The award-winning novelist, playwright and head of the creative writing programme at University of Limerick, just published the second book in his historical fiction: Rome Escape Line trilogy, The Ghosts of Rome …
WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, WHAT DID YOU THINK YOU’D TO GROW UP TO BE? When I was nine, I wanted to be a priest. I used to say mass to my siblings, but becoming a teenager took care of that, and I didn’t want to be a priest anymore.
WERE YOU GOOD AT SCHOOL AND DID YOU LIKE IT? The charitable way to put it is that I had a mixed experience. I went to Blackrock College, which I thought was a dump, though I had some wonderful teachers. It was the whole, “rugby has a lot to teach us” south Dublin shite that went with it. I didn’t bother disliking it. It just was a total irrelevance and an embarrassment. I was very lucky in that there were four or five other misfits, and we went around sneering at everyone, quoting Boomtown Rats songs and giving backchat.
HOW DO YOU REFLECT ON YOUR TIME AT SCHOOL NOW? Of course, I know a lot more now about Blackrock College than I did then. My heart goes out to the boys, now men, who were made to suffer by those priests. I don’t mind saying I knew a priest, Father Flood, whose behaviour towards me did not become sexually abusive but I see now was grooming (Father Flood is now widely and publicly documented as an abuser). They used to show a film in school on Friday night and if you were one of Father Flood’s special little friends, you would drive into town with him to collect the film. There was a café at the Martello tower in Sandymount, and he said, “Sometimes, the boys and I, we stop and cool off and have an ice cream.” I don’t know what it was in me that always said, “I’m not doing that.” At the time, I wouldn’t have realised, but because of the revelations, I’ve come to see how odd it was that a man of that age would be going for ice cream with little boys.
WERE YOU A REBELLIOUS TEENAGER? I was kind of a mix. I would very often win the religion prize but I also mitched off school a lot. I would spend the day walking around town, looking in bookshops, at exhibitions, at the Dandelion Market. I got a very mediocre Leaving Cert and probably didn’t even deserve that. It was one of the great blessings of my life to get into Arts in UCD.
WHEN DID YOU START TO SEE WRITING AS A PATH TO FOLLOW? I would have loved to be a visual artist, but I just didn’t have any ability. I was good at English, and when I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a copy of Catcher in the Rye, and I can remember thinking, “That’s what I’d like to do with my life”.
The hardest thing about becoming a writer was that I didn’t like sitting in a room alone …
WHAT’S YOUR BIGGEST STRENGTH IN YOUR WORK? That I love it is a great strength, because if you don’t love it, it’s too hard to be a creative writer. I’m devoted to it, and I turn up. I don’t think there’s anything mystical about it. It’s like a marriage, or being in a political party or a religion or a team. You’ve got to turn up.
DO AWARDS MATTER TO YOU? They matter a lot when you win one, and they’re a wonderful acknowledgement of literary talent, but if you don’t win one, or you don’t get nominated, they’re a lot of nonsense.
DO YOU EVER REGRET CHOOSING THE SOLITARY LIFE OF A WRITER? The hardest thing about becoming a writer was that I didn’t like sitting in a room alone. I was able to do it, but I never really liked it. I’ve managed by punctuating it with writing that’s done in a more communal setting and now I’ve taught in UL for eleven years. I run the creative writing programme there, so I have colleagues and students and meetings and bureaucracy, and all of those things that help drive me back into my lonely room after a while.
WHAT HAVE BEEN THE IMPORTANT FEMALE RELATIONSHIPS IN YOUR LIFE? I’m extraordinarily lucky to have been married for 26 years to a woman who I love, respect and admire more every day – Anne-Marie Casey. The most intelligent thing I’ve ever done was to fall in love and get married to her. Then my sister Eimear. We were very close as kids, and we’re fantastic friends now. My first teacher, a nun called Mother Laurence, who taught me to read and write, Liz Foley at Penguin Random House, my dear friend and literary agent, Isobel Dixon, and the dean of my faculty at UL, Professor Sandra Joyce.
YOU’D LIKE PEOPLE TO REGARD YOU AS… Having more hair than I do, being slimmer and generally more attractive and younger. YOUR
FRIENDSHIPS ARE FOR THE MOST PART… Lasting. I think when you come from a family where there was a lot of turbulence and unhappiness, your friends become the family that you create. They’re very important to me.
YOUR MOST PHYSICALLY ATTRACTIVE FEATURE IS … I have very beautiful feet. Anne-Marie says, my velvety voice.
YOUR STYLE SIGNIFIER IS … A nice suit. I put on a suit when I’m teaching or giving an interview. A suit makes you face the world with a new confidence.
YOUR FAVOURITE SHOES ARE … My blue suede shoes that I don’t like people to step on. I wear them for special occasions and my children laugh at me when I wear them: “There’s the old boy in his blue shoes. Indulge him. He thinks he looks cool.”
Being with Anne-Marie, having the boys near us, listening to music, having a wonderful dinner …
YOU MOST RECENTLY READ… This fantastic book by Edward Wilson-Lee called The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language in Renaissance Italy. It’s kind of a biography of a man called Giovanni Pico della Mirandalo, who was a Renaissance scholar, and he claimed to know everything. He had a kind of a nightclub act where you could turn up and ask him anything. He’s a fantastic character; I might write a novel about him.
HOW DO YOU COPE WITH A SETBACK? They hurt so much when you’re younger and then when you’re old and bitter like myself, you sort of expect them to happen. My pal Donal Ryan says every successful writer’s career is pockmarked by disappointment. If you can’t handle it, you need to do something else with your life, but it’s too late now for me.
CAN YOU SPEAK A FOREIGN LANGUAGE? I started to learn Italian when I began going to Italy to research for the Rome trilogy, and if I have two glasses of red wine, I speak Italian fluently.
WHERE IS YOUR HAPPY PLACE? I love being at home. We live near the beach in Killiney and if the night is still, you can hear the waves.
WHAT DO YOU COOK AT HOME? Toast. Tea. I do a pretty good scrambled egg, but I’m not a good cook. My role is to be the commis chef.
WHAT IS YOUR IDEA OF THE PERFECT WEEKEND? Being with Anne-Marie, having the boys near us, listening to music, having a wonderful dinner, and then on Sunday night, switching on the computer and someone has written a novel for me, like in the children’s story The Elves and the Shoemaker. Yeah, I like that.
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