Holding Onto Some Sorrows

Musician, journalist, poet, record company supremo; Eamon Carr has worn a lot of hats in his career. Now, with the publication of Deirdre Unforgiven: A Journal Of Sorrows, he adds playwright to that list.

The work weaves the Celtic legend of Deirdre with Carr’s experiences reporting on the conflict in the North during the ‘90s for the Evening Herald.
“I’d been doing feature interviews and suddenly that led to interviewing a lot of the former paramilitaries,” he explains. “I found myself going up north and doing these interviews, which led to doing stories on punishment beatings, the disappeared, Drumcree, Clinton, Blair. I just happened to be the guy that was there for the Herald.
“A lot of what I was reporting seemed to echo Irish mythology,” he continues. “Over the years it began to bug me so I thought I should try to explain or tell this story, get it out there. Then I saw a production of Deirdre – Ulick O’Connor’s version – in The National Library and thought, ‘that’s it’.”
The play marries the stark reflections of a young journalist on the brutalities he’s encountered, with the legend of the Irish mythological heroine. It utilises devices from the Japanese Noh and Greek classical traditions, to compelling effect.
“I remember thinking during those years in the north, ‘This is the landscape of Deirdre of the Sorrows, history is almost repeating itself,’” he says. “I thought, ‘Something hasn’t resolved itself in the national psyche.’ Such loss... you can only imagine the mothers go back to the graveyards every day but we’re all gone, the media is all gone, the politicians are all gone. I wanted to reflect on that. It was probably my conscience too.”
Carr found himself in towns he would have visited as a touring Horslip in the ‘70s, under far different circumstances. 
“I knew the landscape, though now I was there for completely different reasons,” he reflects. “It was genuinely horrific, dreadful stuff. I found myself thrown in. It wasn’t a career choice. Suddenly I was there in the midst of this terrible grief.
“One day I was at a funeral for three kids and three little white coffins came out of a house. The world’s media was there, satellite van guys on ladders, all of that thing. As the cortege moved away I did a couple of interviews with neighbours and I remember talking to one elderly woman and as I started talking to her I burst into tears. So there I was blubbing trying to cover this story!”
Carr’s years in the north were, as one can imagine, not without their more perilous moments.
“I had to interview a guy that had been the victim of punishment beatings a number of times,” he recalls. “I went up to his estate and when I walked down the street I suddenly realised that none of the houses had numbers, they’d all been taken off. It was stuff you’d see in The Wire! I remember the house was in bits, there were holes in the interior walls. He’d been ‘visited’ a few times. He started showing me his scars. Over the last ten years everything had been broken! I’m sitting there interviewing this poor divil thinking, ‘Do you think maybe you would like to go to Australia?!’”
Since his days in poetry group Tara Telephone, the common strand running through Carr’s work has been Celtic mythology. What began the love affair?
“It wasn’t really my choice, if I had a choice I’d be trying to write the follow-up to Love/Hate or some rom-com or something that would make some bloody money!” he laughs. “As a young guy I was always very ill so I spent a lot of time in bed. My grandfather had a fantastic collection of books that I would immerse myself in, books on Cu Chulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhaill. So that was my light reading when kids up the road had their heads stuck in Biggles and Billy Bunter!”

Deirdre Unforgiven : A Journal Of Sorrows is out now through Doire Press