The State we re in

PETER MURPHY: What do you like most about Ireland?
DERMOT BOLGER: I like the fact that you can be a writer in Ireland and it s not a particularly odd job or odd identity. In other words, I m able to live in a fairly working-class part of Dublin, be a writer, and nobody regards me as an oddity for it. It s a healthy environment where you can do what you do for a livin without any particular fuss around you. It makes it easier because I remember talking to Brian Moore, a very famous Irish novelist, and he said that he led a surrogate existence . At that stage of his life everybody he dealt with was either a publisher, an agent, a journalist, publicist or whatever, and he only ever heard of ordinary people second-hand. I remember bringin Salman Rushdie to somebody livin in Howth and everybody nodded and said Howya . They made him feel welcome without makin a fuss over him and I think that s a nice aspect.
What do you like least about Ireland?
It can be a very small country. If a very small group of people have it in for you they can make a very big difference. Somebody like myself who would be severely out of favour with say, the Irish Times, with the universities, with that whole establishment thing, at times they can close down your world in a particular way. It can be a very provincial place and often the people who are most provincial, the alleged intelligentsia or whatever, don t give a fuck. Even though I m an Irish publisher myself, I m glad that I m published outside Ireland in Swedish, German and Italian and there s a whole audience out there, a relatively small international audience, who are reading the books. I m not corralled. There was a notion that Irish writers had to emigrate which I think is no longer true, in fact I think what happens now is they emigrate, they become successful and then they come home for pure financial reasons because they don t have to pay tax. I don t think people emigrate anymore, they commute, and so it isn t as closed a society as it was before but it still can be a very constricting society y know?
Are you proud to be Irish?
I m always proud to be Irish. I never had any hang-ups about it whatsoever. I think it s a good country. Maybe because the only poet I read when I was younger was Yeats, I have a notion that a writer is part of a society and has a small role in a society.
Have you ever been ashamed to be Irish?
No, actually. I ve never done a Chris DeBurgh or an Eamon Dunphy and go on and say I m ashamed to be Irish . (Actually Eamon Dunphy never said that Ed.) Certainly things happen in Ireland that sometimes are totally off the wall and there are times when being Irish can be very frustratin and you say Jaysus that is crazy , but you work on the premise that you take these people on and you fight them because, even though sometimes you see a side of Ireland that can be frightening, there s also all kinds of other sides of it. It s a melting pot, it s a society in flux and I think that it s kind of exciting to live here as a writer cos you re living in a society that s changing tremendously, very, very fast, and it s full of contradictions, there are very few straight lines in it.
Irish heroes?
Irish heroes would include certain sports people and certain musicians. My new novel, Father s Music, is dedicated to three people: Seamus Ennis, John Doherty and Joe Heaney, who all represented certain aspects of Ireland. Seamus was from Finglas and people don t often associate traditional music with Finglas but there s a strong tradition there. John Doherty was a Donegal fiddle player who was on a par with Yehudi Menuhin but never actually owned a fiddle himself. Joe Heaney was the greatest sean nss singer in Ireland and yet couldn t get a job here and worked as a bellboy in a New York apartment block. If these people lived long enough they became internationally acknowledged and wound up playin in concert halls in Vienna and if they didn t, all that s left of them is a few scratchy recordings made on old wax discs with rudimentary equipment in kitchens in remote parts of the country. But I think that they were great artists.
At the beginning of the interview I talked about the being able to live a relatively normal life in Dublin, goin out playin football with your pals at the weekend, bein slagged like fuck if you won the Nobel Prize it wouldn t change anything in that respect. In the same way these musicians were great artists and yet they were totally part of the community, they weren t regarded as oddities or beyond the ordinary
But reading even say, Paul Kimmage s book A Rough Ride about riding the Tour de France, that to me was far more about artistry than many great critical memoirs because it simply was about a guy who was doing something beautiful. Although he s making the poetry of sport, he s also trying to earn a living and trying not to take drugs and trying to support a wife and earning fuck all money and yet riding in the Tour de France which is extraordinary, y know? So very often the heroes I would have, would be people who would be on the fringes of things: they mightn t necessarily have been known but they were following their own dream often without any great acknowledgment.
Traditional music is a great music because you can play it ten thousand different ways and make it real again. The Pogues did that in a big way and carried on the tradition. To me the greatest level of fame imaginable would be to become like Patrick Galvin, the Cork poet whose poem James Connolly has become an anonymous Irish folk song. The one that Christy Moore sings. Or She Moves Through The Fair by Padraig Colum. The true measure of immortality is writing a song that becomes part of the timeless culture.
Irish villains?
Read the books! They go from the Duggan family to the Plunkett political family. People always associate the Plunketts in Journey Home with Fianna Fail which suits me very well because it means that they ve never quite recognised who the book is actually based on.
Do you think the Irish language is worth saving?
Yeah, why not? Again, it s been made new by a generation of poets like Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Michael Davitt and Cathal O Cearcaigh, who wrote wonderful poems in the Irish language about being gay in Donegal. If it s going to stand still and simply be about the Irish language, if it s going to be simply a self-affirming thing, which is what a lot of modern art is for example, then it s not worth saving because it s not alive. But as long as people are using it in new ways, yeah, absolutely.
Are the Irish particularly hung up about sex?
Is that a proposition? (laughs). No, I think that they were for a long time, I don t think they are anymore. I think the Irish are not hung up about an awful lot of things now. It s interesting when you have all these 45-year-old,50-year-old critics writing about Ireland and bringing all their hang-ups to bear. Very often they re looking at Irish writing now in a post colonial context or a post-Catholic context and the majority of twenty-five year-olds don t give a shite. They haven t resolved those dilemmas because those dilemmas don t exist for them. I think that there are generations who are still hung up about sex but very few people under thirty are anymore. I think the problem is that a lot of the fathers of academia and some journalists have a particular notion that because they re still hung up about these things that young people are as well.
The character of Liam (a young closet gay, country n Irish singer in Father s Music) doesn t want to come out not because the media are going to vilify him, it s that they re going to turn him into a hero and he s going to become the token gay singer and that it won t matter anymore whether he s a good singer or a bad singer or whatever. Same as if you re a writer or a painter and you come out as being gay, in some ways it changes how everybody looks toward you and it isn t that they actually vilify you, it s just that they want to relate everything back to your sexuality and so they put you in a different sort of cage, a liberal cage.
If someone like Cathal O Cearcaigh can come out, who is an Irish language poet living in a totally remote part of Donegal and he says My family were too poor to have closets! if he can do that and come out . . . I mean, I remember like, growing up in Finglas and beginning Raven Arts Press and one of the first poets who came to us was a guy living in Dunsink which would be regarded as a very rough area in Finglas who was openly gay and it was no secret. He was just himself. He never ran into any trouble or any hassles, people recognised him as who he was and there were no hang-ups. You would presume somebody living as a homosexual in Finglas would run into problems, but because he was totally open it didn t.
Is it worth voting in an Irish election?
It s worth voting in any election.
If you were made Taoiseach tomorrow what would be your most urgent priorities?
Eh, can I pass on that one?
Is there anything you d ban?
Yeah, I believe in censorship. I find that the people who most strongly oppose censorship are normally people who ban all kinds of things. It s very interesting, the more you deal with these people the more they say there shouldn t be censorship but you can t talk to Phoenix, you can t do this, that or whatever. Everybody understands that there are certain levels of censorship at work in society. People of a certain age shouldn t be allowed to see certain things. I think that people over-18 is a different business. I would be very careful who would see certain films, say, but I certainly wouldn t have any problems with those films being shown.
Do you want to see a United Ireland?
Well, giving an honest answer to that question a few years ago I landed myself in all kinds of hot water. I don t see it as being a feasible thing. The question is too general. Everybody wants to see a United Ireland but it isn t a real question because you have to say Do you want to see a United Ireland with this level of taxation? Do you want to see it by consent? Do you want to see it forced on people? or whatever. I think that the Republic of Ireland is emerging as a relatively good society. It still has enormous problems but we re gettin there. I remember going to Belgium where they ve, like, two of everything, two Ministers for Culture because they ve the Flemish and then the other side, and there s this incredible bureaucratic civil service and I just feel that we re going to have a Catholic this and a Protestant this and it s going to be tokenism, tokenism, tokenism all the way and I don t think we should have a Catholic or Protestant anything. I think this sort of field day notion that the South needs the North to energise it is such a load of horseshit that it s incredibly funny. I think the South of Ireland is a society of inclusion and we will include whoever wants to be part of it. I think the North Of Ireland is a society of exclusion, that they define themselves by saying who they re not. You ve got to recognise the reality that these societies have grown apart over seventy years. If you ask somebody if they want a United Ireland they ll automatically say Yes , because it s an abstraction and it would be a lovely thing to have, but as a practical entity I don t see it happening in the next forty to fifty years.
Should God be in the constitution?
Only if he pays taxes.
What makes you laugh about Irish society?
I actually enjoy the slagging that goes on in our society and the fact that people don t take it too seriously. I enjoy the fact that when you meet friends, neighbours or even people who you know nothing about, they will take the piss out of you. I find that a very healthy, deflating thing. But it s a mask that people hide behind. When you talk to foreigners you find that the Irish are incredibly friendly up to a point but they never actually invite you into their houses, they never actually do things that they might do on the continent. The Irish use a sort of friendliness as a safety thing of keeping people at a certain remove, y know? When you go to England it s so hard because people take everything you say so seriously. That ordinary banter just doesn t exist.
What makes you angry about Irish society?
All kinds of things. I think if I wasn t angry about Irish society and didn t want to change it then I wouldn t write the books I do. Obviously a book like The Journey Home or Father s Music comes out of anger or apprehension. Y know, maybe things are not quite as bad as in some of those books but they were written as warnings as much as anything else. I find now that in my books I need to find some way to resolve that, some way to bring it through. In this book it comes through through music. You have this sort of nightmare nether/underworld of Dublin criminals and this other underworld of traditional music and in Tracey they slowly come together. I think I was thinking of Christie Hennessy who was bumming around for the best part of thirty years going nowhere, and then his daughter comes over and takes over his career and he becomes a success. In the same way I feel that maybe Tracey comes along and through this 22-year-old streetwise London punk maybe Sweeney finally has something to pass on. Like The Pogues! The Pogues came and remade Irish music. I feel that certain things are inarticulate but music is able to cross those divides and so, throughout the whole book, what s passed on is music.
What is the greatest achievement in Irish art?
I d pick Waiting For Godot. To me it s just a magnificent play, I d love to have written it and it makes me laugh. Moreso than Ulysses or whatever. I find that Ulysses can be a rather cold world even though it obviously is an incredible achievement, but Waiting For Godot is a very warm, human play that I would watch a hundred times over.
What is the greatest achievement in Irish sport?
Probably getting to the quarter-finals of the World Cup. Although I do have great memories of the 1988 European championships. The greatest regret which is that we should ve qualified for the 1992 European Championships in Sweden. It was only that we slipped up in the end, we let three goals in away from home with Poland, and England got through on goal difference. I think that we would have cleaned up in Sweden because when we resumed the start of the World Cup campaign after that we were actually playing our best football ever. But it would be madness to presume that you could sustain it. Only people who didn t understand football would ve presumed that Ireland could ve continued on that level.
Is the Irish cultural renaissance all it s cracked up to be?
Ninety-five per cent of what s written in any particular time is shite. Well, not shite, but it won t stand the test of time. So when you go back and take the literature of any period and say That was a great period because these were the books that were written , often those books weren t even the books that were recognised at that time. What history has done is very kindly washed away ninety-eight per cent of what was written. I think that a lot of what is being produced isn t the business. It isn t bad, but isn t the business. But I think that when the dust clears that you will find quite a number of very fine books and plays written at this time.
What s your favourite place in Ireland?
Drumcondra. It s where I live and it s somewhere that I feel really happy in. It s a very comfortable place to live in. In a curious way I feel more at home here than I actually felt in Finglas, which is a strange thing. But it is a place where I m very happy and I wouldn t move a mile from where I live now.
Should the national anthem be replaced and if so, with what?
No, it s a wonderfully bad song as I think all national anthems should be. Wonderfully bad and a tad incoherent. And they don t get any more incoherent than our one. Actually, I think one of the great joys of the national anthem is that nobody understands the words of it and I think that this only becomes a great joy when you listen to national anthems where you do understand the words of them and realise just how bad they are. So whatever we d replace it with would have to be dire to be on a par with anthems the world over. We re as well off as we are! n

Dermot Bolger was interviewed by Peter Murphy. Pics: Colm Henry