Hot Press meets Theo Dorgan

I know I could have this whole country speaking Irish within 12 months.” Sitting in a central Dublin bar, Theo Dorgan takes a pull on his cigarette and flashes an impish grin. We’ve been bemoaning the various failings of the Irish education system, and the outspoken Corkonian has an unlikely solution to at least one of them.

“It would be a very simple thing to do,” he confidently declares. “Just introduce a piece of legislation that would make it illegal to speak Irish, with on-the-spot fines. And then everybody would.” He sighs wearily and shakes his head. “This is the only country in the world where people boast that they spent 12 years learning a language, and they can’t speak it. How weird is that?”
Dorgan’s probably right. Now in his sixtieth year, the self-confessed smartarse is extremely well-versed in Irish anti-authoritarianism and, as an experienced arts administrator as well as an award-winning poet, writer and broadcaster, has long been renowned for his ability to think outside the box and play the powers that be at their own games.
The cigarette, incidentally, is an electronic one, so he’s not breaking any laws. He’s been trying to wean himself off the smokes for years.
“This thing is alright but, to be honest with you, nothing beats a real cigarette,” he laughs throatily.
We’re meeting ostensibly to discuss his recently published debut novel, Making Way. Dorgan seems in no rush to talk about it. “I’ve never had a linear conversation with a pal in my life,” he admits. “It always jumps off into anecdotes and reminiscences and somebody phones, and that’s how life is. At the same time it’s still driving to the 6ft by 3ft slot in the ground, you know? There is a linear thing in life, but we delay it because we are storytelling creatures.”

Let's start, then, with this particular storytelling creature’s humble beginnings and just see where the wind takes us. The eldest of 15 children, Dorgan was born to factory worker parents in Cork on September 21st, 1953 (he shares his birthday with Leonard Cohen).
“There were 16 of us, actually, but one died,” he explains. “I was the eldest – which gave me an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, very young. Both my parents worked in factories. They both left school at 14, but they were always extremely passionate about education. My mum died in ‘74. My dad in ‘81. Much too young.
“I actually remember being stopped once going into the UK in the ’80s,” he continues. “A constable in plain clothes caught me: ‘Your occupation, Mr Dorgan?’ I probably hadn’t slept on the boat or something so I said, ‘I’m general secretary to a soviet of orphans’. He was like, ‘You’re what!?’ And this very witty female sergeant leans over: ‘Mr Dorgan means’ – and there was a little pause while she put the knife into the constable – ‘he’s the eldest of a large family and both his parents are dead. Isn’t that right, Mr Dorgan?’ ‘It is, sergeant, and tell me, is that in the file, too?’ ‘It is, Mr Dorgan, enjoy your time in London’. Everybody between the ages of 18 and 30 was on file in those days.”
His political awakening came in his early teens. “For my 14th birthday I asked my ma to get me Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara. I had read about it in the papers and thought it sounded interesting. I remember my sister being there when she bought it and her insisting that I wanted [Tom Barry’s] Guerrilla Days in Ireland. My ma said, ‘No, no, it’s by a man with a funny name like Che Guevara!’ My father was a trade union man all his life. I realised very young that the only politics I can ever trust are the politics for the poor.”
Although he considers himself a Republican, he insists he’s not a Nationalist. “Some of the most bitter arguments I’ve had in all my life are with people who’ve arrogated the term Republican movement themselves. In my view, Nationalism is not Republicanism. In fact, Republicanism is the antithesis of Nationalism. I’m a profound Republican because I wished I lived in a Republic. I’ve actually just edited a book of essays, which will be out in August, on the Constitution. It’s to try to help drive the debate forward as to what should a Republic be. The Republic has been abrogated. All the liniments of what [John] Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party demanded are there – with the minor alteration that instead of London as the sovereign foreign power, it’s Brussels-Berlin. Otherwise, they’ve achieved Home Rule. The Republic is finished. Until and unless we rebuild it.”
Not that he sees very much chance of that happening, as things currently stand. “There’s a lot of unfocused anger in Ireland,” he sighs. “Just the other day there were 100,000 people on a Facebook petition to complain about Brian O’Driscoll being dropped from the Lions, and 668 signed a petition calling for the jailing of the Anglo bankers. So that’s also the reality of where we live. But it’s not surprising. Michael Hartnett put it fairly well: ‘We queued up for the Castle in 1922 with smiles on our lips/ and entered the Irish paradise of files and paper clips’. What we did is we built a State without ever asking what kind of state institutions we needed.”
He says that he knew from an early age that he was going to be a writer, though he never suspected he would eventually become best known as a poet. “Some people are born with perfect pitch and they’re singing from the age of two – I was born with words,” he says. “It’s what I have, it’s what I use. But when I was a kid I mostly read novels. It never occurred to me until I was about 17 or so to write poems. I went to UCC and found I was writing poems and then suddenly got intrigued by it. Years later I read Kavanagh: ‘I dabbled in verses and found they had become my life’. I always thought I would write novels when I was a kid. But it wasn’t even wanting: I knew it was what I was going to do. Same as some of the kids on the street know that they’re going to be hurlers.”
He attended the North Mon Christian Brothers school in Cork city.
“What was I like in school? I had a feeling you were going to ask me that, and a surprising word that occurred to me this morning was probably disliked. I was one of those kids that can’t help knowing everything. I was a voracious reader. I wasn’t very sporty. I could be a demon corner forward with a hurley for five minutes and then I’d trance off somewhere, so you couldn’t rely on me for team sports – a bad thing. Nobody likes the guy who’s nearly always getting it right and whose essays get read out – perfectly understandable. I have no gripe with that. I’m sure if I saw me now, I wouldn’t have liked me.”
Despite his academic prowess, his teachers weren’t overly fond of him, either. “They did not like me,” he smiles. “That’s a fact. In a way I don’t blame them – I had them sussed. If I was writing an essay and I thought something sounded a bit pompous, I would put quote marks around it and attribute it to a non-existing author. ‘Oh, you’re reading Tyaransen, he’s very good, isn’t he?’ And I’m thinking, ‘You fucking bluffer!’ I was probably too smart for my own good.”
As an aside, he tells me that he had a big row live on air with George Hook about his schoolboy reading habits a couple of years back. “I remember getting into a major barney with him on his [NewsTalk] radio show one day,” he laughs. “He simply refused to believe that I had been reading Germaine Greer under the desk in school. Along with Che Guevara and Buddhist poetry. Everybody was – that stuff was going around in a certain milieu. And Hook wouldn’t believe me.
“I was able to quote Greer from memory – it was an extraordinary sentence to read when you’re 16 – ‘I first tasted my menstrual blood on the tip of my lover’s penis’…and Hooky went green. With him, it was pure Cork class war because he’s Cork middle class. He simply didn’t believe me because, in his world, Mon boys [working class CBS pupils] didn’t read books. I enjoyed the look on his big fat face. He should try to be more pleasant. He would enjoy life a little more.”
His experiences with the Christian Brothers put him off religion.
“I was brought up Catholic. Oh, the whole works, altar boy, the whole lot. Bells and smells. I loved the ritual of it. Catholicism for the poor was your contact with painting, with polished floors with lots of space, with a steady, ritualized pace of life. The things that the aristocracy have taken for granted since the dawn of time – space, time, polished surfaces, meditative quiet which the poor never have because they’re busy trying to stay alive. I always think that was part of the attraction of Catholicism. It’s the communal gathering house. It’s the vision of plenty. I suppose I had that, but I also had the Christian Brothers, which fairly rapidly dealt with all the illusory side of it.”

Although he didn’t release his debut poetry collection until 1991’s The Ordinary House of Love, Dorgan published his first poem during his fresher’s year studying Arts at UCC.
“It was a really, really dreadful poem in the Cork Examiner – a terrible, terrible thing,” he sighs, shaking his head. “Everybody says their early work was terrible, but trust me, this really was awful. But I got two pounds 10 shillings for it or something, and I remember photocopying the cheque. And then reality kicked in after a week or two, and I actually realized it was a piece of shit. And I had thought it was good. There was some hope when I realized it, you know?”
Self-sufficient from a young age, he paid his own way through university. “I supported myself always. The first job I had when I was 14. I used to ride shotgun on an ice-cream van driving around Cork sitting in the back with a sawn-off broomstick waving it in the rear-view mirror to look as if I was beating fellas off, when I was actually throwing them battered stuff from storage. Carrot and stick, I suppose. I was going to have to deal with these lads come September. So they used to have broken boxes of stuff that would have to go back to the factory and I would stick one on the truck and would be waving the stick, throwing battered Choc Ices to the lads. I always worked Christmas in the Post Office. I worked on the buildings in London through the ’70s, and liked it. I put myself through college.”
Since leaving UCC, he has enjoyed a varied and largely successful career as a poet, prose writer, documentary screenwriter, editor, translator and broadcaster (presenting, amongst other programmes, RTE Radio 1’s Poetry Now and the TV books show Imprint). A member of Aosdana since 1999, he has at various times been the Director of Poetry Ireland, one of the main organisers of the Cork Film Festival, and a board member of the Arts Council (2003-2008).
However, he’s definitely no ‘luvvie’. In 2009, when this present writer was moderating a panel discussion about state arts funding at The Music Show in the RDS, Dorgan basically exploded onstage. “A 12-year-old retarded child on speed wouldn’t come up with this nonsense!” he said of the then government’s proposed cutbacks. “The fucking arrogance of them!” Not for the first time in his career, he made a couple of headlines.
He’s less inclined to rant today, but remains just as impassioned. “I think the government is making an enormous mistake in cutting funding for the arts,” he says. “Underneath all of this is that the Department of Finance – this sounds like an obscure thing for a poet to be interested in but it does interest me – the Department of Finance has no mechanism to capture the return on investment. They have no accountancy measure to say if we spend X we get Y back. So all money is spent are considered expenditure with zero return. They don’t see it as investment.
“I’ll give you an example,” he continues. “In 2010, the Arts Council got €68 million from the Department. The bulk of that money went to arts organisations. A fraction of their funding comes from the Council, but they employ people who generate the rest of their income. The return from those organisations was €57 million in PAYE and PRSI. So that €68m is actually €11m and that €11m, according to Indecomm, generated directly – just from those organisations, never mind the spin-offs – €270m. So the actual state of affairs is that an investment of €11m generates a return of €270m. The department of Finance has no mechanism to reflect that.
“This argument has been made by me and many others over the last 30 years. And I have to ask why has that argument not been put to government year after year by the Department of Finance? I believe there is a profound hostility to the arts in the Department of Finance. It’s institutional. There is a profound hostility to seeing State expenditure as investment generally. Because it would mean they would have to get off their asses and have a different financial model. And why should they bother? These are the people who were charged with overseeing the banks. These are the people who, having failed to oversee the banks, are now charged with recovering us from the bank crash. I haven’t lost faith in the political process. There are levels in the Civil Service – principally in the Department of Finance – where I simply couldn’t trust them because they couldn’t run a sweet shop, these guys.”
He knows what he’s talking about. “Look, if I look at back at the various arts organisations I ran, if I’d put that energy into business, I could have made a couple of million,” he shrugs. “That’s a fact. Just didn’t interest me. It’s more interesting to me that people got to go to poetry readings and got to see good films.” 
He laughs when I mention that his fellow Cork poet Louis De Paor's recent comment that it seems like the whole country is now being run by, and for the benefit of, “people who are good at sums.”
“Yes, but this is the gas thing – they’re not good at sums! I ran arts organisations for 25 years. People thought about flat management, lean management, value return. You look at the actual return, don’t mind the social value. Never mind that the arts is the thing everyone actually wants to spend their time on when they’re not at work or asleep. They want to go to gigs, they want to listen to music on the radio, they want to go to the theatre or the movies, they want to put on movies, they want to be actors, they want to write, they want to read books.
“When I hear this bullshit ‘Oh, the arts are elitist…’ It is not! It’s everywhere and everybody wants it. It’s the air we breathe. When I look at these guys, you give me €11m and I’ll give you €270m and they boast about getting a 3% return on industrial investment. What’s 270 over 11? It’s 2000%, something ridiculous. And yet the guys in charge of the state’s finances can’t understand this. Well, either they can’t understand it or they won’t.”
It’s not just the Department of Finance dunces he has no time for. He has little or no respect for Ireland’s supposed leaders, either. “Do you think Pat Rabbitte knows what’s going on? Do you think Eamon Gilmore knows what’s going on? Enda Kenny? This is the terrifying thing. I don’t believe for an instant that they actually understand what’s happening.”
He’s clearly concerned about what he regards as the gradual destruction of our democracy and the patently unfair manner in which, he would argue, Ireland is run. “We have ended up with a State from which people have been alienated since the Civil War. And now you have a state class, senior journalists, senior civil servants, career politicians, and they treat the country as their fiefdom. We get this notional right to participate every five years where we get to rubber-stamp whoever the parties have decided will be allowed to go forward. It’s a joke. What we’ve witnessed in our time is a massive contraction in democracy.”

Enough of all that. Dorgan has lived in Dublin for many years, the last 23 with his partner, poetess Paula Meehan. He met her when he was co-creating The Great Book of Ireland with Gene Lambert. Meehan came into the Poetry Ireland office to contribute a handwritten poem to the vellum manuscript, and sparks flew almost immediately.
It’s obvious from the way he talks about her that he’s still totally besotted. “I would have said that the last thing I had a gift for was monogamy. I’m not even sure it’s monogamy in the sense, it’s just the woman fascinates me so completely. I just want to be with her all the time. The single best thing that ever happened me was meeting Paula. I lie in bed at night and think, ‘One of us will die first. Wouldn’t it be awful if this conversation can’t go on?’ I could handle eternity if it was a prolongation forever of a conversation with Paula Meehan.”
Our own conversation finally navigates towards the waters of Making Way. Set almost entirely on a yacht sailing around the Mediterranean, his debut novel tells the story of Tom and Clare – a retired session musician and a beautiful young barrister, respectively. Having met on the quays of a Sicilian port, these two strangers share a totally unpredictable sea voyage, swapping stories and experiences, and gradually revealing more and more about themselves.
Immensely readable, featuring stories within stories, it’s a hugely impressive achievement – even more so when he reveals that it was written in just 22 days. “The story came to me when I was falling asleep,” he explains. “You know the way on the edge of sleep you can see things that might as well be there as not there. I could see this guy on a boat, an older guy, and a young woman talking to him, and I was trying to hear what they were saying and I couldn’t. A look passed between them and I thought, ‘Ah yeah, I better write that’, and then went to sleep.
"There was no writing down in the notebook at the side of the bed. And it came back fainter the next day and I thought ‘I better write it’ and next thing I got a chance and I just sat down and wrote it through. It took me 22 days. Get up every day, write a batch of words; get up the next day, do the same. Every day you get up you say, ‘what do they do now?’ and just go with it.”
The first draft was pretty close to the finished version. “Yeah, It was just one of those chance, lucky things. It was like falling into a story that was already there.”
Although he has previously published two nautically-themed non-fiction books, he had never tried his hand at fiction.
“I hadn’t even written short stories,” he shrugs. “I cannot understand the architecture of a short story. I try sometimes, but I cannot understand it. How do you go from the beginning to the end? Everyone talks of a moment when a story comes together. I can’t figure that. For me, one story leads into another, which leads into another. And yet I have no trouble understanding when a poem ends. But the short story – I might have a go at it now that you mention it.”  
Given the speed at which his novel was written, a short story shouldn’t take him more than a couple of hours…
“Ha! Well, they were just long, completely obsessive days. As long as the fingers could keep up I was grand because the story was just unfolding. And every now and again I’d think, ‘Where do they go now?’ I’d have to go onto Google Earth and track the next thing and then go to the almanacs next and see how long it would take to sail from here to here at that time of year.
“And at the end it really was running away. It was tearing away and struggling…and I suppose I was tired as well. Or maybe bored – I have a low boredom threshold. I respect the fact that there are people who spend a lot longer crafting their words. I remember interviewing John McGahern years ago for a radio programme. He said, ‘I would write 500 words a day and the next day I would cross those out and start again’. Not to be taken literally I would presume or he would never get a book written. But he wrote that way.
“John Banville, too, he writes by hand and very slowly. And when he writes as Benjamin Black, he just tears into it – a couple of pages a day. I suppose I wasn’t caught up in the idea of, ‘is this a novel or art or whatever?’ It was a story. And I know by now I can write clean English and that’s all I know. I just wanted to see where they went. I’m just one step ahead of the reader on this – finding out what it’s about.”
His non-fiction prose books – Sailing For Home, was praised by Doris Lessing as “a book for everyone” – prepared him well for the novel.
“They were both based on long sea trips, and I had a diary – maybe 100 words, 200 words for each day. And I had photocopies of the log so I had the structure straight away. And maybe unconsciously that model of how to do a prose book was under there. So it’s not a big step from a page a day, to a day a page. So maybe that’s what it was. But it’s also that you get a fool’s pardon the first time out. I just really wanted to see where the story went with these guys.”
Though an experienced sailor, he hadn’t actually made the Mediterranean voyage described in the novel. “No, this is the thing,” he laughs. “When I handed the book into the publisher, he said, ‘It must have been great doing that trip’, and I was like, ‘What trip? I made it all up!’”
He discovered his love of sailing later in life. “When I grew up in Cork, if you didn’t come from a particular class, and a subset of that class, you didn’t sail. Unless there was a boat in the family, you didn’t sail. Now that’s all changed. When I found myself sailing quite by accident I discovered that all sorts of perfectly normal people sail, like Jimmy Crowley.” He smiles, “he’s a singer from Cork, Olaf, before your time.”
While Making Way is largely driven by sexual tension between the older man and the younger woman (will they or won’t they sleep together?), there’s also much about drink, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll debauchery in there. From the mischievous twinkle in his eye, Dorgan is clearly familiar with his subject matter.
“I used to go The Phoenix, and if you went out in town with a couple of quid you could have six pints,” he recalls. “It’s a music pub in Cork. It’s kind of music and politics and harem scarem and whatever you’re having yourself. It was a great place for music, traditional, bluegrass, country, you name it. Well, not country, really. We were too cool for country. And I remember the annual pilgrimage to see Mr Rory Gallagher in the City Hall aged 14 or 15.
“I was very lucky. I had a good friend Jim O’Brien who’s brother was mad into music. He’d a fantastic collection of blues. They lived in the caravan behind the family shop near where our house was. They’d a kind of semi-independent republic of their own out in the back yard. We used to sit there and listen to the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, getting educated in the best of the blues at 16, 17. I always loved the music.
“The thing I notice looking at the streets of Dublin at 2 o’clock in the morning now, is all the aggro out there. I’m realising it’s because kids are starting on spirits. We didn’t drink whiskey until you had been drinking pints for a couple of years and you learned to handle it. It wasn’t a cultural thing. Whiskey was an auld fella drink. Vodka was just becoming popular. You learned how to handle altered states of consciousness in stages. I never heard of anyone doing a tab who hadn’t smoked a few J’s first. I can imagine what that would be like. Never being stoned and then doing a tab? Jesus Christ!
“And then, of course, you had this ridiculous period in the life of the country where coke was cheaper than dope. And you had kids going out there, 16, 17, and having triple vodkas and then doing lines. Sure no wonder they’re out of their fuckin’ heads. I believe in moderation and graduation in all things – including the approach to psychotropic substances and their uses as consciousness expanders.”
He doesn’t have much time for the notion that alcohol or drugs can be useful to the writing process.
“Look, the gas thing is there’s this bourgeois myth of the writer’s deranged senses. Writing is a bit more complicated than riding a bicycle. It takes a little more concentration. I always say to people when they’re extolling the virtues of, ‘Oh, I was outta my head on absinthe and writing...’ Get up on a bike with a few hits of absinthe and see how well you do! Course you can’t paint or compose when you’re like that. It takes you places where, if you’re lucky when you cool down, and you can remember, then you can shape it and craft it. I used to try writing when I was out of my head. I’m sorry I lost the notebooks because they were an object lesson in how it does not work! It’s a cold sober business, writing.” 
What are Theo Dorgan’s ambitions now?
“Ah God!” he laughs. “Keep breathing and keep writing. There are short term things I’m doing. There is this new book on the Constitution. I really would like to see people who are smarter than me, and better read than me, take on this question of what do we need as a constitution to give us back our self-respect. There are people out there for whom this country matters more than it matters to me.
“I’m perfectly aware of my own limitations. There are people out there who are smarter, more passionate, more intelligent than me. And they’re standing back as if they’re not part of the same family. I wish they wouldn’t. It’s still all to play for. There are people who have lost all hope. I don’t think it’s beyond salvation. The hour is getting late. We’re all still waiting to get to heaven before they close the door.”