Sweet Charity

“Peter was a bit of a hippy and he was wearing clogs. Clogs with rubber tacked on to their soles. It was the work of a moment for them, too, to catch fire. Long hair flying, arms spread wide, Peter leaped around the stage alike a beclogged Nureyev, clothed in a gauzy veil of fire and smoke.”

That’s an excerpt from Horslips frontman Barry Devlin’s contribution to A Pint And A Haircut, a new collection of true stories edited by Garret Pearse.
Pearse was inspired by Paul Auster’s bestselling collection, True Tales Of American Life, a compilation of anecdotes submitted by members of the public to National Public Radio in the U.S.
So Devlin is unusual among the contributors to A Pint And A Haircut for being both famous and a professional writer (for screen – Ballykissangel among others). Nearly all of these stories, most no more than a page or two long, are from people who are neither of those things, because being famous or a writer is not really the point – the point is that the stories are true.
There’s an uncanny, possibly slightly voyeuristic, fascination in knowing that all the tales in this collection – funny or miserable, well-written or clunky – are from real life. Some are deeply personal – there’s a bit of a cringe-factor – but the fact that you know this really happened somehow elevates even the worst offenders above mawkishness.
The writers are of all ages and from all backgrounds, and the topics are picked and arranged apparently at random. There’s the hysteria caused by the arrival of sliced bread in Tralee for the first time in the 1940s, World Cup fever in a Dublin pub in 2002, and the depressing story of a French boyfriend who went back to his country and never wrote to his heartbroken teenage girlfriend again.
“I didn’t quite understand what I was asking people to do. I put in a story by myself and you realise then how personal it is to sit down and write about yourself – and how exposing and how difficult,” says Pearse, a Louth-man who works in a software company in south Dublin. “A number of the stories are very personal and very sad and very traumatic and because they’re true it gives them an added meaning.”
Pearse lived in the U.S. for four years, where he worked with a number of Haitians. When news of the earthquake came last January, he was reading his Christmas present – Auster’s collection – and decided to put together an Irish version to raise money for the relief effort.
Barry Devlin explains that like most people who got involved in the book, he wanted to support Concern’s ongoing work in Haiti, even after the world’s attention has turned elsewhere.
“The thing about earthquakes is the cameras go away but the rubble doesn’t,” he reflects.
Regina Henley, who is waiting for a kidney transplant, contributed one of the most poignant stories in the collection, ‘Thoughts At The End Of A Sunny Day’.
“I sat down one evening, I had had a good day in terms of how I was feeling. When you’re sick, that’s what it becomes, every day: how are you feeling?” said Henley. “I think Irish people in some ways are terrible at talking about ourselves and disclosing about ourselves. I’d find it easier to write about the fact that I’m sick than to have a conversation with someone and tell them. When it’s just you and the pen and paper or the computer screen, you’re more open.”
Henley believes that this openness is the strength of the new collection.
“The fact that it’s giving a voice to so many age groups and to people from all walks of life is fantastic. It sums up Irish people in general at the moment because there’s a bit of every experience.”

A Pint And A Haircut is published by Londubh Books. All royalties in aid of the Concern Haiti Fund.