Ireland can teach us some valuable literary lessons

As Ireland's institutions crumbled, writers and artists kept their good name – and are now courted by the state.

By Boyd Tonkin, The Independent,Friday, 15 July 2011

Alamy

Bucolic pleasures: Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland

We're in a small harbour-side courthouse on the far western edge of the European Union. One national flag, and another that bears the EU's ring of stars, flank the magistrate's bench. The public seats are packed. A trio of witnesses – all detectives, after a fashion – rise to tell us in graphic detail about terrible crimes covered up and blamed on (likely) innocents who died to hide the guilty. An untamed countrywoman who worked as a prostitute, and had children by seven wealthy, married men, is savagely killed; a friendless farmer hangs for it. Another framed loner dies on the gallows after the murder of a judge's daughter. A resented foreign woman, with her hapless servant, goes on trial for witchcraft...

The little courtroom in Bantry, a pretty and peaceful town on one of the deep bays where County Cork slides gently into the Atlantic, would not usually play host to such sensations. Each of these real-life cases has prompted a novel, and their authors – visitors to last week's West Cork Literary Festival – took the stand to explain them. The life and death (in 1940) of "Foxy Moll" McCarthy in New Inn, Tipperary propelled Carlo Gébler latest novel, The Dead Eight (see page 29). North of the border, an almost-certainly innocent man was hanged after a young woman's murder in Newry in 1961; Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue (Faber) investigates the miscarriage, and returns to the scenes and people of his earlier The Blue Tango. As for the alleged witch Alice and her maid Petronilla: they faced gruesome torture at the hands of ecclesiastical judges in the Anglo-Norman town of Kilkenny in 1324, as Hugh Fitzgerald Ryan recounts in The Devil to Pay (Lilliput Press).

From David Mitchell to Michael Morpurgo, Hisham Matar to David Soul (Hutch without Starsky, who presented a flamboyant one-man show inspired by the poetry of Pablo Neruda), Bantry welcomed a richly cosmopolitan gang of authors. But there seemed something symbolically new-Irish about that night in court. A state space was given over for a spell to the unsparing revelation of sexual hypocrisy and family trauma, of the abuse of the law and the persecution of outsiders. These true, and tangled, histories fit with uncanny precision the moulds of a literature that seeks to do belated justice to all the victims. For Eoin MacNamee, "These cases have an architecture to them that would be implausible if you made it up".

To the authors, that true-crime architecture carves doorways that lead straight from then to now. As Carlo Gébler put it, "The past is a way of getting to the present." And everything about that scandal-studded history now can and must be said, both to banish the old demons and to shed light on the way we live now. "The modernity of it fascinated me," said Hugh Ryan, drawing lines to link the inquisitors of medieval Leinster to Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib. "It was so like the war on terror... Society coalesces when it identifies an enemy."

As for Gébler – whose mother, the taboo-busting novelist Edna O'Brien, ruffled feathers in 2002 when she too transformed a harrowing murder case into fiction with In the Forest – he traced a connection between the lies and cover-ups of Ireland in the 1940s and more recent events. The deceits behind The Dead Eight exposed, he said, the "total and utter indifference of the elite" to the sufferings of those without voice or rank. The descendants of that ruling clique, he argued, drove fellow-citizens into the economic catastrophe that last November led to an 85 billion euro EU-IMF bail-out and a four-year plan of eye-watering austerity. "They have improved a little – they no longer hang people – but not by very much."

If you suspect that this sounds like another gloating rehearsal of Ireland's current woes from the other side of the water, please think again. The republic's extreme-sports version of boom-and-bust did indeed trigger plenty of patronising coverage in Britain. But you might read that courtroom session in quite another way. Ireland's writers have had to keep their eyes unblinkingly open, and to unpack the most painful secrets, as one by one the pillars of society have crumbled. It began, of course, with the fall of the Church after paedophile scandals and their suppression; then continued with the disgrace of the "Celtic Tiger" bankers and developers, and of the crooked machine politicians who fixed their deals.

You might even view the past few years of Irish history as evidence of a kind of multiple organ failure in the body politic. That's certainly how the abrasive historian-journalist Fintan O'Toole reads events in his acid-tongued critique, Ship of Fools, and in Enough is Enough (Faber) – his manifesto for a "new republic" with a reinvigorated ideal of "public morality" now that, from Catholicism to nationalism, "so many of the old landmarks have disappeared".

But the authors, and artists, have not failed. They have – at their best – told the truth and shamed the devils. Last autumn, shortly before Ireland's leaders threw up their hands and let Brussels and Berlin steer economic policy, I talked in Dublin to novelist Paul Murray (Man Booker-longlisted for the tragi-comic Skippy Dies). He memorably quoted writer-director Neil Jordan, who will film his book. For Jordan, the creators were "the one element of Irish life that hadn't let people down. We hadn't betrayed people." 

Full piece at The Independent.