system here which carefully tests all allegations against anybody and if a case is not properly made it gets thrown out and I’m sure this does happen nearly all the time.  I actually happen to know some very nice judges myself and I wouldn’t quite trust them with my life but I think I would stand a chance.  So eventually Jerome’s case, after many other vicissitudes and two deaths so far comes to court and he’s prosecuted by a scrupulous and nice old gentleman who is anxious not to whip up emotions against the man in the dock, he says in fact we should be sympathetic to anyone who finds himself in this type of position but he does of course have to present the facts.Mr McEnespy [this is the Senior Counsel for the Prosecution] Mr McEnespy’s outline of the prosecution took almost until lunchtime.  He lingered scrupulously over the arrest at Dublin Airport, over Jerome Fennessy’s verbal and written confessions, over the laboratory analysis of the substance he had imported, the two sachets being identical in their degree of purity and chemical composition must have come from the same batch, and over the distasteful character of the magazine that had been discovered in the Defendant’s overnight bag.  Mr Senan Roche’s [this is the man for the Defence] opening rebuttal was considerably shorter and more robust.  “Here we had ...”, he roared “one of the most savage and unprincipled frame ups in the history of the State”.  His client, an honourable man, a teacher who had fallen on hard times, had been cynically picked out as a sacrificial victim, had be tricked into going to a foreign land as a favour to an old school chum, had had heinous drugs and the most filthy pornography placed in his luggage, had been improperly detained and mercilessly interrogated, had been forced to confess to a crime he’d never committed and had seen his words twisted in a way that made him appear like the blackest of criminals.  And for why?  To bolster the reputation of a wasteful and unconstitutional quango, the so called Irish Drugs Enforcement Agency, which was designed for no other purpose than to flatter the vanity of an ambitious politician, the Minister for Justice, Mr Richard Fry.  The Defendant had been thrown to the IDEA by the drug barons like a piece of fish bait in furtherance of their own sinister aims and the IDEA had gratefully accepted this early Christmas present from the criminal confraternity.  If colluding with drug barons to frame innocent citizens was the best they could do the IDEA should shut up shop.  Mr Gerald McEnespy, Senior Counsel for the Prosecution, sighed, cast his eyes to heaven and was moving to call his first witness when Mr Justice McQueen intervened adjourning the court until 2 o’clock. Well when I come to be tried I will of course hope to get a very good impartial judge who will do his best or her best to give me a fair trial and we will get a correct verdict of, in my case, not guilty and everything will be quite alright.  But in this case Mr Justice McQueen is an unfair judge.  He doesn’t go too far but he slightly calls any dubious decisions in favour of the Prosecution and against the Defence. He rejects all of the Defence Motions to have a case thrown out and so on.  And eventually he having carefully summed up in the most neutral but damning of language against the Defendant the Jury come back. The Jury were back within an hour, guilty on both counts, importing drugs and importing pornography.  Mr Justice McQueen thanked them profusely for their patience in sitting through more than a week of this distasteful case.  It had been prolonged far beyond what was necessary by the tactics of wild accusation and unreasonable cross-examination adopted by the Defence.  He had allowed Mr Roche a broad level of flexibility in running those tactics lest it be thought that an already weak Defence Brief might be further cramped by heavy handed umpiring.  Now that the verdict was in, however, he could safely say that the Defence line had been grossly irresponsible and injurious to a number of dedicated public servants.  Mr Fennessy had not merely degraded himself by working for peddlers of drugs and pornography but had sought, through his Counsel, to besmirch the reputations of the men and women who strive on behalf of all of us to stem those twin ties of filth.  Mr Fennessy had been caught red handed on this occasion but how often in past had he escaped scot-free?  There was a minimum sentence of 10 years imprisonment to be imposed for the crimes of which Mr Fennessy stood convicted but normally judges tend to be restive about statutory minimum sentences feeling, perhaps rightly, that these cut across the discretionary consideration of individual circumstances which out to inform and enlighten sentencing policy.  On this occasion, however, he was happy to impose the statutory sentence in the knowledge that it fitted the depravity of the crimes committed.So there you are, an unfair trial leading to a tragic conviction, the book is over, the case is lost.  Well this is where we are in the book and as you know from reading books when things look lost, when all is lost, when we have been defeated, when disaster looms, something is bound to happen to sort things out differently.  And indeed things by the end of the book do get sorted out very differently owing to a concatenation of circumstances involving a small dangerous nun and a schoolgirl with a sense of justice.  Eventually Séamus Joyce is forced to recognise that his own agency and some of the people that he believes in, people that he is responsible for, have been acting in an unjust way and he goes and confronts his Minister about this.  Now he first takes the precaution of putting a small recording device up the sleeve of his jacket.  Because did I mention, like any heroes of crime fiction, he is a jazz enthusiast and likes to record jazz concerts surreptitiously so he happens to have a little microphone.  You should always have ... it is actually on the back of one of the covers ... anyway you should always have this little small device or ability that the hero can call on in moments of distress.  So he confronts his Minister and he explains that as a good public servant he’s got responsibilities and he has to ensure that the agency he is in charge of is discharging his functions and so on and the Minister puts a very different point of view.  But what I’ve tried to do is to give the Minister some good lines, some proper arguments of his own, because it’s no use to have a villain in a book who just says “I’m a villain ah-ha” I mean that would do for children’s stories but in adult fiction there has to be I think more dimension than just badness and wrongness to an effective villain.  So I tried to give him so valid lines some of which I actually happen to agree with myself, so if ever I become Minister of Justice it would be quite dangerous.  So he comes to visit the Minister, he happens to meet him in Buswell’s Hotel during the start of an election campaign and he starts off in his boring ... one of the things about Séamus Joyce is I tried to make him very boring and I think I’ve succeeded.“I have to tell you Minister that certain doubts have arisen about our conduct in the Fennessy case” [I mean how is that for a boring first sentence].  A moment’s chilly silence, “The Fennessy case has been tried in a court of law has it not?  The Defences objections were swept aside, that’s good enough for me M. Joyce”.  “There is evidence of the possible intimidation of witnesses Minister.”  “Who is making these complaints?” “I am not at liberty to say.”  “You must, I am your Minister.”  “Only when I have completed my review of the case, with respect.”  “My dear Séamus, one meets these cranks and busy bodies, we cannot have Government held up to ransom.”  “There may be nothing in it” Séamus said “ but if something was done wrong I’ll have to put it right, if something was done, that’s why I prefer to keep quiet for the moment.”  “You?  You? You will have to put it right?  We have a court system in this great little island, perhaps you prefer some other system?  Let the Defendant appeal if he thinks he was hard done by, it’s not for you, Mr Joyce, to undo the work of our judiciary.”  “His legal team was entitled to be informed.”  “Your position will become untenable if you start to unpick the work of the agency which you nominally lead.”  “I’m not unpicking anything, I will investigate the matter carefully and discretely and keep you informed.”  “Mr Joyce you will be out on your ear if you even start down this road.  I will not tolerate it.  Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” “The legislation establishing the IDEA gives me a statutory responsibility which I cannot legally evade and for which I’m answerable to Dáil Éireann.”  “How are the feeble risen, I took pity on you, I rescued your so-called career from the doldrums, I’m still protecting you against allegations of impropriety from an earlier stage in your career.  Do not be a complete idiot.”  Séamus continued, “Among the matters which have come to light, Minister, is an attempt to compromise me by paying money into a bank account in my name from an unknown source.”  Richard Fry whinnied, “You don’t mean to say Mr Joyce that you’ve been accepting bribes in your exulted position?”.  “I’ve accepted nothing.  These funds may be coming from a source of the drug business.”  “And why would anyone want to do that?  Are you such a king pin?”  “It has been alleged to me, Minister, that somebody within the police or within my own organisation is working to shut down certain drug dealers while building up others, especially one larger importer who is poised to take over the Dublin heroin market.”  The Minister turned to Séamus [I’ve left out a bit in the middle] “This is amusing, Mr Joyce, to hear a desk bound bureaucrat such as yourself pronounce with such confidence on the ins and outs of crime.  You might be better off leaving such operational matters in the hands of your capable lieutenant Mr O’Rourke.  Let us suppose for a moment that there is some truth in what you’re saying, let us suppose that you’re not speaking complete nonsense.  Now which is better Mr Joyce one large importer or a dozen small competing ones importing material of dubious or dangerous quality flooding the market with cheap and unreliable supplies killing each other in unseemly disputes?” Well it eventually becomes clear from this rather entrapping conversation because one of the characters has got the microphone and the other one doesn’t know that the Minister is in fact trying to create a single importer situation to take away the competing criminal groups and to ensure that the passage of drugs through Ireland does not involve bad publicity for the country because his theory is that you cannot suppress drugs, he says the IDEA cannot prevent drugs from being used all it can do is to limit the side effects.  And I think in the end that’s a real question because people will take drugs, I take drugs myself.  Alcohol every day, coffee, every day.  I’m not an addict, I could give up at any time.  (laughter)  If, however, the alcohol were made illegal what effect would it have?  Would I still consume it?  Maybe not, one of the reasons why I wouldn’t take drugs is I don’t wish to support the drug industry.  I don’t like those people.  But I had a sister who smoked 40 a day, she lived to be 46, so when it comes to drug pushers I have some extremely strong views on quite respectable companies, good people listed on the Stock Exchange, who it seems to me do a fair amount of damage in their daily work.  So what I’m trying to say is that the situation is genuinely more complicated, yes.  Well what should politics do?  Should you ban things that are bad?  If you do what price do you pay?  And whereas there may be all kinds of good answers to those questions which you’ll hear from people who know something about the situation and whereas, you know, if you come back next week and hear Paul O’Mahony you’ll know an awful lot about penal policy, the punishment of wrong doers and the amount of damage that we do trying to do that.  But those are policy questions and what the fiction writer tries to do is to put a face on it, to personalise it, to make it something emotional.  To take some ordinary boring individual, like Séamus Joyce, and put him in a situation where he has to make a decision, has to stand up for one thing or the other.  So is that a proper function for fiction to be talking about crime and life and death?  I’d suggest that there’s a fair amount of fiction goes on in ordinary life as well.  For example, last night in the State of Georgia they executed a man for shooting a policeman.  Not only do they more or less know that he didn’t do it but they’ve got a pretty good idea who did do it, it was one of his accusers.  If you look up the Amnesty International coverage on the web you’ll find there’s lots of Affidavits there from witnesses who were coerced and intimidated into naming the wrong person as it appears for this crime and does it bother the establishment?  Not at all because a good crime story should end with somebody’s death preferably the guilty person but if you can’t get the guilty person somebody else will do.  So at this stage maybe I will stop talking for a bit and invite questions or would you like to ...Questions & AnswersFacilitator: Okay, so now we’ll invite questions from the audience.Participant 1: Yeah, could you give me some examples of how you develop the cop in your novel, you said you needed to have a multi dimensional character.Cormac: Yes.Participant 1: What is the reason for that?  Because you didn’t read much from him.Cormac: I didn’t, no.  The idea is he’s a very brave man and extremely ... he’s willing to put himself at enormous risk, that’s one of the things about him.  I find that admirable.  And the reason for that particular trait is I once stood in Duke Street going about my business in a respectable area and watched a big man walking up towards the door of a bank, he was a plain clothes policeman holding a very large gun down by his side, and I was thinking I wouldn’t do that and the next thought that came to me was well if I did do that, if I was willing to do that, would I be willing to be told what to do and what not to do by some boring fellow behind a desk?  Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t.  So he’s brave, that’s one of the things about him.  I can tell you ... I mean I can you something, it will ruin the book in a way but give you the big motivation which is that he has a high dependency child who needs constant nursing and he’s not living with the mother of the child but he is making a lot of money on the side and all of which passes through to the mother of his child so that the child can be looked after.  It’s also the case, we learn near the beginning of the book, that he almost got himself killed quite wrongly by opening fire on a group of gangsters who had a child and he couldn’t let them take the child away so out of fear of that he killed them and almost got himself killed, he got himself very badly wounded.  So in some ways he’s heroic.  In some ways he’s altruistic but as we know your good qualities can lead you to do bad, just as much as your bad qualities.  Okay.Participant 2: I haven’t read your books but I’m very interested in crime writing and I just read an article yesterday in The Sunday Times about the murder of a child, there was an article about murdered children.Cormac: Yeah.Participant 2: And it was awful, it really disturbed me as her uncle did it and I just wondered how you deal with that, the disturbing elements of maybe writing about it?Cormac: Yeah.Participant 2: Because obviously you must have to go into the mind of criminals and, you know, so that’s…Cormac: Yeah.  Okay.  I mostly deal with that sort of thing by not writing about it (laughter) because I’m extremely queasy.  Yeah there was a very interesting quote I came across once “in real life good people are lovely and interesting and bad people are limited and boring” but in fiction it’s the other way around, you know, so (laughs) sometimes you get inside the mind of somebody but you don’t necessarily ... I mean there are these novels that say, you know, is the train going to come along and run over the heroine who is strapped to the railway lines, well that’s a variant of suspense writing that I don’t particularly enjoy myself.  However, yes if you’re a writer you have to be on both sides of the equation and you have to be able to say, yeah, if I was in this position, if I had to do it I might do a thing like that.  Now the murder of a child is particularly hard to rationalise because it’s just, as you say, awful and unending pain for all involved and so on.  But that’s probably the extreme case.  But there are cases where you could imagine, for example, if you got into terrible debt and you were about to lose everything I think people will do bad things for fear of loss whereas they wouldn’t necessarily do the same things for hope of gain.  I wouldn’t wipe out somebody in the street just because I knew that they had a winning lotto ticket in their pocket but if somebody was coming after my family to reclaim my house and put me out on the side of the street and I had some other reason maybe I’d do it.  You have to be able to imagine yourself to have the possibility of doing anything that is depicted in your book.  Okay.Participant 2: Thank you.Participant 3: I was just going to say is there a danger of glamorising like we see in Mexico even just reading the daily paper sometimes, they had a series a month or two ago about gangsters and stuff, it was almost like they were movie stars, they were in their own world.Cormac: Yeah.Participant 3: And I’m thinking of ... I mean I love the whole [inaudible] and it’s really funny I’d love to get involved and is there a danger that it also can make that they could glamorise those things whereas maybe well I’d be affected by a drug addict, this is being sold, buys these things, and people have been mugged around my area.Cormac: Yeah.Participant 3: These people are desperate for money so it’s not a safe place at this point in time.  Is it a danger that you can actually glamorise that and how does an author cope with the balances of that?Cormac: Yes.Participant 3: Do you know, is there any suggestion because this could make it ...?Cormac: It’s a very big question.  I mean if you look at the Godfather Part I it presents lovable people with very strong family values and all kinds of big tragedies in their life, somebody kills one of them and they kill some of the other, brave in their own way as they call themselves mean of honour.  The Mafia call themselves men of honour and even a very realistic and sometimes horrifying film at that doesn’t really show you the kind of down the line misery that is created by large parts of their business.  So yeah I mean crime is boring and awful and especially I mean I would find it really hard to write about, you know, on Saturday nights in Ireland people get drunk and they stab each other with kitchen knives, that’s a true fact and a large part of the murders that are committed in Ireland are done by people who probably wouldn’t even remember it the following morning.  So you wouldn’t glamorise that and yet if you even wrote about it it would be so depressing (laughs) just that, you know, why would anybody read you?  The older style of detective story set in a village about who stole the knitting needle that was used to stab the victim that sort of thing is actually comforting to read.  You could read one of those late at night and sleep well.  (laughter)  And it’s not glamorising but it’s sanitising in a sense something that is awful.  But we do live in a society where you’re famous and you could be famous for being a great footballer like Mr Beckham or famous for being married to a good footballer like Mrs Beckham but I think she has other talents as well.  But of course we have all these people that we admire or we know about merely because they’re in the papers and gangsters almost fit into that.  Because I mean in Ireland we glamorise terrorists quite a lot.  I mean some of us don’t but it is a fact that if you are prepared to go out and kill somebody for their religion or your beliefs or whatever it might be but there’s a kind of a grudging feeling, oh yeah well I mean after all he didn’t do it for himself and he did go to jail for it and so yeah I admire him really.  Very difficult to balance up the different feelings in that way.  To make a bad person glamorous I mean just from a totally different line of business years ago when they used to execute criminals in public squares all over Europe and it was one of the big – before television – entertainments and the idea was you’d say how bad this person was and everyone would hate them but then the exact opposite sensation came in, here is this poor man who is about to be put to a horrible death and look there beside him is the priest hearing his last confession and even as he dies he’s sorry for his sins now and he’s going to go to heaven and people actually started admiring the person they were supposed to hate.  And I think there’s something in human nature that whenever you think of one thing you also think the opposite and our rational mind makes us cancel out the bit that doesn’t make sense but that doesn’t really mean that it’s gone from your feelings.  Your feelings are still there.  Yeah.Participant 3: Thank you .Facilitator: Very interesting.  I have a question.  You are an Associate Professor in Italian.Cormac: Yeah.Facilitator: And your novel was translated into Italian.Cormac: Yes.Facilitator: It must be like a strange experience having somebody else translate your own novel.Cormac: Yes.  It was a wonderful experience.  To find the words that you've written are no longer there, it's still in a way your book but if you happen to know the other language to see that somebody else has made a completely new text out of the same thing.  And it was very nice because I got to meet the translator.  I got to correct some of her mistakes.  She's a woman who lives in Italy but she has friends in Bray and therefore she was able to get most of the local speech in the book which is quite difficult but even her friend in Bray wasn't able to catch everything so there was a few little points where I was able to tell her that it should have been different.  But I mean what every writer wants is readers, that's the basic deal.  And to think that there’s people in a language you don't even know necessarily, and I do happen to know Italian, but to feel that there's people – somebody – you know even when you're 50 years dead somebody will come to a library and take out a book and open it and put it back on the shelf or maybe stay and read it.  That's a nice feeling and I think translation adds a whole dimension to that.Facilitator: Okay thank you.Cormac: Well can I thank you all for your patience and thank you for coming and there's a much better speaker next week I’m sure Beata will tell you.Facilitator: So thanks very much for this interesting and insightful talk.  We really enjoyed it all.Participants: Yes.  (clapping)Cormac: Thank you.  Thank you very much.  (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 John Lonergan's talk and reading.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode John Lonergan. former Governor of Mountjoy Prison, talks of his time in the Prison Service and his philosophy on prison, dealing with prisoners and people in general. He touches on parenting, the importance of education, self-esteem and community. Recorded in front of a live audience at the Central Library in September 2011 as part of its 'Crime and the City' series.Thanks very much for the invitation because it’s great to the opportunity just to share a few I suppose experiences with people and then hopefully later on we’ll have some dialogue and some debate or some discussion because it’s a subject that everybody has an opinion on.  Probably one of the subjects…there was an old man that used to work years and years ago in Mountjoy and he said it’s a the one subject that everybody has an opinion on and the further you’re removed from the field of a prison the more stronger your opinions are which is actually true and that’s not a criticism that’s just because of I suppose the lack of insight and information into it.  As it’s been said I have been involved in the system for 42 years plus, starting off in Limerick in 1968, and I’ve often said reminiscing, looking back 42 years ago, a different world, a different prison system, a different society – everything was different.  Indeed I’ve a friend who says that we, us, people, our generation who were born in the late 40s and early 50s probably lived through the greatest changing society and culture of any other generation ever past and he claims ever future as well.  And I wouldn’t disagree with him because we lived through phenomenal change and just looking at the prison services, an isolated issue, and crime we had around 660 people in prison in total in Ireland in those days 260 of them were juveniles or under age 16-21 year olds so we only had 400 adults in three prisons, in Limerick – a small little local prison, Portlaoise – where all the convicts were, that was a substitute for transportation penal servitude, they were known as convicts.  Prior to 1856 of course we got rid of all our problems to other countries and then after 1856/57, that period, transportation from Ireland ended and we substituted transportation with a penalty called penal servitude.  It’s gone now off the legislation completely.  I don’t think there’s any sentences left of penal servitude but the idea of penal servitude was that it was a complete substitute for transportation.  And the difference between it and imprisonment was that it was a sentence that at one stage was handed down, the time of the warrant ran irrespective of whether you were in custody or not, so if you could escape and stay out for 4 or 5 years the time actually was still being served because the idea was well sure if you were transported well you couldn’t escape as such.  That was the idea.But anyway that’s gone now and now we have imprisonment almost for every crime but anyway that was to just put it into perspective I suppose and like everybody else, anybody here as well that wouldn’t have any insight into the system, I’m sure you would be thinking the very same as I was thinking way back in 1968 that all the baddies were in prison, all the goodies were outside and that was it.  And off I went with that sort of an expectation and it was proved to be fatal because almost instantly I discovered that the reality was a million miles away from what I expected and I’m sure what you expect as well because I often compared it afterwards as the equivalent of a county home.  The young people here won’t understand what I’m saying when I’m saying a county home but when I was a child growing up every county had a hospital where all the poor ‘oul social misfits and all the broken people and all the poor people ended up.  My mother used to say, you know, I’ll end up in the county home as a result of us, like the children she had, (laughter) or she’d be better off in the county home was another saying she used to have (laughter) and probably she probably would be, she’d probably have more peace of mind there and less responsibility.  But anyway older people will know if they ever visited them they’d know, you know, they were very depressing places because you had a lot of broken people and disconnected people and sad people there and I thought after a while I often equated the prison that I entered into in 1968 as the equivalent of the county home.  A couple of high profile tough type of criminals but the majority were people who were out of psychiatric hospitals, were winos – at that time we used to call them winos, they were drinking old cheap wine and living like that on the streets.  Anyway that was the way it was.  There was only 400 adults plus in it and just think today that we’re well over 4,500 without temporary release it would be over 5,000 and the graph is flying up.  So you’d have to asking yourself what the hell has gone wrong even though we have made so much progress.  My friend says we had the biggest change ever in our generation, that’s a span of about 50 years, when you go back, if you could go back, anyone that’s old enough to go back, you couldn’t disagree with it.  Phenomenal change in terms of technology.  Remember, we only had a radio at that time, we hadn’t televisions and just imagine what has happened since with technology.  Like on Saturday morning, just unbelievable, you’ll be sitting down in your home if you’re interested at 9.30 and you can actually tune in to Ireland playing Australia in New Zealand, live as it happens.  Now if I told my grandparents that, that had happened, they’d say ‘you’re cracked’ or they just say ‘we now know it for certain you’re gone mad’.  But anyway that will just tell you, and travel is fantastic, it took people months to go to America now they can go in a few hours.  And so the world became smaller and more information and better education, believe it or not, even though we’ll touch on the education later on but generally speaking far greater education in terms of its availability and more and more people availing of it and a whole lot of different things as well.  And I suppose that’s why I’d be saying to you, especially again the younger people, when we are in a bad recession at the moment and we are but it’s relative, it’s relative to what we were used to in the last 10 or 15 years rather than saying we have a recession now that it was the equivalent of the 60s or 40s, there’s not a comparison, the people in the 40s and 50s and go back another 100 years to the famine and then you really had recession and that’s not living in the past it’s just putting it all into perspective.  So today while we have a recession and all that things have changed and I suppose that’s interesting in terms of society and the way I suppose it’s been structured as well.  We blame the British as you know, when we were growing up the British were blamed for the way our society was structured and then, you know, now we have had our own responsibility for it for many, many years and have we done any better in terms of a fair and equal society?  I’d say not, I’d say we actually made it worse in terms of the gap because when I was a child the landlord was regarded as somebody that was imposed on and the big land owners and all those sort of people, well now we have segregation worse than ever in terms of how ... and this is leading to crime because a lot of crime is still ... we’ll concentrate mainly in Dublin city but statistically we’re very weak as well in terms of research would you believe it, there’s very little research being done around monitoring crime and doing sort of social and criminology type of connection with crime or where it comes and all.  The last piece of decent work that was done was done in 1996 in Mountjoy by Dr Paul O’Mahony and I tried to get it repeated in 2006 which would have given us a 20 year span and three comparisons to do which would have been very informative and I couldn’t get them to do it, I couldn’t get the Department of Justice to give the money to do it and it was an opportunity missed.  But in 1996/97 when it was done the last time, for instance, six little pockets in Dublin supply 75% of all Dublin born prisoners.  I’ll just repeat that for you because people won’t often believe it.  75% of people came from six separate little areas, tiny little areas by the way not huge big areas, tiny little areas within six separate postal districts, 75% of all people in Mountjoy in 1996 came from those addresses so we could identify very clearly where these black spots, if you like to call them in terms of crime now, where they were located.  And the numbers were very small, the numbers are still very small in terms of the numbers of people who go to prison, very, very small, around 5,000 as I said, 5,000 two or three hundred in total, including temporary release, so when you take that out of a population of 5 million, you know, we’re still a very small system and it still gives us a great opportunity I suppose.  There’s a lot of women here as well, just to break it down for women and men as well, the world over this is true, something that you mightn’t have thought about, but the percentage of men versus women in prison is huge, the difference, about 96/97% of the prison population are men or males and about 3/4% are women and that’s by the way generally the world over.  So that’s another issue, why is it that there’s so many men?  Is it because of their masculinity and their aggression and all that or is it a culture or what the heck is it?  But certainly that’s another breakdown so you don’t have a huge concentration of people.  And by the way it’s not limited to Dublin it applies in any city in the world, the same old issues apply, poor areas so housing, I just want to leave this with you, that housing policy is at the core of a lot of it.  Not everything, because there are people up in Mountjoy that were living in very different circumstances, but 75% were born into areas where there was huge what I would call social disadvantage in terms of amenities and facilities and culture.  For me the biggest single factor I suppose and I’ve been arguing this for years and years and years is the culture you’re born into.  I just think that that is far more significant than most of realise unless we sort of reflect on it, the culture, the culture you’re grown in.  If you’re born in a city, for instance, you inherit quite a sort of an urbanised type of culture.  If you’re born in the country it’s completely the opposite, you have a very rural culture.  And then so on, and within Dublin itself there’s different cultures in different areas.  In affluent areas the culture is all about getting on well, going to third level education, getting high qualifications, getting big money and living a high lifestyle.  My daughter one time said to me “But dad there’s difficulties in affluent areas as well” and she was pointing out some of them, she said “For instance, there’s many of them have eating disorders because they want to stay nice and slim so they can fit the profile, the expectation”.  Money, they get disillusioned when they’re not getting 50K to start off in a job because their expectations are so high.  So it’s not that affluent areas don’t have their difficulties, they do, but I suppose the contrast is amazing, the difference, the ambition of people.  You know, one person’s ambition is to become the Chief Justice, another person’s ambition is simply to be able to get a job in the local shop and to get the job in the local shop would be a massive achievement and I suppose that’s the difference in expectation and in terms of education because I think it’s very important just to mention some of the other things that can be tackled should be tackled.  Education, for instance, about 50% of all prisoners in the middle 2000s, about 6 or 7 years ago when the survey was done nationally, 50% were in level one or pre-level one in terms of literacy and numeracy.  In other words 50% on average of all prisoners from 16 years upwards either were in pre-level one which was lower than the normal measurement that’s done for numeracy and literacy in ordinary life, they had to introduce a pre-level one because so many were so low and level one is very basic, you can barely read and write now, I’m talking about barely.  You could read maybe the main headlines on a paper and it would be very basic stuff.  So 50% of people were in that and only 6% in 1997 of all prisoners in Mountjoy stayed on at school after 16 years of age.  And 57% were gone out of education before 15.  So there’s a clear link, if you leave school early it doesn’t mean you’re going to end up in Mountjoy because that would be very unfair to thousands of people who left school at 15.  The majority of people who leave school don’t end up in prison but it is an early indicator, leaving education at a very young age is an indicator.  I would be putting a red flag up in areas where they’ve high levels of early school leavers simply saying that we need to watch out for those areas because there’s certainly the signs of ... so education is at the very core of it.Unemployment, about 88% of people in prison are unemployed before they came into prison.  That’s massive.  So you’ve poor education and then you have poor employment skills or poor employment experience so you’re at a massive disadvantage as well as the whole culture which is negative.  What does negative culture do?  Negative culture really says that if you get up in the morning to go to school or go to work a lot of people, your peers, a lot of your neighbours, would say  ‘what the hell are you doing?  Stay in bed’ or ‘Who do you think you are?’ or if you go back to second level education to try to reinvent yourself the pressure will be ‘Who the hell do you think you are?  You’re getting too big for yourself Miss’ because what they know is that once you get educated and get informed what do you do?  You change your lifestyle and people don’t want you to do that so instead of encouraging you they actually drag you back down again, the culture does.  So that’s the sort of basics of it and then I suppose I said I’d mention drugs because very closely associated with drugs is criminality and criminality is so much associated with drugs.  Now which comes first I don’t know, I want to be honest, I don’t know.  Does criminality come first or does drugs come first?  In my view I’d say it is a bit of an overlap.  And in drugs I also include alcohol by the way because alcohol is still a massive contributor to all sorts of difficulties in terms of violence and aggression in particular.  So addiction is a massive contributing factor and where it comes from.  In many areas it is a contributor, it shows us its ugly head because it relieves people from the pain they’re in, in the lifestyles that they set, because that’s what drugs does.  Or at least they sell you that.  Anyone that knows anything about addiction and drugs will know that the old smiley face on the old ecstasy tablet isn’t there for fun.  The idea of putting the happy face on that tablet is to say if you take me I’ll make you happy and of course he will for a couple of seconds or a half an hour or 2 hours and then of course it wears off and you were never as bad in terms of your mental and physical and emotional wellbeing.  You’re sick and you want more and more and more.  And I did say and I do say yet I never came across what I would call a happy contented drug addicted person yet.  (laughter)  No, because if they’re high on drugs they’re out of this world anyway and they don’t know where they are or they don’t care so they’re in a false world even though they feel in some way cut off from the mainstream but they’re in a false world or they’re not connected to the reality.  And when they haven’t drugs they’re sick and they’re longing for drugs and they’re aggressive and they’re depressed so ... and there’s no in between, that’s the way it is.  So they’re all the time looking for something, to get drugs, and when they get the drugs they’re all the time stoned out of their mind.  So anybody that tries to sell me the idea that drugs are brilliant and they do great ... I’m talking about like heroin and cocaine and heavy drugs.  And naturally enough they’re ... and people from the inner city here will know that way back in the late 70s heroin showed us its ugly head for the first time in the inner city part of Dublin in the poorest and most socially disadvantaged areas and I often ask the question why is it that in every city in the world the place where drugs are most prominent, certainly the history of them was in the most disadvantaged areas.  Were they because people were very, very vulnerable or were they exploitable or whatever?  But that’s what happened.  And by the way Irish society and Dublin society ignored it until it became a crisis out on the main streets but while they were in their own little areas nobody took any great notice.  And the people like the late Tony Gregory gave a lifetime raising that and challenging saying ‘Why the hell are you allowing this to happen in our little localities when in actual fact ....’ and it was only actually when it began to spread.Then of course with the Celtic Tiger era and will all the money drugs became far more widespread in every community and every social class.  And so the yuppies who had plenty of money and high profile lifestyles they used things like cocaine on the weekends to give them that little extra buzz and to give them greater energy.  So instead of money reducing the demand on drugs it actually increased the usage of drugs right across the social levels and right from urban Ireland to rural Ireland as well by the way.  It’s not just Dublin, everywhere in Ireland today they have a drug problem, believe it or not, in the smallest little village they have a drug problem.  There’s drugs seeping into those little localities and a lot of people are using them.  So that gives you sort of a history too.  So drugs are a huge contributing factor and then of course nowadays we have the consequences in the drug areas where you have the gangs, because most of the gangs are directly associated with drugs, for two reasons, either controlling the areas in terms of the industry that drug sees, a massive industry in terms of making money.  Controlling patches or else people that owe money.  We could talk a lot about drugs, we won’t talk too much about it except people get interested later on, but I mean it is itself it’s a subject that needs an awful lot of teasing out and discussion because the dynamics are unbelievable in terms of what happens to people and how people become totally and utterly dependent on drugs and then become totally vulnerable in terms of being used to sell drugs, to supply drugs, to hold onto drugs or whatever.  Once you get compromised well you’re vulnerable and if you’re compromised you will be used and the one thing you can’t do is go to the police in case anyone might say ‘well why don’t they go to the guards’, well in that culture the worst crime you can commit is giving information to the guards would you believe.  That’s the worst crime.  It’s actually more acceptable to kill somebody than it is to give information.  And that is an amazing ... but it’s a true statement.  So the last thing you can do is go to the police even though ... and this has nothing in the world got to do with criticism of the police, it’s nothing got to do with the police in that sense, but it’s just a culture, you don’t give information.  So if you don’t give information how do you protect yourself?  Well you don’t protect yourself you’re just vulnerable. So you can imagine, now of course I keep saying these are the sort of challenges, you can imagine what it’s like for little children to be born into those areas.  I always start at that position and say look this is where it starts, little children born into this culture, growing up in this environment, how the hell do we expect them to turn out anyway different than what they do?  Sure the culture is so powerful and the influence are so powerful that it’s so, so difficult and the miracle I suppose is and this needs to be recorded today as well, for me to say it, is that families and individual parents often but families often survive that believe it or not and come out at the other end and never get into difficulty.  And they’re the real heroes.  Imagine the struggle for a mother in some of those areas, every day trying to ... and I particularly mention mothers because they genuinely and normally look after children in that sense.  Imagine trying to mind children in that environment and bring them through?  And in some cases they have brought them through and brought them out at the other end which is almost a miracle and deserves great credit for endurance and commitment and stability and all that.I suppose I should mention as well about our own makeup because we’re very good sometimes, I think anyway, at looking at other people and sort of pointing the finger and saying ‘Look at me’, even fellas often say to me ‘Look I was born poor and I didn’t rob’ and I always say to them “Jesus you were great (laughter) we’ll put a statue up for you” (laughter) because listen when I mention disadvantaged areas some people who live in those areas sort of take it almost that it is offensive, I don’t mean any offence to people at all, but what I’m saying is that the environment and the infrastructure and the amenities are absolutely almost non-existent.  And you go to other parts of Dublin city and you see the amenities that are there, swimming pools, playing pitches, second level colleges, third level colleges, housing –wonderful housing estates – I’d say how the hell do we expect children born in some of the more socially disadvantages areas to compete with children at that level?  And I’m afraid money as well, I’m afraid I have to say that money is also a major contributing factor and a major influence.  If you have money ... I know myself because my daughters are grown up and they’re adults now in their 30s but when they growing up as teenagers especially at second level, you know, and every parent that’s here knows this that if you wanted them to develop to their potential going back to if it was music or art or sport or whatever it all costs money, it costs us a lot of money.  And in things like music and talents like that if you hadn’t the resources I’m afraid a lot of the talent would lay dormant and would never be produced and I suppose that was one of the frustrations that I found in Mountjoy and often spoke about that, the talent that was up in Mountjoy, there is wonderful talent there.  So you should never associate criminality with a lack of talent or people who are in prison or in poor areas with a lack of ability or talent, it’s the lack of opportunity that is the key factor not the talent.  And one of the saddest things of all would be and one of the most I suppose inspiring things and gratifying things of all would be for somebody, a teacher or a social worker or a chaplain or somebody, a member of staff, to meet somebody in a prison, discover what that talent is, help that person to access to something that will enable him or her to develop that talent and change their lives.  And that happens often.  Change their lives, simply because now that they became aware of their talent and now because they got the opportunity to develop the talent it changed their attitudes, their self esteem and their ability to move away.What’s the biggest factor I’d say in prison?  I’d say the biggest factor in prison would be low self-esteem.  If you said to me what is the biggest single factor that you’ll find right across almost the entire prison population?  I’d say low self-esteem.  Very little confidence.  Very little belief in themselves and very little sort of drive and energy and I suppose commitment to be able to make that transition.  It is alright talking about it, it is easy to tell people what to do, but to get them to be able to sustain it in terms of the discipline that’s required and the commitment and I’m afraid opportunity as well.  I keep saying always I mean in my life and in everyone else’s life, every single person here, young and old, it doesn’t matter what age you are, what country you come from, it doesn’t matter one thing, the one thing I’m certain of that every human being is totally dependent in their lives to other people.  There’s not a person I ever met anywhere in the world that was able to stand up and say ‘Well from day one I made it on my own’, there’s nobody.  And so we are all dependent on others, our parents, our neighbours, our teachers, our employers, our friends, our wives or husbands later on and a whole multitude and life’s doors of opportunity often open by chance rather than by design and everybody here has experienced that.  The day you’re somewhere by pure chance.  I remember Brian Farrell, Professor Brian Farrell who was on Prime Time and Seven Days on RTÉ for many, many years and became very famous as a broadcaster but he was born in England.  And I remember him when he retired being interviewed and they said how did you come, where you became, and he said “Listen every single change in my life happened by pure chance.”  He was born in England by chance.  He came back to Ireland by chance.  He went to UCD by chance.  When he was in UCD as a part-time student he met somebody who said “Listen would you not be interested in broadcasting?” and “Here’s someone you should write to” and he did and they gave him a little bit of a start and then all ... and so life is very much like that I would say.  And the same is true the other way round, that circumstances can often dictate, and that’s not an excuse by the way in case anyone might be say you’re only making excuses for people.  I’m not making excuses though but what I’m saying is the reality can be that chance and opportunity is twofold and in some cases doors open for people and in other cases they don’t. Just prison then for a few minutes because people know nothing about it, thank God.  99% of people know nothing about prison, thank God.  I always say to parents in particular when I’m talking to parents one of the toughest jobs and challenges any parent will ever get in their life is having to go to a prison to visit a son or a daughter and the more you’re removed from that environment over the years, if you have never been to a prison, if you have never been in a court, if you have never any connection, the worse it is.  The most traumatic.  And I often give the example about how the culture that’s created, if I go sometimes to ... I talk a bit in schools, if I got to a middle class school or a working class school or in certain areas in Dublin sometimes the teacher will say to me going in ‘by the way there’s a girl in there or a boy in there whose father is in prison, just that you know’ and of course naturally I will never mention anything about such things in talking to kids in a classroom and they would most definitely not say anything.  So I go through the little session and they’d leave and that was the end of it.  But when I got to certain areas of this city, I’m not going to mention any of them now because I regard them as absolutely vital areas, they’re great areas and there’s some wonderful people there, but when I go into the secondary school in some of those areas I’m not inside the door in the classroom when there’s five or six young lads up around me saying “Do you know me dad?  Do you know me ...?” (laughter) and while that’s funny, and you know it is funny, it’s also very sad because what it tells you is that in my culture going up to Mountjoy is normal.  And I often say that so many times, you take no notice of this but if you go up to Mountjoy and stand on the North Circular Road today at 2 o’clock I guarantee you you’ll see many little babies being brought up in the arms or in a buggy and up and in through the gate and into the visiting area in Mountjoy and then they’ll be subjected to a dog sniffing at them and a search, including a body search where their mums might be asked to take off their nappies even, and they’re brought in through all this system into prison to meet dad who is not now allowed even to hold a baby so ... and this is all done in the name of humanity and justice and all that sort of stuff.  And imagine you’re doing that from the age of 4 or 5 weeks or days.  Because I met a baby going in one day that was only 3 days old.  So if you’re doing that for 5 or 6 years can you imagine what fear prison has for you?  None.  None.  Sure this is where I go on my outing every day.  And they’re the human challenges.  That’s nothing got to do by the way with making excuses for the adults who get into crime, that’s a separate issue, they must be dealt with separately and the penalties must be separate.  But the dilemma is how do you compensate for the child?  And how do you try to keep that relationship going in a very difficult environment.So prison, for me anyway, is the worst thing that can happen to you after health.  If I had a choice tomorrow morning, I often say this, if someone gave me a choice tomorrow morning a very serious illness, for instance like cancer, and treatment in the Mater Hospital, or 5 years in Mountjoy. I’d opt for 5 years in Mountjoy, honestly I would.  Why?  Because I’d say I’ll come out of Mountjoy.  I’ll survive it and I have my health and in 5 years time I’ll be back again on my feet.  I mightn’t survive the Mater Hospital and serious cancer or any other serious health disease.  So I’m just saying you have to put into perspective.  That would be my perspective, health first, I’d hold onto my health first, and after that I’d say the worst experience for any human being is to be sent to prison.  So any idea that people have that this is some sort of an old holiday resort or some sort of a good time, and just because fellas come out of prison and say ‘Ah Jesus it was grand’ you see that’s a reflection on their standards, their ambitions, where they’re at.  Anyone who says to me well they’re better off in prison that they are outside, I say well that’s a sadder reflection of what’s outside than what’s inside because I can assure you that inside is horrible.  Even in the most modern prisons it’s still terrible but in the older prisons like Mountjoy it’s horrific.  And that’s it, that’s honest, it’s horrific.  And it was bad enough when I started off in Mountjoy which as Padraic mentioned I started off there in 1984 and I spent over 20 years there despite the fact that I spent a few years in Portlaoise.  But at least when I started off there was about 420 on a daily average and would you believe that in 1985 and 86 I was writing to the Department of Justice giving out about the numbers.  Honest to God, at 425, this is grossly overcrowded and something has to be done, 1985.  And then I ended up with 880 then – 880 – double the population and I was still writing, this is a scandal.So I suppose in some ways, this is the amazing thing, things changed in my time in prison, some things changed brilliantly I have to say, I’m delighted to say it, some things improved dramatically and other things never changed and other things deteriorated.  What are the things that deteriorated more?  And Liam Herrick is here from the Irish Penal Reform Trust and he has been advocating and arguing in public streets on this issue for a long time now, but the worst issue that has happened is overcrowding in terms of doubling up.  And most people here have no idea about what the consequences of doubling up are and you hear people like me and Liam and others talking about doubling up and you say ah it’s too good for them, ah what the hell do they expect, like a former Minister said, after all he said they’re prisoners, the cheek of you.  If we don’t have some basic measurement, some basic standards even for prisoners I would say well then we’ve lost it, we must have basic standards.  But anyway just to say in terms of doubling up, I guess none of you have ever thought about this I could absolutely be certain of this every single person here young and old needs time on their own.  I bet you do.  I bet you every day you spend some amount of time exclusively on your own.  It might be in the kitchen, it might be in your bedroom, it might be out in the garden, I don’t care where it is (laughter) but I’ll guarantee you you’re somewhere every day on your own.  And our mother used to say, “Get out, I want a bit of peace” and we’d be all ran out into the garden or out to the field and she’d be pottering around the house but she needed space.  Every single human being needs space on their own, to get the hell out of ... and if you’re in the prison and you’re doubled up in prison you’ll never spend a second on your own.  Isn’t that terrible?  Or unbelievable rather than maybe terrible because some people might say it was too good for them.  But being on your own, you’re never, you’ll spend about 16 hours a day locked up in the cell and you’ve someone with you and maybe two or three people with you.  And maybe a header with you, a guy that’s quite crazy.  (laughter)  Seriously - quite crazy.  Imagine sharing your cell with somebody that never stops talking.  (laughter) Just think about that.  10 o’clock at night and he’s (makes a noise) and you’re trying to sleep.  Or you’re in a cell with someone who is bullying you, a big strong fella and he’s telling you, shush, give me all your cigarettes, give me all your – whatever it is you have – chocolate, give me everything you have.  But do you know what I said about giving information?  You can’t give information? Why can’t you give information?  Because now you are absolutely totally persona non grata, you’re not accepted at all, so you have to try and put up with it.  But the biggest single thing, suppose you’re sharing with someone and they’re snoring all night.  I’m talking about 5 or 6 or 7 years of this now, this isn’t just something that will just go away.  So doubling up anyway has been an absolute disaster and would you believe that the old Brits in the middle 1900s brought in a piece of legislation that said every prisoner should be in a single cell and those who need communal sort of cells because some people who were psychiatrically ill might need somebody they had to be three, in what were called triple cells.  So the cells were huge and there was three beds in them and they were ... and if you put ... in my day when I was a young lad down in Limerick if I put two prisoners into a cell and shut the door I’d be sacked, it was that serious.  You never put two prisoners in a cell.  You always put one or three.  The three idea was that they’ll protect each other, there’d be no abuse and no bullying, the chances would be that one would protect the other or that sort of stuff.  Keep an eye out for them.  So they spend about ... so doubling up is the worst thing. Drugs, the greatest scourge that ever happened Ireland I think.  I’m always saying I’ve been convinced that anything else that happened, even the bloody recession, I’d say no I’d say drugs when you think about it in the last 30 years or so, what the damage they have done and the devastation they have brought to people, the human suffering, not just to individual people who are addicted but to everybody in their family and to everybody often in their community as well.  So it’s not confined to just the person who is addicted, can you imagine what it’s like to have a young person addicted to heroin, for instance, every time they leave the door if you’re their parent, for instance, or brother or sister, what are you?  You’re terrified.  He’ll be caught, he’ll be arrested, he’ll be shot, he’ll come home stoned, he’ll die of an overdose or whatever.  And the consequence of what drugs have done are huge I’d say and I’m not so sure what sort of a handle we have on it yet in terms of that. The other good things that happened in prison I suppose is education, why in some prisons it’s far better than others, because of facilities by the way rather than because of lack of teaching.  That’s the one thing I could never say in Mountjoy there was never any difficulty with teachers, we got as many teachers as we could accommodate.  Our problem in Mountjoy was we couldn’t accommodate, only facilities for about 40 prisoners or 45 at any one time out of 600 or 700.  So that puts it into perspective.  But it wasn’t because we couldn’t get the teachers it was simply because we couldn’t facilitate.  But the work they do is immense considering the limitations on their resource because education must be at the very foundation of solutions, I think.  That if you don’t educate ... because it’s not just simply about work by the way, because we think sometimes that it’s just about work, but education is so important right across life’s spectrum, it’s not just work.  Imagine if you illiterate or you’re only at 50% and your little child is going to school and the little child comes home with his little first year book, you can’t read it, imagine that?  You just can’t sit down with your own little child and read and that’s not confined to prisoners, but I’m talking about prisoners rather than the broader thrust of society.  So education is vital in terms of knowledge, access, ability, confidence – so there’s a million and one benefits come out of education including an extra to just getting jobs.  And by the way as well one of the lowest motivated people are ... and this is true in life as well as in prison, the lowest motivated people in prison in relation to education are those who have the lowest levels of education, it is.  People who go into prison who have no education or poorly educated are the very ones that have no motivation and vice and versa, if you go into prison and you have already a degree and you’re going to spend 5 years in prison what do you do?  Well I’d be doing a degree that I’d loved to have done, whatever a degree, I’ll learn Spanish and do a degree in Social Science or something, and you would, and you’d get it.  Why?  Because you have the ability, the motivation and you’d say well now while I’m in prison I must ... I know a neighbour of mine ended up in prison a few years ago, 4 or 5 years ago, I knew him very well.  He ended up in prison.  And he was very high profile in terms of job; he had a very powerful job, very well educated.  What did he do when he was in prison?  He did a degree in Spanish and he got his degree in Spanish.  And why?  Because he said listen while I’m here I might as well do something and he came out of prison and he had a degree and he’s able to speak fluent Spanish.  I’m just making that point, that if he went into prison illiterate I’d say you can almost guarantee he’d come out ... so some of the jobs or challenges around motivating people.  The same with addiction would you believe.  Because everybody says why don’t you treat them as if was a simple little problem or a simple task of just walking around giving everyone an injection or something and saying now that will ... of course the biggest problem with addiction is, you know, accepting that you’re addicted, recognising that you’re addicted and motivating yourself to do something about your addiction and that’s where prison found it very difficult and is still finding it very difficult because quite a huge, biggest percentage of people who are addicted their first stage is total denial.  You meet them, you talk to them, you say listen you’ll have difficulty with your addiction, what, I’ve no addiction, I can give it up anytime I like, I only take it when I’m outside.  Of course they are addicted but they’re in denial and it is no use I telling you that you’ve a problem.  That’s useless.  The only stage of recovery is when you tell me you’ve a problem.  I’ve a problem can you help me and of course then ... now the struggle in prison is that when a person comes to that decision the help isn’t always available for them and therefore another opportunity is lost because in Mountjoy alone if you were to respond to the needs of everybody there about 500 I’d say of the 700 have a history of addiction at some level or other.  Some would be very serious.  You can imagine the facilities that would be required to respond to that number of people who would be at all different levels.  But 250 or 260 in my time in Mountjoy were on methadone on a daily basis.  250 on a daily basis getting methadone as a substitute for heroin so that was massive. And of course the last disaster in Mountjoy would have been that they hadn’t and had not up to and probably won’t have for a while to come yet, internal sanitation.  So they still have pots.  They’re still slopping out.  There’s still all that humiliation of people.  A lack of washing facilities and cleaning facilities and hygiene very low because of the old building.  Mountjoy by the way was built in 1850, opened on the 8th of March 1850, which is 161 years ago since last March.  And is probably one of if not the only institution in Dublin that’s still operating to full capacity and the same basis as they did in 1850 which is amazing.  Because the main block in Mountjoy is exactly the same today as it was way back in 1850.  So the facilities are very ... so, for instance, there was no education facilities built into Mountjoy, there was no work facilities would you believe, because they all stayed in their cells apparently, 22 or 23 hours a day in those days.  They did work in their cells so they seldom came out of their cells.  Even at mass on a Sunday they were in cubicles so they never met, so each person sat into a cubicle so as that they couldn’t speak or see each other.  So prison was designed in 1850 for separation and segregation and all that sort of stuff.  The idea ... Crofton was a very famous ‘prison reformer’ and his policy was that you’d sort of beat the bad out of them first, you know, and you’d punish the bad out of them and then when all their badness is going, it’s something like our education when we were kids (laughter), seriously, that was very much the policy of our education system.  We were beaten when we did things wrong, physically beaten, and we were beaten when we didn’t do things right, like with spellings for instance.  So their philosophy was the same, that you beat the bad out of them.  I would obviously argue totally against that and say that I’m totally opposed to the concept that punishment works in that sense.  You have to have some strictures and rules and penalties in line, of course you have, you have to have law and order, oh of course you have.  But personally I don’t believe that you can punish a person into doing good.  No I believe that the task is quite different and more complex than that and I think some of my experiences in prison would prove that as well, that people do respond to different things.  And indeed a lot of it, my own philosophy, was based on – and I still argue that philosophy anyway but – it was about that thing I said about finding the potential in people and by the way I absolutely believe 100% that there’s potential in every human being to do good and bad.  Potential now, I’m not saying people do bad but there’s the potential to do bad in everybody and there’s also the potential to do good.  And in prison, in my time anyway, I certainly found that most prisoners wanted to do good, that’s a difference now from doing good, but they wanted to do good, their aspiration, and they got great satisfaction.  And the proof of that was, for instance, at times like the Special Olympics when they worked their backsides off day and night to make flags and to do different things in order that they could contribute to the Special Olympics and they felt great when they saw their flags down in Croke Park – 80,000 of them made by hand.  And that’s what I mean, or when they raise money for charity or whatever they do, you know, they felt because I’m helping someone so I believe that that’s how you change people, that you build and nurture the humanity in them, the talent in them, the good in them and the higher and the more you’re making them aware of their own humanity the less likely they are to be inhumane to others.  That’s my philosophy but lots of people disagree with that. Listen that’s enough of my old rubbish (laughter) because a lot of people here obviously want to maybe ask questions or say things or whatever and by the way I’m not the slightest bit defensive about the system.  If people have criticism or whatever they want to say feel free to do so because I’m not going to defend anything.  I’ve always believed actually from way back, the mid 80s onwards, and I said this in the mid 80s, prisons belong to you, not you personally I think society.  Prisons are there for you, you own them, your responsible for it in that global sense and they are yours, they’re not mine or weren’t mine or they’re not belong to the Minster or they’re not belong to the staff in our job and prisoners come from society, 99.99% of them come from Irish society in some shape or form.  I mean people living in Ireland, they come from your streets, they came through your school, they came from your communities, whoever they are, and they end up in prison and when they leave prison they go back out into your society, your community, your area and that’s why I have always said that people working in prison or managing prisons should never feel that they were failures.  They’re not failures, they belong to society, and that’s why I was highly motivated all my life anyway to try to open prisons up as much as possible to the public and we did that quite a lot with school tours, with open nights for drama, for a whole lot of different professionals like legal students and ordinary students and all sorts of people.  We tried to bring in as many as we could into Mountjoy simply to do that, to say to them this is what a prison is, it’s your prison, if you want to improve it that’s fine but at least you’ll know what it’s like.  And that’s why I did that because I believe that it’s very important that people know exactly what happens in prisons.  Prisons exist in your name and they are ours.  They’re an Irish institution funded by the Irish tax payer for a service that the Irish tax payer believe that they need and in that case then the ownership of them should be the broader community as well.  Anyway belt away any of you that have questions or criticisms or whatever.Questions and AnswersJohn: Yeah go on?Participant 1: Do you miss working in Mountjoy?John: Oh God not a bit, no.  (laughter)  And I should clarify that now because honestly now, honestly, and this is the truth, I spent 42 years and a bit in the penal service and I spent over 26 years as the Governor of Mountjoy or Portlaoise and I can honestly say I never, ever, ever woke up any morning and said “Jesus do I have to go in there?”  I enjoyed it as a challenge and I enjoyed the work and I enjoyed the relationship and I got great education in prison.  The greatest education I got in my life was definitely in prison, way, way more than anyone else and that includes my family.  And anyone that rears children, for instance, and rearing their own family will know how educational that is.  But I would have to say and do say generously that I got my greatest education in prison and my greatest satisfaction in life in prison as well.  But the time comes and I decided in 2009, that 2010, 26 years was enough of it.  I was also coming on.  I was 63 years of age at the time and I said, right, I have to retire at 65 so there’s no point in waiting until they throw you out (laughter) so I had my mind made up in 2009 that I was going in 2010 and I did.  And I can honestly say that I never regretted a moment of it.  So I’ve nothing but good memories, not happy memories because I think it would be a bit of a contradiction to say that, you know, prison and what goes on in prison could make you happy, but I suppose the happy or the fulfilment I would have gotten was trying to do something in whatever way I could for the people who end up in prison and their families.  Because I met some fantastic people, mothers and fathers, mainly mothers by the way, by and large now I’d say 85-90% of visitors to prisons are either mothers or siblings.  The rest are made up of others but mothers in particular go to prison all the time and grandmothers in many of these areas that I talked about, those six areas, grandmothers are now going up to Mountjoy to visit their grandchildren because their own children are dead as a result of drugs and that’s bigger than you think.  And it is very sad to meet a grandmother going back in after coming up 25 years ago with her own children and now she’s going back in to visit her grandchildren who are carrying on the same old traditions.  And by the way I was into, by the time I left Mountjoy, in many individual cases I’m into the third generation of families going to prison – grandparents, parents and their children.  And not a regular basis but on a frequent basis enough, a father and a son or a mother and a daughter could be in prison at the one time and that’s terrible sad. Yeah?Participant 2: Is there someone carrying on your terrific work in Mountjoy?John: Well first of all I wouldn’t dream of saying it was terrific work.  I suppose I had my own ideas and my own beliefs and my own philosophy that most people didn’t agree with by the way, so I’d have to record that first all, that it was very much my own in that sense and I suppose I discovered that early on in my career as well that if you didn’t do your own thing you’d do nothing because nobody would come down and tell you what to do or show you what to do or ... they’d knock you and criticise you but they wouldn’t innovate anything.  So from my perspective I suppose I had a philosophy based on what I said and that’s what I tried to do in the main.  And as I said that wouldn’t be very popular but I mean I suppose the prisoners in particular and their families would respond to it maybe more so than the establishment, that they saw it as a humane approach.  But anyone listen the ‘oul book is here because I might forget it.  I just want to give you a laugh.  Because the ‘oul book came out last ... and it’s not promoting the book, Jesus don’t think I’m trying to promote my book.  (laughter)  I couldn’t care less if the ‘oul book is ever sold.  (laughter) But listen to me, the ‘oul book came out last October anyway, almost 12 months ago.  And a couple of days or weeks after it being published it was one of the chaplains in Mountjoy and she was down town one day, close enough to here, down to Chapters the big book shop, and she was going to buy the book.  So she went in anyway to Chapters and she was going around and she couldn’t see the book so she asked one of the floor staff, she said “By the way where is Lonergan’s book” and he said “Ask your man behind the desk” so she said “Well what is it behind the desk for?”, “Oh he said “Thieving, thieving, they’re all robbing it.”  (laughter)  So all my friends from Mountjoy were coming in taking the book but not paying for it.  (laughter)  So when I meet them, I often meet them on the street nowadays, “I read your book” and I always say to them “I hope you paid for it.”  (laughter) John: Sorry dear?Participant 3: Would not run for President?John: Ah here now, here.  (laughter)  Hold on now.  (laughter)  The country is a bad state.  (laughs)  Yeah grand?Participant 4: Can I just ask you ...John: Yeah?Participant 4: ... what percentage of the people in Mountjoy ever got to get education?  Was that ... you said you couldn’t get enough teachers but the people that did go for education was that by their own choice or were they encouraged or how was it decided what people got to get it?John: Yeah, yeah, to get it.  Yeah first of all education is delivered in prison by the local VECs in this case Dublin City, brilliant by the way, I must record that, Dublin City, and all the VECs are very generous and very supportive and have been for over 35 years in relation to providing education.  They promote and deliver an adult education philosophy in their teaching which is that it is always voluntary and that it’s done on the basis that people want to go, so it is always voluntary.  In terms of who goes I suppose people show interest and people encourage it, like chaplains or prison staff or whoever it would be in some cases.  We had a fantastic project going in Mountjoy at one stage called the Connect Project which would have been a very progressive project where the first stage where 12 or 14 guys would sit down with a facilitator for about 6 weeks and look at their lives and look at their ambitions and set goals for themselves and then go with a monitor to monitor them and a lot of them will have said “I can’t read or write” and so step one would be to go for literacy and numeracy, basic education services.  So some of them go as I said because they’re highly motivated, because they are aware of education, and some go genuinely because they want to better themselves.  But generally speaking those who go to education, generally now speaking, are the ones that are less likely ever to come back again.  Why?  Because we can see already that they’re motivated, that they want to do something.  The problem as I keep saying, it’s one of the greatest problems, is to try to motivate people.  See a lot of people just simply say look I’ve never got anything, I never achieve anything, I never will.  There’s a little ... not too far from here ... I won’t name the area but, sorry, I have to name the area sorry, Jesus, I can’t tell you what he wrote up in Shanganagh but it is so long ago now it doesn’t matter.  But we had dormers in Shanganagh way back but it was open, by the way now that’s closed which was a desperate backward step because it had fantastic potential, an open centre for ... we have no open centre for juveniles in Ireland which is unbelievable and we have 260 or whatever it is up in St. Pat’s.  We have no open centre for them and the idea of an open centre was you took them out of that criminal environment and put them into a more caring progressive environment.  But anyway, there was a young lad and they were all in dormitories and he wrote up on the side of his dormitory, way back – this is way back in the early 70s, ‘My name is Mousey O’Brien and I come from the Hill, never worked and never will’.  And I have never forgot that simply because I said Jesus if you believe that at 16 years of age my God where’s the hope for you?  But that was the culture and that was the way he was ... so education.  Then in other prisons they have far greater ... like in the more modern prisons, they have far greater facilities and far greater opportunities and quite a significant number of prisoners would take on different types of education, some a very academic type education but not exclusively, they learn computers, they do art, they do a lot of different ... maybe I should say myself from my own experience I suppose the creative arts would be the one thing that maybe every prisoner would have a great interest in and many of them have a great capacity as well.  So artwork, drama, music – all that sort of stuff – great interest and great creativity and whether that’s a compensation for other things that they miss in life, I don’t know, but one of the things, their characteristics, would be that quite a number of people from those areas would have a background, social background, would have been very creative as people.  Some of the stuff they’ve made and created with their hands would be unbelievable, the detail and the creativity and the innovation.  So and that’s why I keep saying to people that the perception might be that they’re stupid or something, these people are not stupid.  I mean they are very, very intelligent, capable people and where you’re able to direct their energies and their abilities in another direction they would be very successful so.  And by the way as well, contrary to what people think, quite a significant number of people never go back to prison.  But if you asked anybody what’s the recidivist rate, that’s what they call people going back to prison, it’s about 80% but you see that’s very misleading because there’s huge numbers of people that go back to prison all their lives, they never leave, and the cut off point ... if you’re from a disadvantaged area in the normal sort of criminal culture you’ll probably go to prison, if you go, in your middle to late teens or special institutions and you’ll continue till your early 30s and then almost dramatically 90% of them disappear.  So they spend all their latter teens and most of their 20s in and out of prison and then they just stop.  Now is that because they grow up?  Is it because they form relationships?  Is it because they have children of their own?  Is it they get tired of prison?  Is it they’re not caught again?  Because you see these sort of statistic are very misleading because I mean a person could be still robbing away, for instance, at his heart’s content and not be caught and people would be saying ‘ah he’s never robbed since’.  So the statistics, the research, I suppose I’d be saying myself and again Liam would be advocating again we’re very weak on research.  We don’t have enough of ... and why don’t we?  Because Government don’t want research because in groups like the Irish Penal Reform Trust and people who do make referencing the more information you have, the more statistics you have, the more research you have, the stronger your voice is because you can go in and say look this is what’s happening.  The Government aren’t stupid and bureaucracy isn’t stupid and they say right, give them that ammunition sure they’ll come in and they’ll beat you with that ammunition so don’t give them ammunition in the first place and they won’t be able to beat you.  So we do need to look at these things a lot more and to identify where the crises are, where the answers are, what works best.  There’s no evaluation done in prison on any programmes that are in prisons.  No evaluations done, there’s no ... and that was one great part of the Connect Project there was ongoing evaluation even by an outside agency, the National Training Agency.  So they were monitoring and measuring is it working?  And if it wasn’t working they’d say well that project isn’t working.  And that’s what you need really, you need evaluation ongoing to know whether what you’re doing is right or wrong.  But I mean prison itself you spend about 16/17 hours a day every day locked up in a cell.  That’s the reality.Participant 5: And Thornton Hall, all the fuss over Thornton Hall and the price of the land and everything else, did you agree with Thornton Hall or was it in the wrong place?John: Oh God yeah, of course it was.  (laughter) I suppose I mean Thornton Hall I suppose from day one almost I suppose it’s 10km, 6 miles, from Finglas Village and there’s no bus service there so I was always arguing myself that if you lived in certain parts of Dublin city, for instance, you have to get a bus and most, 99% of people going to prison have no transport of their own so you have to get a bus, for example, from Ballyfermot into town, get a bus from town up to Finglas and then be above in Finglas waiting for someone to collect you, maybe an old van or something, to bring you 6 more miles out into the middle of the country, have your visit maybe with two or three little children, the visit is over, get back again to Finglas, wait for the bus into town and get the bus back home.  I’d say it would be the best part of a day’s work.  You could imagine trying to do that with two or three little children.Participant 5: So there was no consultation at all?John: None whatsoever no, none whatsoever and which is another ... not amazing thing but another sad reality.  The areas where most of the prisoners come from, the communities there, there are fantastic communities in some of those areas, wonderful work being done for people who leave prison and for the families of prisoners, children, while they’re in prison, and no consultation good, bad or indifferent with those communities even.  No information sharing.  And so that just doesn’t happen that sort of prospect that you’re talking about, asking people where would a good location be.  And finally then myself I’m a great old advocate myself of having prisons in the public eye.  I’m a great believer of that.  You’re walking down the North Circular Road at the moment on the right hand side Out-Patients, the Mater Hospital, sick people, on the left hand side Mountjoy Prison, St. Patrick’s Institution, the Women’s Prisons, it reminds people that we have prisoners.  That there’s people in there who are prisoners, their ours, they may have offended us but they’re ours and it keeps them in your mind.  If they’re out in the middle of nowhere like in England now where you have big ... and the first thing they did with Thornton Hall was they ordered hundreds and hundreds of trees to plant all around the periphery, which they are by the way, and the idea is that they’ll grow and then nobody will ever know there’s a prison there.  And I would say out of sight out of mind.  I think it’s very important that all of us from time to time are reminded that there are such things, such people, as prisoners, they are our people and it is in our interests that we see them.  Because finally I suppose I should make this point to you because you might say ‘well he’s all about prisoners’, well I am because that was my job, because I saw that was my job to look after prisoners, it wasn’t to look after society in a broader context and you’re going say ‘well what about the victim?’.  See my philosophy would be that if I could turn the prisoner away from crime I was automatically turning away ... reducing the number of victims, that was my philosophy.  The more ... and there’s no contradiction in my mind between looking after victims, supporting victims, being good to victims and also being progressive in prisons.   There’s no contradiction.  I’d say we should be doing both enthusiastically but we do nothing for victims actually in the country.  Nothing.  Or very little in terms of support and counselling and therapy for people who are traumatised as a result of crime.  My job was to try to change people away from criminality and I always believed that if you could move people away from criminality you were making a massive contribution to reducing victims and the suffering of victims because at the end of the day they are the people who suffer most just in case people don’t think I appreciate them.  Well the figures are ... the question is what money, what does it cost to keep a prisoner?  It’s falling in the last number of years.  Why?  Because of overcrowding.  Like we have more prisoners in the same space with the same numbers of staff or less staff and actually the cost of prison is falling as a result.  Of course the quality of life in prison is reducing as well but the cost is running around 75,000 a year at the moment on average and it’s around 200,000 a year to keep someone in Portlaoise because of the added security.  So you’re talking around 75,000 to 80,000 Euro a year to keep somebody in a prison, that’s what it costs.  In terms of I suppose ... oh someone one time proposed this wonderful idea that for every Euro you’d spend on a prison the Government should be forced to spend 2 Euro on the outside on prevention and I would be a great supporter of that.  I think that if those six areas for instance – and we know where they are and we know the size of them and we know the issues that are in – I honestly believe that if they were really tackling it in a meaningful way through education and through work and through improving the living conditions and the environment I honestly believe that there would be a significant reduction in the numbers going to prison.  And I think that while initially people would see like Moyross, the regeneration of Moyross or Ballymun, they’d say oh how can they justify spending so much, hundreds of millions, in these areas.  I believe that in 10-15 years time the real value of that will be we’ll be seeing a dramatic reduction in the number of people going to prison.  The age?  The average age, again, we’re reading up on that because we don’t have ... I can only tell you in 1997 is the last time we had really scientific research done into that and at that stage the average age was 27 but two thirds of them were under 27, if you get me.  Because an older person you see, a 70/80 year old, would completely distort the average age in prison because we’d have a smaller number of people in their 80s, mainly sex offenders, in prison and they would distort the average age.  But about two thirds were in the bracket of 18 to 27 so it is fundamentally and basically a young person.  And prison and crime is a young person’s thing anyway because I mean I see a lot of older men now, they wouldn’t be that old relatively speaking but they’d be in their 50s, but they would have been regulars in Mountjoy.  I see quite a lot of them around the city now and they would be, you know, homeless and they’d be drinking wine but they wouldn’t be committing crime anymore or very little crime because they’re too old.  They’d say that to you themselves.  And a lot of them would meet me on the street and say “Ah Jesus I’m too old now for that” (laughter), they actually realise that they’re too old and they couldn’t hack it.  And what drives older fellas crazy in prison is they meet young fellas, because young fellas are full of energy going around and that drives them crazy because they want to relax and have a quiet life and the young lads are all buzzing.  And most people in prison would have ... and I suppose I’d often say this as well ... most people in prison would have many, many personal issues and emotional issues, psychological issues, mental issues.  1 in 4, by the way in 1997, had a history of being an in-patient in a psychiatric hospital, 1 in 4.  There’s no community anywhere else except a psychiatric hospital where you would have that level of psychiatric illness and 40% had contact with the psychiatric service, so that’s a huge level of psychiatric background difficulties that people had.  And then when you’d add on addiction, you know, you can see where between addiction and psychiatric illness we’ve a massive difficulty in terms of the sort of problems that people have.  Learning difficulties would be massive as well, often never, ever discovered, you know, serious like dyslexia, behavioural difficulties, ADHD, all these sort of issues would be prevalent in prison population as well.  And a lot of it would never have been detected or treated.  In some cases they would have been diagnosed but never got the follow-on treatment like counselling and support and the like and quite a number of them would go through education, for instance, through primary and never be discovered that they were dyslexic and maybe years later they discover it and get help and then of course say oh Jesus their lives have changed instantly because now the problem that they had in school was gone.  And that’s what we mean by early intervention.  I’ll give you a good one, Barnardo’s,  I’m on the board of Barnardo’s, I just came from a meeting before in there and Fergus Finley the Chief Executive of Barnardo’s is tired saying it, he said “If you spend on early intervention you’ll save on the consequences often” and no I’d totally agree with him because if you could support families at the very early stages and we now know that from when you’re 3 or 4 years of age it’s an absolutely crucial age, not 15 or 16, 3 or 4 years of age, that’s when the child is really going to make that real significant move in way or the other and so we should be focusing on the disadvantaged areas where there’s a varying lack of resources and facilities.  And sometimes I have to say as well parenting skills are often very ... no fault, no criticism of the parents, but they are low on the skills of parenting, well I mean they need that sort of support and help as well.  And where it is in Barnardo’s they’re doing wonderful work all around Dublin city and other places and it will be very interesting because they are doing a dilation as they’re going along and it will be very interesting to see in 10 years time, for instance, will that make a huge difference in some of the areas because they are working in the most socially disadvantaged areas.  Helping mums, helping families, helping communities from baby, from pregnancy upwards, helping the mums and it’ll be very interesting to see will that make a difference.  I believe it will, a significant difference, but we have to wait and see.Participant 5: Has the education always been available to prisoners and do prisoners have access to facilities like pool tables?John: No, now well first of all in a place like Mountjoy education isn’t available to all simply because there are no facilities there and 40 people sign up for education, maybe 100 in total would be at some element of education and about 600 wouldn’t and that’s basically because they don’t have the facilities to facilitate it.  In relation to activities and things like pool tables in every wing of the prison there’s probably a pool table or a snooker table but there would also be about 150 to 170 prisoners availing of that facility in that area so while you can say they have pool tables the reality is that they might get a game of snooker once a week because there’d be so many people, you know, vying for the one facility.  So you have snooker tables and television and things like that but of course the demand for them also has to be linked into the amount of the facilities that are there.  The recreation facilities in Mountjoy are diabolical, that’s it in a nutshell.  Simply because when the place was built there was no recreation and they didn’t build it with that in mind so anything that’s there now is done on the basis of ad hoc, opening up an old basement area, converting a number of cells into a recreation area, all that sort of stuff.  The workshops are not purpose built, they’re just converted cells.  So the facilities were never built into the place when they were building it in 1850 and now the room isn’t there to expand, to provide the facilities that you really need.  Listen thank you very much anyway you’re very good.  (clapping)  Thanks Padraic.  (recording ends here)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 Johnny Connolly's talk.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode criminologist Johnny Connolly outlines current research and policy on the broad areas of crime and drugs, and also discusses crime statistics and recent trends in drug consumption. Recorded in front of a live audience in the Central Library on 8 September 2011 as part of its 'Crime and the City' series.Very happy to be here.  Happy to be invited.  Right, well what I’m going to do is start by looking at what we think we know about drug related crime.  Now first of all when we talk about drug related crime, we’re talking about illicit drugs and the reason I’m talking about illicit drugs is because certain substances have been made legal through statute often as a result of international obligations and our main sort of drugs legislation are based in the 1977 Misuse of Drugs Act.  Now later on hopefully in a bit of discussion we can talk about some contemporary issues.  One particular issue is the whole issue of so-called head shops and psychotropic substances and new substances, every week apparently a new substance is being created and the challenges that creates for any legislative system or any system of criminal deterrents.  So we’ll have a little chat about that.  I want to start, however, by just talking a little bit about the background to the issue of drug related crime.  And then I’m going to talk about the official picture and that is what people talk about or what you read in the newspapers often about the, you know, where politicians say the crime rate is increasing or decreasing etc., I’m going to sort of interrogate that a little bit and see what exactly that means.  And then I’m going to look at what we referred to as the dark figure of drug related crime, what that picture, that official picture, doesn’t tell us.  And then I’m going to go through the various models that look at ... that have emerged to try and explain the connection between illicit drug use and offending behaviour.  And there are four sort of dominant models that have emerged in the literature to explain the connection because people sort of assume that’s it quite simple but it’s actually a very complex area in terms of determining the causative connection between the use of illicit drugs and offending behaviour.  Most people who use illicit drugs don’t commit any offence whatsoever expect the offence of possession and that’s something that we can touch on as well.  I’m then going to go into a little bit, you know, in a more sort of topical way looking at how we understand the drugs phenomenon in a Dublin context in particular.  The way in which different sort of perspectives within society have responded to the problem, the way in which the State has responded, the way in which communities most affected by the problems have responded and then maybe we’ll start talking about other different approaches that are debated – legalisation, decriminalisation and various other models that have emerged perhaps in Portugal or in the Netherlands etc.  So hopefully, you know, be as interactive as you want, feel free to cut across and at the end hopefully we’ll have time for a bit of a discussion.  Now the photographs I’m using and I’m trying not to be overly academic here so I’ve used photographs that have been taken by a friend of mine called Ronnie Close.  And myself and Ronnie worked on a project in the mid 1990s where we were looking at the whole revival of the anti-drugs movement that emerged at that time and for those who aren’t familiar with this the drug phenomenon, particularly heroin, really impacted in the north inner city in the late 70s and early 1980s.  At that time a movement emerged made up of what was referred to as ‘the concerned parents against drugs’ because there was a perception that the State and that the police either couldn’t or wouldn’t respond adequately to the problem.  This phenomenon emerged again in the mid 1990s, particularly with the emergence of ecstasy and the whole rave scene and then the resurgence in a way of heroin back onto the scene and a number of drug related deaths, particularly in inner city Dublin communities and in sort of economically deprived parts of the area of Dublin as a whole. And then we had sort of a quite ... what you might refer to as a watershed and that was the murder of Veronica Guerin, a journalist, in 1996 by people allegedly connected to the trade in drugs.  And that led to a major reaction from the State in terms of legislation and that sort of approach has really been sustained over time like there was sort of a renewal of the whole sort of what is being referred to as ‘the war on drugs’ at that time.  It was a major challenge to the democratic institutions of the State that a journalist was murdered who had been prominent in writing about people involved in drug related crime and gangland and those involved in gangs etc., associated with drugs and this was what was perceived a major symbolic threat to the State and so it was quite an important watershed.  So we’ll talk later about all of that.Now I’m going to go through ... and then we’ll talk a little bit about the challenge in recent times as a result of head shops and also the Internet and the challenge that has created for people trying to legislate against psychoactive substances which are changing so rapidly and which can be sold so easily over the Internet etc. Now I’m going to show a couple of graphs and I hope you can see them easily enough.  And this reflects what I refer to as the official picture.  Now when you read in the newspapers or you hear coming up to election time in particular where one group of politicians are saying that this group are soft on crime and the other group are saying that we’re hard on crime and we’re tough on crime and then one group will come back and say but drug crimes are increasing or crimes associated with drugs are increasing dramatically, now what we’re actually talking about in that debate is very little in terms of what actually is happening but what the statistics, the official picture, is telling us is really what the police are doing.  They are a reflection of law enforcement activity.  So, for example, the statistics that we see are produced largely by Customs and by the Garda Síochána who have the main responsibility in the State for the prosecution of drug offences.  But those statistics are determined by the resources of these agencies, by their ability to detect drugs, by the ability of those involved in the trade to conceal their drugs and to evade detection.  So really what these figures are telling us is about what the police do in response in carrying out their mandate to enforce drug offences, the offences contained in the Misuse of Drugs Act.  And the main offences that are prosecuted are possession, or what we refer to as simple possession, it’s a Section 3 offence, possession often for personal use, amounts of a substance, most cannabis and then drug supply, Section 15, where you are prosecuted for the possession and distribution of drugs.  And then you’ve a couple of other offences that sort of are dominant such as obstruction where you might try and throw drugs down a toilet or you might try and resist arrest and this is another dominant area.  Cultivation of drugs, personal cultivation is an area that has increasingly been ... it’s increasingly dominating headlines and we’re hearing about factories where people are producing their own drugs.  Now again is this a real increase in this phenomenon or are we just seeing law enforcement focusing more on it and this is a very difficult one to know. Now what you see here if you follow the yellow line, that’s the total drug offences between 1993 and 2005.  The pink line is for possession and the blue line is for supply.  So what that tells us immediately is that the main trend in drug offences is determined by possession offences.  That is the bulk of the offences that are prosecuted through the courts.  If you notice something interesting there as well, in 1997 you see that the line jumps up very rapidly.  Now I think that that is because of the murder of Veronica Guerin in 1996 and what you saw was this major reaction by the State but in terms of statistics where you’d see politicians say we’re winning the fight against drugs etc., what you see in actual practice is a huge increase in people being prosecuted for the simple possession of cannabis not really what you would see as a very significant response to that murder.  Now a number of other things happened as well of course which we’ll talk about, but all I’m trying to illustrate here is the way in which statistics can be so revealing but also the way in which they can conceal so much of what is actually happening.  Now again this shows you that most of the offences that are prosecuted are for Cannabis as the line sort of very clearly follows each other, the possession, most of the possession offences are related to cannabis so most of the prosecutions that we see in the statistics are for people possessing cannabis for personal use.  Now I’m not offering any moral position on this, that is the law, the law must be enforced, but that is also what is actually happening.  And of course there is a huge debate as to the legal status of cannabis and it is probably one of the most hotly contested issues within this whole area both publicly and in terms of the literature etc. Here we look at prosecutions for heroin and prosecutions for cocaine between 1995 and 2005, over that decade.  And what is interesting if you look at the pink line which is cocaine through the whole Celtic Tiger era you saw cocaine moving beyond its sort of idea as the rich man’s drug contained within sort of a certain section of society.  And heroin was seen as a drug that was always associated with those really on the margins of society, what we refer to as dependent or problematic users.  But what you see is a steady increase in prosecutions of cocaine until it eventually eclipses heroin for the first time in the history of the State in around 2004.  Now another thing that tells us is that this data can be useful, it can show us trends in what is actually going on and it’s an indirect indicator of availability.  You can compare say police data with treatment data and that can help you build up a picture of what actually is going on. This is one that I think is very interesting and this is under 17 year olds prosecuted by gender from 1995 to 2005.  Now if you look at that you’ll see that the number of females remains very low and relatively steady while the number of males increases year on year pretty much dramatically over the decade.  Now is that because more boys are using or is it something else?  And it doesn’t reflect, say, use of alcohol by girls because what we have seen in alcohol data is that the use of alcohol by girls is actually coming closer over that period of time to the use of alcohol by males and sometimes alcohol and illicit drug use can be sort of comparable to a certain degree.  There’s another way that might be ... there’s another explanation.  For example, when young people are stopped and searched for a girl to be searched there needs to be a female guard present but there is a lot less female guards than there are male guards so possibly it could be that.  If I was a teenager and I was walking down the street with drugs it would be the girl who’d be carrying them because she’d be less likely to be stopped, to be searched, to be detected and what that tells us is the way in which statistics or production of the discretionary behaviour of law enforcement, the way in which often the picture that we think we have is a picture that has been constructed by the day to day activities of law enforcement.  Because I don’t think that picture really reflects what is going on out there.  And you could also argue from the perspective of young males that that is discriminatory police behaviour and this young male I think would probably agree with you.  (laughter) Now if we look at drug offences more recently again we have seen a consistent increase – that’s a bit difficult to read  - but the broken line at the top is total drug offences, the second one is drug possession and the third one is supply and again we can see that supply is relatively consistent, the trend in the total number is really determined by simple possession.  If we look more recently as well what we can see is – and this is an interesting phenomena in recent times – a decline as the Celtic Tiger and people’s disposable income has declined we have seen a simultaneous decline in the use of illicit substances or at least in their detection.  Now I wouldn’t say that that reflects any difference in police behaviour, I’d say it actually is probably a more accurate reflection of people’s actual use of illicit substances because other surveys, other studies, have also reflected this decline.  Again if we look here we can see the dark broken line is ecstasy and that’s an interesting phenomenon because where in the mid 1990s you had huge seizures of ecstasy and it was a very popular drug, what this tells us is that it was a culturally relevant drug.  It emerged at a particular time, probably associated with the rave culture, it was popular at a certain time, but something else might be happening there as well and that is the growth, the emergence of head shops and the use of other substances that might have mirrored ecstasy or mirrored cocaine, for example mephedrone, which increased and became popular and possibly displaced the use of ecstasy.  Sort of the other line there, the sort of smaller dots on it, that’s cocaine and that’s interesting where you see this rapid decrease in cocaine and again I would say that reflects the lesser availability of disposable income for people and the lesser use of cocaine.  And then heroin at the bottom is relatively consistent because heroin is a drug that often those who use it who are dependent drug users the economic circumstances don’t really matter to them, it’s what we refer to in economic terms as an economically inelastic demand for that drug because if it becomes more expensive people will rob more to pay for it.  And the economic circumstances don’t really matter because there is a serious dependency or a serious addiction.  So it doesn’t as easily as other drugs, such as cocaine, it doesn’t necessarily reflect people’s disposable income. But what are we missing?  Firstly, in general when we talk about crime and the law that is there politicians, when they respond to crime, maybe they’ll pass some legislation.  Now that’s fine but we know very little about how that legislation is actually enforced.  We know next to nothing about how that legislation is actually enforced.  We also know very little in this country.  In the UK, for example, we know that about 1 out of the 4 crimes that are committed upon people are actually reported to the police.  Now the reason we know that is because what they do, they’ve been doing it since the 1980s, they’ve been comparing the official picture from the police data with self report studies that are conducted every year.  So they look at the official picture and they ask people were you a victim of crime in the last year?  And they say yes.  Well did you report it?  No we didn’t.  Why didn’t you?  Well there was no point, nothing would happen.  There was no insurance potential.  I couldn’t be bothered.  The police wouldn’t do anything, nothing would happen.  So actually in terms of the crime picture what we are seeing is only a very small part of the picture of crime.  If we go into certain types of crimes, for example, shop lifting.  Only 1 out of 11 shoplifting offences are actually reported.  If we look at bicycle thefts it’s even higher.  So in terms of our picture of crime, in terms of the official picture it is extremely limited in terms of reflecting what is actually happening.  And even when people do report crimes that doesn’t mean they’re actually ever recorded.  For example, a study in the UK showed that 40% of crimes reported to the police weren’t recorded.  Perhaps the police office at the time didn’t think it was a crime, didn’t believe it was important enough.  Maybe they were finishing their shift and they couldn’t be bothered and all of these things have been shown as reasons why this might be the case and again human behaviour is an important element of this and discretionary behaviour in terms of how our picture of crime is affected.  But the dark figure of crime, that’s what we call this, is much higher for drug related crime because a lot of drug related crime never enters the official picture.  A lot of drug related offences, like serious ones, are never reported and one of the main reasons for this is because people are fearful of those involved in the drug trade.  Other times people don’t care, if they see somebody smoking a joint or they see somebody, a crime is being committed but it’s their business, it’s not really that important and there are much more serious crimes and we know in this country, of course, that the really serious crimes aren’t often seen as crimes, for example, tax evasion.  I remember having a conversation with a business man one time and it took me about an hour to explain that tax evasion was actually a crime and that was a culture that we are beginning to see the consequences of now, that only certain crimes on the criminal statute books have ever been enforced.  And so crime is also… and who we see as offenders is also a production of how society determines what’s important to prosecute and what’s not important. Most of what we know in terms of crime or as we see crime it relates to street level crime – theft, burglary, robbery, assault, etc.  That is the sort of bread and butter of what we would determine as crime and those we would see as criminals are often referred to as police property groups, the people that the police prosecute on a day-to-day basis, usually young working class males make up the bulk of the offender.  And if you look at, say, those in prison, for example, the vast majority of those in Mountjoy prison come from three postal districts in Dublin.  And that is also a reflection of the discretionary nature of the system.  Certain people are stopped.  Certain people are arrested.  And certain people the way they talk back to the guards might determine whether they will be actually prosecuted or not.  Or where they are from, the whole attitude test, do they pass the attitude test?  Certain people for the same offence might be likely to get a custodial sentence while others would not and that is the whole discretionary nature of the criminal justice system and that makes up our picture.Now there are four dominant models explaining the link between drug use and crime.  The first is what we refer to as the psychopharmacological model, which says that there is something within the property of the substance that leads to the offending behaviour.  Intoxication where it might cause criminal especially violent behaviour, now research has shown a very strong connection between offending behaviour and the consumption of alcohol.  There’s a consistent association between violent crime and alcohol and I don’t think that would be huge news for most of us here.  But the link between offending behaviour and particularly violent crime has been refuted with regards to heroin and cannabis.  There is some evidence for crack cocaine.  There is some evidence for heroin particularly where people are interfered with if they have heroin in their possession or if they are shooting up there can be a violent reaction but really the link, the violent link, has not been proven.  It is in the social environment, the context in which drugs are used is a much more important indicator of violence than the actual psychopharmacological effect of the substance themselves.  The second important link is what we refer to as the economic compulsive or the acquisitive and this would be one that would be most dominant probably in most of our minds, where people are committing crimes to feed their habit.  This has been proven in terms of research, international and Irish research that we have seen an increase in economically motivated crimes after addiction.  After people become dependent on drugs and when they are in an effective, well-resourced treatment programme, for example, methadone maintenance with other supports, we have seen a reduction in offending behaviour.  So again that proves from the other side, from the treatment side, a clear connection between economically motivated crimes and addiction. I’m going to show you a couple of police studies that were done here which I think are interesting.  What they show and what a lot of other data shows is that an increase in employment and the availability of treatment has seen a very large reduction in economically motivated crimes here in Ireland.  Another important point, however, is that those who are dependent on drugs are far more likely to be caught offending than those who are not dependent on drugs.  The police know who they are because they’re essentially their bread and butter, they’re picking them up every day or they’re stopping them every day.  So somebody who is let’s say a chaotic drug user or a dependent or problematic user is much more likely to be stopped and prosecuted than somebody who is not dependent.  For example, somebody who uses drugs at the weekend, a recreational user who goes to work on a Monday morning, they do not appear in the statistics.  They’re not generally stopped, they’re not prosecuted etc.  And their use of the substance is manageable, they are managing it and they’re not engaging in serious crime, in any crime beyond possession, so they don’t appear really. Just very quickly, two studies were done, one that got a huge lot of attention in 1997.  It was a Garda study and they asked a number of people who they knew were dependent drug users a series of questions and then a sort of follow-up study, not as strong a study, was done in 2004 again by the Garda Research Unit.  And just to go through a couple of the findings, those who found as crime as their main source of income, in 1997 it was 59% in 2004 it was 13%.  Now at that time, in 2004, there was a huge increase in employment.  There was an almost levelling out of unemployment.  Unemployment was effectively gone at that time.  And what that tells us is that people who are dependent on drugs can also maintain a job so it sort of breaks that sort of stigma that we have, that people were actually maintaining employment, at some level, and also maintaining their drug use and it was serious drug use, heroin primarily.  And again the unemployment rate was far less in the latter study than in 1997.  The drug first used was cannabis and that’s been fairly consistent, although if we exclude tobacco and we exclude alcohol cannabis was the drug first used.  First introduced to drugs by a friend, and this again is consistent, is 81% and 86% and that’s very consistent with all studies I’m aware of, that people are first introduced to illicit drugs by someone who they know, by a family member or a friend.  Now why that’s a very important point is that there is this perception of drug dealers as the stranger at the school gate, as it’s put, preying on people.  Actually most people are introduced to drugs by somebody that they know and somebody that is close to them and that must question our whole understanding of the drug dealing enterprise and how people actually become involved in drugs in the first place.  Drugs sourced from a local dealer had increased from 46% to 76% and what that tells me anyway is that drug markets are far more integrated into local communities.  We must also remember that the mobile phone became very, you know, everyone had mobile phones and anyone with a mobile phone and a list of names can be a drug dealer and they’re very difficult to detect from a policing perspective.  So an easier access to drugs was also facilitated by the mobile phone.  The number who had been to prison had decreased slightly and the estimated daily expenditure, allowing for inflation etc., wasn’t that different.  And an interesting finding was the movement from the Punt to the Euro and honestly people aren’t going to start looking for change on the street, like you know it’s 12.5 Euro from 10 Punts so what is that, 7.50?  You know, that’s not going to happen.  So really what happened was that the legitimate market wasn’t followed in the illegitimate market, changes that took place in the legitimate markets where prices largely increased to allow for the Euro in the illegitimate market there was no real change, it was just rounded figures was all that was important.  And systemic crime is crimes committed as a consequence of the fact that drugs are illegal and there is an illicit market.  And we refer to these as systemic types of crime.  How we understand this, we look at things like drug seizures, drug prices, drug purities, drug roots, price impurity.  If the purity of drugs is lower will the price be lower?  And in any studies that I’ve conducted here anyway and there are very few there doesn’t seem to be a huge connection between price and purity, certainly not at a street level.  If somebody keeps giving somebody crap, as it’s referred to, they will simply go to a different dealer but it doesn’t seem to be reflected in changes in price.  But you would assume also let’s say for example if there’s a lower availability you would assume that prices would increase following basic demand and supply.  And yet what we have seen is that drug prices have decreased in Ireland over the last number of years while availability hasn’t really been affected.  So these are the sorts of indicators we try and use to understand the market. We have seen sort of a stabilisation of markets over time and often we look at drug markets, as a simple way of explaining, as involving three levels, you have the import level, you have what we refer to as the middle market level and then you have the street level.  And then you have what we refer to at street level as open and closed markets, so an open market might be a market on the street where you can go up and you can be a complete stranger and they would sell you drugs and there was a time in Dublin, particularly when there was all those street protests and marches were taking place, when you did have a lot of that around the city.  It still exists but it’s less open in the sense that often you have to know the person that your getting drugs off so we use the concept of open and closed markets to describe this type of thing.  You might have closed markets in that they take place in clubs, in night clubs, and again you would have to know the person or be introduced to the person by somebody who is trusted before you will get drugs.  And also one of the reasons that forces markets from open to closed is because of police undercover operations which are a major factor of policing in the illicit drug trade where they pose as drug users or people looking for drugs and as a consequence people are increasingly cautious about who they are buying and selling from.  Local drug markets are particularly important of course, particularly open ones, because they cause huge community disturbance.  People see them all the time.  People who are trying to get treatment have to run through a gauntlet of drug dealers which is an extremely difficult thing to do.  Also for younger people they might be attracted to the money that is being made particularly in very socio and economically deprived communities, so open drug markets are attractive to young people and they are problematic from that perspective as well because they are seen as legitimate.  If they are happening openly without interference well then there must be something okay about them so they are particularly important.  In terms of the involvement of organised crime and organised crime is a term that I think requires a lot of like analysis because two people and recently we’ve had legislation on organised crime but two or three people can be organised.  They can arrange something together but does that mean they can be referred to as organised crime?  Yes it does in one way but it’s not what we understand by organised crime.  And this is something, a study that I’m completing at the moment, it’s the first national study on illicit drug markets which is taking place in four locations around the country where I’ve tried to address those types of questions – how are drug markets structured?  Who is involved?  What sort of roles do they perform?  And these types of questions.  Because in a way you have to look at like an ordinary market, like a legitimate market, because there are massive profits to be made but there are exchanges, there is supply, there is demand, etc., and these are important. So how organised is organised crime?  Europol has looked, has sort of compared different types of markets and it says one of the unique things about the Irish market is that it involves families, that at a certain higher level it is very much centred around families.  In a lot of other countries of course it would be centred around perhaps particular ethnic groups.  Now one study I conducted here in Dublin was on crack cocaine, there’s a copy of that at the back, and that found that crack cocaine initially in around 2005 was associated with West Africans, initially.  Or else people coming back from England who had the ability to wash up cocaine into crack and so that was an interesting factor in that it was something that was associated with a new ethnic group emerging here who had the know-how, who had the ability, but that is no longer the case now throughout the city.  And then there’s the final model, this is called the common cause model, where illicit drug use and offending behaviour are common factors of perhaps a deviant lifestyle.  One doesn’t necessarily lead to the other but they are both factors of other things or consequences of other things, they’re not causally linked but they’re produced by underlining social factors such as inequality, deprivation, etc.  And just to go through this list studies that have been conducted here since the 1990s, since Paul O’Mahony conducted a major study and he’s speaking here I think in a couple of weeks on a sociological and criminological profile of Mountjoy prisoners and he went through ... and nothing has emerged to say that this profile is any different today, that most were single male age 14 to 30, they were urban, living in the parental home, from large and often broken families.  They left school before the minimum age of 16.  They were from areas with high levels of unemployment.  Their best ever job in the lowest socioeconomic class.  They had a high number of previous convictions and rates of recidivism – where they’ve been to prison before.  They had a history of family members being in prison and they were from local authority housing and areas of high levels of long-term unemployment.  The common cause model is probably the most under-investigated model but it is also probably the most important.  But from a policymaker’s perspective it is a much more difficult model to handle because the common cause model says that a drug policy on its own is not going to solve the drug problem or the drugs and crime problem.  Unless you look at all of the socio and economic context in which drug use and crime take place you can’t fix the problem and so it’s a much more challenging reality from a policymaking perspective.Participant 1: Sorry there, if that is the case, and you clearly have this well researched, have successive governments that the research board has been informing are they are taking any of this kind of research on board?Johnny: Well they are.  I mean like the National Drugs Strategy combines five pillars including demand reduction, supplier reduction, treatment, education and rehabilitation and research so in a sense the model is right and it’s quite a well-respected approach.  So it is acknowledging those multiple dimensions.  Now if you’re talking specifically about crime, however, and the causes and the solutions to crime they can not only be policing solutions or imprisonment etc., certainly not that, they must be responded to in a more holistic way.  So I think that is ... I don’t think that anybody who doesn’t realise that is the case but translating it into actual policy is much more challenging because there is no quick fix solution to that.Participant 1: Yeah it’s long term.Johnny: It’s a long-term societal change, it’s not just about introducing the policy with 50 action points, it’s a much broader societal change that you have to address.  For example, if you look at the initiative that was taken in Limerick, that was a multi-faceted approach to that problem involving changing infrastructure, looking at education, looking at pre-school, looking at family support and that is the way you address not only the drug problem but the crime problem and that’s the important thing that this, the common cause type of research, has shown. So just to summarise the link between drugs and crime, most drug users do not commit crimes other than those of possession.  There’s a link between some forms of illicit drug use and crime and particularly violent crime, some forms of illicit drug use and crime mostly heroin and cocaine.  Most problematic users receive prison sentences for drug related offences rather than drug offences.  And just a point to explain what I mean by that.  There’s a major crisis of overcrowding in our prisons and increasingly this is getting some attention and a lot of international organisations, recently the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, has focused on this major issue and the inspector for prisons has written a lot about this very serious crisis within the prison system.  Most of those who are dependent drug users receive very short sentences of between 3 to 6 months in prison so they’re obviously not seen as a threat to society if they’re only serving such short sentences.  And clearly given the state of the prisons, although the treatment in prisons has improved a lot since about 2006, clearly that is not the answer to somebody who is a dependent problematic addicted person.  Now legislation is to be introduced to basically force judges to consider non-custodial sentences for anybody who they would have given a 1-year sentence and that has to be most dependent drug users.  And that is a question again for society that we have to look at different ways of treating people who are dependent users and a very highly stigmatised group of people as well, people will serious health problems.  This is a very important finding, most problematic users began their criminal career before their drug use so it wasn’t drugs that led them to commit crime, they were already committing crimes.  So drugs didn’t cause crime, their offending behaviour had already begun.  Now drug use and particularly addiction would have increased the rate of their offending behaviour but it didn’t cause it in the first place so if you’re trying to address the cause you have to address the cause of crime in the first place.  So there’s no clear causal link between drug use and crime, there is links proven between alcohol and violent crime and that is clear in the evidence.Again although there is so much concern about illicit drug use, although we read in our newspapers every day about some gangland killing and there is a lot of public concern and public fear and there are huge amounts of legislation out there to address it, we know very little about illicit drug markets in Ireland.  We know almost nothing.  The research that has been done, the research I’ve done say on crack cocaine was the first study that really tried to address this as a market and the dynamics of a market and tried to apply that sort of logic to it.  If you’re trying to interfere or you’re trying to intervene and address it I think you have to start approaching it in that way.  What brings people into it?  What sort of profits are being made?  And these types of questions, how is structured?  How many people are involved?  And this research has been done.  Early next year there will be a study that is finished now which is due to be published by the National Advisory Committee on Drugs and ourselves, in the Health Research Board, which again looks at drug markets from that perspective, looking at four markets around the country, you know, one city, one suburban area, one inner city area, one regional town, to try and get a sense of different types of markets and how they evolve, how they are organised and structured and how we respond to them.  And that’s the other point, there’s almost no research done on what the police are actually doing.  We see the statistics, the data, the graphs and the trends that I’ve shown, but we don’t know how many people are stopped and searched.  We don’t know how the legislation is being implemented?  How many people are stopped and searched and who are they?  How many of them are arrested?  What happens those people?Participant 2: Have people tried to get that information?  I mean I used to work as a journalist and I know it’s extremely difficult to get information out of the guards, have there been attempts to get that kind of information?Johnny: Well it’s not something ... I mean the IT system in the guards has improved dramatically, in the PULSE system – Police Using Leading Systems Effectively – it’s called.  That has improved dramatically but it was never introduced for the journalists and for researchers, it was introduced as an operational factor.  Now something that is improving is the connection between the different parts of the system, for example, the police, the prosecutor’s office, the courts and the prisons because there’s no connection, in terms of trying to understand it from a research perspective or a journalistic perspective.  You can’t follow people through the system, you know, and that’s something that we have been very weak at, it is to improve and it is improving slowly but it doesn’t ... and also let’s say if you go deeper than that, like there’s a huge amount of what we would refer to as captured data, for example, those being prosecuted, you know, the sort of research that I’m interested in and the guards worked very closely with this research project in a huge way.  They have cooperated with it.  So I think it is not only about that resistance because it’s not their ... like this is something now that is not only an Irish thing, this is something that the European Commission, Europol and an organisation called the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction in Lisbon are now collaborating on developing indicators to understand the connections between drugs and crime and supply reduction efforts and that is only now really developing.  And that’s the other point, we don’t know how many people are committing offences as a consequence of a drug addiction, we don’t know that, what we refer to as the attributable cause of the offence.  So, you know, in prison they are drug offenders but most of them, as I said, are in there because of an addiction and a crime committed as a consequence of that addiction but we don’t know how many.  We know the numbers using methadone within the prison system so clearly they are people who have a very serious drug problem.  But in terms of understanding crime and offending and criminal justices responses to it our understanding is very limited and from a democratic or accountable perspective huge resources go into this area and have always gone into the area.  There’s almost never been any sort of cutback on spending on law and order but there’s very little understanding of how that money is actually spent in practice so that is a very important issue.Participant 2: And are you saying there isn’t a culture of ... in my dealing with the Gardaí there was a cultural issue about giving information, the guards are very closed and compared to many other societies, I include military dictatorships.Johnny:  Yeah.Participant 2: Very secretive.Johnny: Yeah.Participant 2: So you’re saying that the lack of information from your point of view is not a cultural issue?Johnny: I didn’t say that but the culture, there is of course a cultural issue and policing studies have shown a very inherent conservatism and a great wariness of potential criticism etc.  Now what we’ve had here up until very recently, up until about the mid 2000s, was that the guards would never give any information on say things like seizures, drug seizures, or things like that in the local area until the Garda Commissioner’s Report was published.  Now the Garda Commissioner’s Report was usually about 2 years out of day so it was of no use in terms of understanding what was going on locally.  I was involved in setting up a community policing system in the north inner city in 2000 with the late Tony Gregory and local guards in Store Street and it’s still functioning very effectively.  But it was I think January 2000 when a member of the local Garda Drugs Unit stood up and he explained to the local people, about 300 local people, the number of seizures that had been made in the last 3 months in the area.  Now I was flabbergasted at the time because that was something that had never been done before.  Now it didn’t tell them a huge amount they didn’t know anyway because they live there but I think what the Gardaí didn’t realise was the importance in terms of communicating to people of just showing them that you’re actually doing something rather than just saying it but showing that you ... and it is a form of accountability.  I think what you could probably say is, and this isn’t only just institutions like the Gardaí, there has never really been accountability in that sense here in any of the institutions that have sort of formed the identity of the State and that is something that I think is now breaking down.  Clearly it is breaking down and people are demanding it.  But I think that probably is part of the picture. Now in terms of our debates about drug related crime and drug crime and all of these various things I think one thing that has often been missing is a perspective on those who are most affected by drug related crime.  The drug problem has always disproportionately impacted on the most vulnerable communities in the sense that they are already suffering numerous aspects of socio and economic problems – low education levels, early school leaving, high levels of unemployment, etc.  And they are also the greatest victims in terms of drug offending.  There isn’t this romantic idea that people in certain areas go out to other areas and rob from other areas and that is one of the things I think that really led to the huge marches that emerged in inner city Dublin in the 1980s and the 1990s was that heroin changed the complexion of crime in a lot of these areas because people were now robbing on their own people whereas traditionally there had been a sense of well you don’t rob on your own.  But the drug problem it completely undermined that whole romantic notion and I think that is a perspective that responses have to look at it.  For example, one of the major issues at the moment I believe – and this was sort of a picture of how communities responded at that time, you know, having marches, marching on Government Buildings, setting up vigils out on the street to stop people dealing, marching on people’s houses who they alleged were drug dealers and evicting them from their houses and on one occasion killing somebody who was an alleged dealer – and that’s the whole aspect of vigilantism as well, there is that potential but what it did show was a serious crisis where a lot of communities felt we’re not noticed and our problems are not addressed.  And I think there is a sense that their problems, as the saying goes, they were over policed but they were under protected in that their priorities, their crime priorities, were not really being reflected in what was happening and what the criminal justice system was doing.  After Veronica Guerin the State response was to symbolically assert itself, that we are winning the war on drugs.  The Criminal Assets Bureau was something that was quite original and was something that has been followed up in many other countries and a range of new drug laws were introduced in the wake of that, of Veronica Guerin’s killing.  But again communities were asking when you actually look at the legislation in practice are our priorities actually being reflected in the policing process?  And the police initiative I mentioned there earlier, in 2000, was the first time that you really had a sort of form of local democratic accountability in Store Street which is still going on. Subsequently now since 2005 there has been the Garda Act, this is quite an ambitious poster of the Labour Party in 1997, yeah the 1997 elections, “1992 drug barons reign, 1997 drug barons run”.  Now there’s a number of reasons why they might have run, one reason is that the source of drugs are not in Ireland they are often in Spain or they’re in Portugal or they’re in the Netherlands so there’s a logical reason to move.  Now recently I believe as a consequence of the organised crime legislation that is something that seems to be causing some concern and also the ability to use different forms of evidence, particularly photographic evidence and telecommunication evidence in prosecutions, is something that is apparently causing some concern.  But drug markets have changed as well, they’ve become more hidden and, as I said, the mobile phones facilitated this.   They become more credit based where people are giving drugs on tick or on credit, more mobile, but they become more violent.  A lot of research has shown that.  And they become much younger, much younger people being involved and much younger people being brought in to keep a look-out, to hold on to drugs, to run drugs between various people but being brought into the enterprise at a much younger age and some say that is one of the reasons it has also become more violent.  And where people to get debts of very small amounts of money are prepared to use levels of violence that historically only 10 years ago you wouldn’t have seen in the Irish drug scene. And some of the issues that are there of course that need to be addressed, one of the major issues I think that hasn’t really sort of got national headlines as of yet I think is the issue of intimidation and violence.  Drug related intimidation of not just users but their families in response to drug debts and economically as the market decreases people’s determination to recoup their debts becomes much more heightened and there have been some studies done by the Family Support Network and by Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign which has been trying to put some sort of focus onto this really serious issue.  But again I think the fact that it isn’t really in the mainstream yet shows you the way in which the drug related crime problem how it’s prioritised.  This, I think, is the main priority for a lot of communities around the city, addressing the issue of intimidation, but it’s not really on the national thing.  There’s an article at the back I wrote there in our journal Drugnet Ireland, which you can get your hands on, where I’ve written up on a recent conference which looked specifically at this issue of intimidation. No-go areas, community stigma, the development of gangs, particularly the involvement of young people and the emergence of sort of gangs around drugs, fear of reprisal which is a major issue in terms of the State, and the drugs strategy, a lot of it is based on local drug taskforces requiring people in local communities to work with the organs of the State to address the various problems but fear of reprisal and the fear of seeing to be associated with responses of the State breaks down that cooperation or that willingness to cooperate and there’s a major democratic problem in relation to that.  So in terms of things like intimidation and drug related crime and fear there is a serious requirement of the State, if it wants to sustain some sort of policy response, it has to address issues of intimidation. Okay, I’m going to move on and conclude.  I think one of the things we have to question in terms of responses is on whose response is the behalf being made and how do we prioritise this issue?  First looking at it, analysing it and then prioritising, what is the important thing to start with because you do have to prioritise.  You can get a copy of this presentation.  I just want to just finish with this slide.  Some of the debates of course doing the rounds of course are like legalisation of drugs and some argue that will take the market from underneath the gangs and the dealers, decriminalisation where you introduce different sanctions.  Portugal is the first country certainly in Europe if not in the world to decriminalise all drugs and so people are now sent to a form of sort of committee that deals with issues of treatment etc., but they are taken completely out of the criminal justice system.  De-penalisation where you don’t send people to prison if they have a health problem, that’s what you address, you don’t incarcerate them as a consequence.  The Dutch solution which has virtually legalised the consumption of drugs in regulated conditions in what they called ‘Coffee Houses’ but a very interesting solution in that in the Netherlands the front door is legal but the back door is illegal, as they say.  The supply of drugs to the coffee house remains illegal but the consumption of drugs in the coffee house is legal.  So this is a sort of a form of, you know, and then you’ve things like community-based mediation, problem solving, local community policing, etc.  I’m going to finish on that.  So feel free to question or comment about it. Participant 3: What’s the data from the Portuguese solution and the Dutch solution?  Is it helping?Johnny: Yes, I think the data is generally fairly positive.  There’s a few articles have been written about that.  Say the Portuguese situation first in that there has been no increase in drug use, that’s one thing.  There has been no increase in drug related deaths which is a very important indicator.  And the Netherlands has shown a consistent decrease in drug related deaths.  Because what the Dutch were doing, and this was as early as 1966, was it wasn’t about legalising drugs, that wasn’t their interest, their interest was about separating markets so separating the cannabis market from more serious drug markets and that is something that they have succeeded in doing.  Now they’re under a lot of pressure.  One of the problems at the moment is because of the much higher purity of cannabis and in the Netherlands in particular and that’s a concern that a lot of other countries would have.  A problem for the Dutch of course is they’ve come under huge pressure from other European countries to reverse their approach and they seem to be yielding to that pressure and there’s some internal pressure as well, there is some political division.  Now as far as I’m aware there’s no political party in the Netherlands that wants to reverse that general approach but what they’re talking about doing is making them only accessible to Dutch people, for example, so that they’re not a tourist attraction for non-Dutch people.  So those are the sort of issues.  The Portuguese process I’ve read everything that’s been written about that and that also seems to be a very ... and I’ve seen them actually working and it seems to be a really interesting process.  Now one of the problems associated with this and like it’s about 10 years now in operation is the message it gives out to young people and this is often a very difficult thing to address, does that mean drugs are okay and that is something that they’re sort of looking at at the moment.  And it’s a very difficult one to square, how do you actually ... because you don’t know what message the more deterrent or prohibitive approach is giving, what message is that giving?  But the more liberal approach that is also giving a message that needs to be considered and I think also the coffee shop phenomenon is a very interesting concept that I think challenges anybody who calls for a liberalisation of drug laws because one of the concerns about that here was that a lot of people could avail of drugs in these coffee shops that mirrored, for example, cocaine, mephedrone.  But many people started using mind altering substances who would never have done otherwise except alcohol so they would never have experimented with substances like that but the fact that you could go into the city centre and go into a main street and go in and buy your drugs and go into the night club next door it did give a message to people that that’s okay and that was a major issue.  Now they’ve been pretty much all closed down but I think anyone in a free market economy who argues for legalisation must also confront the fact that people will then sell aggressively.  They will sell aggressively.  Look at alcohol, you know,alco-pops, people are making profit and there’s huge amounts of profit to be made.  Of course there’s massive profits in an illicit market but there’s also massive profits in an illicit market.  Like one of the things about the head shop phenomenon was the amount of money that was seized.  Like, for example, there was one burned out in Capel Street and they seized I think it was half a million from that shop and if you observed them there was a huge trade so there’s a lot of money to be made and this is a free market economy so ... and there will be aggressive advertising and so people who argue for a more liberal approach have to look at that.  Now that is not to say that those arguments aren’t valid but people come often from a harm reduction approach and they’re saying that the current system isn’t working because people are generally ignoring it and so the harms of their use is hidden so we have to try and bring it more out to the open so we can address these harms.  Another argument about the coffee shops was that once you made them illegal all the substances would simply be transferred into the illicit market.  I don’t think that has really happened.  Mephedrone I’d say it is very likely it has happened but a lot of other substances seem to disappear.  And then of course there’s the reality that people are getting drugs over the Internet so how do you challenge that?  How do you legislate for the Internet?Participant 4: Just around the thing around the inelasticity of heroin in particular and it’s kind of counter intuitive to think that it would be elastic because it’s like the archetypal drug of addiction and people are very dependent on it but interestingly about this time last year or a little bit later there was a good 6 month drought of the availability of street heroin and it just became unavailable really, now that threw up its own consequences like people getting ripped off buying stuff that just wasn’t heroin and whatever heroin was around became very, very pricey but one of the things I would have expected and you heard anecdotal evidence of it happening but it didn’t come across in the statistics that people hammered treatment centres then, the people that would have been addicted to street heroin then all of a sudden would have gone to their local treatment centre but the statistics at the treatment centres didn’t reflect that so.Johnny: And they’d be going there for Methadone, yeah?Participant 4: Yeah.  So I don’t know what that was about, maybe some of it is to do with some heroin use being discretionary, maybe people using heroin on top of their methadone maintenance and using heroin on dole day or when they’ve had a few bob extra, you know.Johnny: Yeah.Participant 4: And then that discretionary use went out and it might have diverted into other drugs, you know, if you like benzodiazepines and things like that.Johnny: That’s what I was just thinking that it’s probably I would say I mean that drought they say was because of a drought in Afghanistan, the crop being affected in Afghanistan how that then rebounded here, but that I would see it as the polydrug issue, that was very interesting, there was a study done in the south inner city called A Dizzying Array of Substances which showed how in a very small ... and often people there’s a perception sometimes that you’ve got a heroin market and you’ve a cannabis market and never the twain shall meet but I think you know yourself better than I do that that’s not the case and so it is probably that people were moving maybe for a similar hit or something similar but it’s an interesting like factor, did that increase the number of people seeking methadone?  People who were happy to use heroin and weren’t interested in methadone.Participant 4: You would imagine there would have been a spike and there wasn’t in the statistics according to the treatment centres.Johnny: Yeah.  Have those statistics been published yet, have they?Participant 4: Yeah, for that time period it must have been about 8 months ago now or 10 months.Johnny: Okay, yeah.  It would be very interesting to check it out.Participant 5: Johnny hiya.Johnny: Hiya.Participant 5: You mentioned about the drugs taskforces earlier and I know that a lot of the funding was cut very recently and most of their funding I think would have been cut in most of the organisations and I wonder is there any statistics or data out there yet about the impact that’s having on communities?  I mean I’ve read anecdotal stuff but I don’t know if there’s anything ... is it too early even to say?Johnny: Well you see there’s a guy, is it Harvey, I know his second name is Harvey, who has written a lot on this, on the actual social infrastructure of communities or the social capital as Putnam would put it and how those taskforces and all of the voluntary work around those taskforces is so important for those communities and so that tiny amount of money that they’ve cut back the effect that has, it has a multiple corrosive impact.  Now he’s the only one I’m aware who has really written about that so far but in terms of other like data has that ... I don’t know, I think that would require that type of sociological analysis that he applies.  And the thing is that it’s probably the most well spent money is money spent at that local level.Participant 6: In your recent research is there much evidence of crystal meth use?Johnny: No, there was a lot of fear of crystal meth and crystal meth was something ... like in a European context the main area, or main country, is the Czech Republic and I think Norway or Sweden were sort of standout countries in terms of crystal meth.  The UK has had a big problem with it as well but there was a concern about 2 years ago that because it was sort of emerging in the UK that the guards felt there’s an 18 month transfer period but UK have had crystal meth problems since the 80s and it’s never really taken off as a big problem here.  Now there have been a number of seizures but it hasn’t seemed to have taken off and any research I have done it’s been talked about and mentioned but nothing like say crack cocaine has been mentioned and there we’ve seen since it emerged really in 2005 it is now available certainly in all taskforce areas around Dublin and it is a market that is a very stable market and a very lucrative market.  Like while prices have fluctuated in other drugs crack is something that has been very steady and very lucrative because people are, you know, there’s such a demand for it, such a repeat demand.  But in terms of crystal meth and it’s also probably more concealed, you know, if you can call it a market because it can produce it in their home.  Like I remember watching a video once where the only way police seized crystal meth was when houses blew up because of the mixture of chemicals and so it might be something that is concealed possibly within certain ethnic groups who have a cultural background of using crystal meth but I don’t think it has transferred across to mainstream Irish society.Participant 7 Yeah, I was just wondering and it’s the same as you were talking about just now, I’ve read in the media about this new phenomenon in the UK that they label it as bath substance but ...Johnny: Bath salts, yeah.Participant 7: ... yeah, yeah has that reached Ireland already because it’s a very strong substance?Participant 4: Been and gone.Johnny: It’s been and ... yeah, it’s been and gone in that like the substances in what were referred to as head shops were nearly always marketed as something else like bath salts and things like that so that’s how the head shops were sort of getting around it.  Now the new legislation that was passed in 2010 prohibits that so now most head shops – and I think there’s about 10 of them out of whatever there was 80 or 90 or more are remaining open and that’s largely because of that new legislation that was introduced, the Psychotropic Substances Act, 2010.  We’ll just take one final quick one there.Participant 8: Just very quickly, are you optimistic or pessimistic for the future?Johnny: Optimistic.  (laughs)Participant 8: In relation to drugs?  (laughter)Johnny: I think one issue that I’ve mentioned that I think is really an important one is the issue of intimidation because that is really breaking down families in ways that mainstream society and the government doesn’t seem to really appreciate yet.  And I think there really needs to be a concerted response to that because once that is allowed and particularly if  the whole concept of gangs and territorial control is allowed to develop well then it’ll turn a corner and it will really be very difficult to come back.  I mean there was a study done recently in Limerick called Understanding Limerick and it showed the way in certain parts of Limerick and it was a very organised destruction of a community to facilitate drug dealing.  And there was a very sort of conscious disintegration of areas to assert control by people involved in the drugs trade and I think if that’s not grasped, you know, we have a sort of a ... I think we can see what can happen and if that isn’t grasped and I think the issue of intimidation is something that really has the potential to, you know, where you have people coming together in the past in large groups and sitting in meeting rooms like the photographs I’ve shown you, it’s very difficult to get that because people are so fearful but I think without that, without that willingness of people to come together and to address it the State can’t address it on its own, they certainly can’t.  So that would be ... I wouldn’t be optimistic unless that is addressed.Facilitator: So I’d just like to say thank you very much for coming along and thank you very much to Johnny for giving the talk.Johnny: You’re very welcome.  Okay.  (clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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

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.