Kevin Myers

To some people Kevin Myers is a pro-Unionist, bigoted and right-wing columnist. And as such, he is seen as a natural soul brother to the perpetrator of the recent attack on the paralympics, and by extension on the disabled, his friend, Mary Ellen Synon.

To others, he is a breath of fresh air - a straight-talking columnist who is also capable of being deliciously satirical and witty.
But these are judgements made on the run by people responding, for the most part, to Myers' regular Irish Times column, An Irishman's Diary.
Now, with the publication of a collection of pieces from the column in book form, it is possible to take a cooler and more objective look at what Myers has to say and at who and what he is. And just perhaps to get behind the bluster and the verbal dexterity, to uncover the real Kevin Myers.
I join Kevin for a lunch of decidedly politically incorrect hot dogs on buns , in the relatively newly-purchased country home he shares in Kildare with his wife, since 1996, Rachel Nolan.

Is there anything in this book that you're particularly proud of?
I haven t read the book. I don t like reading my own stuff. I look at it and am only critical, only see where I ve gone wrong, my failings. Though sometimes I see a sentence which pleases me.
So you didn t choose the articles to be included in this book?
I refused to. Michael Adams in Four Courts did. Other publishers, before, asked me would I put together a selection of Irishman s Diaries and I said no, I m not capable of making the judgement. No man should be a judge in his own court. I can t judge what is good or bad about my material. Four Courts did send me proofs but I never looked at them.
There are very few biographical facts in your book. You were born in Leicester, which basically makes you not a real Irishman ` la Tony Cascarino.
That s what a lot of people say! Eamon de Valera wasn t an Irishman, James Connolly wasn t an Irishman.
Does it bother you when people say you re not Irish so what the hell right have you to write An Irishman s Diary?
Of course. But I am an Irishman, in a sense. My family is Irish. My brothers and sisters were born in Dublin and I was always coming back and forth throughout my life. I went to UCD. Being Irish was a natural part of my identity. Though my accent disqualifies me, some people say. And my place of birth. And the fact that my primary and secondary education took place in England.
Some say your attitudes are also decidedly English.
Fuck em!
One hopes that the satirical tilt on your family in Cyril s Cinders your piss-take on Angela s Ashes does not depict the real upbringing of Kevin Myers!
Not at all. I had a very, very happy childhood. My parents were classically devoted. My father died when I was fifteen and we discovered then he had no life assurance policy, no pension fund, nothing. He was 63, died of a heart attack. I was at boarding school and they woke me to tell me. It was really, really bad.
Were you close to him?
I was close to both my parents. We were happy, endlessly fought as happy families do, explosive, a lot of cross tempers but a good family. Very Catholic. And for much of my life I couldn t distinguish between Catholicism and Irish-ness. If somebody was Irish, they were Catholic and if something was Catholic it had to be Irish. That s how I saw things at ten.
How deeply did your dad s death affect you and the family?
Very painful for all of us. A 15-year-old boy needs a father. But I think it was even worse for my 13-year-old brother. I was a troubled teenager. But then I had gone through a bereavement. And economic catastrophe, which my family lurched into. It was a troubling time, overall.
Does economic catastrophe mean poverty?
Just about. My father died intestate, so his estate, bank account, everything was frozen for two years. When we got back from burying my father, my mother had to put an advertisement in the Leicester Mercury looking for paying guests. Even the contents of his wallet were seized. We had nothing.
But you weren t hauled out of school, made go to work?
My sister was. The school fees for me were sorted out between the school and the Local Education Authority.
So this image of you coming from an exceedingly privileged background and always living a pampered life isn t true?
No. My father was a middle-class GP who came from a lower-middle-class/working-class Dublin family. My mother s family were better off. Her father was a doctor and lectured in the College of Surgeons. They were a middle-class, well-established family. Catholic, well-to-do. My father was working-class and poor.
And this was the mix of class attitudes you absorbed as a boy?
I haven t got class attitudes. I have my own attitudes. You can judge them as class attitudes . I don t. My parents were my parents. It s only in adulthood I look back and say those were the divergent streams that came together.
In one piece you wrote about the sexual revolution that haunts the liberal parents of the seventies in relation to their nineties son now bringing his girlfriend home to sleep over while the father smoulders with jealousy. Did your parents let your girlfriends sleep over?
(Mock shock) Oh no! Bless my soul. I didn t have girlfriends! I was at boarding school!
Did you have boyfriends?
Didn t have boyfriends either! And they wouldn t have slept over! It s not that my parents were particularly repressive but, in the mid-sixties, before the sexual revolution, sexual activity of any kind wasn t something one would discuss with one s parents. Besides, as I say, I didn t have any girlfriends or boyfriends, I just had friends. I was quite sexually neutered. At 15, 16, 17.
At what age did you cease being sexually neutered?
Late teens, when I came to Dublin in 1966.
Was something happening in Dublin that wasn t happening in Britain, in terms of the sexual revolution?
There was fuck all happening there! And as for the sexual revolution and Dublin? I did my best to introduce it here, yet didn t succeed! But, to get back to that question of the sexual revolution of the 1970s now haunting the parents of the nineties, I m not a father myself, but I see it in my friends, who can t get rid of their children out of the house. And their sons do want their girlfriends to be able to walk around naked and fuck, or whatever.
Do you see these changes as healthy or unhealthy, when compared to the repressive sexual attitudes of the seventies?
More healthy. But children staying in the parental home too long can be unhealthy, though it s not as dysfunctionally unhealthy as the old repression. But I was lucky. I didn t carry any of that forward. Boys of my age, 17, 18 were starting to have sex. I hadn t got a girlfriend. But when I came to Dublin and was studying at UCD, things did start to happen for me, sexually. But I was luckier than a lot of fellows because the whole sexual ethos was unbelievably backward, even then. Yet I found action.
Were you also smoking dope?
Certainly, when I was at UCD. And later.
In your book, you write about what you say is the erroneous belief that all journalists are drunks. Did you ever, say, use dope to relax yourself to write?
I would never write under the influence of alcohol or drugs. If I m working on copy I must deliver the next day, I might have a couple of glasses of wine. But I d go back to it the next morning. I wouldn t release it having taken drink and worked on it. But the cannabis I regard as a beneficial experience. Absolutely. It s many years since I smoked dope. But if somebody offered it to me in the right circumstances I d say yes. I have nothing but pleasurable memories of dope.
Any heavier stuff, like LSD?
Once. LSD. Didn t do anything for me. I just got a slight hallucinatory effect, slightly disorientating, not at all worrying. Yet I decided it was too risky a substance to take because of what it could trigger. I never drank as a student. The only drug I ever took was the occasional joint.
You never tried cocaine which I ve heard is very popular in journalistic circles?
Maybe. But I don t mix in those circles. For example, when I lived in Phibsboro, that was a deliberate decision because I didn t want to live amongst people who were like me. I don t want to be limited by that world. It reduces your perspectives and only confirms what you already believe. Which is a bad thing. You ve got to constantly challenge what you are, think, believe. And when I lived in Phibsboro I knew I wasn t comfortable in the areas journalists naturally gravitated to, in Dublin: Ranelagh and Sandymount.
Were you and Rachel together then?
No. She s very young. She is 22 years younger than me. I had another girlfriend then, Grainne, but we split up or, rather, she left eight years ago. We d been together since 1980, 12 years.
Twelve years with Grainne, half of the past decade with Rachel, ever feel that limited your sexual experience?
No. I was 33 when I started with Grainne. That s not a young man. So I d lived my twenties, and beyond, loosely and lightly!
You ve written about Bishop Eamon Casey folding into the sumptuous embrace of luscious young Murphy . So was she your ideal sex symbol?
Did I write that? She was mad, wasn t she? We ve all gone to bed with mad women, haven t we?
But was Annie Murphy sumptuous to you?
No! There was an irony there! She was a maddie! And only bishops would think that a maddie was something special.
I ve also heard that neurotic women are the most erotic?
Not in my experience. Neurotic women make you say oh my God, am I going to wake up with a carving knife between my shoulder blades?
You ve written in defence of prostitutes.
Often. In terms of their right to do what they want. Earn money, get protection from their pimps, get protection from the law. The state is entirely wrong to harass them. It is a grotesque thing, that these women are hounded by the state. They ve got a very dangerous way of making a living. Both for health reasons and the fact that they are exposed to strange men. Not just their pimps but clients, some of whom, obviously, are, unhinged. I feel very strongly about the way prostitutes are treated in this society. It s a fucking scandal the way they are marginalised.
Less so in some European countries where Prostitutes have, say, formed unions?
Yes. They have to be more organised. Because what happens here is monstrous.
Ever been with a prostitute?
No. But people have said to me, because I defend them, that I must have been. But I have spoken to a number of prostitutes. My first article, ever, was about a prostitute. I wrote it for the student magazine in UCD. I interviewed this woman, on the quays who, I imagine, is dead now and she had syphilis. I chose her to write about because I had sympathy with the position she and her fellow workers were in. It always seemed to me wrong that people who were prostitutes should be hounded by the law. Prostitution in Ireland should be decriminalised, prostitutes should be able to operate out of flats. It s lunacy that they can t operate out of a sheltered accommodation without the owner of that accommodation being prosecuted.
Where do you stand in relation to Mike Hogan being prosecuted for advertising brothels in In Dublin ?
I m entirely against that prosecution. It s frivolous. I don t know Mike Hogan but I do believe if these people are offering their services, they should be entitled to advertise these services. I believe in the free market. I believe that if people are not doing anything criminal then, as consenting adults ,we should be able to follow up advertisements or ignore them. It s called adulthood.
Did you have a problem with Anna Nolan, your cousin, going public on her lesbianism in Big Brother?
No. None of the family had either. She s not a lesbian. She s Anna. To define her according to her sexuality is stupid. It s tabloidism. And if you allow the tabloids to rule your world, you re in for a very unhappy life. She s not my family, but she is one of the lovely members of the family into which I married. But I did write about this on a couple of occasions because I don t like the format of Big Brother. The whole thing was an intrusion, tabloid television.
You defend the right of prostitutes to earn money. But what about poor pop stars like Bob Dylan? In your book, as part of an article written to celebrate the man s fiftieth birthday, you have just one piece of advice for him: stop singing, now!
But he s just awful. And I d repeat that advice today! Obviously, I don t go to his concerts but I have seen him on television and he s woeful! It s excruciating. He s actually vocally disabled. He could qualify for Government assistance!
One could deduce from such comments that you are not exactly a devotee of pop culture. In fact, you once wrote that pop music never gave us a lyric more substantial than The Teddy Bear s Picnic.
Jimmy Kennedy wrote that. As well as Red Sails In The Sunset and South of the Border (Down Mexico Way) . He was from county Tyrone, so South Of The Border obviously had implications people haven t considered! But I really do feel that about pop culture.
Have you ever bothered to listen to the classic pop composers? Say, back when you were in college?
I loved the late Beatles, who really were a part of my late adolescence and early adulthood. The White Album. And I haven t heard much material to compare with The Beatles songs since then. I am an unwilling consumer of pop culture and I know that if there was stuff of the same quality as the Beatles, I d have come across it. But I don t want to be too frivolous about pop culture. It does produce great art. Frank Sinatra was a great artist. He is an enduring cultural icon of the twentieth century. Serious musicians will look back on Sinatra, and Presley, as serious artists because their music has survived. That s the test of great art. There may be music around today that is going to be great art but I don t know what it is.
But you do, ultimately, rate Beethoven as the greatest genius as a composer?
No. Not above Bach. Bach is more mathematically sublime. There is an order, sequence and discipline to Bach which is incredible. And his melodic skills are astonishing. But so is Puccini. This morning I was listening to an excerpt from La Bohhme and, after My Tiny Hand Is Frozen , we think that is an aria that would make Andrew Lloyd Webber say I ve got my tune . But Puccini follows that with My Name Is Mimi. One unbelievably ravishing melody followed by another. So these would be the giants by which I measure the ultimate worth of music, yes.
We talked earlier about drugs. Do you think using drugs played a part in what you describe, in one article, as the psychopathology of terrorists in Northern Ireland?
No. I believe the INLA people might have been out-of-their-minds on drugs but most IRA people I ve come across disapprove of drugs. In the Kesh, lots of people took drugs smoked dope, mostly but the IRA disapproved of this.
Was it Private Eye that referred to you as a pro-unionist, bigoted, right-wing columnist?
It wasn t Private Eye! It was Checkout, the consumer magazine! And it s interesting that there is that conjunction: between pro-unionist and bigoted. If so, what kind of bigot am I?
Anti-Nationalist?
I m not anti-nationalist. Certainly not anti-constitutional nationalist. And I welcome what Sinn Fein are doing. I just wish they d separate themselves from the IRA. And I m not pro-Unionist. I just recognise the democratic right of people who are unionist to remain free of government from Dublin.
Is it true that Douglas Gageby (editor of the Irish Times before its current editor, Conor Brady) confined you to the ghetto of writing columns because he would have seen you as pro-unionist?
He didn t move me into the corner of doing a column to silence me, no. And in those days when I started writing the column in 1981 it wasn t political in any sense. It was more of a social and arty column. But as the years went on I realised journalists were speaking with one voice Liberal, Left, Feminist. I became uneasy with the new orthodoxies that were being established.
What sort of orthodoxies are you talking about?
Everyone was pro-Sandinista, pro-contraception which I am but there was an absolute moral certainty about this Lefty, Liberal, Feminist issues with which I may have been in agreement but wasn t certain. So what I felt was assembling was this New Catholicism, full of liberal dogma that couldn t be questioned. I still think this is the case. I think the media is infested with the Liberal dogma. And I began to question these things. So the column went off in that direction.
In your article,The Future of the RUC, you devote just a paragraph to talking about the RUC s Shoot-To-Kill policy. You say their actions weren t exactly Little Orphan Annie but you focus mostly on the atrociousness of the IRA campaign. And elsewhere you set Hitler up as a soul-brother to the IRA! Can you see why people might say you have a pro-unionist bias?
That Hitler analogy was made in another article so I don t think your point of comparison is fair. Obviously, as I say, I haven t read the book but I will be as honest with you as I can. From memory. What I remember saying is that the shoot-to-kill thing in Armagh which, I imagine, I was talking about was murder. But the RUC has not, generally, traded in murder. Its job is not to commit, but to prevent, murder. Or solve crimes of murder. I lived in North Belfast when the Shankhill Butchers were at their capers. I know the RUC did not do all it could to stop the Shankhill Butchers. They had other priorities, and their other priorities were catching IRA terrorists rather than Loyalist terrorists.
Had they not also got a vested interest in the Shankhill Butchers operating for the RUC/British Government?
I don t believe, at an operational level, RUC men were saying that. For some of the time, Jamie Flanagan, a Catholic, was the Chief Constable and wouldn t have had any interest in having innocent Catholics bumped off. If the Shankhill Butchers had been targeting people, you could say there was an operational reason for the RUC to turn a blind eye. But they weren t targeting people. They were picking up Catholic drunks, cutting their throats, torturing them. And I don t think, organisationally, the RUC in those days regarded that with the seriousness they should have done. But they were being overwhelmed by republican terrorists. The RUC had its deficiencies at the time. There is no doubt of that. Yet in recent years, its honesty and neutrality have been extraordinary. They have done an incredible job and have not been thanked for it. I believe them to have been an extraordinarily brave force, composed of for the most part honest people who have not broken the law.
In the book having referred to the demonisation of a species: the English you do, very pointedly, demonise Martin McGuinness, going as close as libel laws allow, to labelling the man a murderer.
I don t say he was a murderer. But I know what Martin McGuinness was. He was a terrorist. He was a member of the IRA. He ran the IRA in Derry. And was involved in the IRA at the time a number of Derrymen vanished . Like the man whose mother was assured, by McGuinness, that he was okay. And like I said, directly, to Martin McGuinness in that article have you heard the tape recording of the interview with that man before he was murdered? The IRA always tape record interviews with the people they are about to murder. There was, for example, one man in South Armagh, the IRA had for two months. Interrogating him.
While his wife according to one article included in your book was being told by the IRA he s okay. In another article, and in a different context, you say you heard Gerry Adams, in a pub in Belfast, give the order shoot him .
Is that in the book? If so, I honestly didn t realise I d written that in An Irishman s Diary.
Did you get any death threats from the IRA as a result of that?
I got death threats but I don t know if they were from the IRA.
Did you take those death threats seriously?
Never. If the IRA wanted to kill me they would kill me. They are not going to give me a warning beforehand.
What would you say to those who might argue that you put Gerry Adams life in danger by saying you heard him issue the order shoot him ?
Gerry Adams chose the life he s chosen and everyone knows who he is. And I wouldn t have said anything that put his life in danger. He d already survived one assassination attempt. But my article about that particular thing first appeared in The Spectator about six years ago. And it is not something I would have repeated, because I believe Gerry Adams is doing his best to stop the violence in Northern Ireland, to resolve the conflict.
And can he succeed?
I don t believe the conflict can be resolved. But it can become a conflict fought through surrogate means, without the use of violence. I believe Gerry Adams is doing that. And, frankly, I regret reviving that incident in the pub in Belfast, because it might impede his efforts to bring the conflict to an end. I don t think it will, because everyone knows what Gerry Adams is. They know what he s done. And that s why he s got the power he has. Within Sinn Fein/IRA.
But, as you say, you admit you don t know whether that alleged shoot him meant as you say in the book kill or kneecap him. Or whether that order was carried out.
That s not the point. He said it. And said it the whole time. We know this. Everyone knows this. David Trimble knows it. MI5 know it, MI6, the Dublin Government knows it. That s why he is in the position to deliver the IRA because he s done it all. Same as McGuinness. The people who can bring peace in conflict are the people who have bloodied their hands. Michael Collins could do it because he was the man who ran the IRA. McGuinness and Adams have that ability. They can stop the violence. Though, obviously, not all of it.
In July this year you wrote of the Belfast Agreement being a fix: the rules were triggered to keep Sinn Fein-IRA happy and those rigged rules then won the assent of the Irish people. Is that still your view of the Peace Process?
I would say that still, because Sinn Fein-IRA are an impossible community to keep happy in terms unionists can accept. And the IRA can t disarm. I wouldn t expect it to disarm. Armies don t disarm. No army ever has, voluntarily. The IRA will protect its interests and I can t see how a representative of an army like that can be in cabinet with an organisation like the Unionist Party. Sooner or later there will be a rupture between the unionists who are intensely law-abiding and Sinn Fein.
You seem to be implying that it is inevitable.
I see that happening now. The other day, the IRA murdered a man in Ballymurphy. A policeman was blown up two days ago and Sinn Fein-IRA refused to condemn it. You ve got forces being released here which are centrifugal forces on the Executive of Northern Ireland, and slowly but surely things will come apart. But the desire to keep them together is really so strong. No one wants to return to the dark old days. On the other hand the desire to kill is still there. The UDA and the UVF have no problem getting their volunteers to kill one another. These people can as soon turn their guns on their ancestral enemies as they have on themselves.
You say the IRA should assist in tracing the Omagh bombers.
If you are real about peace, about bringing an end to conflict, you draw a line and say Omagh was after all the agreements. Everything was on the table at that point. If you are serious about maintaining these institutions, then those who break the law must go to jail. The IRA has to understand that. Michael Collins realised that. DeValera did. He arranged for ex-colleagues of his to be shot by firing squad. The IRA has to make the same journey. It s got to send people to jail. Omagh was the perfect example. There is an onus on the likes of Adams and McGuinness to see that the perpetrators of that crime are sent to jail. But they won t go that route for the same reason they refused to condemn the attack on the RUC man. Their constituency is too close to dividing.
As in going with splinter groups like the Real IRA?
That s right. Sinn Fein is loyal to itself. Ourselves alone. Their sense of loyalty to themselves is more binding than their sense of obligation to the Good Friday Agreement or the Executive. And if Trimble hadn t said I m going to bar Sinn Fein from Cross-Border-Bodies, he would have lost the vote and there would have been no Executive. But I do feel pretty hopeless in terms of the North.
You and Mary Ellen Synon would be seen as fellow travellers, not just in terms of the recent controversy in relation to the paralympics but the article in the book where you seem to defend her attack on travellers as being (in her words) without the ennobling intellect of man, or the steadying instinct of beasts.
My argument was that what Mary Ellen Synon was attacking was traveller life, not travellers.
That quote sounds to me like she is actually saying travellers are less than beasts. Isn t that why the Gardai tried to get her on an incitement-to-hatred charge?
And they talked to me about it. But you know I wouldn t say travellers are less than beasts. If she was saying that, it is entirely deplorable. They re not less than beasts. They re no less human than any one of us. And all humanity is inviolable. But I would go along with her when she says all humans aren t equal. A Nazi war criminal is not equal to his victim. His victim is morally superior to him. So I would go along with Mary Ellen Synon or she would go along with me in opposing the heresy of egalitarianism. You re not equal to me. I m not equal to you. This is one of the Left, Liberal heresies. That egalitarianism is desirable. It is not.
But surely the real question is one of equality in terms of opportunity at every level?
But there isn t equal opportunity at every level. Somebody who has got only one leg can t be a professional footballer. Somebody who s blind, and can t read, can t be a journalist. So there isn t equality. There are many things a disabled person could do better than me. And I shouldn t even begin to complain about their right to do that because if they are better than me at it, they should be doing it.
You do talk in your book about the demonisation of a species: the English. Surely Mary Ellen Synon and yourself similarly demonised travellers, if not the disabled.
I haven t demonised anybody. What I say is that we have to be realistic about what everybody can do. If you re saying everybody is equal , then you are not being realistic. All I m asking for is realism. The discussion about travellers has been rendered almost useless, in the sense that people discuss them only as victims. And they are not just victims. They are, to a large part, authors of their own lives, heroes of their own lives. And to just treat them as victims is to be as condescending as to say that the defining thing about a disabled person is his disability. I will not accept that a disabled person should be defined as a disabled person because of their disability. But the State should do its utmost to assist people who have been disabled by misfortunes of birth or accident. But I demonise nobody.
Your article in response to Mary Ellen Synon s attack on the disabled focused more on the idea that she didn t express herself clearly, rather than criticising the nature of what she was saying. Which suggests that you agree with her.
She got into trouble and she deserved to get into trouble. Her language was dreadful. It also was inaccurate. She said that wheelchair people wobble . They don t! They are incredibly good athletes. This is an event that could be in the real Olympics. They re going at forty, fifty miles an hour, enormous skills, enormous courage. These people don t wobble. Swimmers don t swim by Braille. I disliked the tone of what she was saying. And the content. And most of the implications. The only thing I accepted was that she said people are not equal.
In the diary this August you took a shot at U2 saying millionaires with clever accountants should be slow to deliver sermons from the Mount to anyone. That s a bit rich coming from you.
I m not a millionaire! And I pay the same tax, at the same rate, as everybody else. I have no privileges. And I haven t got a clever accountant!
Are you suggesting that what you would see as Bono s sermonising negates the good he has done, say, in trying to cancel out Third World Debt?
That s just stupid. If he wants to do something about Third World Money he could transfer his funds to a Third World Country. Bank with a Third World Bank. So that s just Bono. He poses, he s a posturer. I don t want to get too personal.
But surely his work in terms of Third World Debt is having a positive effect?
I don t believe in unconditional cancellation of the Third World Debt. Because every Third World country just about is a non-democracy. If you have a dictator whose debts are cancelled, he s just going to do what he s already done. You ve got to have rules for cancellation of debts. So the overall concept of cancelling the Third World Debt is politically naive. If, on the other hand, you ve got a democratic leader who says we can t function with these debts you say: We ll cancel it but here are the conditions. No more government Mercedes, no more prestige airports, no more banquets on your birthday which takes up four years of your annual budget. You lay down rules.
You also asked, in terms of an anti-racist petition the band signed would U2, in their sermons from the turrets and embattlements in Dalkey, describe the State s failure to treat infected people properly when they arrived as de-humanising? This implies that African immigrants may spread AIDS.
If people come from a country like Zaire, where there is a great deal of AIDS, we are being feckless and immoral towards them and ourselves if we allow them into the community without checking whether or they ve got AIDS. My own instinct is, if they are HIV positive, we put them into the care of the State. We look after them. But there is nothing wrong with giving people tests for AIDS.
In comments like this aren t you in danger of stigmatising Africans?
AIDS is endemic in Africa, it s not endemic in China. That s why I mentioned Africa. And, in fact, I am anti-racist. Absolutely. But I accept realities. You can t have large numbers of races mixing together without friction of some sort. Which is happening here at the moment.
Much of what I read vanished from my memory as quick as breath from a blade. Is that the ultimate fate of the work of a columnist?
Quite clearly it s true of my work! I wrote it and read it four or five times before I sent it to the Irish Times and I can t remember it! If I can t, none of my readers will either.
Is this part of the reason you re publishing a novel next year? Did the impermanent nature of writing a column propel you towards something with more longevity?
The biggest influence on my life has been Rachel. She has given me a sense of present and future, which I never had. And I did want to do something more enduring than just a daily column. I have a sense of permanence and future with Rachel that I never had in my past and part of that has been to create something that has a little more life in it than a daily column. Rachel has changed my life. Everything that I am now, is due to her. She gave me a sense of purpose, dimension, priority and importance which, as I say, I never had before.

Kevin Myers From The Irish Times Column An Irishman s Diary is published by Four Courts Press