Let Them Eat Babies

Had we but known, we could have organised a cannibalistic orgy of baby-eating. An article in The Economist, dated February 18 and by-lined ‘T.N.’, bemoans the dearth of ‘recession art’ produced by Irish artists, filmmakers, writers, et al. “You’d expect this sorry tale to have generated a wave of films, plays and novels,” observes T.N. after a short tour of Ireland, which somehow managed to miss the droves of natives on their hands and knees in the fields, feasting on grass. “After all, the Irish have never shied away from telling stories about themselves.”
  There’s more than a touch of schadenfreude about T.N.’s article. Have Americans ever ‘shied away from telling stories about themselves’? Have the British, or the Burmese, or the Virgin Islanders? How about journalists from The Economist? Isn’t ‘telling stories about themselves’ what people tend to do when telling stories?
  T.N. also seems rather exasperated that Irish cultural types haven’t yet started singing for their supper to provide entertainment of the world at large, like court jesters jingling their bells for a few scraps from the King’s table, bawling out beal bocht tales about our ‘sorry tale’ of riches-to-rags humiliation. Perhaps it’s significant that T.N. references the ‘Frank McCourt-style misery memoir’, suggesting that ‘sorry autobiographical or semi-autobiographical tales of poverty, domestic violence and abuse of various licit or illicit substances,’ dominated the best-seller lists in Ireland during the boom years. Really? I’d have thought that if there was one kind of book that could characterise the boom years of the Celtic Tiger, it’d be the bright, cheerful glitz of the chick lit novels, which celebrated, for good or ill, a country a million miles removed from the poverty-stricken hole of Frank McCourt’s Limerick.
  As for a recession generating a wave of films, plays and novels about the recession, well, T.N. appears to be blithely unaware that films and plays are expensive blighters to produce, requiring funding that a recession tends to bleach from the economy. Nowhere does T.N. refer to the savage cuts imposed on the Arts Council, say, or acknowledge that now, when they’re most sorely needed, the voices of Irish filmmakers are being choked for the want of seed capital. The same applies to those who produce plays, of course, although T.N. neglected to mention that one of last year’s runaway theatrical successes was David McWilliam’s one-man show lambasting the powers-that-be.
  The novel is cheaper to produce, of course, requiring no start-up funding; but few writers have the wherewithal to publish their own novels, and if domestic publishers - also feeling the squeeze, naturally - believe that there is more of an appetite for celebrity-endorsed books rather than treatises on economic failure, then there’s not a lot that most writers can do to get their work into the market.
  There’s another issue at play here too, and it’s that the greed, stupidity and pathetic ineptness of Ireland’s ruling cartel of politicians, bankers and regulators that have contributed so spectacularly to the crash are almost beyond parody. Certain people bemoan the absence of a Scrap Saturday-style show satirising such excesses, but really, given the headline-grabbing antics of Brians Cowen and Lenihan and Marys Coughlan and Harney, of Willie O’Dea and John Gormley, you’d need to be a complete moron not to get the sick joke without someone handing you a punchline on a plate.
  One aspect of the economic crash and bail out that T.N. doesn’t cover in his or her gleeful appraisal of the current situation, incidentally, is the extent to which ordinary Irish tax-payers are being punished for the sinful stupidity of European bankers who lent extraordinary amounts of money to Irish banks without taking even the most basic precautions to ensure that said banks would be in a position to repay the loans. If any of those European financial powerhouses were now of a mind to sponsor, say, a theatre festival dedicated to exploring the current economic state of Ireland, I’m sure T.N. would get a bellyful of Irish artists’ responses to the recession.
  Finally, T.N. does include a very short paragraph in which he alludes very briefly to a coterie of writers who have been using the economic crash as a backdrop to their novels for the past couple of years. To wit:

“[Fintan] O’Toole also draws attention to a couple of crime novels, “small masterpieces” he says do a good job of depicting Ireland’s “globalised culture”. In that vein I should mention that a couple of friends have recommended Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND as painting an accurate portrait of the seamy side of Ireland’s boom.”

  Indeed it does, but T.N. - had she or he scratched the surface - might have discovered that Ken Bruen, in his own inimitable way, has been charting Ireland’s economic decline through the prism of Galway for the past number of years; that the recent novels of Declan Hughes have offered, almost in passing, telling insights into the country’s changing dynamic; that the characters in Tana French’s novels are chthonic in relation to their economic environment; that Gene Kerrigan in particular is exercised by the impact of macro-economics on the lower rungs of the social order; and that CAPITAL SINS, Peter Cunningham’s novel from last year, details the ludicrous excess of the Celtic Tiger’s last days. Yes, they’re all crime novels, and as such lack the cachet of the official literary establishment’s response to Ireland’s woes; still, if they’re all we have, they’re better than nothing, right?
  Finally, it might be worth noting that during the Great Depression in the US, the top movie box office draw for four years straight, 1935-1938, was Shirley Temple. Which is to say, and at the risk of jumping to conclusions, that when people’s lives are miserable, they tend not to want to spend what little hard-earned cash they have on perpetuating their misery; they prefer escapism, distraction, release. Hence, presumably, Jedward and the Eurovision.
  T.N.? We Irish will jingle our jesters’ bells with the best of them, but we’ll do it to laugh at and among ourselves, and to comfort one another by telling ourselves our own stories. Right now, pace Swift, we’re too busy eating our babies in order to survive.

Sheer Geneius

Gene Kerrigan is one of the finest Irish novelists around at the moment, in CAP’s not-so-humble opinion, and those of you who haven’t read his latest offering, DARK TIMES IN THE CITY – which, I suspect, is most of you – should hasten to your nearest bookstore and purchase it forthwith, sparing not the horses, James.
  I’m also rather fond of Gene Kerrigan’s columns on the back page of the Sunday Independent, which have taken on something of a quixotic poignancy in recent times, as he vainly tilts against the windmills of Ireland’s entrenched vested interests. The most recent subject of his ire is the McCarthy Report. To wit:

It’s like we’re all on a lifeboat. At one end of the lifeboat, we’re being told that things are so bad that we must choose which amongst us is to be served up as dinner, so that the rest won’t all perish.
  And, from the other end of the lifeboat, we can hear the enormous farts from the bloated arses of the Very Serious People, on the fourth course of their blow-out.
  As this column said before, this battle is about the quality of wine on the dinner tables of the elite. People who routinely uncork a €48 bottle of wine will, indeed, make sacrifices in our hour of peril. They’ll settle for a €36 bottle of plonk. But they’re damned if they’ll slum it with a crappy €22 bottle.

  Geneius. For the rest, clickety-click here ...
  The McCarthy Report, for those of you interested, is a report on where savings can be made in the Government’s public sector wage bill. It targets, for the most part, education, health and essential services – one proposal, for example, suggests closing down half the rural Garda stations.
  Here’s the situation in Ireland:
  A Fianna Fail-led government has been in power for over a decade;
  We’ve gone from boom to bust in the last three years;
  The same government who led us into the tailspin are now proposing to pull us out;
  They propose to achieve this by commissioning a report from a group of people who are ideologically wedded to the economic model that got us bust in the first place;
  The overall aim is to reassert the status quo, although possibly with more safety-nets built in for the very wealthy individuals whose greed caused the bust in the first place;
  The cost of paying for the stupid greed of a gilded elite will be picked up by the taxpayer, and the taxpayer’s children, and very probably the taxpayer’s grandchildren, because the government insists on bailing out useless, rotten banks by investing billions that could be spent on education, health, and essential services.
  Meanwhile, the opposition parties clamour for an election, pretending that they want to be in charge of the fiasco, but no one seems prepared to say that it’s the system that’s at fault; that it’s the system that has provided us with a generation of utterly useless politicians, bankers and captains of industry; that it’s the system that needs to change. Otherwise we’re just shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.
  My father, bless his heart, is no political or economic savant. But for as long as I can remember, going back to the early ’80s, when it was clear to everyone with eyes to see that Charles J. Haughey was filthy to the core, my father was saying, “We need to ask Fidel to come over and sort us out.” A benign dictatorship was what he was proposing, in effect. And you can laugh if you want to, but answer me this: with Ireland on its way to hell in a hand-basket, broke and bust and borrowing billions at a punitive rate of interest just to keep up with the day-to-day spending, this a few short years after the Celtic Tiger was roaring all over the world, at anyone who’d listen, about how wonderful the Irish economy was – answer me this: how much worse of a job would Fidel Castro have done at managing the Irish economy than Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen?

To Vote Or Not To Vote? I’m Glad You Asked Me That Question, Bob …

We had local and European elections in Ireland last week, while I was washing my hair.
  Shame on me, right? Men and women fought and died so that I could have the right to vote.
  If you don’t vote, you’re not entitled to complain.
  Etc.
  Okay, so here’s how I see it:
  If you do vote, you’re not entitled to complain. If you vote, you’re simply perpetuating the same old rubbish – bland policies that are minute variations on centre-right economics, dreamed up by the scions of political dynasties that have little to recommend them bar their longevity.
  If you want to complain, you have to be prepared to sacrifice your right to representation, stand outside the system, and piss into the tent.
  Because if the best this country has to offer as leaders of its two main political parties are Brian Cowen and Enda Kenny, then there’s a good chance the problem lies with the system itself.
  And if a tent can’t take a good pissing-into once in a while, we’re probably best off without that particular tent. God forbid you’d be camping out some night and the weather would turn rough …
  Here’s the thing:
  You wouldn’t let someone run a McDonald’s without a degree in management. Right? You wouldn’t let someone run a football team without a coaching badge.
  So why do we elect people to run the entire country who haven’t spent so much as a wet afternoon studying political theory?
  Now, you might be sitting there thinking that that’s elitist and anti-democratic. Not everyone gets to go to university and get themselves a fancy degree. In fact, most people don’t.
  Maybe that’s why there’s a resistance in this country to intelligent politicians, while the cerebrally-minded likes of Alan Shatter, Garrett Fitzgerald, Alan Dukes and John Bruton spent the vast majority of their political lives in opposition. And maybe it’s just because they were all Blueshirts, I honestly don’t know.
  Anyway, the point is this: I don’t want ‘most people’ running the country. I don’t want you running it, and I certainly don’t want me. I want the best and the brightest. And I definitely don’t want someone performing heart-surgery on me or mine on the basis that his or her father was a heart-surgeon.
  So here’s a modest proposal. The current government, being composed for the most part of the morons who squandered the wealth of the Celtic Tiger and are now penalising the people for their venal pandering to vested interests, should do the patriotic thing and resign en masse for the good of the country.
  President McAleese should then dissolve the Dail forthwith and turf everyone out on their ear.
  Any TD who wants to apply for re-election can do so, but only after obtaining a degree in political science, a degree that should ideally encompass (in no particular order) ethics, management, economics, accountancy, ethics, political theory, and ethics.
  Just so the politicos don’t miss out on their perks and junkets, the course will include mandatory internships attached to another country’s political system, preferably Sweden’s.
  Of course, this leaves us with a minimum of a three-year gap before there’ll be sufficient graduates to go forward for election, so we’ll have to throw ourselves on the mercy of the EU and apply for a form of bridging government.
  A degree in political science being the bare minimum required, anyone wishing to apply for ministerial posts should continue their studies to gain a master’s degree. This, however, can be achieved by attending night-school and / or the Open University while serving as a TD.
  This might affect the running of a politician’s constituency office, of course, and result in far fewer drink-driving charges being quashed. Still, we’ll just have to hope it’ll all work out for the best.
  Sure, it’ll be chaotic for a couple of years, and the rudderless country might well be devastated by a combination of political stagnation, EU meddling and economic recession …
  Oh.

39 Steps To … Getting Published

1. Get genius idea for a story.
2. Example: Man gets brain transplant from loopy nun and has visions of Jesus telling him the Holy Grail is in fact Barack Obama’s coffee mug.
3. Write one-page synopsis.
4. Run out of steam around the paragraph mark.
5. Pitch to drunk literary agent anyway.
6. Pitch to 17 more drunk agents.
7. Get genius idea about a serial killer who goes around bumping off literary agents.
8. Discover you are the 731,204th person to pitch that idea this month alone.
9. First literary agent calls back to say, “This famous relative you have – it’s not Brian Cowen, right?”
10. Lie like Nixon. About everything, to everyone.
11. Claim that you are, in fact, the love-child of Richard Nixon and Barbara Cartland.
12. Decide to think about actually writing the novel.
13. Although first you’ll actually read a novel, ‘just to see how they go.’
14. Apply for Arts Council grant.
15. Apply to Inland Revenue for artist’s tax-break.
16. Set up blog.
17. Type ‘Chapter 1’.
18. Establish the novel’s structure by typing ‘Chapter 2’, ‘Chapter 3’, ‘Chapter 4’, etc., until you reach ‘Chapter 32’.
19. Briefly consider the possibility of getting away with claiming that 32 blank pages ‘convey a post-modern non-narrative exploring the existential emptiness of being’.
20. Write a blog post asking readers’ advice on how to overcome writer’s block.
21. Get blocked after typing ‘How Do You Overcome Writer’s Block?’
22. Do a promotional live phone-link with the Gerry Ryan radio show in which you parade up and down Grafton Street with your knickers on your head asking illegal immigrants for a date.
23. Think some more about writing the novel.
24. Get genius idea to ‘emulate’ your heroes by copying out one chapter from each of your 32 favourite novels.
25. Realise you only have two favourite novels, both of which have ‘Pooh’ in the title.
26. Join a creative writing class.
27. Befriend one of the writers, ask if you can help by critiquing her work, then put her in a coma.
28. Inform agent that the loopy nun / brain transplant / Obama / holy grail story is ‘too mainstream’. Instead it’ll be about ‘a thirty-flirty gal who works in PR with fabulous fashion-sense and more gay friends than you could swing a cat at but who can’t get married although it’s not for the want of a wardrobe full of Jimmy Choos and sound relationship advice from all those gay friends who finally reveal how your sister, the bitch, was sleeping with that hunky bisexual cousin you had your eye on all along’.
29. Drop Oprah an email to let her know that April is good for you.
30. Choose the pseudonym ‘Cecilia Nixon-Binchy’ on the off-chance erstwhile friend emerges from coma.
31. Spend a harrowing month adapting her manuscript by changing the heroine’s name from ‘Aggie’ to ‘Abbie’ without using find-and-delete, ‘because that would be cheating’.
32. Send novel to respected Irish publisher.
33. Tell Barry Egan, exclusively, that you wrote the novel on napkins during your ten-minute lunch-break at the Centre for Helping One-Legged Blind Orphans To Hear Better.
34. Drop Salman Rushdie an email, asking if he’d be so kind as to launch your book for you with ‘a few well-chosen words’.
35. Sign contract with respected Irish publisher, revealing exclusively on TV A.M. that it’s ‘a five-book deal for seven figures’.
36. Neglect to mention that all seven figures are zeroes.
37. Refuse to emerge, blinking shyly, into the bright lights of the Late Late Show until Pat Kenny pins you in a half-nelson on the Montrose lawn.
38. Tell Ryan Tubridy ‘It’s nice that a work of art won for a change,’ when novel hits the best-seller list. Neglect to mention that it was your mother who bought all 14 copies.
39. Immediately set up a creative writing workshop – so you can ‘give something back’ to ‘those less fortunate’ – on Grand Bahama.

This feature first appeared in the Evening Herald