In a high-ceilinged room of Ely House, a carefully restored Georgian building just off Lower Baggot Street, a dozen people were seated quietly in a circle one evening last March for the first of six sessions of a course in positive psychology. Some were wearing suits, fresh from work; others, like myself, were dressed casually. A few had a smudge of grey on their forehead and it dawned on me that it was Ash Wednesday.

After a brief introduction outlining her professional credentials and working experience as a psychotherapist, Margaret Forde, the course convenor, asked us to stand, to introduce ourselves to the person seated beside us, and to tell that person one positive thing that had happened to us in the past seven days. ‘It doesn’t have to be something earth-shattering,’ Forde said. I shook hands with the young woman beside me, who smiled and told me she had just moved into a new apartment with a good friend. I smiled back, told her I had just received a commission to write an article for a newspaper and that this had made me happy. ‘Briefly,’ I added.

We sat back down, and Forde asked us to name things that make us happy. ‘Family,’ said one. ‘Friends,’ said another. ‘Drink.’ ‘Holidays.’ ‘Nature.’ ‘Work.’ ‘Love.’ ‘Peace.’ ‘Excitement.’ ‘Music.’ ‘Courses like this can make you happy,’ said the young woman beside me; ‘I’ve always been interested in psychology.’

The most striking feature of the room was the pair of Doric columns at one end, faux-supports to the corniced ceiling. Forde scribbled our suggestions onto a flipchart placed between the columns. She then turned to a clean page, drew a circle in the centre. ‘Ten per cent of our happiness comes from our circumstances,’ she said, marking off a small segment of the circle with the letter ‘c’, for circumstances. She sliced through the circle again, printing the letter ‘g’ inside this segment. ‘That’s got to do with genetics – 40 to 50 per cent. We’ve got a happiness set point.’ She told us about a study of lottery winners, whose happiness levels, the researchers found, soared in the aftermath of the win but took less than a year, on average, to return to pre-lottery-winning levels. ‘Your happiness peaks, and then comes back down to what it was previously,’ said Forde. ‘The same with troughs.’

‘Blue-collar workers in the US are only marginally less happy than American millionaires, research shows,’ she continued. ‘And this is terrific news, because the rest of the happiness circle’ – she inscribed the letter ‘a’ in the remaining segment – ‘that’s down to our attitudes and thoughts, which can change our lives so radically.’

The defining characteristic of happy people – and, as it turned out, the characteristic that received the most attention throughout Margaret Forde’s six-week course – was their ability to bounce back in the face of stresses, setbacks and tragedies. ‘I’m not going to wave a magic wand and turn you all into little airy-fairy Pollyannas and pretend that nothing ever goes wrong,’ she said. ‘But that sort of resilience displayed by happy people – that can be learned.’

On a recent visit to the house where I grew up in rural Tipperary, looking through the books I’d left in my old bedroom, I saw perhaps a dozen slim self-help volumes I’d bought in my late teens or early twenties. Occasionally interleaving slabs of secondhand Nietzsches and copiously underlined Salingers and coverless Chekhovs from my college years, the spines of stray titles like 23 Steps to Success and Achievement, Confidence in Just Seven Days, Six Pillars of Self-Esteem – books I had forgotten ever having read – stood out on the tightly packed shelves.

The names of the authors on the covers of these books were usually followed by initials denoting the degrees they had earned. The blurbs promised to reveal to the careful reader the secrets to boosting confidence, to conquering fears, to honing sexual prowess. I recalled now doing the exercises, trying out some of the tactics in a coffee shop, on a dance floor, walking down a pavement. Leafing through The Nice Guys’ Guide to Getting Girls once again, I recalled the aloof French girl who worked in the Enchanter vintage clothing store in Galway. Whenever I’d visit the shop, I’d try – as instructed – to make small talk in a casual, confident way, head up, chest out, even though my heart was thumping like a spent greyhound’s. My efforts made not the faintest impression on the French girl.

Over a decade since I’d last strutted between rails of sheepskins and grandfather shirts in the Enchanter, and since I’d last bought a self-help book, I now found myself listening to Margaret Forde’s soft, kind voice, suspicious of anything she might say that had the ring of a quick-fix nostrum. How can one honestly try to undo years of harmful thought patterns, part of me thought, in a twelve-hour night class? But, Forde’s approach was more scientific than those of the self-help books of my youth, and it was alluring to picture life brightening, if only by a solitary ray, through learning this discipline of positive thinking.

And so, for two hours every Wednesday evening over the next five weeks, I bracketed as best I could my reservations about the supposed benefits of adopting a sunny outlook on life, and instead allowed Margaret Forde to guide me through a range of exercises designed to teach us how to boost our resilience, increase the intensity of the positive feelings we already have, and limit the impact of negative feelings, that are inevitable, this side of heaven.




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Trevor Byrne

Mad for the rain

Tom Lee

The Hunters

Donald Mahoney

A disused restaurant in Co. Clare

Jim O’Donoghue

My animal passion

Karen O’Reilly

The act

David Ralph

The vortex

Maurice Walsh

9/11 and the seminar room

David Wheatley

‘He who is Gaelic will be Gaelic always’

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If her father asked, Caroline planned to say she’d been waiting for the weather report. It was half true. She was parked outside his house with the radio on, not yet ready to go inside. A country song ended, and was followed by the forecast for east-central Idaho: tomorrow would be warmer, clear skies with a high of fifty-five. For now the potholes in her father’s driveway brimmed with rainwater, and the cottonwood leaves hung dull and heavy. To the north of town, the Bitterroot Range stood cloaked in snow clouds. Caroline noted that her father had yet to stack the firewood or rake the yard. Through the car’s air vents, she caught the faint hint of crab apples rotting on the ground.

A grey pickup was parked under the carport, beside it a camper shell under a blue tarp. The front curtains were open, and Caroline watched her father’s silhouette, his beer belly and shuffling gait, as he moved about the kitchen. She had the feeling, looking out one window and into another, that she was about to cross a threshold from which there was no return. Her car was packed with boxes of winter clothes and bed linens, her slalom skis and fishing rods, and a computer monitor seat-belted into the passenger side. Everything else was in a storage unit back in Missoula, on the other side of the Continental Divide.

Her father came out and stood on the porch while she wrestled her duffel bag from the trunk. He wore reading glasses, the lenses flecked with rain, and an apron with the strings hanging loose. The glasses he’d bought from a revolving rack at King’s Discount Store, but the apron was new; the fabric still held the creases from its packaging. Three weeks had passed since she’d last seen him, but in the porch light he looked older, and older still in the light of the door – the broken blood vessels of his cheeks, his patchy beard, yellow in the whites of his eyes. ‘I was beginning to think you wanted to spend the night in your car,’ he said.

He held the door and Caroline hefted her bag inside. The TV was on with the volume muted. A fire burned in the woodstove. She took off her coat, then slipped out of her white hospital clogs. She’d worked her last twelve-hour shift at St Pat’s before driving from Missoula, and she was exhausted. The past month had been a whirlwind of hard decisions, and this was how it had ended: she’d broken her lease, quit her job, and today moved to Salmon, Idaho to be closer to her father. At sixty-eight he was not yet of a state that required caretaking, but he was alone and depressed and careless with his health. A month ago he’d had an accident downriver, and Caroline, his only child, no longer felt comfortable with the 140 miles between them.

Caroline turned on the floor lamp and told her father to stand still; she wanted to see how his brow was healing. The scar was puckered and pink. The stitches, she remembered, were half-assed. ‘You’re not using the cream I gave you.’

‘Do you really think it matters at my age?’ Her father reached behind his back to tie the apron strings and winced. His left forearm muscle seized and his fingers curled. Last year he’d undergone surgery for a ruptured disc in his neck. The surgeon had fused two vertebrae with a titanium plate, and he could no longer tuck in his own shirt.

Caroline took hold of his hand and massaged his fingers until the muscle loosened. ‘You know you can’t twist like that.’

‘My daughter, the nurse.’

‘We’ll see about that come Monday.’

‘What time’s your interview?’

‘Ten o’clock,’ she said, though she’d told him twice already. In the last year he’d begun to repeat himself – from memory loss or lack of conversation or both.

‘You’ll do great.’

‘I hope so. Otherwise I’ll be giving sponge baths at the Discovery Care Center.’ He laughed. The apron, she saw now, had a picture of a T-bone on a poker table and read, ‘The Steaks Are High!’ She tied the strings at his waist, and he made a pretence of sucking in his gut. ‘Where’d you get this thing, anyway?’

‘Bought it off the TV. Came with five kinds of bacon salt. You like it?’

‘It suits you.’

‘Because I’m an old bachelor,’ he said. The oven timer buzzed, and her father raised one finger. ‘The potatoes are almost ready. Dirk and Trina are expecting us for dinner at seven.’

He walked into the kitchen, and Caroline rummaged through her bag for a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. She changed in her father’s bedroom, which held the distinct smell of any old, convalescing man – skin and oils and sleep. His nightstand was cluttered with the contents of his pockets: loose change, wrinkled receipts, a spool of thread stained with fish blood, fingernail clippers, and three orange corkies. Inside his wallet, she knew, he still carried a photo of her mother, who’d left him two years ago for a retired stockbroker. After the divorce, he’d sold his welding equipment and retired to Salmon. The house had come furnished – a one-bedroom with a deck overlooking the Salmon River – and he’d brought only his fishing gear and a worn leather recliner in the bed of his pickup.

When the potatoes were ready, Caroline’s father added two kinds of bacon salt – hickory and original – and then Caroline covered the dish with tinfoil. They shouldered into their coats, and he retrieved a six-pack in a paper sack from the refrigerator. He carried it, along with a tallboy of Natural Ice, under his good arm to the pickup. Caroline took the driver’s seat and her father handed over the keys. The cab smelled of old sandwiches and rusted snow chains and the canned tuna he used for bait. They waited for the windows to defog. Her father put on his seatbelt, then took a drink from his beer and fit the can into the cup holder.

She said, ‘Since when do you drink and drive?’

He said, ‘I’m not the one driving.’

Caroline shook her head; she didn’t feel like arguing. She took the back way to Dirk and Trina’s without question from her father, who drank stealthily from his beer. It was a Thursday night in the last week of October, steelhead season. Main Street was quiet, a misting rain giving hum to the tyres. Storefront windows were painted for Homecoming with cartoon footballs and the slogan ‘Sack the Sugar Beets’. They passed the Trails End Motel, four real-estate offices, a used-car lot, and the Salmon River Coffee Shop. A young girl looked out from a window booth, her face framed by ads and flyers, and waved as the pickup passed by.

Salmon was a ranching community with roots in gold mining – valley land backed by the Continental Divide and named for its river, its river for the chinook that migrated nine hundred miles from the Pacific. River rafting companies, backcountry outfitters and bed-and-breakfast retreats catered to tourists seeking the true Western experience. The local newspaper ran excerpts from the journals of Lewis and Clark, for lack of other pressing news, and a sign on the outskirts of town boasted ‘Birthplace of Sacajawea’. Caroline remembered her father saying that the high school mascot was once an Indian chief. The school marquee still read ‘Home of the Savages’.

Caroline drove down Alder Street, past Sheldon’s house. The windows were dark, but his F-150 was parked in the driveway. She recognized the truck’s grill guard – dented from the elk he hit last winter – and the rusted headache rack. In a halo of porch light she saw a yellow toy Tonka truck, a pair of rubber boots, and two Adirondack chairs. A pumpkin sat slump-faced on the step, its triangle nose collapsing into its mouth.

Rain ticked against the windshield. The pavement glistened in the headlights. Caroline thought by next month there’d be snow on the ground, then Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s, and then she’d be thirty.

Her father said, ‘Heard from your mother lately?’

‘Not since the last time you asked.’

‘When was the last time I asked?’

‘Yesterday on the phone. I said, ‘Do you want me to pick up anything from Costco?’ and you said, ‘What have you heard from your mother?’’l

‘I don’t hear so great.’

‘I know.’

Her father cupped his ear. ‘What’s that?’

Caroline laughed. It was an old joke. She parked the pickup. ‘We’re late.’

‘You better get used to that,’ her father said. ‘Around here, twenty minutes late is right on time.’

*

Dirk and Trina Vincent owned a 1920s ranch house with leaded-glass windows, a rusted tin roof, and a wrap-around porch lined with firewood. Most of the house was original, and therefore in a state of disrepair. Trina answered the door before they could knock. She took the potatoes from Caroline’s hands, then Caroline’s coat, which she slung over the back of the couch. From down the hall, the dogs came running, collars jingling, tails thwacking the furniture. Trina yelled, ‘They’re here!’ and the pitch of her voice sent Gypsy, the old English hound, and Roxy, the Black Labrador, into barking hysterics.

Caroline’s father said, ‘Hello, girls,’ and the dogs jumped at his legs.

‘Down,’ Trina ordered, and clapped her hands. Trina was ten years younger than Dirk, a freckled redhead who, at the age of forty-nine, wore her hair long and her crow’s feet with pride. ‘Dirk’s out back,’ she said. ‘The deep freeze is acting funny again.’

She and Caroline’s father hugged awkwardly over one shoulder, the potatoes wedged like a bible between two slow-dancers. He held up the six-pack of Moose Drool.

‘Beer in glass bottles?’ She gestured to her T-shirt and jeans. ‘I’d have worn a fucking dress!’ They laughed. Trina said to Caroline, ‘Your old man’s been talking about you moving here all month. We can’t get him to shut up about it.’

Caroline smiled. She’d moved here for her father, though her father had yet to acknowledge it. As Trina passed through a swinging door into the kitchen, Caroline asked if she needed any help, and Trina said that Caroline should make herself at home.

It was still raining outside, heavy drops that sounded like BBs against the tin roof. Caroline found her way to the living room with the dogs at her heels. The ceiling’s exposed beams were grey with dust, as were the head- and shoulder-mounts of deer and elk, cobwebs laced between antlers. The house was warm and smelled of wood smoke and the steelhead baking in the oven. Above the mantel, framed by old barn wood and barbed wire, hung Dirk and Trina’s wedding photo. The wedding party was dressed in matching camouflage vests, each with a hunting rifle aimed at the photographer. Caroline knew from her father that the boy in the photo was Trina’s son from a previous marriage. He too was looking down the barrel of a rifle, a small-calibre .22, and Caroline couldn’t see his face, only his russet hair and bandy-legged stance. No one spoke of the boy. All Caroline knew was that he’d drowned in the Snake River when he was eight years old.

Roxy dropped a bone at Caroline’s feet. It was a deer leg, the hoof still attached. Caroline gave the bone back, and the dog, in turn, dropped it at her feet. She would do this for hours if Caroline played along.

‘Roxy,’ Dirk said from the doorway. ‘Give it a break.’ He tipped a beer can toward Caroline. ‘Your old man says the Moose Drool is for you, but we can’t find the damn bottle opener.’ He popped the tab and handed her the beer.

‘I dated a guy in college who could open beer bottles with his teeth,’ she said. ‘He was a real hit at parties, but not much of a kisser.’

Dirk laughed, an honest and deep-seated laugh. He was a big man with a salt-and-pepper beard, a foot taller than Trina and thick through the middle. Caroline’s father walked in, and Dirk turned on the television. A game-show audience chanted, ‘No deal! No deal!’ The men stood beside the couch drinking their beers, eyes fixed on the television. They both wore beards and ball caps, Wranglers and hiking boots, and their beer cans wore matching cozies. Trina had knitted them from red yarn with the men’s initials on the front, and it looked like they’d dressed their beers in Christmas sweaters.

Dinner was baked steelhead, asparagus, mashed potatoes, and – because Dirk was watching his weight – Coors Light. Caroline sat across from her father. Dirk and Trina sat either end of the pine-top table, and the dogs lay beneath. An elk-antler chandelier threw shadows over the ceiling. Caroline complimented the homemade camouflage placemats and matching cloth napkins, and Dirk winked and said Trina was a whiz on the sewing machine. Trina complimented the mashed potatoes, and Curtis complimented the steelhead, and Dirk complimented himself for landing the fish in the first place.

Trina talked about her job with Idaho Fish & Game, about driving out to ranches where she checked fish screens along irrigation canals. She told Caroline that in the days before screens, hundreds of steelhead and salmon, in their migration to the ocean, swam down the canals and spilled into the hayfields. She said fifty years ago a rancher could look out his window and see salmon leaping through the alfalfa and startling the cattle. She said in the winter the steelhead would freeze in the fields, and when it warmed up again they’d spring back to life. Caroline imagined graveyards of fish, alfalfa sprouting up through eye sockets and castles of ribs.

Her father raised his beer in a toast. Dirk drum-rolled his hands on the table, and the dogs, confusing it for a knock at the door, jumped up and barked. When it was quiet again, Caroline’s father said, ‘The name steelhead refers to the fish and the fisherman!’

Everyone touched beers. The knitted cozies muted the cheers of the cans, and Trina said, ‘Clink-clink!’

Caroline’s father had been saying this for as long as she could remember. It was as close as he’d come to giving her advice about men. She took a long drink and wondered if Sheldon had taken his wife and son out to dinner tonight, and if so, where they had gone. Sheldon had come into Caroline’s life nine months ago, on the Salmon River. Her father had driven to Booker’s Outpost to pick up a pair of cheeseburgers, and Caroline was fishing alone. Sheldon walked down the riverbank and asked if she’d had any luck yet. He said the steelhead were biting on red hellgies, and he held out a handful of lures. His gray eyes pinched when he smiled. ‘Go on,’ he’d said. ‘Trust me.’

They saw each other casually through the winter, and by spring they were meeting every other weekend. Sheldon worked road construction on the highway connecting Idaho and Montana, and this had made it easy to meet between Salmon and Missoula. They spent summer nights camping out or shacking up in roadside motels. Caroline fell for the charm of these retreats – the skinny-dipping and intimacy of a two-man tent, the threadbare coverlet of a motel bed, a sportsman’s regulation guide in lieu of the Gideon Bible.

One night they’d gotten careless and two-stepped at the Stumble Inn, followed it up with a steak dinner at the Rocky Knob, their knees touching under the table, and Sheldon’s wife caught wind of the affair. That was six weeks ago, and he’d kept Caroline at a distance ever since. He said he had a son to consider, and she said she understood. Now it was only a matter of time before Caroline ran into them at the gas pumps or the only grocery store in town. Sheldon’s wife was named Tiffany, and Caroline had an image of her – a pale, fine-boned woman with a prescription for Ativan and the handshake of a hummingbird.

Dirk said to Trina, ‘What’s for dessert, honey?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, and crossed her arms. ‘What’d you make?’ Dirk got up and went into the kitchen and came back with another round of beers. Caroline accepted, though she was feeling a little tipsy and didn’t want to have to walk her father, who was now drunk, back home in the rain. The thought struck her as depressing, and not because she hadn’t done it before, but because now there was no escaping him.

Trina said to Caroline, ‘Are you coming fishing tomorrow? Dirk and I are staying downriver in the camper.’

‘Why hell yes we’re coming,’ Caroline’s father said. ‘Aren’t we, Carrie?’

‘I guess I can always unpack later,’ she said.

‘I meant to tell you,’ Trina said. ‘There’s a nice place for sale up Fourth of July Creek. Hardwood floors and a wood-burning stove. There’s a big swing-set in the back, but you could always take that out.’

Caroline nodded. She didn’t know what to make of the swing-set comment but felt strangely offended.

Dirk said, ‘I got a joke for you, Caroline.’ He cleared his throat. ‘A woman is in bed with her husband’s best friend when the phone rings.’ Dirk made a telephone of his hand and batted his eyelashes. ‘She answers – “Hello?” – and after she hangs up, the man says, “Who was it?” The woman says, “It was my husband. But don’t worry. He’s not coming home. He says he’s fishing with you.”’

Dirk laughed and Caroline’s father laughed, though she knew her father didn’t find this funny. Trina threw her empty beer can across the table and hit Dirk in the shoulder. She said to Caroline, ‘Don’t listen to a word he says.’

After dinner, the men went outside to look at the broken deep freeze – an excuse to drink more beer – and Trina brought Caroline into the back room. She wanted her to choose a color of yarn for the beer cozy she planned to knit with Caroline’s initials. The room was small and neat with a table and sewing machine, several reams of fabric, baskets of yarn, and a gun cabinet. A mountain lion’s hide spanned the length of one wall, mottled with bald spots. Trina explained that Dirk’s mother had tried to vacuum it, and the women laughed.

For several years, Trina had worked as a big-cat hunting guide in Colorado, and she had photos of her old hunting hounds displayed in chronological order – Tank, Penny, Pete, Mark, Luke, John, Rick, Tally, Coop, Zip, and Doc – the way a parent might display a child’s school photos. She dusted the frames with the tail of her shirt as she told Caroline their stories.

In one photo Trina held a mountain lion up from under the arms. ‘That tom weighed 145-fucking-pounds,’ she said. Another photo showed a hound at the top of a cedar tree, way out on the limb, at a height only a squirrel would venture. ‘That’s Bell. Rest in peace, she was one of my favourites. When the cat jumped into the Colorado River, Bell jumped too. We never saw her again.’

‘I didn’t know dogs could climb trees,’ Caroline said. She realized it was a foolish thing to say and regretted it in the silence that followed.

Trina put her hand to the photo, and when she brought it away, the whorls of her fingerprints remained on the glass.

*

Caroline lay awake on the air mattress, listening to her father snore. Twice in the night he’d stumbled down the hall in his white boxer shorts, grunting as he flipped on the bathroom light. The Audubon clock he’d bought from the Home Shopping Network sang a different bird song every hour, and finally, at 3 a.m., when the American goldfinch chirped its high-pitched chip-ee! chip-ee!, Caroline got up and buried the clock between two elk steaks in the freezer. She slept a restless, shallow sleep and woke in the dark of morning. The living room was small enough that her father, unable to get around the air mattress, stepped on it as he crossed the room. Caroline’s body was thrust upward under his weight, then dropped as he stepped off. She opened her eyes.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Did I wake you?’

‘No, not at all.’ She sat up and cracked her neck. The mattress had a slow leak, which her father had patched with a strip of duct tape. It was now half as full as when she’d gone to bed.

‘I got you something.’ He held up a pair of Carhartt overalls, identical to the ones he was wearing – brown bibs with a chap-style front and elastic suspenders.

‘Those are nice. Did you buy them off the TV?’

He laughed. ‘Two for the price of one.’ He sat in his recliner in his sock feet, and Caroline listened to his laboured breathing, the way he wheezed while tying his shoes. She imagined the hours he spent in that recliner, sleeping through movies or talking to infomercial sales associates in distant cities. ‘We better get going if we want a decent fishing hole. It’s a rat race downriver this time of year.’ He stepped on the air mattress as he left the room. ‘Dirk’s grilling elk burgers,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘And we’re bringing the buns and the bait.’

Caroline dressed in long underwear and the new overalls, the fabric stiff as cardboard, then washed her face and braided her hair. She had her mother’s looks but none of the self-awareness to expect anything from it, and she couldn’t be bothered with makeup. She sat on the toilet lid and pulled on wool socks and considered how often her father drank and how much. He’d worked ten-hour days when she was growing up, had welded what he called ‘Mare Motels’ for horse breeders, and Caroline remembered his arc-burned neck and the tiny white burn scars on his forearms and hands. He came home smelling of iron and blowing his nose. In the mornings he’d cooked breakfast and warmed her school clothes in front of the fire. It was he, more than her mother, who she’d relied on. Now, when she looked at her father, it was hard to see the man who had raised her.

A month had passed since she’d gotten the phone call from Trina about his accident downriver. Trina said he’d had too much to drink and passed out on a sleeping bag in the back of Dirk’s truck. When it began to rain, Dirk strapped a tarp over the truck’s backend to keep him dry through the night. When he awoke, confused and unable to loosen the tarp, he thrashed around until he knocked himself out on the wheel well. He had a concussion and a split brow and was badly bruised, but he wouldn’t go to the hospital. Luckily, Trina said, there was a veterinarian in the campground, and he’d stitched him up. ‘He was so disoriented,’ she said. ‘He kept crying out for Poppy.’ And Caroline told her, ‘Poppy was his name for my mother.’

It was a cold, clear morning – the first killing frost of the year. Caroline cooked a breakfast of scrambled egg whites and wheat toast while her father readied the pickup. He cleared the frost from the windshield with a spatula because he couldn’t find the ice scraper, and he left the engine running while they ate breakfast. He tucked a napkin into his shirt collar and rested both elbows on the table. Again he asked of Caroline’s mother, and again she told him what she knew – that her mother and the retired stockbroker were travelling cross-country on a motorcycle. He said, ‘A goddamned murder-cycle.’

‘Dad,’ Caroline said. ‘I hate to see you this way.’

He covered his eyes with both hands. ‘Then don’t look.’

She stood and stacked the plates in the sink. ‘Why don’t you let me take your blood pressure before we leave? It’ll only take a minute.’

‘Fine. But on one condition – tomorrow we go out for breakfast. I can’t stomach this egg-white business. It’s an insult to me and the chicken.’

Her father rolled up his shirtsleeve and Caroline slipped the blood-pressure cuff around his arm. Since the surgery for his ruptured disc, his left biceps was half the size of his right. When the doctor told him he couldn’t lift anything heavier than ten pounds for the first six weeks, he’d said, ‘What the hell am I supposed to do all day?’ After some contemplation, he’d added, ‘I guess you expect me to piss sitting down?’

Caroline inflated the cuff and listened for the sound of her father’s heartbeat to cease under the pressure. She read the gauge, then opened the valve on the cuff and listened for its return. Always when she did this, she felt a sense of relief to hear her father’s heartbeat again.

When she removed the cuff, her father made a show of flexing his hand. She wrote his blood pressure and the date in a notebook he kept by the telephone. ‘We’re almost done,’ she said, ‘but I want to listen to your lungs.’

She asked him to lift his shirt. He said, ‘Aren’t you gonna buy me a drink first?’

Caroline flicked him on the shoulder and told him to be perfectly quiet or he’d blow out her eardrums and they’d both be deaf. She tried to sound more like his daughter and less like a nurse when she asked him to take three big, deep breaths.

When she finished, she smoothed her father’s shirt back and straightened his collar. His eyes were closed. He said, ‘I don’t want to know if it’s good or bad.’

‘You don’t have to know,’ she said. ‘I’ll know for the both of us.’

*

Dirk was smoking a cigarette on the front porch when they arrived. His diesel truck idled in the driveway, and a single light burned orange in the house window. Caroline had never seen Dirk smoke, but now he lit a second with the first as he walked toward the pickup. He wore a brown coat with ‘Kimball Construction’ and his name on the front, and he hadn’t bothered to zip it up. Caroline’s father rolled down the window. ‘Trina’s gonna meet up with us later,’ Dirk said. ‘All right if she drives your pickup and you two ride with me? That way we only drive two rigs downriver.’

‘Fine with me. Everything all right with Trina?’

Dirk pitched his cigarette butt into the street. ‘She’ll be all right. It’s just that time of year.’

They transferred everything into Dirk’s truck. Dirk whistled for Roxy to load up but had to lift Gypsy, with her bad hip, into the bed. Caroline helped guide the camper trailer onto the hitch, and the dogs whined as Dirk cranked the wheel jack. When they were ready, Caroline climbed into the cab and swung her legs to the right of the gearshift. The radio played the only station for miles, a morning programme called ‘Swap Shop’. A man selling a bicycle with a gun rack welded to the handlebars gave his phone number and an asking price of forty dollars.

They drove over the bridge and north of town, following the river. The hayfields lay white with frost, irrigation canals overwhelmed by dying cattails. Creekside aspen shook the gold coins of their leaves. On the Big Flat they passed a ranch house with a pumpkin patch covered in old blankets, an image that reminded Caroline of children tucked into bed, and her thoughts fell to Trina’s son, drowned in the Snake River, and to Sheldon’s son, of whom she knew so little. In her mind they took the form of the same boy, neither dead nor alive, and she could see him pushing the Tonka truck across the front porch of Sheldon’s house.

When they arrived at the North Fork gas station, twenty miles from Salmon, the parking lot was packed with trucks and campers and RVs. Dirk slowed, and Caroline’s father read off the licence plates in an incredulous voice. The Idaho plates were marked by the first letter of the county and a number. Caroline had learned that the southern Idaho counties of Bannock, Bingham, Blaine and Butte were known as the Killer B’s. They had a bad reputation with the Lemhi County sportsmen for driving too fast on the back roads and shamelessly crowding the fishing holes during steelhead season. Dirk rolled down the window, honked and yelled, ‘Go home, flatlanders!’

They drove the river road slowly, looking for vacant fishing holes and finding them occupied. In another two months, when the single-digit weather hit and the city fishermen left, they’d have the river to themselves. For now, the campgrounds were at capacity, tendrils of smoke rising from morning campfires. The surrounding mountains were a patchwork of old and new forest – stands of charred trunks amongst the new, smaller pines, and the underbrush turning with the season. It had snowed in the high country overnight, and the snow gleamed in the sun. Caroline’s father told a story for every bend in the river. He couldn’t remember to keep his red shirts and white socks separate in the wash, but he knew every fish he’d ever hooked, lost, and landed.

They passed the old Gold Hill Mine, crossed a one-lane bridge and Pine Creek Rapids, and drove on to the Painted Rock hole. Dirk stopped, and the men started to unload their gear. Caroline searched the road ahead. Sheldon’s truck was parked at the next hole downriver. From where she stood she couldn’t see around the bend, to where Sheldon would be fishing from the bank. A single gnarled cottonwood grew out at an angle, its exposed roots clinging to the slope.

She wasn’t altogether surprised that Sheldon was here. She’d fished this stretch of river with him last February when the water was riddled with ice floes. They’d spent the afternoon beside a campfire drinking hot toddies and pretending to bobber-fish. Across the river, two deer had fallen through the shelf ice and frozen to death in the night, and the image returned to Caroline. Sheldon had never promised to leave his wife, and Caroline had never asked it of him. For a long time she believed she was in control of her feelings, that she could keep from falling in love – but now it seemed to have happened overnight, the way a single wind can strip a tree of its leaves.

Dirk lowered the tailgate, and the dogs raced to the bank. Caroline carried her fishing rod down the steep embankment and over a narrow trail thick with sagebrush and willow. The river was swift and green with a dense fog burning off the water. She fingered the current, then lowered a thermometer and announced that it was 46 degrees: cold enough for the fish to bite, but not yet cold enough to make it easy.

Her father opened his tackle box and asked which colour lure she preferred. This was their routine, one they’d followed since Caroline was old enough to hold a rod, to interpret the rhythms of a river, to know the slip and tug of the farthest unseen reaches. She was perfectly capable of baiting her own hook, but she allowed her father this ritual. She chose a bright pink jig-head, to which he attached a black plastic squid with chartreuse tentacles. From his coat pocket he retrieved a spool of thread. He bit off a short length and tied a piece of shrimp to the hook, then set the bobber knot at six feet and handed her the rod.

They all three cast in order, beginning with Caroline’s father because he was the furthest downriver. It was easy fishing – her only job was to watch the bobber, and, when it went under, jerk and set the hook – but she was distracted by the presence of Sheldon, by everything left undone between them. She sensed he didn’t believe she’d moved for her father, and this bothered her more than anything.

Twice in the first hour she cast out of order, tangling her line with Dirk’s. She apologized, and Dirk said, ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. I know I’m a good catch.’ Two casts later she let her line drift too far downriver where it snagged in the rocks. She pulled too hard and snapped the braided line, and the Styrofoam bobber drifted away. Dirk whistled, and Roxy plunged into the river. The dog paddled back, shook the water from her coat, and dropped the bobber at Dirk’s feet.

An hour later Trina arrived in the pickup, blowing the horn from the road above the embankment. She greeted the dogs with a pair of pig’s ears. From twenty yards away, she called down to Caroline: ‘What’s with the matching overalls? You two look like the goddamned Bobbsey Twins!’

Trina rigged her line and took her place on the bank, and then there were four of them casting one after the other, yellow lines unfurling across the water.

*

Caroline’s father was the first to shout out, ‘Hog on!’ He raised his rod, reeled as he lowered, and the steelhead took off downriver, line zipping from the reel. He dug his muck boots into the rocky bank, trying for a solid foothold, then said through clenched teeth, ‘It’s a big one all right.’ Caroline, Dirk and Trina watched him fight the fish for twenty minutes, his left arm shaking. He reeled and waited, let the fish run then reeled again, and Caroline wanted nothing more than to take the rod from his hands, to make it easy on him, to make it easy on herself.

She said, ‘Are you all right?’

Trina said, ‘Let him be. He’s got it.’

They watched until the fish was right up to the bank, and then it jumped, its body a silver crescent speckled in green and streaked in pink. Caroline’s father asked for the net, and Dirk looked at Trina, and Trina looked at Dirk.

‘Don’t look at me,’ Trina said. ‘I brought the beer.’

In the absence of a net, Dirk moved in to tail the steelhead, but her father said for Caroline to do it. She stepped into the shallows with a blue hankie wrapped around her hand, caught the fish by the tail and lifted it from the river. It was a male with a hooked jaw and a clipped adipose fin – a hatchery fish and a keeper.

Her father was red-faced and wheezing. He rubbed the back of his neck, then flexed his left hand. ‘Let me get a good look at him,’ he said.

Caroline gripped the fish through the gills with her thumb and forefinger, then used her Leatherman to work the hook free. The steelhead was heavy and slippery, strong and lean from its long migration from the ocean, and before she could cut the gills it wrenched its body and sprung free. It flopped along the bank, and Caroline and her father fumbled after it. Dirk wedged between them with a rock in hand, and he smashed the fish over the head.

‘Well,’ Caroline said, ‘that’s one way to do it.’

Trina carried the fish with a kind of ceremony to a willow bush, where she hung it from the gills on a thick branch. She brushed the hair from her face and tried to smile. ‘Who’s ready for lunch?’

Dirk fired up his Hibachi and cooked five elk burgers from the tailgate – one for each of them and one for the dogs to share. Dirk, Trina, and Caroline’s father cracked beers on the roadside, but Caroline returned to the river and cast half-heartedly. She looked again toward Sheldon’s truck and wondered if he was having any luck. She knew his wife was not an angler. He’d said she didn’t eat fish and wouldn’t cook fish, and this had stayed with Caroline. It pleased her more than it should.

Trina joined Caroline on the bank. She reached into her back pocket for a can of Copenhagen and tapped it with two fingers. ‘I don’t know if I ever told you this,’ she said, ‘but when I first met Dirk he was married.’

‘No,’ Caroline said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘He was working then as a repairman for Allred’s, if you can believe that. He came out to work on my broken refrigerator and didn’t go home for two days. When he finally faced his wife, she’d filed a missing-person report.’ Trina pinched a chew, then wiped her hands on the thighs of her pants. ‘I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes who we love, and how we love them, is out of our control.’

Caroline smiled because she didn’t know what to say. She wondered if her father knew about Sheldon. She wondered if everyone knew.

Trina spat into the rocks, then nodded upriver. ‘Looks like we got company.’

Two fishermen and a small girl approached in a drift boat. The men dropped anchor and the boat stopped mid-river, current rushing against the stern. They were thirty yards away, close enough to see the poles in their holders, the Diet Pepsi they were drinking, and the girl as she struggled to blow bubbles with a mouthful of gum. The side of the boat read ‘Steelhead King II’.

Dirk called out that the burgers were ready, but Trina ignored him. She cupped her hands and shouted, ‘Hey there!’

The fisherman at the bow of the drift boat yelled back, ‘Catch anything?’

‘Yeah,’ Dirk said. ‘A 32-incher.’

Trina pointed to the older fisherman, who sat beside the girl. He looked like a Sportsman’s Warehouse model in a red flannel shirt and khaki fishing vest, a Ducks Unlimited cap and black neoprene gloves. She said, ‘Are you the Steelhead King?’

The men in the boat laughed.

‘What’s your name, Steelhead King?’

‘Thomas Jensen,’ the man answered.

‘Where you from, Tommy?’

‘Blackfoot,’ he said.

‘That your kid, Tommy?’

‘Yeah,’ Thomas Jensen said, ‘this is my daughter.’

Dirk said to Trina, ‘Don’t be an idiot.’

Trina said to Dirk, ‘He’s the fucking idiot.’

‘Hey, Tommy,’ Trina called. ‘How about putting a life jacket on your daughter, OK? Think you can handle that, Tommy Jensen from Blackfoot?’

No one spoke. The men in the boat looked at each other.

Trina yelled, ‘I can see the goddamn life jacket from here!’

Thomas Jensen said, ‘Hey man, how about getting your wife under control?’

‘We don’t want no trouble here,’ Dirk said. ‘Just put the life jacket on the kid and get on downriver.’

To which Thomas Jensen said, ‘The fuck I will.’

Trina waded into the river as deep as she could stand. Her voice cracked and broke as she strained to yell over the current. Roxy swam beside her, barking like mad, Gypsy howling from the shore the saddest howl Caroline had ever heard. Dirk yelled for the dogs to shut up, for Trina to cool it, and for Thomas Jensen to take his no-good 4-B ass back to Bingham County. The girl in the boat began to cry, then Trina began to cry, and Thomas Jensen lifted anchor and the boat drifted away.

Dirk waded out and put his hands around Trina’s waist. In the depths of the river she looked the size of a child. He picked her up in one motion and slung her over his shoulder and carried her through the water. Trina was still cussing and kicking and crying as Dirk walked up the bank and down the road toward the truck and camper. He swung the camper door open, pounded up the steps, and closed the door behind him.

Caroline and her father stood looking first at the camper and then at the river, as if for an answer. Her father said, ‘I think maybe we better call it a day.’ He patted his fillet knife, hanging from a leather sheath on his belt. ‘Why don’t we clean that steelhead?’

He started down the embankment, and Caroline called to him. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, and she motioned over her shoulder. ‘I just need a minute.’

‘You do what you have to do,’ he said. ‘And I’ll be right here.’

Caroline waited until he was out of sight. She removed her stocking cap and smoothed the static from her hair, then broke down her fishing rod and carried it so as not to appear entirely aimless. She passed the camper with its camouflage curtains drawn, kept on toward Sheldon’s truck, and paused at the edge of the embankment.

Sheldon and his son stood below, beside them a red cooler, a child’s backpack, and the tackle box she’d given Sheldon for his birthday. The boy tugged on his rod, and Sheldon took it from his hands. He spoke, and though she couldn’t make out the words, she guessed he was explaining that the boy must cast beyond the rock on which the hook was snagged. She watched them for some time, watched Sheldon work the line free and bait the boy’s hook, watched the boy struggle to cast past the rock. Sheldon pulled a hankie from his back pocket and wiped his hands, then bent and zipped the boy’s coat. They had the same dark hair, the boy’s curling out from under his hunter-orange stocking cap.

Caroline looked back at the Painted Rock hole. Her father stood in the shallows washing the blood from the steelhead. She watched as he sliced through the fish’s belly – its insides bright with viscera and meat – and she thought of what Trina had said about the hayfields of frozen fish, hundreds of steelhead resurrected each spring.

A canyon wind shook the cottonwood tree and scattered yellow leaves across the water. Sheldon, as if sensing Caroline’s presence, paused and looked over his shoulder, then up the embankment. He studied Caroline as she studied him, and Caroline waited – for what, she didn’t know. Sheldon took off his baseball cap and put it on again, and the shadow on his face made it impossible to read his expression.

They watched each other a beat longer before the boy called for his father. He was snagged on the same rock, his rod doubled as he tugged, and at this distance it was possible to believe the boy was fighting the biggest fish of his life.

Sheldon raised his hand in a wave, a wave that signified to Caroline neither hello nor goodbye, and he turned to answer his son.

Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 44 Autumn 2011

The great unmentionable of Irish life is its boredom – this is among the dreariest places of the earth. Dreary are the grey skies, and drab the yellow bungalows, and our dreariness extends to the unseen horizon that is lost always in a grey mist. The yellow of the bungalows snuggles up against the nutso acid-trip green of the damp hillsides, and the smoke signals jig-jag depressively from the chimneys even yet here in high summer, making a pallid calligraphy across the sky: grey on grey.

I live myself in south County Sligo, most of the time, and it rains here, almost all of the time. I live in an old Garda station. When we first moved in, I peeled up the lino in one of the bedrooms and found a page from the Irish Catholic newspaper. It was dated 1963. I can see the old sergeant propped up in bed having a good read of it. He is whiskey-faced, purplish, treacherously bored. Mad thoughts will enter the stewed brain of such an old sergeant – it is the boredom that does it.

First thing in the morning, at the barracks, I get out of the bed and the stove gets lit – twelve months of the year, the stove gets lit. I try to write stories in the mornings. This is my ‘work’ but also it is a bulwark against the boredom. I recently wrote a story in which a man attempts to choke his wife by ramming a lump of turf down her throat. I have not yet shown this story to my own dear wife.

Around noon, I get on my bicycle and pedal off into the wet hills. I get a small buzz from the effort. I become faintly hysterical and I sing aloud as I drift along. I make up country songs for my own entertainment, as there is no other.

The writer Conal Creedon once posited that because there is a goldfish on a weathervane atop Shandon church in the city of Cork, it must surely follow that Cork is essentially an underwater place – if goldfish are swimming through the air, what else could it be? I lived in that water-coloured and marshy city for the best part of a decade, and it was there that I became obsessed for a while with Flann O’Brien – not so much his books as his approach, his way of seeing.

Having snorkelled the length of the country, I now live in another marsh. We are caught between the Bricklieve mountains and the Curlews here. We say ‘mountains’ in the Irish way – these are of course merely hills, but they loom in a dark and foreboding manner all the same, and there is no pine-shaded Alp of grimmer aspect than that knuckle of high ground in the Curlews, when you’re a good way outside Boyle, up there around the Forestry land, just north a little of the Aughanagh bog. The country songs tend to stop for a while as I cycle through this vicinity. A hare will stand perfectly still on the lip of a ditch and eyeball me nervously as I quietly pass – hear now just the eerie whirr of the spokes, and the breeze in the trees, and see the hare as grey-skinned as the skies are grey – and on my madder days I start to have weird thoughts about the occult significance of hares in the Irish folklore.

Aren’t they supposed to be bad luck?

But then there is very little in the Irish folklore that is meant to be good luck.

It is the boredom of Irish life that is insatiable. It is our great complaint. It is the boredom that sends us to the embrace of drink, madness, despair, murderousness, and deranged art. It is the boredom that has made us an island of fabulists. If you didn’t make stuff up, you’d go fucking nuts. Flann could not handle the boredom and it threw him hard into the grip of the bottle and it killed him young(ish). I suspect he is happy enough to be out of it.

Sad, though, and it is very hard to live in a police station and to ride a bicycle and to adore Flann and not to try in some way to commemorate him here. I had a vague notion at one point of hanging a bicycle wheel on the high supporting wall that rises with the stairwell. But I worried it would look like something out of the Flann O’Brien suite in a boutique hotel themed around ‘the greats of Irish literature’.

Now I have another idea – the boredom has delivered it to me.

We have half a drizzly acre of a field beside the barracks. We are trying to clear it to make a garden. It is full of weeds and roots and debris from one hundred and sixty years of neglect. (The barracks was RIC before the guards had it.) The field is also lately the residence of a mink. A farmer has told me the best thing I can do is shoot the mink. They are vicious little bastards, alien to the marsh but thriving here, the descendants of fur-farm absconders. I grew almost tearful with pride at the farmer’s notion that I might be able to handle a gun. But this is beside the immediate point. I have been taking up rocks from the field with a pickaxe and a crowbar, and I keep unturning ancient bottles. There are all sorts – some I recognize, like the squat tubby Bovril bottles from the ’70s, I reckon, and the green curvaceous Lilt bottles of a decidedly ’80s mien (‘with the totally tropical taste’), but many look older, much older. All sorts of ancient, evil grog bottles, and I have been brushing the soil from them and lining them up against the gable. The plan now is to polish them up and erect them on a little wall shelf inside and name it the Flann shelf. Maybe light a candle beneath.

It might be just the merest flicker of gratitude but it will be something. And gratitude is due. For he was the one who taught us that as we look around this dreary and deranged little island, none of it is in any way to be taken seriously.

Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 44 Autumn 2011

8 July 2011

This evening I drove along the top of Gleann na nGealt again: my third time this week on that narrow, winding road. A front from the Atlantic made a bulky grey sky, soaking all the grass and lashing rain against the windscreen, but the lovely steep green sides of the valley were still visible, stitched across and down with hedgerows. A few houses sat in against the slope, and beneath them, on the valley floor, were the rounded treetops of a small wood.

Gleann na nGealt lies down to the right after you leave Camp, on the road from Tralee that swings inland through the mountains to Annascaul and Dingle. It opens out generously towards the sea and sand of Castlegregory and the Maharees, and its name means Lunatic Valley, but this has nothing to do with the people in the houses. In the early 1930s, the narrow-gauge Dingle railway ran beside the high road, and the young Cambridge scholar Kenneth Jackson travelled on it every summer towards the Great Blasket Island, where Peig Sayers told him stories to teach him Irish. One was about a young woman driven mad by the loss of her lover, and Peig identified this remote, isolated valley as the place she and other troubled souls fled to, living wild among the trees and drinking spring water, long before the railway came. That it is also the place called Gleann Bolcáin in the Middle Irish Buile Shuibhne, The Frenzy of Suibhne, has been clear since Gearóid S. Mac Eoin wrote about it in the folklore journal Béaloideas in 1962. This gorgeous place is Flann O’Brien’s Glen Bolcain, therefore, where his King Sweeny took refuge, mad and naked, one among many, eating watercress and brooklime, roosting in trees, and complaining of his discomforts. It has been the subject of a centuries-long, often inaudible, conversation among storytellers, poets, scholars and artists, yet there is no plaque or monument, no marking on a map.

‘Tell me this, do you ever open a book at all?’

I bought At Swim-Two-Birds at Christmas in my first year at UCD (I wrote the date inside the front cover). I was seventeen, studying Irish, Welsh and Latin, hoping to get honours at the end of the year, to do a BA in Celtic Studies. I had barely heard of Flann O’Brien, and had no idea that as Brian O’Nolan he had preceded me by forty years, but I trusted Penguin Modern Classics. I recognized Finn Mac Cool and his various henchmen, and their solemn melodious talk among bizarre adventures: remarkably faithful takes on the literature of Fionn mac Cumhaill. I knew a bit about the pooka too, and it didn’t take long to find Sweeny / Suibhne. He was a revelation: a native king who fell foul of Christian missionaries, like Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo, and an equally edgy character. His cranky, eloquent, book-hating voice dwelt at hilarious length on his physical and social troubles, but it also ecstatically celebrated Irish landscape. I was making friendships then that still endure, and at that early stage they involved a lot of wordplay, some music, a little alcohol, and a huge, comforting nostalgia for the airy Gaeltacht landscapes of our secondary-school summers. At Swim-Two-Birds was a hall of mirrors, folded up small. It fitted easily in a bag or pocket, and we loved it—because we got all the jokes, or thought we did. It opened out into the places we were living in, studying, and imagining, and it sent the bewildering differences among languages and registers of language flying through the air in exuberant colours.

Most of us had two names back then, but Flann O’Brien, as far as I know, was the first writer both knowledgeable enough and irreverent enough to take the sonorous personal and place names of Irish saga literature and render them into modern, antiheroic equivalents. In one early passage, Caolcrodha Mac Morna from Sliabh Riabhach is glossed as Calecroe MacMorney from Baltinglass, and Liagan Luaimneach Ó Luachair Dheaghaidh becomes Lagan Lumley O’Lowther-Day from Elphin Beg. Translators usually left names like these in their original form; they were sacred to a certain kind of nationalism, and Brian O’Nolan, in passing, was sending up its adherents who insisted on the Irish version of their own and others’ names. Without him, Heaney might never have found his Sweeney Astray, or Brian Bourke the bare forked creature of his ‘Sweeney’ prints.

Without him, the delight I had found as a child in stories from early Irish might have gone stale; my studies would certainly have been much less fun. E.M. Forster was another hero of ours, with his exhortation ‘Only connect’, and Flann O’Brien connected: our own losses, terrors and discomforts; our own jokes; Dublin pubs; watery green landscapes; the books we were studying, and even the place where we studied them, for we were the last First Arts class in Earlsfort Terrace before UCD moved to Belfield.

I’m still hoping to walk Gleann na nGealt. I want to explore that quiet place and try to imagine the working of the storytellers’ minds, who populated it so vividly and made it ring with poetry. I want to think about how for hundreds of years it was filled with urgent imagined voices, of which no trace remains in the landscape, and about that unique Sweeny voice that combines lyrical appreciation of environment with a thorny catalogue of bodily discomfort. I want to wonder about the difference between a culture that erects tall buildings and plasters their sides with advertisements and exhortations, and one that trusts the listening ears of individuals to pay attention and store things up in their hearts, pondering them. I want to think again about Brian O’Nolan, drunk on early Irish literature, beset by examinations and civil service work, writing his fantastic book.

Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 44 Autumn 2011

Some wet Wednesday in 1987, I rocked gently on the top deck of the 62, jaw cupped in both palms, moaning softly. Our school had half-days of a Wednesday, but recently my teeth had decided to shift tectonically out of shape. On this bus I was, for the first time, wearing a set of metal train tracks in public. Tracks are laid to bring you somewhere but I was stuck with them. Before we go further, let me say this: anyone who suggests that schooldays are the best of times is bananas, amnesiac or a dangerous idiot.

My uncle had done this to me. He was our family dentist, and desperately wanted to become an orthodontist. Back then, orthodontic work was a new and expensive strain of special torture, and my parents had already spunked a small fortune fixing my older sister’s wandering teeth. They must have winced at the sideways slide of my molars, beads across the debit side of an abacus. Understandably, they were powerless in the face of the deal presented by my uncle the apprentice. He had an eye for my gaps, and every fourth Wednesday afternoon at the Dental Hospital, using my mouth, he would figure out how to put a few o’s in dentistry and a few zeros on his paycheque.

The 62 used to bear right at the top of Harcourt Street, hard left onto Charlemont Street and thence to Ranelagh, Clonskeagh, Goatstown and on. ‘My poor mouth,’ I moaned, over and over, drowning in self-pity, as the Bombardier rattled past a pub whose name, I noticed, was An Béal Boċt. I watched the sign recede in the rear window, and ran my tongue numbly over the razor wire, vowing to look it up. Whose mouth was as poor as mine?

*

A few years later, a few miles on, a VHS copy of The Brother was passed along the row to me, in Theatre L, UCD. The happenstance of An Béal Boċt had given me a head start, and now my teeth were straight, but other motivations had become a little skewed. We were embarking on maiden voyages as daytime drinkers, and we devoured all the booze-sodden art we could find. We loved Reuben Reuben starring Tom Conti. We loved Keith Moon and Peter Cook. We loved Withnail and I. But above them all we loved The Brother, screened first on RTE in 1974. Eamonn Morrissey’s brilliant portrayal of Flann O’Brien’s Everyman passed among us like porn.

I showed Dad the tape, because Flann O’Brien was also a thing he and I shared. In the way of all those reared in the middle of Ireland in the middle of the century, Dad had once drunk with Morrissey père et fils, and told me a story about Brian O’Nolan climbing a drain pipe outside a house after closing time one night, then the terrible wrench of pipe leaving wall, and a crash. Someone (a friend of a friend? Does it matter?), parted the curtains of their digs and saw him in the garden, on his back, atop a privet hedge, illuminated by the moon, the punchline already lit and smouldering in his mouth.

There was still the odd evening of Americana, when the yawning morning hordes of Theatre L smashed back gassy pints of Furstenberg, in a club called Hollywood Nights (by way of Stillorgan), but by now we had graduated to the old city-centre snugs, the mustier the better. We stuffed ourselves into them, aching for an age we hadn’t lived through. The days of ‘Pint, please, and a ball of malt’. A time of bicycles lingering by sideboards, near the sandwiches. And the catchphrases, lifted in their hundreds from texts and whispered, snickering, across the rows of Theatre L the morning after.

—The Brother wouldn’t look at an egg.

—The bag is out of order.

—It’s a thing that will always stand to us … jumping.

The fallacy that pickling oneself in alcohol was more than just adjacent to a creative life had already begun to take hold. Stirring times. Dangerous times …

*

Decades later, and having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I’m rattling through Ranelagh on the top deck, heading into town. They’ve discontinued the 62 – I’m on an 11, if you don’t mind. I chew, and I read. Since the day they ripped up the train tracks, that particular road has unfurled like a promise, from The Third Policeman to Dead as Doornails, over the hill to Julian MacLaren-Ross and Patrick Hamilton, then onwards to Richard Yates, deep into sadder and more remote estates of desperate drinking. Throughout this journey, the humour of Flann abided – what is funny, always funny, in horror. I think back to my uncle the impatient, pinning me, the out-patient, on a squeaking blue plastic chair, and how, using his knee to gain purchase, he would yank sweatily at my face. During year three of our mutual education the poor man sneezed directly into my callipered mouth.

I hardly ever go to the dentist these days – I have neither the guts nor the optimism. And I have been on so many journeys like this, I am now part bus. We turn right onto Appian Way, this route no longer taking in An Béal Boċt, even if An Béal Boċt were standing. The writing will endure of course, but assuming he wanted to get there, what chance would Flann O’Brien now have of finding Ballinteer? You can’t get a bus into Harcourt Street on account of the Luas. The streets and pubs of this town have been re-imagined, entire neighbourhoods continuing to vanish into memory. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.

Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 44 Autumn 2011

1

On a wet Saturday in January 2009, Noel Denmead looked out his window at the plaque affixed to the low wall opposite his house, in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, and thought things were going to be okay. ‘the family that pray together stay together’, says the plaque; above it is a relief of two hands holding rosary beads. It is dedicated to Edel Quinn (1907–1944), a lay missionary from Clonmel who became envoy of the Legion of Mary in East Africa. The legend, in large, cheery, light-blue letters, is written in over three lines, like this: ‘the family that / pray together / stay together’, and the bottom line is just above the pavement. Noel Denmead could read the top line, ‘the family that’. The rest was under water.

‘The top of the ‘pray’ was gone,’ he told me the following Monday, sitting on a chair in his living room, wearing wellies. A dehumidifier hummed lightly in a corner. The sofa was sitting on a table. ‘The water was about half way between the “t” on the “the” and the “p” on the “pray”.’ That meant that there was about two feet of water flowing down the road outside; in a normal year, that would have been tolerable. Noel Denmead’s house, as with all the others in his terrace at Old Bridge, Clonmel, is raised above the road level as protection against the chronic flooding of the river Suir. Every year, the road outside is flooded, and Noel Denmead and his wife, Kitty, watch the plaque opposite to get a sense of the height of the floodwaters.

‘We watch it rise, and we take our time. We hold out for as long as we can before we start moving everything.’

That January, as the water climbed up the ‘p’ in ‘pray’, they emptied the bottom cupboards in the living room and kitchen, and moved the good furniture upstairs. The army had delivered sandbags, and Noel Denmead had placed them in front of the house to block water rising from the road.

Mid morning on Saturday, Noel Denmead took a call from Marian Finucane, live on air on RTÉ Radio One, and described his experience of being flooded over the years. While he was talking to her, he noticed water trickling through the living room. ‘Jesus,’ he said to himself, ‘it’s feckin’ coming in the back of the house.’

The Denmeads’ house backs onto a small meadow that leads to the banks of the Suir, twenty or thirty metres behind. There used be a depression in the middle of the meadow, and when there was flooding this would fill with water, giving the Denmeads a further indicator of the level of threat to the house, in addition to that  offered by the plaque out front. But an extensive flood-relief scheme in Clonmel had transformed the meadow behind the house into a construction site, and with the topography altered Noel Denmead hadn’t noticed the threat from the back. The sandbags out front were now keeping the floodwater in rather than preventing it from entering, and Noel Denmead rushed to remove them.

‘We were caught by the hasp of the arse,’ he said.

Clonmel has always been prone to flooding, and suffered badly again last November – as did localities in various parts of Ireland where flooding is not common (or where, as in the case of new housing estates built on flood plains, water had not previously threatened people’s homes). Whether or not any particular recent flood can be attributed to climate change is impossible to say, but climate change models predict an increase in flooding in Ireland, particularly flash floods caused by short bursts of very heavy rainfall over concentrated areas.

Every image of floodwaters on the nightly news reinforces a common misconception about Ireland: that we have too much water. And if there is too much water, how can there not be enough?

* *

In a small office on the campus of Maynooth University, one day in 2007, Conor Murphy pressed ‘return’ on his computer and went off for a cup of tea. The computer hummed away, and by the time he returned, fifteen or so minutes later, it had produced a list of figures. For the previous two and a half years, Murphy had spent ten hours a day entering data into the computer: the first results of his doctoral research. What the computer gave him was a massive spreadsheet, projecting values for rainfall over parts of the eastern seaboard of Ireland for every fifteen-minute period from now to the end of the century.

Conor Murphy’s research involved three stages. First, he selected a ‘global climate model’ – a mathematical model of how the atmosphere and oceans interact under different climatic circumstances, which uses research data and mathematical equations to project future weather data – from among the various models developed by international scientific institutes. In the second stage, Murphy inputted various scenarios for future concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which were in turn based on different estimates of  population growth and energy usage. The third stage involved ‘downscaling’ the results from the global to a more local level, creating a regional climate model for Ireland. He repeated this approach using different global climate models, different emissions scenarios, and different methods of downscaling. The first two and a half years were spent inputting data and adjusting his models; in the final months, he started to run his projections.

In Ireland, Murphy found, climate change is likely to provoke an increase in extreme events, such as storms and floods, in winter, alongside a rise in sea levels, and reduced flows of water through watercourses in summer. By the 2020s, he estimates, the south and east coasts will see reductions in summer water flows of up to 16 per cent. By the 2050s, they will see reductions of up to 28 per cent; by the 2080s, there may be 40 per cent less water flowing through our lakes and rivers in summer. Potato growing will no longer be viable in the east and south-east of Ireland. In the south-east, pastureland – that is, grass – won’t grow without artificial irrigation.

‘I think we might be over-believing this airy-fairy global warming stuff,’ declared Noel Ahern TD at a meeting of the Oireachtas transport committee in January of this year, in the aftermath of an extended spell of icy weather that had closed roads and airports. Ahern seems to have been making the common error of believing that global warming must mean that all places are warmer all the time. But even if he and other climate-change sceptics are proved correct, and the dramatic changes in rainfall patterns projected by Conor Murphy do not come to pass, Ireland’s ability to supply clean drinking water to its population over the coming decades is by no means secure. The water shortages experienced in Dublin at the beginning of this year – of which the cold weather was the proximate cause – were shocking to many, but they were a salutary reminder of how vulnerable public water supplies can be, even in a country as wet as Ireland.


2

Dublin’s current water-supply infrastructure dates as far back as the 1860s. Before that, there was a limited public water supply in the city, drawn from the newly built Grand and Royal canals, which fed reservoirs at Blessington Basin and Portobello, and distributed through the city via a limited network of cast-iron pipes.

The canals had two rather severe disadvantages as a municipal water supply: the water pressure was so poor that they could only deliver water to ground floors and basements; and they were filthy. ‘See the nauseous abominations conveyed into them from manure boats, dead dogs, etc,’ wrote one Dubliner of the day, Walter Thomas Meyler. ‘Drink the canal water as it is and you swallow filth and animal nature; boil it and you drink a decoction of poison.’* But many Dubliners did not have direct access even to this water. Thomas Willis, a renowned doctor, apothecary and social campaigner, wrote in the 1840s of the north inner city parish of St Michan’s:

Of those houses let to weekly tenants, not one in ten has the water conveyed into it by branch from the street main. The tenants in such cases are dependent for their supply on the public fountain, which is often at a considerable distance from their residence. The water is not constantly on in these fountains. The wretched people have no vessel to contain a supply; the kettle and broken jar are the only ones to be seen in these abodes of misery. … Even for the purpose of cleanliness a scanty supply is with difficulty to be had, and appears of such value that it is rarely thrown out until after being put to several uses. I have frequently noticed this filthy stuff remaining within the rooms, and have been invariably told that it was yet wanted. It had first been used, perhaps, to wash the man’s shirt, and some little white linen; it was then used to wash coarser things, and even again put in requisition to mop out the room floor, or stairs … The most offensive stench to be met with is that which emanates from these filthy suds.

One of the dangers associated with such poor water provision was cholera, although it was not until 1854 that the British physician John Snow traced an outbreak to a public water pump at Broad Street in Soho, thereby disproving the general belief that it was an airborne disease. Snow’s discovery was not fully appreciated at the time, and his detective work had to be replicated by Dublin Corporation’s analyst, Charles Cameron, who noticed in 1866 the high incidence of cholera amongst people who drew water from a pump in Duke Lane, off Duke Street. Cameron had the pump’s water tested, and it was found to contain sewage. The pump was closed, but not before over a thousand people had died from the cholera.

Cameron was one of a new generation of Victorian civic improvers’ in Dublin, and they were facilitated by reform of the city’s governance structure. In 1840, the self-perpetuating City Assembly had been replaced with a democratically elected council (albeit under restricted suffrage). In 1849, a Dublin Improvements Act gave greater powers to the council and paved the way for improvements in public services. And in 1852, John Gray was elected to the council.

*

John Gray was born in Claremorris, Co. Mayo, in 1816, where his father (also John Gray, a Presbyterian from Monaghan) was a farmer and excise officer. He was the third son in a family of ten children; his mother, Elizabeth Wilson, was the daughter of a local innkeeper and brewer. Gray attended Trinity College, Dublin, originally intending to enter the church, but switched to medicine, qualifying as a doctor and subsequently as a surgeon. While practising in North Cumberland Street hospital, he began to write for the Freeman’s Journal, later becoming its proprietor. He joined Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association, and was with O’Connell at the ‘monster meetings’ of 1843, which led to his arrest and conviction on charges of seditious conspiracy. Gray served three months in the Bridewell, alongside O’Connell, before their conviction was  quashed on appeal to the House of Lords.

Gray later became involved in tenant rights, joining the Tenants’ League and standing for election to parliament representing Monaghan in 1852. He failed in that election (he would eventually be elected to Westminster in 1865, for Kilkenny), but succeeded the same year in being elected to Dublin Corporation, where he gained a reputation as an improver, being involved in the establishment of a fire brigade and of a new cattle market on the North Circular Road. In 1853 he was elected chairman of the waterworks committee;

the following year, the committee began working to develop an improved water supply for Dublin. A royal commissioner appointed to evaluate the different possibilities identified the river Vartry, rising in Calary Bog under the Sugar Loaf mountain in County Wicklow, as the ideal source.

John Gray backed the Vartry scheme and steered it through the Corporation, which then sought to have a bill passed in parliament empowering it to commission the necessary works. Gray and two councillors went to Westminster for the debate on the bill, and found themselves fighting attempts by the canal companies – which faced the loss of lucrative contracts – to resurrect alternative schemes. The debate ran over five weeks in the Commons, and a further six days in the Lords, before the bill was passed. Gray, pre-empting peculators, quickly bought land at Roundwood in County Wicklow that would be needed for the damming of the Vartry and the creation of a reservoir, and subsequently transferred it to the Corporation at cost.

The first stone in the new works was laid in 1862. The work was done by men using picks and shovels, and horses and carts for transport. A two-and-a-half- mile tunnel was dug from Roundwood to Callowhill, at a pace of four feet per week: the miners drilled boreholes with a hammer and chisel, packed them with explosives, detonated them, and then removed the blasted rock by hand. Gray was knighted on the occasion of the first waters being run into the Roundwood reservoir in 1863. The word ‘Vartry’ was inscribed on his coat of arms.

When John Gray died, in 1875, his funeral ‘assumed the proportions and character of a great national  demonstration’, the Nation reported; the procession stretched for a mile and a half. A group came together in Gray’s ward of the city to promote the cause of raising a public memorial; they agreed a resolution that his work in ‘procuring for our city the blessings of a pure and abundant supply of water’ entitled him to the ‘enduring gratitude’ of Dublin’s citizens, and duly started a fund. Four years later, a statue of Sir John Gray was unveiled on O’Connell Street, where it stands still, just south of the Spire.

John Gray’s Vartry waterworks proved remarkably resilient. It failed once, due to drought, in 1893, and a second reservoir was subsequently built at Roundwood. Dublin’s water supply did not come under serious pressure again  until 1935, when water was pumped from the Grand Canal to relieve the shortages. The following year, Dublin Corporation agreed to contribute to the development by the Electricity Supply Board of a hydroelectric plant on the Liffey, at Poulaphouca/Ballymore-Eustace in County Wicklow, which  involved the creation of a reservoir from which the city could take water. In the 1960s, a reservoir was developed at the ESB’s dam in Leixlip to provide water to Dublin’s northern suburbs, which had until then been supplied by local water sources, such as wells. Today, Poulaphouca and Leixlip between them provide some 85 per cent of Dublin’s water; the Vartry provides a much reduced proportion, while smaller supplies are taken from the Dodder and from groundwater sources in Fingal and north Kildare.

Once again, however, Dublin’s water supply system is operating at capacity. This became generally evident in the freezing weather of January, when demand spiked due to householders running their taps continuously for fear of freezing pipes or hoarding water in anticipation of cut-offs, and when frost heaves caused extensive damage to the supply network; many districts of the city experienced water shortages or stoppages. But the problem is not new. A series of studies since 1996 have predicted water shortages in Dublin in the early decades of this century and identified the need for a new source, irrespective of the effects of climate change.

Dublin’s water-supply region includes the administrative areas of Dublin City, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, Fingal, South Dublin and significant parts of Wicklow, Meath and Kildare, and currently provides 540 megalitres of water per day to a population of 1.4 million. (A megalitre is a million litres. There are just over three megalitres of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool, so that daily supply is the equivalent of the water in 180 Olympic pools.) Dublin City Council estimates that this population will rise to 2.2 million by 2031 and (along with the region’s industry) will require a water supply capacity of 980 megalitres per day – nearly double the system’s current capacity.

To investigate options for a new water source for the city, the council engaged a consortium of two commercial entities – RPS, an international engineering consultancy firm, which acquired Ireland’s largest engineering consultancy, M.C. O’Sullivan and Co., in 2002, and Veolia, the world’s largest private water company – to conduct feasibility studies. Gerry Geoghegan, an engineer with RPS, explained the problems with the current system to me. ‘Dublin is being supplied by water in an unsustainable manner,’ he said. ‘There is no redundancy in the system. It’s operating beyond capacity.’ Water from the Ballymore-Eustace treatment plant flows into the Saggart reservoir in two pipes – ‘the most crucial two pipes in all of the country’. Basic maintenance and leakage repair can be done on the pipes, Geoghegan says, but ideally they should be replaced, which would involve cutting off the supply through them for a period. This can’t be done at present because the system can’t do without them. The Leixlip plant, he says, is currently producing 170 megalitres per day, but its sustainable capacity – the amount of water that can be extracted without compromising the viability of the source – is just 140 megalitres per day. Work in progress will develop other supplies to the maximum levels at which water can sustainably be taken from them, at which point they should then provide the city with a total of 630 megalitres per day. That will leave the system 350 megalitres short of the anticipated requirements for 2031.

In Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland, water leakage is a significant drain on resources. What is known as ‘unaccounted-for water’ accounts for over 40 per cent of the water treated in the urban centres classified as ‘gateways’ and ‘hubs’ in the National Spatial Strategy, for example. In Tuam, Co. Galway, 76 per cent of the water supply is unaccounted for. In Dublin, leakage was reduced from over 40 per cent in the late 1990s to 30 per cent by 2007; according to RPS, it will be down to 20 per cent by 2031. Why not reduce leakage to zero, saving over 100 megalitres per day? ‘But it’s the whole thing that’s leaking,’ says Jerry Grant, managing director of RPS. ‘There are millions of leaks: there are 10,000 kilometres of pipes that are bolted together – they’ve mechanical joints as opposed to welded joints – so the whole thing is leaking. So there comes a point when it gets uneconomic to reduce and repair leaks.’ Aiming for leakage of 20 per cent is ‘best international practice’, according to RPS.

RPS/Veolia identified ten options for Dublin’s new water source. Seven of these involved drawing drinking water from various parts of the river Shannon; the others were a groundwater source in Fingal and north Kildare, the addition of a supply from the Barrow river to that from the Liffey at Poulaphouca to increase the supply to the Ballymore-Eustace treatment plant, and the use of desalinated sea water. Each of the options is still officially under consideration, but it is clear that neither the groundwater nor the Barrow option, nor both in combination, can provide anything like the additional water supply necessary for the Dublin region, although they may have a part in the eventual strategy. Desalination is much more expensive than any freshwater option, and is also considered more environmentally damaging, due to high energy use and the production of waste products. That leaves the Shannon.

The most direct – and hence the cheapest – of the Shannon options would be to take water from Lough Ree, just north of Athlone: this would involve the water being treated near Lough Ree and then piped 104 kilometres to Dublin, serving the Midlands en route. According to RPS’s estimates, this would produce water at a cost of 29 cents per cubic metre over the 25-year life of the project (giving a total cost for the project, over 25 years, of €576 million). There is enough water to provide the 350 megalitres per day required, but during dry summers this would require modification to the sluice operations at Athlone that control the water levels on the lake. Existing regulations stipulate minimum water levels for the lake in order to minimize flooding risk downstream while maintaining the viability of boating. In practice, Jerry Grant thinks, it would be too difficult to get consensus from the different interests relying on the lake to make the Lough Ree option feasible.

Lough Derg, downstream from Lough Ree, is slightly further from Dublin, and thus water taken from there would be slightly more expensive, at 32 cents per cubic metre (based on a total cost for the project, over 25 years, of €641 million). But the lake is significantly larger than Lough Ree, and management of water levels on it is far simpler. Lough Derg’s water level is controlled by the ESB’s hydroelectric plant at Ardnacrusha, through which 95 per cent of the lake’s outflow passes. Taking water for Dublin would reduce the flow of water through the lake by between 1 and 2 per cent. According to RPS, ‘minor modifications’ to the ESB’s electricity output to reduce the flow of water through the plant would compensate for any water removed for Dublin, so water levels on the lake would not be affected.

The other options involve variants on these. Water could be taken from Parteen Basin, just downstream of Lough Derg, which functions as a reservoir for Ardnacrusha: this would require a pipeline of 158 kilometres, and would cost €771 million. Alternatively, either the Lough Ree or the Lough Derg supply options could be combined with a water storage facility so that more water could be withdrawn in winter and less in summer, in order to address fears that water levels on the lakes would be jeopardized. These options involve storing the water in Bord na Móna cutaway bogs in the midlands, from where it could be piped to Dublin as needed, at marginally greater expense than being piped directly (€680 to €690 million).

In February 2009, RPS completed a period of public consultation on all the above options, and in late 2009 RPS made its recommendation of a preferred option to Dublin City Council. This was not made public and, at time of writing, is due for consideration by the Council, before being referred to the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. The RPS preliminary studies indicated a ‘preferred environmental option’ of piping raw water from Lough Derg to a cutaway bog at Portarlington, Co. Laois. Though this would be slightly more expensive than piping the water straight to Dublin, it would have an added advantage of revitalizing some 1,000 acres of cutaway bog and allow Bord na Móna to develop an ‘eco-tourism’ facility around the new reservoir. I understand that this is the option that was recommended to the Council. If approved by the Department, this will then be subjected to the statutory planning process, which will involve a further, more thorough stage of environmental assessment.

The first public consultations on the proposals to pipe water from the Shannon to Dublin took place in 2006, and in April 2007, at a meeting in Athlone, local organizations and individuals came together to form the Shannon Protection Alliance, with the purpose of preventing the extraction of water from Lough Ree. The SPA subsequently linked up with local organizations in the Lough Derg area to lobby for the abandonment of the plans. It has commissioned independent environmental studies of the Dublin scheme, and based its arguments on a combination of the threat to the viability of the Shannon and the feasibility of alternative water sources (such as groundwater) and water conservation methods for Dublin. (RPS counters that these alternatives would not produce enough water, and that the extraction from the Shannon will not harm it.) The SPA’s primary objection, though, appears to be more fundamental: ‘Rivers are designed by nature and by God to serve the hinterland through which they course,’ said P.J. Walsh, the organization’s spokesman.

The SPA claims to have received direct pledges of support from local organizations and businesses representing over 100,000 people. Walsh believes it would be ‘political suicide’ for local politicians to support the Dublin scheme; with the Shannon flowing through or between thirteen counties, and its tributaries touching another five, Walsh counts the 83 TDs in those eighteen counties as ‘local’. And if political lobbying doesn’t work, there is a default strategy: ‘We will hold them up in the courts for about twenty years.’


3

‘There was this blow-in from Dublin,’ says John Acheson, sitting by a space heater in the corner of the old hall. ‘He’d just moved in, and all’s well, and then, one day, he turns on the tap in the morning, and there’s no water. So he phones the Council to complain. And the Council checks the records, and he’s not even on the water scheme! He’d a bore hole, and he didn’t even know it!’ Acheson and the men with him collapse into laughter. ‘City folk,’ he says. ‘They think they’ve a God-given right that water comes out of a tap when they turn it on.’

Acheson is a committee member of a group water scheme in County Cavan, covering the townlands of Castlerahan, Mountnugent and Munterconnaught. The scheme has 650 members, most of them domestic households, though some are farms and other businesses. Acheson’s wife, Winifred, is secretary to the scheme, a part-time, paid position, and a caretaker is also employed part-time. This is a new scheme; before its completion, last year, the locals drew raw water from their own, private sources. The Achesons had a spring well. ‘We assume it was good quality,’ says Winifred Acheson. ‘We never got sick. But we never got it tested neither.’

The south-eastern end of the area approaches Virginia in County Cavan, which is on the fringes of Dublin’s commuter belt, and the boom years saw a local explosion in house-building. This helped drive local efforts to develop a water supply. A group of interested locals collected €100 from ‘as many houses as would give it’ to fund a feasibility study and then approached the county council, which promised 85 per cent of the necessary capital expenditure. The scheme contracted to buy treated water from the council, and built two reservoirs to store it and a network of about 100 kilometres of pipe to deliver it to members’ gates. (Members are responsible for piping the water through their own land, to their houses.) There is a €1,850 joining fee (which compares favourably with the €3,000 or so that installing an individual well and pump would cost), and then an annual standing charge of €75, which covers a water allowance of 136 cubic metres per year per household. Additional water used is charged at 75 cents per cubic metre. From the council, the scheme receives 227 cubic metres per household for free, and is charged €1.10 per cubic metre thereafter. The scheme receives a subsidy from the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government of €70 per domestic household (provided it meets certain criteria); the subsidy was devised to compensate rural households for the fact that people in towns don’t pay water charges. The upshot is that a family of five shouldn’t pay more than €100 per year, says Winifred Acheson, ‘provided they don’t have leaks’.

Last May, the scheme held its annual general meeting in an old dance hall outside Ballyjamesduff, nicknamed ‘the Blue Lagoon’. Twenty-five or so people, mostly men, mostly farmers, gathered to hear the chairman present the annual report, and then a talk from an officer of the National Federation of Group Water Schemes, Brian MacDonald.

MacDonald warned the scheme’s members not to set the price of water too low. ‘Too many schemes still think that cheap water is the answer,’ he said; but it is essential for a scheme to keep its charges high enough to stay in surplus, lest costly repairs be required. He warned that the possible re-introduction of charges for publicly supplied water would cause the subsidy for rural schemes to be withdrawn. MacDonald also lamented the abandonment of certain water-collection practices in rural Ireland. In the 1960s, he said, schools and barns were automatically built with rainwater tanks on them. But then people ‘turned against it – it was as if rainwater was a badge of poverty’. On the Aran Islands, he recalled, people used to collect rainwater for drinking, ‘and the only filtration they had on it was auld tights. And they never had a water failure.’ ‘It’s crazy,’ he says, ‘we’re using water that’s been treated to potable standard to wash out farmyards.’

While MacDonald talked, a committee member seated at the head table, behind him, made hand signals at a man in the front row, who duly got up to check on the progress of the water boiling in the Burco. When he finished, everybody assembled around a small table at the side of the hall for tea and brack, and MacDonald traded water anecdotes with John Acheson and others. The following day, MacDonald took me for a drive to visit neighbouring water schemes in County Monaghan.

The morning started with a detour – ‘D’ya mind going to a wee country funeral?’ We stood outside a small, crowded church, situated atop a drumlin. Inside, the funeral of ‘a cousin of my wife’s people’ proceeded; outside, men talked quietly about the deceased’s family and the upcoming local elections. MacDonald introduced Brian McKenna, an elderly man who remembers fetching water from the local river by filling barrels and loading them onto the linkbox of the tractor.

The first rural water schemes were developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s; prior to that, the Irish state’s sole investment in rural water had been in the provision of water pumps for villages. In Stradbally, Co. Laois, for example, there was just one pump for the town, which, in 1943, was ‘condemned by the county medical officer of health’, as the local TD Oliver Flanagan told the Dáil. According to the census of 1946, just 8.6 per cent of rural homes had water on tap; in towns, which had benefited from state investment, the figure was 92 per cent. By then, the desirability of supplying water to rural homes was widely accepted, but the finance was lacking. In a 1945 debate in the Dáil, the then Minister for Agriculture, Dr James Ryan, argued that ‘We should aim at having the country house just as well equipped as the city house, so that the farmer will have proper lighting, heating, hot and cold water, proper sanitation and so on, so that if a girl has to make a choice between marrying a farmer and settling down in the country, or settling down in the city, she shall at least have the same amenities in the country as in the town or city.’

Later that year, Tipperary TD William Francis O’Donnell, a member of the farmers’ party Clann na Talmhan, put down a private member’s motion calling for a national survey of water resources, with a view to guaranteeing a water supply to all rural homes. O’Donnell described how, in Clonmel, drinking water was taken from the river, which was also used to deposit the sewage from the ‘fever hospital’, and described the lengths people went to to get drinking water in rural areas: ‘About five miles from Clogheen, which is mentioned in the “Life of St Declan”, there is a supply of pure water for about two hundred families. It appears that when the son of the pagan chief there accepted the Faith, the saint struck a rock and since then there has been a supply of water available, so that he did more than baptise the son of the chief. The people, however, have to travel five miles to avail of that supply.’

O’Donnell endorsed and quoted at length from James Ryan’s earlier comments, and added: ‘Our women folk are the finest in the world. They are second to none. I am sure you will all agree with me that they are glorious.’ The Dáil transcript does not record to what extent the other members agreed with him; on the substantive point, however, O’Donnell was defeated. For the government, the parliamentary secretary, Francis Ward, concluded: ‘I do not think it is possible to provide an adequate supply of pure water to every rural dwelling in the country. I do not think it is physically possible; I do not think that it is financially possible; and I am pretty sure that an adequate water supply to every dwelling in rural Ireland is not immediately available.’

In 1950, the then Minister for Agriculture, Fine Gael’s James Dillon, introduced a grant scheme to help farmers install a piped water supply; by 1959, 13,000 farmers had availed of the scheme. According to MacDonald, ‘It was hygiene in the dairy that pushed the issue of water for rural homes’. The Irish Countrywomen’s Association, in which his mother, Maemo MacDonald, was active, was a prominent advocate for water supplies for rural homes, in order to lighten the workload of rural women, and in the late 1950s it organized an exhibit of a modern bathroom and kitchen to tour rural fairs. ‘If he won’t put a bathroom in, don’t marry him,’ the ICA urged.

According to MacDonald’s own research, the first group water scheme was developed in 1959, in Kilbride in County Wicklow, near the Blessington lakes. Those lakes, which were created by the ESB as a reservoir for the Poulaphouca dam, had been supplying water to Dublin homes since the mid 1940s; but when a young Kerryman, Joe Collins, arrived in Kilbride as parish priest in 1957, the villagers were still taking their water in buckets from local spring wells. With a background in engineering, Collins set about trying to organize a water supply to the local houses from the springs. A site for the reservoir tank was donated, and Collins recruited a team of local volunteers for the labour. They dug a hole for a 9,000-gallon tank, with spades; a local farmer provided the sole tractor in the area to transport the cement and gravel for the tank; and local tradesmen made the mould for the tank, poured the concrete and fitted the pipes. Most of the local houses that joined the scheme invested in a new cooking range, with a water heater, to accompany their water supply, and the fee for joining the scheme included the supply of a Belfast sink.

Neil Blaney, the Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government, subsequently rolled out a national water strategy, aiming to increase the provision of piped water in rural areas and improve the facilities available in the towns. He provided grants to incentivize group water schemes, and encouraged local authorities to collaborate with group schemes to provide water from local-authority-managed sources to remote rural homes. Developing this strategy in the 1962 Local Government (Sanitary Services) Bill, he explained: ‘Local authorities are equipped for the development of large sources, the construction of reservoirs, and laying down trunk mains. Private groups with the assistance of State and local grants and technical advice, can in many cases speedily and economically fill in the distribution network. By this means, the benefits of private initiative may in such cases be brought to bear on the larger type of scheme, and the resources of enthusiasm, voluntary labour and leadership in local groups and rural organisations may be tapped to the best advantage.’

An article in the Irish Times that year described the arrival of a water supply to Lisivigeen, ‘in the shadow of the famed Mangerton mountains’, in County Kerry. Each of the fifteen households provided one member for a committee, and the local headmaster was appointed secretary. A bank in Killarney provided a loan to cover the scheme’s costs until the issuing of grants from the Department of Local Government and County Council. A local diviner was employed to identify the source, and all labour thereafter was voluntary, including the operation of a compressor and pneumatic drill that had been borrowed from the county council.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Ireland was not unique in developing a community-run network of small rural water supplies; similar developments happened in other rural parts of Europe, including the United Kingdom. But across Europe, these supplies were typically taken over by municipal authorities and often consolidated into, or replaced with, larger schemes. In Northern Ireland, local councils were responsible for water services until 1973, when the Department of the Environment took over responsibility and formed a water executive to manage them. In 2007, this became a government-owned company, Northern Ireland Water Limited, which maintains 47 water treatment plants across the province.

In England and Wales, where there were over a thousand water providers in the 1950s, there were fewer than 200 by the early 1970s. There was further consolidation in 1973, bringing all public water providers together in ten regional water authorities, alongside a number of smaller, private water companies, some of which had existed since Victorian times. The water authorities were privatized by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1989, and the water supply in England and Wales is now dominated by ten private water companies, alongside some surviving smaller companies. Scotland’s water supplies remained under the management of twelve local councils, which owned the relevant assets and resisted the privatization. These councils were later merged into three service providers, and in 2002, these were merged to form a public company, Scottish Water.

In Ireland, by contrast, fragmentation remains the norm: cities and towns are served by local authorities, and over 5,500 group water schemes provide water in rural areas. The 2006 census recorded that 173,000 homes received their water via the rural schemes. Most schemes operated using treated water purchased from a local-authority-managed supply; but a substantial minority, providing water to just under 50,000 homes, operated their own supplies. Nearly 150,000 homes still relied on their own water sources, such as a private well or borehole. Three thousand homes, almost all in rural areas, reported having no piped water.

In the early years of the group water schemes, the water being sourced was generally of naturally high quality, and there was no need to treat it. In the 1990s, though, many rural schemes started to come under pressure with the increase in population, housing and economic activity in the areas they served. The government launched a Rural Water Programme to improve standards in the sector. Schemes started contracting private water companies to build and operate water treatment plants and distribution networks, and hiring trained staff to manage the plants and distribution. One consequence of this was a move, in a great many schemes, towards charging for water used (as well as, or instead of, charging a flat membership fee). A combination of metering of individual households, telemetric bulk metering (which identifies leaks in the distribution network) and charging has generally had the effect of reducing demand on schemes by between 20 and 50 per cent, and sometimes as much as 80 per cent, according to Brian MacDonald. Demand falls dramatically once meters are installed, and then starts to climb again in the period before the first bills are issued, before dropping off again. MacDonald believes that charges should ideally be set so that each household receives a minimum adequate supply for free, with additional water sufficiently expensive to incentivize conservation.

Noel Carmody is manager of the largest group water scheme in the country, the Kilmaley–Inagh scheme in County Clare. The scheme moved to ‘universal metering’ in 2008, following the building of a new water treatment plant. In one district meter area, with just twenty-five houses connected, Carmody noticed that two houses were using as much water as the other twenty-three. In one of them, a leaking connection was identified and repaired. In the other, a washer had broken in an outside tap, and the tap was running constantly. The owner had rigged up a pipe from the tap to a wastewater manhole, and 2,300 cubic metres of water per year was disappearing down it. The cost to the group water scheme of treating that water was €713 per year. The cost of repairing the tap was 70 cents, for a new washer.


4

On 13 March 2007, a copy of new regulations dealing with the supervision of public drinking water facilities in Ireland landed on Darragh Page’s desk, and Page suddenly became more powerful. For the first time, the regulations gave the Environmental Protection Agency enforcement powers over local authorities; and as an EPA inspector, Page thus became an enforcer. That same day, Page got word about a likely outbreak of Cryptosporidium in Galway city, in an area served by the Terryland water treatment plant. The subject was familiar. Three years previously, Page and a colleague had conducted an audit of the plant, which comprises two separate waterworks, known as Terryland ‘Old’, built in the 1950s, and Terryland ‘New’, built in 1979. Under the regulations then in force, the EPA had no enforcement powers, and Page’s primary concern was whether the plant was monitoring its water adequately. It was. During the audit, Page was given a copy of a report that the plant itself had carried out the previous month. The report was a risk assessment for Cryptosporidium, a water-borne parasite that causes cryptosporidiosis, a disease that typically causes severe, watery diarrhoea; in people with pre-existing illness or compromised immunity, it can be fatal. In 1993 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis caused up to a hundred deaths, mainly of people with HIV or AIDS. The Terryland plant draws its water supply from Lough Corrib, and due to the large area of the lake, the presence of cattle (which often carry Cryptosporidium) on its shores, and the presence upstream of sewage treatment plants, the plant’s internal assessment identified a ‘very high risk’ of contamination by the parasite. Page’s own report included a brief section on the Cryptosporidium risk, and concluded that measures to reduce it ‘should be implemented as a matter of urgency’.

Cryptosporidium can be removed from a water supply by filters, and the Terryland Old plant used ‘pressure’ filtration, whereby the water is forced through sand and gravel. Following the 2007 Cryptosporidium outbreak at Terryland, the EPA conducted another audit of the plant, which concluded that the sand and gravel had not been replaced in over twenty years and was no longer filtering adequately. Armed with its new enforcement powers, the EPA issued a directive to Galway City Council to shut the plant down. (In the meantime, the council had issued a ‘boil water’ notice to the public.) To shut down Terryland Old while continuing to supply water, the council had to rapidly increase the treatment capacity at a new plant it had recently opened, at Luimnigh. Forty people were hospitalized in Galway for cryptosporidisis, and a total of 266 cases were confirmed by laboratory testing. The ‘boil water’ notice was rescinded in August 2007, five months after the initial outbreak.

In November of that year, the EPA audited a water treatment plant at Craughwell in south-east Galway, run by Galway County Council. The chlorination system at the plant had broken down, and as there was no 24-hour monitoring and alarm system in place, the caretaker had not realized there was a problem till the following morning. Untreated water had therefore passed through the plant and into the drinking water supply, and E. coli, a bacterium that can cause severe illness, was found in the water. (There were no reports of resulting illness, however.) The EPA had directed the county council to install a chlorine monitor and alarm; when the EPA audited the plant, it found these had not been installed. The agency sued the council, in the district court, and won; the council was fined €4,000, with costs granted against it. The council subsequently installed a temporary alarm system, and has since shut down the Craughwell plant.

The problem of contamination of public water supplies is not confined to County Galway. In 2007, E. coli was found in 52 (or 5 per cent) of Ireland’s public water supplies; this was an improvement from the previous year, when it was found in 77 supplies. In 2008, ‘boil water’ notices or other restrictions on water use were issued with regard to 53 supplies serving some 118,000 people. As of September 2008, 341 public water supplies were on an EPA ‘remedial action list’ Just 40 per cent of public water supply treatment plants were equipped with chlorine monitors and alarms, which are considered a vital part of water infrastructure safety. Of 64 supplies identified by the EPA in 2007 as having no treatment barrier to remove Cryptosporidium, just seven had installed an adequate barrier by the time of writing of the EPA’s most recent report.

In December 2009, the EPA’s budget was reduced by 18 per cent.


5

At 5 a.m. one winter morning in 1996, two young men sat in a car in a Dublin housing estate, watching a nearby house. The house was the home of a Dublin Corporation water inspector; the men were, respectively, members of the Workers’ Solidarity Movement, an anarchist organization, and Militant Labour, another left-wing political group. One of the men got out of the car and went behind a nearby bush to urinate. As he did so, the hall door of the house opened; the water inspector got into his car and pulled out onto the street. The Militant Labour man roared at his comrade, the anarchist zipped up and hurried back to the car, and the two left in open pursuit of the inspector. The inspector drove around for some time, apparently aimlessly; then, having evidently spotted his tail, he stopped at Crumlin Garda Station and then headed back home. The activists were members of the Dublin campaign against water charges, and they had, they believed, scored a small victory for the campaign. The inspector had been, they assumed, on his way to disconnect a household that hadn’t paid its water charges, doing so in the early hours in order to avoid alerting the family and neighbours; by following him, the activists had caused him to abandon the attempt and demonstrated that they would be ready to block any attempt to cut off a family.

Water charges had first been applied in Ireland’s cities in the 1980s, following legislation brought in by the Fine Gael–Labour government in 1983 to allow local councils to levy service charges. This followed the abolition of domestic rates by the Fianna Fáil government in 1977. The government had told the councils it would add the difference to their block grants, and that it would increase VAT rates in order to raise this income, but while VAT duly rose, the block grants to the councils did not; the purpose of charges for water and other services was to compensate councils for the shortfall. The water charge was not based on use – which was not metered – and so had no conservation intention or effect. It met widespread resistance, causing some local councils, including Dublin’s, to abandon attempts to introduce it. One of the leaders of the protests was Proinsias De Rossa, then a member of Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party, who was elected as a councillor in 1985 on an anti-watercharges ticket.

In the early 1990s, Dublin’s councils made another attempt to introduce a charge for water, and again met resistance led by left-wing activists. The movement gained momentum when South Dublin County Council moved to start cutting off people for non-payment of charges. Teams of activists were organized to reconnect people whom the council had disconnected. The council used to give residents notice that they were to be disconnected; once notice had been received, the activists would locate the stopcock on the water mains outside the house, cover it with an empty tin can, and fill the space around it with concrete. As Gregor Kerr of the Workers’ Solidarity Movement told me, this didn’t permanently disable the mechanism, as the concrete could be broken off, but it ensured that the council would not be able to disconnect people quietly, by night. Communities – and in particular the local children, playing in the street or in parks – were encouraged to look out for council waterworks vans, and to knock on doors when vans entered a neighbourhood.

Following the collapse of the Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition in 1994, a new government was formed by Fine Gael, Labour and the Workers’ Party spinoff Democratic Left, now headed by Proinsias De Rossa. Facing pressure from the left to rescind the water charges, the government imposed a requirement that councils obtain court orders before disconnecting people. The anti-watercharges group responded by launching a membership drive, at £2 per member, to raise funds to fight cases in court. They employed a dual strategy of employing lawyers to ‘challenge everything and clog up the system’ and organizing popular protests to coincide with court hearings, Gregor Kerr recalls. At one hearing in Rathfarnham district court in November 1995, over five hundred people turned up to protest, and subsequently paraded through the village when the council’s case was thrown out of court.

The campaign had much success in thwarting the councils’ attempts to collect water charges and enforce disconnections. It stepped up a level following the death of the former Tánaiste, Brian Lenihan, in 1995. In the consequent by-election in Dublin West, in April 1996, Joe Higgins stood against Lenihan’s son, Brian Lenihan Jr, on an anti-water-charges ticket, and came within 252 votes of taking the seat. As the anti-water charges movement prepared to run more candidates in the next general election, the incumbent left-wing TD for Dublin West, Labour’s Joan Burton, looked particularly vulnerable. In December 1996 the then Minister for the Environment, Burton’s party colleague Brendan Howlin, announced new legislation in which domestic water charges would be abolished; they were replaced as a source of revenue for the local councils with the receipts from car tax, which was henceforth to be retained by the local councils rather than transferred to central government. The damage, though, had been done. In the general election of June 1997, Joe Higgins was elected to the Dáil for the new Socialist Party, topping the poll; Joan Burton lost her seat. Her vote had collapsed from over 8,000 to under 5,000. Water charges became a political untouchable.

As the economist Sue Scott, of the Economic and Social Research Institute, argued later, water charges were unpopular ‘for several good reasons’: they were not metered, and therefore constituted a flat, regressive tax that did nothing to promote conservation; the bill was infrequent and therefore large, and reportedly arrived at awkward times for some families, such as at the same time as back-to-school expenditures; and there was no adequate approach to dealing with vulnerable families. Rather than address these faults, Ireland abolished water charges altogether.

In the run-up to the 2007 general election, the idea of charging for domestic water usage remained taboo. Neither the Green Party’s manifesto, nor the programme for government the party subsequently agreed with Fianna Fáil, made any mention of it. At the same time, massive investment was planned for the water network: a total of €4.7 billion on capital investment in water and waste services over the lifetime of the National Development Plan for 2007–2013. This investment was intended both to increase the capacity of water and waste services and to bring quality in line with EU directives.

By mid 2008, Ireland’s economic crisis had completely changed the context in which both spending and taxation were being thought about and discussed. The report of the Commission on Taxation in September in 2009 summarized the argument for water charges: ‘Households do not pay for water, and there is no incentive to conserve, so that consumption per capita is about 30 per cent more in Ireland than in jurisdictions that do charge based on use. Those who use water irresponsibly are in effect subsidized by those who use it sparingly, and there is a constant need to expand the supply of treated water involving major and expensive engineering projects. It is unlikely that Ireland will be able to maintain this level of expenditure indefinitely from general taxation, and the outcome will be inadequacies in the quantity and quality of supply.’ The Commission recommended the phasing in of water charges over a five-year period, commencing with a flat-rate charge and, once meters were installed, moving to charges based on usage; it also proposed waivers for those unable to pay.

The Commission’s view was backed by the Department of Finance, which estimated average domestic water usage costs at €350 per household per year and recommended an initial flat rate water charge of €150 per household. The Department estimated the cost of installing meters in 1.2 million households to be between €250 and €300 million over five to ten years.

The Green Party met with Fianna Fáil in late September and early October to negotiate a revised programme for government to deal with the economic crisis. The programme stated: ‘We will introduce charging for treated water use that is fair, significantly reduces waste and is easily applied. It will be based on a system where households are allocated a free basic allowance, with charging only for water use in excess of this allowance. In keeping with the allocation of greater responsibility to local government, Local Authorities will set their own rates for water use.’

In the Dáil, opposition members tried to pin the government down on the proposed charges. The Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, replied to questions from the Labour leader, Eamon Gilmore, on the details of the scheme. ‘No definitive or detailed framework for the implementation of the commitment can be spelled out at this point,’ said Cowen. ‘The policy considerations relate to the need for legislation to give effect to a commitment which must be examined … We are outlining in the policy the direction of our intentions.’

The Green Party’s Eamon Ryan, Minister for Energy and Natural Resources, was somewhat more forthright when quoted in the Irish Times as saying the installation of water meters ‘could take years’. And then the weather changed. On 25 January, amidst water shortages caused by the freeze, environment minister John Gormley announced a fivefold increase in the budget for repairs to water mains over the next three years. He said he hoped that the installation of domestic water meters would commence next year, and that water charges would be implemented with a free basic quota and charges for excess water used.

‘We are the only country in Europe where we don’t have water metering and where we don’t charge domestically,’ he said. ‘That needs to be reversed and reversed as soon as possible.’ Water charges would ultimately raise €1 billion per year, sufficient to cover the cost of treating public water supplies.

The earlier government decision to abandon water charges was ‘nonsensical and pretty spineless’, Gormley said.

*

For a week while researching this article, I washed from a bucket, used a dry toilet, and drank only bottled water, thereby reducing my daily water consumption from around 150 litres – the estimated average daily consumption in Ireland – to perhaps about 30, or less than goes down the average Irish toilet in a day. I had no choice, as it happened, for I was visiting the Western Saharan refugee camps in western Algeria, for another story, and there was no running water. In fact, there was barely any water at all: the camps are in an area of the Sahara known as the Hamada, one of the most arid, hostile environments on the planet. There are five camps, homes to approximately 150,000 people, the Sahrawi, who live in squat, single-storey houses built with mud bricks and (sometimes) cement. Outside the houses sit battered plastic and steel vats, with numbers painted on the sides: these are water tanks, and they are filled by a fleet of trucks, supplied by charities and foreign governments, that distributes the water from scarce wells.

These camps have been here for thirty-five years, since the outbreak of war in Western Sahara following the withdrawal of the colonial power, Spain, and the subsequent invasion of the territory by Morocco, which lies immediately to its north. The Western Saharan liberation movement, the Polisario Front, set up a government in exile in the camps and fought a guerrilla war against Morocco till a ceasefire in 1991. Since then, an uneasy peace has held, while negotiations on the territory’s status have repeatedly stalled. Meanwhile, Morocco has consolidated its control of Western Sahara, developing industry and promoting the resettlement of Moroccans in the territory.

The Sahrawi are traditionally a nomadic people, and though their homeland is desert, it was marked in the cultural memory by routes to water sources and oases. The capital, Laayoune, or, in Arabic, El-Aaiún, means ‘the springs’. Those Sahrawi living in Western Sahara have largely ceased to be nomadic; some of those in the camps maintain the tradition by travelling into the desert for periods of the year, but their movement is greatly circumscribed by politics, and they are largely dependent on humanitarian aid for food and water.

Though their plight is primarily a political one, it seems relevant that, while Morocco boasts of having developed an extensive water infrastructure in Western Sahara, using desalination plants, the country in which the refugees find themselves, Algeria, is one of the most vulnerable to water shortages in Africa. Current water availability in Algeria is 500 cubic metres per person per year, just half the minimum provision recommended by the World Bank. By 2020, this is predicted to fall to 450 cubic metres. Like its neighbours in the region, Algeria is hoping to tackle these water shortages by investing in energy-intensive desalination. Oil-rich and water-poor, these countries are effectively hoping to convert energy into water.

Globally, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that 44 per cent of the world’s population, 2.8 billion people, live in areas subject to water shortages; in its view, the current global situation constitutes a ‘water bubble’ that is liable to be followed by ‘water bankruptcy’.

Water is a source of tension, and potential conflicts, between states in various parts of the world. Amnesty International recently reported that the average daily water consumption in the Palestinian territories was 70 litres per person, with some Palestinians barely getting 20 litres a day, the minimum recommended even in humanitarian emergencies. This compared with an average water use of 300 litres per day in Israel, which included water being used by Israeli settlers to fill swimming pools and water gardens. Amnesty said that Israel used more than 80 per cent of the water from the Mountain Aquifer, the main source of underground water in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

‘Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford,’ said Amnesty’s Donatella Rovera. Israel rejected Amnesty’s claims, saying it had exceeded its obligations to the Palestinians under a water agreement while the Palestinians had violated the agreement by illegal drilling for wells and improper treatment of sewage.

Israel was a protagonist in what British science journalist Fred Pearce has called ‘the first modern water war’, the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours, in 1967. Ariel Sharon wrote in his autobiography that the conflict was initially provoked by Syria’s actions in digging a canal to divert the headwaters of the River Jordan, which supplied much of Israel’s water. ‘The Six Day War really started on the day Israel decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan,’ wrote Sharon. ‘While the border disputes were of great significance, the matter of water diversion was a stark issue of life and death.’ What could become the second modern water war, according to Pearce, simmers in Kashmir, where tensions underlie a treaty between India and Pakistan on the management of the river Indus, which originates in India but provides Pakistan with most of its water. That treaty was brokered in 1960 by the World Bank, following the 1947 Indo-Pakistani War and subsequent skirmishes over the Indus. Now, an Indian hydroelectric-dam project on a key tributary of the Indus has provoked Pakistani claims that they are violating the treaty, and that the dam could be used in any future project to withhold vital water from Pakistan, causing famine.

* *

There has been talk of water wars in Ireland, too. On the Shannon, P.J. Walsh promised ‘a fucking revolution’ if Dublin City Council proceeded with plans to extract water from either Lough Ree or Lough Derg.

‘The last great battle of Lough Ree was recorded in 903 ad, and we can assure those officials in Dublin that this battle will be fought just as hard,’ Walsh has said. ‘We won’t let them put as much as a straw into the river.’

Meanwhile, as John Gormley moves to introduce domestic meters and charges, Joe Higgins, now a member of the European Parliament, is mobilizing to launch a new anti-water-charges campaign. When charges were recommended by the Commission on Taxation late last year, he issued a warning: ‘Should the government attempt to reintroduce the hated water charges which we worked so hard to abolish in the 1990s, we promise them a major water war.’

One of those who won’t be rejoining the anti-water-charges campaign is Proinsias De Rossa – now, like Higgins, an MEP, but for the Labour party. De Rossa now backs water charges. ‘I don’t think we can be cavalier with usage of water. There needs to be a rationing of it,’ he said. (This, he adds, ‘isn’t the party view’. Labour is, officially, against water charges.)

‘There’s a big weakness in relation to how people conceive citizenship in Ireland: people regard themselves as consumers, and consumers have no responsibilities, they just have rights,’ he said. ‘I grew up with the idea that water was endless, but that’s not the case. Over the last ten years, I’ve become more and more conscious of the way in which water is used and abused in Ireland. There’s an attitude to water, like there’s an attitude to dumping. It goes from the kids who are allowed to litter streets to farmers who let effluent run into rivers. It’s a cultural thing.’


*Quoted in Our Good Health: A History of Dublin’s Water and Drainage by Michael Corcoran (2006), on which I have drawn heavily for my account of the career of John Gray.


Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 38 Spring 2010

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus

1

I cannot remember exactly where in downtown Pest the large flat belonging to Eduardo Rózsa-Flores was located, but I do remember envying the spacious living room filled with books and sunlight, and thinking that this was why Ildikó had brought me here: she had scored not just Eduardo, but the kudos of his pad and all that went on there. A king-size bed covered in a canary-yellow bedspread was visible through an open doorway; the bedroom led to a balcony over an inner courtyard. A breeze stirred the net curtains in the tall narrow windows. Various associates moved through the main room, cast me a quick glance, and continued their business without a greeting. In the centre stood a table, spread with a map that hung over its edges like a tablecloth. Its legend was in Cyrillic lettering. Coloured pins were fanned out across a mountainous region, stuttering into clusters at points to mark out combat zones in what I presumed was some part of the former Yugoslavia. To my left, above a  desk, letters and numerals were chalked up with further arrows and diagrams that represented a set of instructions indecipherable to the casual observer. A stocky man entered from the kitchen, still carrying on a conversation over his shoulder in Hungarian. Ildikó stepped nimbly around the table to greet him with a kiss. As she released him to set down her bag, Eduardo turned on me the smile of her kiss, a wide smile, all of the mouth, and invited me to sit down on one of the four metal chairs set out around the map. ‘Would you like a beer?’ he asked me in English. I nodded, and one of the guys from the kitchen rose and fetched me one.

‘Ildikó tells me you are Irish?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. His face was still creased in the smile but his eyes were waiting for my expression to register his charisma. He waited while I looked around as nonchalantly as I could at the crammed bookshelves, only for my gaze to stop short at two plaster busts, placed on pedestals either side of the window. One was of Stalin, the other of Hitler. ‘Those guys,’ he said, and he threw his head back and laughed loudly, ‘they’re just for company. What are you doing here in Budapest?’

He knew already, of course. Ildi, though a couple of years my senior, was a student of mine at the Eötvös Collégium, where I had landed a teaching fellowship for the year. She was the one who had helped me along as I floundered through my first seminars, examining her hands as I stammered into the silence that greeted any attempt to generate discussion, before looking up, her head cocked to one side, to ask combatively for clarification of whatever critical point I had been trying to make. Her English was as fluent as her boyfriend’s, learned in the States where she had spent a couple of summers with her uncle. ‘Isn’t that great?’ was the phrase that punctuated her conversation most frequently, and her large blue eyes would sparkle for a moment, as they had when she told me about Eduardo a week before in Tilos Az Á, a nightclub in Mikszáth Kálmán Tér.

Eduardo was Hungarian, or half-Hungarian, born in Bolivia to a Hungarian father and a Spanish mother. He could speak six languages fluently, Ildi boasted, and was a poet and a fighter. ‘What kind of a fighter?’ I asked, half wanting to leave the conversation and go listen to Pégé, the Gypsy musician playing double bass with his quartet in the cellar below. I knew that her brother was a wrestler, a Hungarian sporting hero, who was looking to invest his winnings in a string of bars around the city – strip bars, she had added, with a lack of concern I had struggled to match. Over the six months we had known each other, I had formed the impression that she was picked on at home – at the mercy, since her father’s death, of two elder brothers to whom her degree seemed a petulant indulgence while they and their mother worked hard, and perhaps nefariously, to earn a living at the edge of the city. The difficulty of getting home, or of being at home, meant she had stayed over most nights in my attic flat in the leafy twelfth district, until she had met Eduardo. We were coming into summer, heralded by the lengthening of the girls’ legs in Váci Útca. I had bought a long, full-skirted dress with a floral print which tied across the bust in a bow. I fancied it an ironic take on a frock for a vicar’s tea party, but it felt out of place in the clammy heat of the club and I wished I had worn something else. Ildikó was wearing her customary dark grey vest and torn denim jeans, and she had recently shaved off her bob. Eduardo liked the feel of the buzz-cut, she said, and she did too. A mural of New York brownstones stretched up behind the dance floor, towards the balcony where the guys who were writing novels and producing video art hung out. They seemed more like her natural set, I had arrogantly thought, than her brother’s friends whom I had not met, but it would take some confidence to muscle in as a woman and not be reduced to playing handmaiden to their talents at the cost of her own. Perhaps this was why she preferred her fighter who might not regard her as intellectual competition.

She seemed reluctant to answer my question, leaning forward to trace circles in the spilt beer while she weighed up whethermy interest was worth the indiscretion of a reply. Eduardo, she told me eventually, was running petrol supplies for the Croatian army, or something in that line. Her answer disappointed me, but I had not the heart to press her further on how this qualified her boyfriend as a ‘fighter’. The oblique consequences of the war could be felt everywhere in Hungary. For the past term I’d been travelling weekly to Szeged to teach a class on Beckett to a group of ethnic Hungarians who had registered with the drama department in order to avoid the draft in their native Vojvodina, tenmiles across the Serbian border. Anyonemaking seriousmoney in Budapest – where my wage was considered good at £100 a month – seemed to be making it on some illegal trade into blockaded Yugoslavia. Instead I asked how they had first met.‘Through the university,’ she replied vaguely, waving any further questions aside. ‘Why don’t you come over with me sometime next week? I’m sure that Eduardo would be interested to meet you.’

*

Eduardo took several phone calls during the course of our conversation. Each time he courteously excused himself, and I could hear him switching into what sounded like fluent Serbo-Croatian as he picked up the receiver in the bedroom. Ildikó was eyeing me, her head cocked to one side as if we were in class again. ‘So?’ she asked quietly, mindful of the presence of two lads about our age who were conducting a conversation off the living room through a shortwave radio set. ‘Some operation,’ I said. She shook her head, amused. This was not what she wanted. ‘Yeah, okay, I like him,’ I admitted, and it’s true, I did.With his chestnut hair, dark eyes, broad face and shoulders, he was capably male if not handsome. His manners were good, he listened with an almost unnatural intensity given the constant interruptions, and he seemed to have an easy intimacy with my friend, who, I noticed, grew skittish whenever he threw her a glance. But how could you ignore the map, the shortwave radio, the busts, for heaven’s sake, which were surely not on display for their kitsch value alone? At a time when the decommissioning of statues from the streets of Budapest was all the foreign press could write about, Stalin’s presence in Eduardo’s flat seemed even odder than Hitler’s.

What I was looking at didn’t strike me as any sort of humanitarian set-up. ‘He runs some kind of international brigade of volunteers fighting for the Croatians,’ she confided on our way home. ‘He covered the Vukovar siege for a Spanish paper, but when he saw what the Serbs were doing to civilians he decided he couldn’t just report on what was happening.’ ‘And who funds his work now?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ replied Ildi, and, pulling at my sleeve, added, ‘Hell, I’m just his girlfriend.’

Shortly after this first meeting, a friend of mine arrived to stay, and he saw more of Eduardo than I did, for I learned in time that Eduardo liked best to share Ildi’s attentions in bed with anotherman. Excited by his proximity to the underworld, my friend began to strut a little, laughing off the occasional threesome as part of his experiment in detaching sexual pleasure from bourgeois ideas of love. Ildikó looked less sure, I thought, for it seemed to me that as one girl marooned with two guys, she was reinventing the pattern of home she had sought to leave behind. Eduardo was charming whenever we met up for drinks, asking me about the Irish language, literature, and republican politics, but I had begun to notice that his smile always lasted the same length of time, no matter the quality of the joke. I wanted to avoid his eyes when I talked, for I was unnerved by just how quickly his expression could change from complete interest to total boredom. The few nights he joined us it was clear he was humouring his girlfriend while saving his attention formore important affairs. As news began to circulate of war crimes carried out by Croatian forces in the Medak pocket near Gospic, I felt Eduardo’s murky activities required an explanation that neither of my friends was willing, or able, to give.




2

All of this was far from my mind when, one morning this past April, I picked up the Irish Times and started to read Tom Hennigan’s report on the killing of Michael Dwyer, a twenty-four-year-old Irishman, in Bolivia nine days previously. I had been out of the country for a week and so knew little of the story beyond the first headlines: that a Tipperary man, asleep in his Santa Cruz hotel room, had been shot dead along with two other men by an armed squad of the Bolivian police, on suspicion of involvement in a plot to assassinate President Evo Morales. It seemed a preposterous allegation against a GAA fan from Ballinderry with no known history of political or criminal involvement, even when pictures of Michael Dwyer in combat gear were reprinted from the internet. It was unfair, I thought vaguely, to present a young guy’s interest in paint-balling as something sinister when the family were already devastated. And then I found myself rereading the following sentence: ‘It was around this time that he met a 49-year-old Bolivian of Hungarian descent named Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, the man killed in room 458 and named by the authorities as the group’s leader.’

Hennigan wrote that Dwyer had travelled to Santa Cruz in November 2008 with three others, two Hungarians and a Slovak, to attend a training course for bodyguards that never took place. His companions returned to Ireland early but Dwyer stayed on, hanging out with Eduardo’s group around the swimming pools of a succession of four- and five-star hotels. On Tuesday, 14 April, the five men checked in to the Hotel Las Americas, where they were assigned separate rooms on the empty fourth floor. Two nights later, at 4 a.m., armed officers crashed into the rooms of Eduardo, Dwyer and Árpád Magyarosi, a twenty-eight-year-old ethnic Hungarian from Transylvania. Each, still in his underwear, died from multiple gunshot wounds to the chest. The two others, a half-Bolivian veteran of the Croatian war named Mario Tadic Astorga, and Elöd Tóásó, a twenty-nine-year-old computer expert also from Transylvania, were both arrested unscathed.

As I read, I found myself struggling to assemble scattered bits of information from fifteen years ago. In Budapest, I had discounted some of the wilder rumours about Eduardo’s activities as welcome fodder for any myth-makers who still liked to view Hungary through the gauze of the Iron Curtain. From what I had seen in his flat, I was willing to accept that he commanded a brigade attached to the Croatian army as Ildikó had disclosed. I listened supportively as she abandoned her earlier reticence on the very few occasions we met without Eduardo, sensing that the new boasts about her boyfriend’s importance were to disguise the fear that his attention had begun to drift away from her. She told me that Eduardo had been granted honorary Croatian citizenship for his heroic role in the fighting around Osijek in Eastern Slavonia. Promoted to the rank of major, Eduardo had commanded more than one hundred men. His passport had been personally handed to him by the president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman. But what I was trying to recall now was the remnant of a rumour linking Eduardo to Carlos the Jackal. It was Ildikó, I think, who had intimated that Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, then the most wanted man in the world for his taking of sixty-two hostages at an OPEC meeting, a car bomb in Paris, and other kidnappings and atrocities across Europe and the Middle East through the 1970s and ’80s, had served as a mentor to Eduardo. It would have been like her to boast that Eduardo knew exactly where Carlos was holed up in flight from the CIA and the French secret services, a claim I now remember greeting with sceptical laughter.

It turns out this claim may have had some truth to it. The two men shared similar backgrounds.¹ They were born eleven years apart in South America – Carlos in Caracas, Eduardo in Santa Cruz, where his life would end. Both were the sons of Marxist fathers, becoming linguists through necessity as their families sought political exile abroad: Carlos moved to London in 1966, Eduardo to Chile in 1972 and thence to Sweden after Pinochet’s coup d’état ousted Allende the following year. In 1975, the Rózsa-Flores family resettled in Hungary.² Both Carlos and Eduardo followed up their involvement in communist youth organizations with spells in Moscow, where it has been suggested that Eduardo received KGB training, and where Carlos spent two years at Patrice Lumumba University before his expulsion in 1970. In Moscow, it appears both men became disillusioned by the hardship of life under Soviet communism. In 1980, while Eduardo was a student at the military academy in Budapest, the Jackal spent two years living it up around the city’s bars, brothels and international hotels under the protection of Kádár’s regime. A 2007 article in a Bucharest daily claims that Eduardo acted as the Jackal’s Hungarian interpreter between 1980 and 1982, at a time when he controlled his terrorist network from Budapest.³ By the time I met Eduardo, the world’s most wanted man was living between Amman and Damascus; but his funds, which he had planned to access on a trip to Budapest in late 1990, were still locked in accounts in Hungary and Slovakia.

How had Michael Dwyer fallen in with Eduardo? Until October 2008, Dwyer was employed by Integrated Risk Management Services (I-RMS), a security firm that has been contracted by Shell to guard the construction of the controversial Corrib gas pipeline through the Erris peninsula in Mayo. A photograph posted on the Indymedia website appears to show Dwyer filming protesters alongside Tibor Révész, a thirty-two-year-old ethnic Hungarian from Sfantu Gheorghe, Romania, who travelled to Bolivia with Dwyer last November.⁴ The Bolivian authorities have since claimed that Révész recruited four out of the initial group of eight associates from among workers at I-RMS. In addition to Révész, the investigators are reported to be still searching for two other Hungarians alleged to be involved in the plot: Gábor Dudog and Dániel Gáspár, who, like Révész, left Bolivia before Christmas.⁵

It seems that what brought Eduardo and Tibor Révész together was the Székely Legion, an ultra-right paramilitary group with the declared aim of ‘defending’ Székelyföld, a region of central Romania comprising three counties where ethnic Hungarians make up the vast majority of the population. Based in the Hungarian town of Dúnaújváros, the Legion has been running combat training camps in the Ciuc Mountains of Székelyföld, where interethnic tensions run high. Révész, a former judo champion and dog handler, has been described as their chief military instructor and commander, and he also administered the Székely Legion website. Eduardo contributed regularly to its various forums, including a lengthy article on the secessionist movement in Santa Cruz, posted on 4 May 2008.⁶ Árpád Magyarosi, the other Santa Cruz fatality, Elöd Tóásó, one of the two arrested, and the suspect Gábor Dudog were also members.

As it happens, Tibor Révész used to advertise combat courses through a link on his own homepage to ‘The International Protective and Security Academy’.⁷ Floridly designed patches, to be sewn on the sleeve like boy-scout achievement badges, were issued by Révész for security operations at Glengad Beach in Co. Mayo and involvement in the Solitaire Shield – an operation to protect the boat used by Shell for pipe-laying off Erris. This last badge has at its centre a ghoulish skull-and-crossbones surrounded by Celtic knotwork. It is possible, therefore, to credit Michael Dwyer’s claim to his family that his intended purpose in Bolivia was to attend a ‘bodyguard training course’ – though Bolivia seems a long way to go for such training. Within weeks of his death, doubts were being cast on Dwyer’s role as the innocent abroad who had stumbled out of his depth. The journalist Andrew Flood has since reported that Dwyer’s loss has been mourned on the Irish neo-Nazi forum Stormfront by a contributor with the username ‘Byzantium Endures’, who signs off with the motto, ‘100% Fascist and proud of it’.⁸ By his own testimony, aged forty, single and ‘not bad-looking’, ‘Byzantium Endures’ calls himself a member of the International Bodyguards Association, an organization that claims to run combat training courses across the Baltic States, Russia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Mike Dwyer, he writes, identified himself as a White Nationalist or neo-Nazi by the SS runes tatooed on his left arm (displayed proudly in the pictures of a shirtless Dwyer pointing a handgun at the camera that were posted on his Facebook site). He goes on to claim that Dwyer was in Bolivia working for IRMS to provide ‘close protection for Shell executives’ – a claim to be treated sceptically given its source, as Flood also emphasizes. Indeed, the Stormfront thread on Dwyer’s death is taken over by furious debate as to whether Eduardo, given his mestizo heritage, can really be considered white enough to be admitted to the forum’s pantheon of neo-fascist heroes.⁹

These revelations have caused consternation in Erris. The Shell-to-Sea campaign alleges that last April’s assault on Willie Corduff and the sinking of Pat O’Donnell’s trawler in June are just two incidents in which local protesters have been subjected to the kind of combat techniques taught in counter-terrorist camps. Concern about the recruitment strategies of I-RMS has also been expressed by Judge Mary Devins during the recent prosecution of one of its Corrib employees, Richard Kinsella, for a public order offence. During the trial it was revealed that Kinsella had a number of previous convictions that should have precluded him from doing security work.¹⁰ The Phoenix also revealed that several other I-RMS employees had not properly registered with Ireland’s Private Security Authority.¹¹

In a pamphlet published through the Dublin branch of the Shell-to-Sea campaign, Andrew Flood points out that four months before Michael Dwyer and his companions flew to Bolivia, Evo Morales announced the nationalization of a gas pipeline held by a company in which Shell has a 25 per cent stake. One of the chief shareholders in the pipeline, according to the pamphlet, is Branko Marinkovic, a Santa Cruz businessman of Croatian descent who has been a vociferous opponent of Morales. Bolivian authorities have accused Marinkovic of ‘financing the Flores group’¹²; they also claim that Eduardo and Dwyer met Marinkovic on a number of occasions and that a factory associated with one of his businesses was used as a store for their cache of arms. Flood maintains that Shell would stand to gain from the return to power of the Santa Cruz elite whose control of Bolivia’s natural resources flourished until the socialists came into government. Citing the $15.5 million settlement last June of the case against Shell for their conspiracy to assassinate Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other opponents of their activities in the Niger delta, Flood argues that the events in Santa Cruz likewise demonstrate Shell’s desire to manipulate local politics in Bolivia, and Ireland, for its own purposes. Of Eduardo and his gang, he concludes: ‘These fascists are simply useful idiots in the global corporate game of gaining control over energy resources…None of the events in Bolivia directly involve Shell. The corporation is always one step if not more removed from events on the ground.’

I suspect the coincidences and connections spanning Transylvania, Santa Cruz and the remotest points of Mayo are too multiple and diverse to be accounted for in the one conspiracy. Nor can the same motives be assumed for all involved. The unique twists and turns of Eduardo’s own biography brought these men together, and Transylvania, rather than Mayo, seems to have been where the strongest links were forged.




3

In the summer of 1994, I spent a week in Tibor Révész’s home town, Sfantu Gheorghe, or Sepsiszentgyörgy as it is known to its predominantly Magyar population, at the heart of Székelyföld in eastern Transylvania. My friend Nina, a Hungarian emigrée to Canada, was returning to visit old friends there and she suggested I tag along. We took the overnight train and, according to the diary I kept, crossed the Romanian border at Kisújszállo. I woke at six to the sight of heavy dew on the open green hills. Women in kerchiefs and gathered skirts were already out in the meadows, raking in swathes of freshly scythed grass. A horse-drawn cart on a dusty track was overtaken by a bareheaded man on a motorbike, struggling to counter-balance the weight of an oil drum bouncing in his side-car. Solid farmhouses sat gable-end to the road, their yards visible through heavy, ornately carved gates with their inhabitants’ names engraved on the lintels above: Andreas Stollenberg and Adolf Fischer were the two I noted in my diary. Nina explained that these houses once belonged to ethnic Germans, many of whom descended from people who had settled in Transylvania during the twelfth century. As part of Ceausescu’s plan to homogenize Romania, this population of some 400,000 was ‘repatriated’ en masse to Germany during the 1970s.¹³ The houses we passed had since been granted to Romanian, Transdniestrian and Roma families who worked in the rusting factories the dictator had plonked down in the valleys to ensure the resettlement of the Transylvanian countryside and the dilution of the ethnic- Hungarian majority who lived there. This resettlement and the confiscation of church property, Nina told me, was what had prompted the first protests in Timosoara led by Laszlo Tókesi in 1989, which had resulted in Ceausescu’s downfall; although, she added regretfully, Tókes had subsequently crossed to the right and started ‘saying stupid things’.

Our host, Anna, worked as a librarian in Brasov, an elegant town an hour’s drive away from the estate of tower blocks on the outskirts of Sepsiszentgyörgy where she shared a two-bedroom flat with her son, her first husband, László, his second wife, his parents, and now, temporarily, us. The block’s hot-water supply ran for three hours in the morning and three in the evening. The average salary was forty US dollars a month. What enabled our hosts to survive was the garden they owned with another family out in the countryside where they grew all the vegetables they ate, the fruit they bottled for the winter, and the windfalls reserved for palinka, a lethal fruit brandy. Clari, László’s second wife, told me that the shopkeeper in the nearby village assigned her customers to three categories – alcoholics, illiterates and retards – all of whom kept giving birth to children, ‘each one stupider than the next’. All went to her to spend their last 500 lei on palinka. When Clari started to grow courgettes, the villagers lined up along the fence, stared at her weird crop and asked her what to do with them. ‘And then, when I had told them,’ she said, ‘they vanished overnight.’

As we drove through the village of Hadareni on the way to the allotment, I noticed a row of burnt-out houses, thirteen or fourteen in all. ‘What happened here?’ I asked. In response, László pointed to a large chestnut tree where, he reported uneasily, two Gypsies had been strung up by a lynch mob the previous September. The mob comprised most of the village’s 750 inhabitants: Hungarians and Romanians for once pulling together. A further two men were murdered as they fled the crowd, which then went on the rampage, torching the Roma houses I had noticed. The remaining Gypsy population, of over a hundred, departed that night, abandoning houses and belongings. ‘We are barbarians,’ László finished, shaking his head, ‘And this in the birthplace of Imre Nagy!’

By this stage I had learned enough about Eastern Europe to know that László’s contempt for these murders represented a rare tolerance towards the Roma population. Since the collapse of the Ceausescu regime, UNHCR and Amnesty International had noted with alarm the steep rise in racist attacks on Gypsies across Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, some of them orchestrated by neo-Nazi groups.

On my last night in Sepsiszentgyörgy, I offered to take the children to the circus as a farewell treat. The big top was standing on a littered waste-ground beside the flats. We arrived early and walked in through the metal crush barriers. Circus hands with Alsatians on choke chains took our tickets from us. The ringmistress, who had sold us our tickets, was Romanian. She began the evening’s entertainment with a twenty-minute peroration on the rules and regulations to be observed by the audience, few of them related to health and safety, which she then invited a shambolic man from the audience to translate ‘exactly’ into Hungarian. ‘Hello,’ he slurred into the microphone. ‘We welcome you here tonight. Thank you. Goodbye.’ There was a pig in a crown, some geese, the mighty Ion who laid down his bare torso on glass and nails and stood up unscathed, and two trapeze artists who swung round and round by their teeth in the air above us. Our applause was punctuated by regular outbreaks of barking and the clatter of sticks, as Gypsy children ran the gauntlet of the handlers outside and squeezed in through gaps in the canvas. Once inside they sat a few rows back, and dropped down under the banks of seats whenever they spotted a handler entering the ring. ‘Don’t think, because I can’t see you, that you will get away with this,’ Anna translated as the ringmistress screeched into the microphone.

The highlight was reserved for the end of the show. Sudden revving announced the entrance of a balding man, clad in a white tracksuit with silver sequins down each leg, riding a battered stunt bike. The tent filled with noise and exhaust fumes. This is what the ragged band of kids had been waiting for. They clutched each other in wild excitement as the bike roared a few laps of honour while the handlers built up a ramp with boxes and flat sheets of steel. The ringmistress stalked back in. Who, she challenged, would volunteer for the finale, the daredevil stunt never before attempted this side of Bucharest? A gaggle of kids, some no more than three years old, scrambled into the ring and prostrated themselves in the dirt. I counted twenty lying in a row beneath the makeshift ramp. Surely, I thought, the clowns will tumble in now and clear them out, replacing their frail bodies with something more expendable? But no, the rider revved up, stalled, revved up again and took flight out over the children. His back wheel landed about six inches from the last boy’s face. When the kid got to his feet I could see the mixture of terror, pride and outrage shining in his eyes through the mud on his cheeks.

‘More!’ demanded the ringmistress. I wondered now whether I shouldn’t get to my feet and protest, but no one else seemed worried. Another five children were added, the last in line jostling for a position closer to the ramp. With hardly a glance at them, the stunt man left off his chat with the ringmistress and returned to his bike. Again after several false starts, he took off and raced up the ramp. This time I watched in horror as the bike twisted sideways in the air; but the last boy, somehow anticipating its early fall, scrambled forward just in time, and the back tyre thumped down on the precise spot where his face had been. The biker dismounted to wild applause.

*

This ragged town, its outskirts as trashed and seemingly everyday decent as any of Hungary’s post-industrial estates, has provided the political heart for the campaign to restore autonomous status to Székelyföld ever since its loss in 1968. Nearly 90 per cent of Székelyföld’s population of 800,000 are ethnic Hungarians. The UN’s decision to recognize Kosovo as an independent state has re-ignited these demands. Since 2004, a more radical group has emerged from the Democratic Union of Hungarians (UDMR), a junior party in the Romanian coalition government: the Hungarian Civic Party wants the restoration of full Szekler autonomy, guaranteed by closer ties with Budapest. Its headquarters in Sepsiszentgyörgy are shared with the Szekler National Council, which last February organized a rally of over 4,000 people in the centre of the town to present the government with a list of ten demands. Among these was the creation of a national university to serve the needs of the country’s 1.43 million Hungarians, many of whom do not speak Romanian. Zoltan Gazda, president of the Hungarian Civic Party’s local branch, warned a year ago that if the fight for Székely autonomy could not be won within Romanian law, he believed there were some elements in the region who would seek to take it through violence.¹⁴

The Legion’s activities might be discounted as just the nastier edge of local politics, the common coincidence of separatist ambition and disenfranchised youth giving rise to preposterous war games in the far-off woods of Transylvania, save for the fact that its rhetoric is echoed by various organizations on the far right that are fast gaining popular support throughout Hungary. Chief among the newcomers is the Jobbik party, established by Lájos Für, a former Minister for Defence from the centrist MDF (Hungarian Democratic Party). In June’s European Parliamentary elections, Jobbik won 14.8 per cent of the country’s vote, giving it three seats in Strasbourg.

Searchlight has condemned Jobbik for its systematic incitement of hatred ‘against Jews, Gypsies and gays as well as against Slovaks, Romanians and Serbs’.¹⁵ Prominently featured on the party’s website is a map of Hungary. Coloured dots mark the locations of alleged outrages perpetrated by the Roma – rapes, murders, mob attacks. Conspicuous by its absence is any warning that due legal process should be observed.

In the immediate run-up to the election, five Roma were murdered in separate incidents across Hungary, targeted, according to activists, by the same hit squad.¹⁶ Jobbik boasts its own proto-militia, the Magyar Gárda, inaugurated at a ceremony outside Buda Castle where fifty-six members in black uniforms assembled under the Árpad stripe flag made familiar by the Arrow Cross, the fascist party that ran Hungary from March 1944 until the arrival of the Red Army the following year. Among the speakers that day were MPs from the right-wing opposition party Fidesz, which had run a common slate with Jobbik in the local elections the previous year.¹⁷

The new cooperation between Fidesz, Jobbik and other small right-wing parties successfully capitalizes on the populist dream of regaining the former Hungarian territories in Serbia, Slovakia and Romania as a sentimental antidote to the economic gloom. Of these territories, Erdély, as the entirety of Transylvania is known in Hungary, is held especially dear. When, in 1994, Eduardo was demobbed at the rank of major from the Croatian army, it was Fidesz that first engaged his sympathies, then a more moderate youth party on the Christian Democratic right. And with remarkable speed, the day after his killing, one of the first websites to record its grief was Jobbik’s: ‘With deep sorrow we report that our friend and fellow editor, Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, passed away. He died for his country.’¹⁸




4

But for which country? In 2001, Ibolya Fekete won the award for best director at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival for Chico, with Eduardo starring as himself in the title role. In her interviews, Fekete carefully asserts the right to treat the facts of her hero’s life fictionally; all roles other than the lead are played by actors, with newsreel footage and a couple of real-life interviews anchoring the narration in the tradition of cinéma-vérité. Fekete relates in one interview how she met Eduardo while working on an earlier film in which he was cast in a minor role as an amateur actor. During coffee-breaks, he explained that his own hybrid identity – half-Hungarian, half-Spanish; half-Jewish, half- Catholic; true Bolivian mestizo – left him feeling at home nowhere. By her own account, she came to see in his story a metaphor for Eastern Europe: cast adrift from the communism that repressed individuality and promoted certainty, it had rushed sentimentally into the politics of national identity promoted by Western capitalism. And yet the film is less detached from its protagonist than this résumé might suggest.

‘Somos Bolivianos,’ Eduardo’s mother tells a fellow passenger on the flight from Chile to Sweden in the wake of Allende’s assassination:We are Bolivians. ‘No,’ contradicts his father loudly, ‘somos internationalistas’, and on cue, the cabin fills with an impassioned chorus of ‘The Internationale’. Chico’s central premise is that Jorge Rózsa’s commitment to the workers’ revolution left his son unable to navigate a post-communist world; he becomes a revolutionary in search of a country for which to fight, inspired by a vague idea of justice and the emotional rewards of belonging to a ‘band of brothers’. Eduardo’s decision to throw in his press-card and join the Croatian Army comes after he has been roughed up by a Serb commander who persistently demands, ‘Why do you hold all these passports?’ as he displays them for the camera – Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, and Bolivian. ‘No se,’ Eduardo responds wearily, at a loss to condense the complexities of his upbringing into an appropriate answer to serve in this inter-ethnic war. It is axiomatic that Chico, so nicknamed for his resemblance to a comic-strip character, will find these issues resolved in his command of the similarly stateless volunteers who arrive in the small border village where he is posted, asking for ‘the Spaniard’ to enlist them. The fact that Lazlovo is populated by Hungarians, who movingly declare that only through fighting for Croatia can they defend their 800-year-old settlement from Serb annihilation, further shapes the village to the contours of home.

Lazlovo, where Eduardo based his brigade in the autumn of 1991, lies eighteen kilometres south of Osijek in the Croatian territory of Eastern Slavonia. After the fall of Vukovar to the Serbs in August, resulting in over two hundred civilian casualties and massive displacement of the civilian population, the city of Osijek on the River Drava became the Croat front line. Its hospital was shelled repeatedly by Serb troops and a group of Serb paramilitaries, or Chetniks, led by the notorious war criminal Zelijvo Ráznatovic, a.k.a. Arkan, looted the villages in Osijek’s vicinity, terrorizing their inhabitants during his night raids. There is evidence that Arkan singled out the Hungarian villages for particular brutality. It is alleged that several atrocities were carried out by Serbs in Eastern Slavonia during this time, including a massacre of Croatian civilians in villages to the north of Osijek. In this light, the defence of Lazlovo can be justly regarded as a noble cause, although the members of Eduardo’s brigade appear to have been a less romantic crew than Chico portrays. Among the one hundred or so he enlisted were many neo-Nazis (unsurprising, perhaps, given the history of Croatia’s Utashe), including a contingent from the French National Front. Eduardo chose ‘Franco’ for his own code-name, a nicely ironic title for the leader of an international brigade. Not withstanding the support of the more openly fascist Zenga units (Croat paramilitaries) further to the south, Lazlovo fell to the Serbs on 24 November 1991.¹⁹

Within the film, there is only one shot of Eduardo killing anyone, and it is portrayed as typically heroic: the strangling of a Chetnik as he stands guard over a kidnapped member of the brigade who lies gagged and bound in the dark. Conspicuous by its absence is any reference to the young Swiss journalist, Christian Wurtemberg, who enlisted with Eduardo just after the fall of Lazlovo, declaring himself eager to experience the visceral thrill of warfare. It seems Wurtemberg soon began to suspect his commander of involvement in trafficking weapons and drugs.²⁰ On 6 January 1992 he was killed some miles from the front line, strangled and then shot. Two weeks later, a British freelance photographer, Paul Jenks, arrived to investigate the circumstances of Wurtemberg’s death. Jenks was shot by a sniper in the back of the neck with a single bullet, out of range of the Serb forces whom the brigade immediately blamed for his death. In July 1994, Channel Four screened a documentary made by a friend of Jenks’s, the investigative journalist John Sweeney, which accused Eduardo of having ordered the murder of both men to cover up his own racketeering.²¹

A coda to Fekete’s account is provided by one of the ‘inspirational quotes’ listed on Eduardo’s blog. It is a short poem, adapted from some lines by the Szekler poet, Endre Ady, considered one of the finest Hungarian writers of the twentieth century. ‘One must kill, yes, kill, because for the rebuilding of the fatherland, there must be mortar / And there is no better bond in the clay / In our fatherland’s tortured soil / Than the blood of the enemy / As well as the blood of the hero.’²² A UN investigation into the use of mercenaries during the Balkans war recorded allegations that Eduardo’s brigade had carried out massacres of Serb civilians in the villages of Divos and Ernestinovo.²³ This goes unmentioned in Chico.

It seems that by the time I met Eduardo in late spring 1994 his reputation as a minor war hero was under threat. Over the summer he began his own campaign of rehabilitation, publishing the first of five books recounting his part in the war. How much of this Ildikó knew, I am not sure, for she stopped confiding in me once I expressed doubts about what good the relationship was doing her. A smart, attractive, articulate undergraduate, fluent in English, was she too part of the rehabilitation process that would culminate in the lavish receptions and press conferences which greeted Chico on its release in 2001?




5

In an interview with András Képes, made before he left for Bolivia in October 2008 and broadcast posthumously by MTV (Hungary’s state broadcaster), Eduardo claimed that he has been invited by the Council of Santa Cruz to train and organize a militia in preparation for civil war. He said he intended to enter Bolivia illegally from Brazil and, once in Santa Cruz, to ready himself for conflict with the government of Evo Morales. ‘We won’t walk with flags, we will do it with arms. We will declare independence and create a new country.’

Santa Cruz is located in Bolivia’s south-eastern lowlands; with its reserves of natural gas and iron it is the richest region of South America’s poorest nation. The propertied and business elite are of predominantly German and Croatian descent, accounting for roughly 30 per cent of the region’s population. Evo Morales’s promise to nationalize state resources and companies and advance indigenous rights presents a direct threat to the power of this elite. The Santa Cruz Civic Committee, to which Eduardo seems to have been referring in his interview, was led until recently by Branko Marinkovic. Its goal is regional autonomy for Santa Cruz, and it is affiliated to two far-right organizations, Union Juvenil Cruçena and the Nacion Camba, both of which have been implicated in racist violence.²⁴ Eduardo’s own website carries links to both organizations alongside other right-wing patriotic sites such as Radio Iyambae and Patria Camba. On one you can listen to an anthem that begins: ‘O valiant Crucenistas, take up your arms / March to the fight / For we will guard our households and our fields from tyranny … To die for your country is glorious.’ Click on the icon for Nación Camba, and a slogan flashes up: ‘El futuro es mestizo’; this is a prelude to a series of articles on the high level of education and entrepreneurship among the region’s European population, in contrast to the Aymara and Quechua indigenes who are described as a ‘backward and miserable race’, threatening the progress of the Bolivian nation through their degeneracy. Across the globe, the terms of racial hatred that cling like barnacles to the underside of militant patriotism are remarkably consistent.

Last September, a mere three weeks before Eduardo Rózsa-Flores arrived in Santa Cruz, nineteen indigenous Bolivians on their way to a pro-Morales rally were killed by armed civilians. The introduction of a new constitution last January recognizing the right of indigenous groups to self-determination, guaranteeing universal access to basic facilities, and protecting minority rights has further angered Crucenistas.25 Nacion Camba is seeking a provincial referendum to decide whether it may secede from Bolivia and form its own state. The Union Juvenil Cruçena runs courses for secondary-school students to educate them in the proper regional and cultural pride that in time may bring about ‘una Revolución Social Camba’.

It is not difficult to imagine that, having been awarded Croatian citizenship by Franjo Tudjman and declared a hero of their war of independence, Eduardo would have been welcomed home to Santa Cruz as a long-lost son among the Croat-descended population. The Bolivian authorities are currently trying to discover who paid for the eight return airfares from Madrid to La Paz, the group’s six-month stay in the city’s finer hotels and the BMW which Michael Dwyer liked to boast had been placed at his disposal to drive Eduardo around the city. For a man who listed writing and acting as his only regular occupations, it was some blow-out.

Among the inspirational quotations listed on his site, Eduardo includes one from Darren Shan, a popular author of teenage Goth fiction: ‘We are foot soldiers in the power struggle of the world.We go where there is need for us and do what we must do. Everything else is secondary.’26 This quotation might serve as a useful synopsis. The way I read it: a group of young ethnic Hungarians engage in paramilitary training in the mountains around their home towns in Székelyföld. Some of them are not too bothered by ideology: they despise the Gypsies for the violence they see on the edge of their towns; they blame the Jews and the socialists for the lack of employment prospects, although the shape of this latter conspiracy is a little unclear and perhaps they choose not to pursue this one too far with Eduardo. They enjoy belonging to a militia, which they can lend occasionally as a strong arm to demonstrations organized by the politicians who might yet regain the cultural recognition denied to their parents before them. A stint with I-RMS in Ireland provides a living doing all those things they have been training to do while waiting for their moment at home. They meet an Irish guy who seems to share their interests in martial arts and survival techniques. When he is let go in September, they are already hatching plans to join a friend of theirs in Bolivia for some kind of operation providing security to businessmen, and the Irishman, seeing no other work in the offing, goes with them.

Eduardo Rózsa-Flores was a man who attracted volunteers. In company, he was always acclaiming, approving and welcoming men and women younger than himself who might be challenged to put their boot behind their ideals. A Facebook link from a pro-Jobbik forum takes me to a video of his friends queuing to pay their respects at an altar. Some girls lay red roses, some reach out to caress his photograph. The film is inter-cut with photographs of his life. The pictures begin with him as a white-bundled baby cradled in his delighted father’s arms, then a jug-eared toddler in shorts, and fade into each other, so that the shot of a boy petting a tapir in a garden, with mother and sister standing by, is briefly visible through the wide brow of the teenager he would shortly become. He looks, I notice in this shot, a little like Evo Morales.

In most of the photos, his glance is modestly downcast, his thoughts inscrutable, while the rest of his face exudes a boyish warmth reciprocated in shot after shot of him relaxing with soldiers, combat rifles and handguns slung casually aside. This is what war is, these photos say, fellowship through tiredness and danger, the laughter of friends as the commander blows out the candles on his birthday cake. In later years, judging from the grizzled stubble, Nehru jacket, and open-necked shirts, Eduardo found a civilian uniform befitting the role of poet-fighter that he finally achieved through the promotion of Chico. After visiting Jerusalem, where in Chico he is filmed praying at the Wailing Wall before seeking out a Catholic priest to hear his confession, he converted to Islam in 2004, and claimed to act as the Vice-President of the Islamic Community of Hungary for the past few years. His conversion might be connected in some way to his participation the same year in a convoy carrying Hungarian aid to Darfur. A photograph of Eduardo kneeling next to an imam at prayers testifies to his devotion, as do the Sufi-inspired love poems that are an improvement on his earlier, more bloodthirsty verse. Not that Islam stopped him from reprising his childhood role as altar-boy in the local Catholic church in SzurdokpüspoÅNk, the northern Hungarian village where he settled with his dog Tito; nor from hollowing out Stalin’s bust to use as a vomit receptacle during drinking bouts, as the reliable Éva Balogh reports a friend saying. His conversion can be read as symptomatic of a ready and admirable willingness to identify with the oppressed, whether of Gaza or of Vukovar; this is the Eduardo celebrated in a city-centre cinema by his friends in the Budapest arts community last May, the Eduardo who talks well to camera, appearing reflective and articulate in his interview with Képes. Or his skull-cap and adopted faith can be read as pragmatic, the cover that might be needed to smuggle out arms or to ensure the next paying gig in some one else’s army, at a time when the next contract seemed most likely to come from the Middle East. By his own admission to Képes, the story he offered acquaintances in Santa Cruz – that he had returned home to film a documentary about the city’s new politics – was a lie. No, to train a militia was another job entirely, for which Eduardo would drag along his customary mix of the impressionable and the dangerous, down the corridors towards some hotel room and the sudden sound of gunfire closing in upon their sleep.




Notes

1. Information about the life of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is taken from John Follain, Jackal: Finally, the Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, 2000.

2. Éva S. Balogh, ‘The Hungarian Far-Right in Bolivia – Eduardo Rózsa-Flores’, Hungarian Spectrum, 18 April 2009.

3. Mihnea Talau, ‘Szekler Paramilitary Training in Romania’, Ziua, 29 January 2007.

4. See ‘Real International Terrorism: Dwyer, IRMS and the Szekler Legion’, The Phoenix, 9 June 2009.

5. Adam Murphy, ‘Manhunt for Mercenary Leader who Worked for Shell in Mayo’, An Phoblacht, 11 June 2009.

6. http://www.szekely.tk.

7. Reported on http://www.politics.ie by the ‘Utopian Monk,’ 27 April 2009. Tibor Révész’s homepage, photosniper.freedom.hu, was removed the week after the Bolivian killings.

8. Andrew Flood, ‘The Shadow over Erris: Shell, IRMS and Bolivia’, Indymedia, 26 June 2009.

9. http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=592157&page=2.

10. ‘Sligo judge changes Shell / IRMS security policy’, Sligo Today, 3 July 2009.

11. ‘Shell’s Unregistered Security Men’, The Phoenix, 21 June 2009.

12. Eduardo Garcia and Mark Tighe, ‘Bolivian forces “found” handgun in Dwyer’s room’, The Times, 10 May 2009.

13. A covert deal with Helmut Schmidt in 1978 brought Ceausescu between 8,000 and 14,000 Deutschmarks for every visa that granted ethnic-German families in Romania the right to resettle in West Germany. Today there are no more than a few hundred ethnic Germans left in Romania, living around Timosoara and Arad.

14. Nicholas Kulish, ‘Kosovo’s Actions Hearten a Hungarian Enclave,’ New York Times, 7 April 2008.

15. Karl Pfeifer, ‘Hungary: Rightwing militia prepares to fight “Satan” government’, Searchlight, October 2007.

16. Adam LeBor, ‘Jobbik: Meet the BNP’s Fascist Friends in Hungary’, The Times, 9 June 2009.

17. 25 August 2007. Pfeifer, Searchlight, October 2007. On 2 July 2009 it was reported that a Hungarian court has ordered the Magyar Gárda to disband under anti-Nazi legislation.

18. Éva S. Balogh, ‘The Hungarian Far-Right in Bolivia – Eduardo Rózsa-Flores’, Hungarian Spectrum, 18 April 2009.

19. This information is taken from testimonies given at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

20. Philip Sherwell, ‘My Meeting with the Man Accused of Plotting the Assassination of Evo Morales,’ Daily Telegraph, 20 April 2009. ‘Germany’s Secret Balkan Plan’, Searchlight, July 1992.

21. Travels with My Camera: Dying for the Truth, dir. Chris Curling, 1994, Hardcash Productions for Channel Four.

22. Eduardo’s adaptation of some lines by Endre Ady, translated by Éva S. Balogh, ‘The Psyche of an “Anarchist”: Eduardo Rózsa-Flores’, Hungarian Spectrum, 21 April 2009.

23 Report to the UN General Assembly, A/49/150, 6 September 1994.

24 Fionuala Cregan, ‘Racism, Violence and Neo-Nazism: Politics as Usual in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’, Indymedia, 29 April 2009. 25. See Fionuala Cregan’s series of three articles about Bolivia in The Irish Times, 17, 22 and 23 January 2009. 26. Éva S. Balogh, Hungarian Spectrum, 21 April 2009.

Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 36 Autumn 2009.

On a foggy Sunday last November, my partner Emma Houlihan and I drove from our home in Dublin to Manorhamilton, Co. Leitrim. Emma had recently finished a five-month residency at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre there, but the final element of her project was still to be completed. She had been working with a large pile of rubble that stood prominently at the end of the town. The pile was all that remained of a house – a fine house, according to local people – that had been destroyed to make way for a housing estate which was never built because the developer was broke. Emma had already transferred a few tonnes of rubble to the gallery, pummeled it with a Kango drill and put the remains into coal sacks. Now she would reconstitute the pebble and dust into nine large concrete blocks that would form an archway. I had assisted with the drilling and would pitch in with the pouring of the concrete.

As we drove west that afternoon, the radio news bulletins were filled with denials from Fianna Fáil ministers about Ireland’s rumoured bailout negotiations with the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, denials that grew louder the next day and the day after. On Tuesday morning, with Brian Lenihan due to travel to Brussels for a meeting with Europe’s finance ministers which seemed likely to provide some resolution to the crisis, I was online avoiding my part-time internet-based copywriting job. Out of the blue, Larry Ryan, a former colleague of mine at Mongrel, a defunct Dublin magazine I used to write for, began to chat with me over Gmail. Larry had moved to London to work for the Independent and I had not spoken with him since the wake Mongrel held for itself in 2008. He asked me if I was still in Ireland and working in journalism. The paper needed some freelance reporting and he was wondering if I was available to ‘go to some ghost estates and talk to people on the ground and whatnot’.

I only had a few moments to calculate the likelihood that I would screw the story up. I had all but given up journalism. Every highlight of my brief career in the trade had been overshadowed by error or tragedy. A month before receiving a masters in journalism in 2006, I travelled to Cape Town to cover Ireland’s participation in the Homeless World Cup. It was a heartwarming story, though my standing with the team dropped when I reported in Mongrel that the team’s captain Simon Canning and another player spent their daily cash allotment on sex at a strip club named Rasputin’s. Canning overdosed a few weeks after the story was published and I will always bear a sliver of guilt over his death. In another profile on the Irish team in the Irish Examiner, I discussed one player’s spell in Mountjoy. The day the story was published, Tim Vaughan, the Examiner’s editor-in-chief, received phone calls from the player’s mother, who was apparently unaware of the fact, threatening a libel action.

I started to pitch stories about Ireland’s incredible wealth to foreign newspapers. The only person interested was David Rampe, a Paris-based editor with the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. The Gray Lady needed a new Ireland stringer and Rampe either sensed my talent from the two stories I wrote for him or was very desperate. Rampe and John Burns, the paper’s decorated war correspondent and new London bureau chief, arranged to visit Dublin in January 2008 to formally discuss how I might officially cover Ireland for the paper. Unfortunately, Rampe suffered a cardiac arrest a few weeks before we were to meet. He fell into a vegetative state and died twelve months later in a New York hospital. Burns found someone else for the position.

Despite this dismal history, which had left me feeling bitter and cursed, I was inclined to take up Larry’s offer. My gut told me that all the Independent wanted was a vox-pop full of righteous indignation, and this seemed like something I could provide. Not only did I volunteer, but I mentioned that I was perfectly situated for the story in Leitrim, the ghost-estate capital of Ireland. Not for the first time, my journalistic instincts betrayed me.

Archie Bland, the Independent’s foreign editor, soon phoned to clarify his expectations. He explained that their reporter Michael Savage was reporting from Dublin, but they wanted to talk to some real Irish people who were affected by ‘the ghost estates’. He specified his ideal interview candidate: someone who ‘lived in a ghost estate, had lost their job and was planning to emigrate’. Having lived in Leitrim for five months, I knew that ghost estates – being, by definition, largely or wholly unoccupied – were not great places in which to find people to interview, and I tried to explain this to Archie. He said he would be interested in whatever good stories I could find.

I knew nobody who lived in a Manorhamilton ghost estate, so a casualty of the Irish property bubble would have to suffice. I approached everyone I knew in the town for help. My only substantial lead came from Richard Cavaliero, the Sculpture Centre’s operations manager, who promised to contact his friend Dave O’Hara. Not having got very far with friends, I decided to approach strangers. The four people I encountered inside Gurn’s pub were distracted by the television: Prince William and Kate Middleton had just announced their engagement. Around the same time a text from Archie arrived from London: ‘in an ideal world, we’re looking for someone well-off brought low’. Minutes later, I received a call from the Independent’s photo desk. A photographer was on her way from Dublin. There was no way out.

Just as I was beginning to panic, Richard contacted me with Dave O’Hara’s phone number and said he would be willing to speak to me. Richard explained that Dave had started a company installing windows and doors in new houses; eighteen months ago, as house construction all but ceased, the company went bust. I rang Dave immediately and found him to be an engaging guy with serious misconceptions about how the media worked. He began by requesting a day to gather his thoughts and prepare for the interview. I informed him that my deadline was looming and the Independent’s interest in his life would not last to the morning. He asked if he would be able to read the story before I filed it and wanted to know how much of what he told me would go into the paper. I could tell he was wary of being misrepresented, and I felt obliged to be direct with him. I said his life story would inevitably be squeezed into a few paragraphs, possibly less. With Archie’s text in mind, I warned him, too, that editors occasionally spin quotes to suit their own news agendas. Dave sounded unsure and hung up to take counsel.

The wait was anxious. I knew the Independent’s story was all but written. All they needed was for me to provide a few quotes and a name to hang them on.

‘A friend says I shouldn’t do the interview,’ Dave said, when he called back. ‘But I want to tell this story. I’m just going to have to trust you.’

He could only do the interview from his house outside Ballintogher, about ten miles south-west of Manorhamilton in Co. Sligo, and as I don’t drive I had to ask Emma for a lift. Before running out the door, I grabbed some blank paper. I had always carried my Dictaphone around with me in my courier bag – in case news found me – but it had been stolen a few weeks earlier. I’d have to rely on my barely legible shorthand. Emma and I got a pizza before hitting the road, and the Romanian man behind the counter told us only positive things about the IMF’s involvement in his own country.

There were no signs of the excesses of the Celtic Tiger outside of Dave’s 120-year-old cottage, where he lived with his wife and young daughter Senna, named after the deceased Formula One driver. Dave had planning permission to build a bigger house on his land, but construction was indefinitely on hold. A dog was tied to a pole outside the house – never a sign of hospitality in my travels in rural Ireland – but the animal was serene. The back garden took in a sweeping view of Lough Gill and the Isle of Inisfree.

‘Do you know your Yeats?’ Dave asked.

I had to admit my knowledge of the poet was limited.

My first impression of Dave – unshaven, quietly intense – was of a West of Ireland hippie, but he described himself as an ‘ambitious capitalist with massive self-confidence who can spot an opportunity’. Over a beautifully made cup of coffee, we sat down at his kitchen table and he told me his story. I interrupted him once at the beginning of the interview and he politely asked me not to disturb him as he spoke. There would be time for questions afterwards, he promised.

Dave’s family had made tombstones in Sligo and Leitrim for seven generations. A sense of adventure had driven him abroad in the 1990s and he managed large-scale construction jobs in Barcelona, the Cayman Islands, New York City and Mozambique. While living in Spain in 2001, he saw the potential of supplying new Irish homes with well-made wooden windows and doors. There was only one other company offering this service in Ireland when Dave launched True Windows in 2004, and he told me that 99 per cent of Irish homes at the time had PVC window frames.

‘The worst-built houses in Europe in the last 50 years are all in Ireland,’ he said.

He sourced timber and glass in Eastern Europe and his up-market products were ideal for Ireland’s frothy property market. While attending the National Ploughing Championships in Co. Kilkenny, he started chatting to two men at the bar about the property game. The men eventually revealed they were developers. Dave explained his business. They ordered half a million euro worth of windows and doors. At the peak of the housing bubble, Dave was importing €60,000 to €70,000 worth of windows and doors every week, and True Windows made nearly €3 million euro a year.

Dave decided he needed an overdraft facility in order to help him manage his cash flow. Bank of Scotland (Ireland) offered him an overdraft, but with a condition. They were worried that Dave did not have enough collateral, so they suggested he buy an established building in Sligo with five apartments and Celtic Bookmakers as tenant in the commercial premises. To facilitate the transaction, the bank gave him a 110 per cent mortgage. And all was fine, until the property bubble burst. Developers owe Dave over €300,000 for stock they had not paid for. Dave in turn owes more than a million euro to a bank that has fled the Irish market.

His narrative was interrupted by Kim Haughton, the photographer the Independent had engaged, who rang to say she was lost in north Leitrim. Dave himself had a parent–teacher conference to attend, so he gave Kim directions to Moran’s pub in Ballintogher, where she and I would await the end of his meeting. Dave gave us strict orders not to discuss our line of work with Mrs Moran, the publican. I’m not sure what Mrs Moran made of us as we gulped tea, camera-wielding Kim and myself, increasingly frazzled by a looming deadline. Shipwrecked honeymooners, maybe. We didn’t know each other’s bylines, an unusual occurrence in Irish journalism that owed mostly to my retreat from the profession. It turned out Kim was one of the few people in the country who were profiting from Ireland’s housing surplus. She had published photo spreads of vacant midlands culs-de-sac in the Guardian and the Financial Times, and a Swiss TV arts programme had chronicled her at work.

Dave turned up at the pub just before it got dark. There was not much post-bubble destitution to document in Ballintogher, but Dave had plenty of inventory. He took us to a cattle shed where hundreds of strangely-shaped glass panes were lined up, not very photogenically, in long rows. In the end, Kim drove a couple of hundred miles for a headshot.

We went to the house of a neighbour whose child Dave had to babysit, and he unspooled the rest of his story. He said he had no great grievance with the developers who owed him money. They had suffered too. I expected disclosing the details of his professional failure might depress him, but debt seemed to invigorate Dave. Unemployment had gifted him the time to hunt deer with a crossbow and tan their hides. With a bountiful supply of wildlife and firewood on his property, Dave said he stood to profit should Ireland revert to a barter economy.

I briefed Archie from the bathroom of the neighbour’s house. He seemed satisfied and extended my deadline. After Kim filed her photos, she decided it was time to head to Dublin. She was my only lift back to Manorhamilton, where I’d stupidly left my laptop. We raced through Dromahair and hit a T-junction: to the right was the Dublin road, to the left was Manorhamilton, eight kilometres away. Kim, who was due to give a lecture in Dublin that night, was not feeling charitable.

‘Can’t your girlfriend come to collect you?’ she said. I admitted she probably could, and so Kim dropped me at the side of the road and turned for home. The ground was too sodden to even attempt walking. I rang Emma from a boggy patch of ground and I was back in Manorhamilton twenty minutes before deadline. I supplied a brief explanation of Dave’s troubles and his most philosophical quotes. Archie emailed to say he wanted the voices of other people, so I hit the pubs of Manorhamilton. Everyone was mum in Heraghty’s, but at the Granary, which was run by a builder named Pat Slevin who owned the pile of rubble that Emma had been transforming, the drinkers were more receptive.

‘The general public don’t comprehend what’s coming or the mess that we’re in,’ said Benny Somers, a labourer. His quotes didn’t make the paper, though the eleventh-hour opinions of our former landlady Jackie McKenna, who welcomed the expected bailout, did.

After I had filed all of my material, I went back to Heraghty’s to unwind. There was still no news on the bailout. Archie rang to say that the story was going on the front page. He asked about the location on my byline. We decided on ‘Donald Mahoney in Manorhamilton’.

The elation of stumbling into my first front-page story was quickly drowned out by a dread that the story would disgrace or libel Dave. I phoned him to explain that his quotes would be bracketed inside a larger piece on Ireland and to inform him about its prominence. He seemed appropriately nervous.

It took a few hours for the adrenaline of reporting to subside. A good day’s freelancing is like hitchhiking: the conversations with strangers, the journeys through strange places and, often, the complete surrender to circumstance. As I lay in bed, doing a final mental fact-check, I was surprised to realize how much I’d missed the chaos of the job.

At the newsagents the next day, I recognized my name on the Independent’s front page (a shared byline with Michael Savage) but not my story. Most of the cover was filled with one of Kim’s black-and-white ghost-estate photos. It depicted a young, raven-haired girl in the foreground, face turned from the camera. A ramshackle fence separated her from a row of identical houses that ascended a hill. Detritus was strewn about the ground, electric poles teetered at forty-five-degree angles. A melodramatic headline was planted upon the pale sky, in three decks: ‘Ghost estates and broken lives: the human cost of the Irish crash’.

The Independent was the only British title at the newsagents that did not feature the royal engagement on its front page. Its story began: ‘They stand empty across Ireland, 300,000 unoccupied homes …’ A quote from Dave – ‘The people who have sinned the most are suffering the least’ – was used as a headline on page 2, above a photo of a homeless man outside the headquarters of Anglo Irish Bank. The caption beneath the small inset photo of Dave incorrectly identified him as a former property developer. The story tried to explain Ireland’s economic collapse through the lens of empty houses, and included an update on the continuing uncertainty over the bailout. Dave’s riches-to-rags narrative supplied the human anchor. Only about fifty of my own words were included, though all the reporting seemed peripheral to the story’s photographic representation of national shame. In the Guardian that day was another photo taken by Kim. This one featured two tracksuit-wearing youths on horseback in Georgian Dublin. The iconography of broke, bailed-out Ireland had been created in advance of the IMF’s arrival.

I feared an angry phone call from Dave all throughout the day, but I never heard from him again. Emma bought the last copy of the Independent from the newsagents and informed the cashier that the cover story had been reported from Manorhamilton. ‘Oh, God,’ the cashier said, horrified.

The concrete for the archway was mixed and laid the next evening and we left Manorhamilton on Friday. The arch would take weeks to dry.

To my surprise and embarrassment, the story had an afterlife, albeit a brief one. The Independent’s front page was used to mock Ireland on that week’s episode of Have I Got News For You on the BBC; and in December, Jackie, our former landlady, received a Christmas card from a Welsh friend that included a note scolding her half-sarcastically for supporting the bailout. When I started as a reporter, I used to allay my fears of misquoting or misrepresenting people by telling myself that no one read the paper. A beginner’s mistake.

Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 42 Spring 2011

This piece is based on a lecture I delivered during the international conference of the Royal Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, in June, when many, many hundreds of obstetricians and gynaecologists gathered in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast. They were, as a group, confident, charming, and well got. Their smiles were easy and their hands were smooth; made silky, as I imagined, by the fragrant interiors of latex gloves and much hand lotion and the wonderful emollient that is money. The exhibition stands beside the buffet gave new meaning to the word ‘exhibition’. A plastic woman with no legs gave birth beside the coleslaw. There was a poster about vulval health beside the coffee flasks.

My girlfriends thought it was hilarious that I was going to address many, many hundreds of obstetricians and gynaecologists. ‘Just tell them to relax,’ said one. ‘And breathe through their mouths.’ But there was no need for that kind of talk. They were all very nice.

‘Deshil Holles Eamus. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.’

My heart fails me sometimes if I find myself obliged to talk about James Joyce. Last week I left Trinity College Library – living, as I do, the life of the mind – to find my way blocked by two people roaring and blackguarding in the street. There was a policeman standing there, and he was laughing at them. It was Bloomsday, the 16th of June, and these were actors or enthusiasts who were pretending to be characters from Ulysses. The town, as I walked through it, was full of similar types. I felt like a mouse that lives in Disneyland, a real mouse, who watches Mickey Mouse leading the parade and says, ‘Could everyone stop making so much noise, I’m trying to get some work done.’

But then you go back, for one reason or another – the spooky, almost Joycean fact, for example, that you have to address a hall full of obstetricians and gynaecologists – you go back to the work itself and are delighted.

‘Before born babe bliss had.’

The ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter of Ulysses is set in the basement of the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street in Dublin, where various drunks and scallywags assemble while, on a floor above, Mina Purefoy is in labour. Mina has been married for nine years – ‘Nine twelve bloodflows chiding her childless’ – and has been in labour for three days. As the nursingwoman tells Bloom, ‘she had seen many births of women but never was none so hard as was that woman’s birth’.

Despite the fact that various wastrels are entertained in the basement, Holles Street gets a good press from Joyce. Everything, for Mina Purefoy, is done ‘commodiously’.

A couch by midwives attended with wholesome food reposeful, cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her case not omitting …

I had my own children in Holles Street and can testify that very little has changed – maybe the food, though I never was down in the basement, so there might still be people drinking stout down there, and eating sardines.

The cast list is uncertain. Punch Costello, Bloom and other ‘likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun., scholar of my lady of Mercy’s, Vin. Lynch, a Scots fellow, Will. Madden, T. Lenehan, very sad for a racinghorse he fancied, and Stephen D’. If the language sounds archaic then that is because it is supposed to. The chapter mimics the process of gestation by moving historically through the English language from Anglo-Saxon poetry to the sentimental novel of the nineteenth century and contemporary slang. Of course, the history of language is also a history of attitudes to what is happening upstairs, and the medieval nursingwoman discusses, with mournful grace, the fact that as we are born, so we must also die. The first attitude that is struck is one of tender and ritual sympathy for this particular woman and for all women, who must give birth, as the Bible says, in pain.

Many matters both large and foolish are discussed by the men downstairs. The question arises of who, in the case of a difficult birth, should be saved and who should be lost, and, still in medieval mode, ‘they all cried with one acclaim nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife should live and the babe to die’. They talk of ‘Lilith, patron of abortions’, and how at the end of the second month a human soul was infused. Interesting ways to get pregnant are discussed, ‘of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth … or an she lie with a woman which her man has but lain with, effectu secuto, or peradventure in her bath’. But time and history move along, and by the end of the paragraph Stephen Dedalus has arrived at the position of the Catholic Church established in late medieval times: that in uncertain cases, the mother should be let die, as unlike the Virgin Mary she was, ‘but a dam to bear beastly … for so saith he that holdeth the fisherman’s seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy church for all ages founded’.

After this there is much bawdy talk among the men of virginity and the deflowering of virgins, fertility and wife-swapping: ‘Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend.’ The good nun, ‘ywimpled’, who let Bloom in, tries to quiet the revellers – but to no avail. Like Chaucerian pilgrims, they show her scant respect. ‘The bedside manner it is that they use in the Mater hospice. Demme, does not Doctor O’Gargle chuck the nuns there under the chin?’

(I feel the Irish nursing sisters got more effective, over the years. By my mother’s day, no one was chucking any nuns under the chin; by my own, the nuns were in disguise.)

The irony of the situation, of a pack of wasters getting drunk in a maternity hospital, is deliberate. The chapter is about men profaning the sacred site and rites of fertility itself. They are admonished for their paganry with ‘A black crack of noise in the street’ as a storm breaks over the centre of Dublin.

It is late in the day when we realize that the doctor on call is also sitting there, shouting and drinking stout, when the ‘young surgeon … rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just then informed him that he was needed in the ward’. And indeed, it is not for the birth he was leaving them, but to deliver the afterbirth: Mina Purefoy has had a boy.

The centuries have passed with each paragraph. The nursingwoman is now ‘the second female infirmarian to the junior medical officer in residence’. Joyce is giving us not just a history of the language but a satirical account of the history of obstetrics. We get the quirky scientific curiosity of the Enlightenment, as they discuss ‘the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that rarer form, with respect to the mother’. This then gives way to increasingly specific medical terminology: ‘the benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep … the premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in the actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent upon the menopause … that distressing manner of delivery called by the Brandenburghers Sturzgeburt’.

This mixture of superstition, cod science and pomposity finally gives way to the social concern of the nineteenth century, with theories for how to reduce mortality rates among the poor. ‘Mr J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in the home but by far the vast majority to neglect … Although the former (we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges …’

Upstairs, recently delivered, Mina Purefoy emerges into the light of our attention at last: ‘Reverently look at her as she reclines there with the motherlight in her eyes …’. She is presented as a mother in the sentimental tradition of motherhood, a wife, and a contented member of the decent middle classes: ‘as her loving eyes behold her babe she wishes only one blessing more, to have her dear Doady there with her to share her joy, to lay in his arms that mite of God’s clay, the fruit of their lawful embraces’.

Along with this sentimental view of the mother is a new version of the doctor in the case, so recently drinking and gasbagging with Dedalus and Bloom: ‘the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and now she was very very happy.’

The birth of Mina’s baby is told from multiple perspectives. It is told, you could say, by everyone but Mina. It is not actually told at all. This is a crowd scene; the action – the real and sacred event – happens in private, elsewhere.

Consider, by way of contrast, the labour that Kitty endures in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. This is a really simple passage, but what it does is remarkable. When her time comes, Kitty’s loving husband, Levin, runs to the chemist for opium then on to the doctor to beg him to attend to his labouring wife. Back home, he is in and out of the room, to tend and reassure. It is a long labour – or so it seems to Levin. When the doctor arrives Levin stands outside the door, where he ‘heard someone shrieking and moaning in a way he had never heard till then, and he knew that these sounds were produced by what once was Kitty. He had long ceased wishing for a child, and now he hated that child. He did not even wish her to live, but only longed that these terrible sufferings should end.’ When he enters the room again, he finds that ‘Kitty’s face did not exist. In its place was something terrible, both because of its strained expression and because of the sounds which proceeded from it.’

In both these powerful accounts of birth, the labouring woman is absent. In Ulysses the absence of the woman is a both a social and a sacred one. In Tolstoy the absence is much more radical. We see the woman, but she is not there. Kitty’s personhood is, in the process of labour, destroyed.

Tolstoy had many children and he, or at any rate his wife, had no illusions about how human beings make their way into the world. Like Joyce, he was on a mission – the mission is the same for every novelist: somehow, in ways that might surprise you, to tell it like it is. We can only tell truths that are available to us, of course, but the facts of labour and childbirth were always there for the writer who looked for them.

When the Irish writer George Moore wrote his novel Esther Waters, about the plight of a pregnant servant girl, he did not spare the details. The book, published in 1894, describes with a rare accuracy the details of her lying-in in the Queen Charlotte’s hospital in London: the medical students eating fondant sweets, their laughing indifference to Esther’s pain and to the screams of a woman in the bed across the room. Moore describes not just her paranoia and distress – both of which I remember from my own labours – but also (and he really did his research here) the pains that ‘creep up from her knees’. When the moment arrives, after a pain that seems to tear her asunder, the doctor places ‘a small wire case over her mouth and nose, and the sickly odour which she breathed from the cotton wool filled her brain with nausea; it seemed to choke her, and then life faded, and at every inhalation she expected to lose sight of the circle of faces’.

The absence of the woman herself is made total, in this scene, by the use of chloroform. Is it not possible to be human at this moment – or is it just impossible to be depicted as such? When Esther comes to, it is to discover not just that she has had a baby boy, but that she herself has been magically changed. ‘A pulp of red flesh rolled up in flannel was laid alongside of her. Its eyes were open; it looked at her, and her flesh filled with a sense of happiness so deep and so intense that she was like one enchanted.’

Moore’s book was a great success. The content shocked many, but his social zeal won the approval of others, including Gladstone. Despite the fact that Moore was born on an estate in County Mayo, the novel’s realism exposes not poor suffering Ireland (Gladstone felt sorry for us too, you know) but the suffering of English serving classes in the industrial age.

Perhaps Ireland was not real enough to have real childbirth in it. The question remains as to why, in a country obsessed by reproduction, obsessed for decades with the ownership of female fertility – a country, moreover, with more decent writers per acre than any other piece of land in the world – there are so few accounts of labour and birth in Irish literature.

These subjects are deeply taboo, but that is not a real excuse: Irish writers have long been in the business of breaking taboos. Many Irish writers were men – but so was George Moore. Many of the women writers did not have children, or if they did, they had no time to write anymore. ‘For every baby a tooth,’ they used to say, and, when I started out, ‘for every baby a book’. (They were wrong.)

But even if the writer is a woman, and one who has given birth, there are problems writing the experience into a novel, as opposed to a non-fiction account. It is hard to remember a labour, unless you remember it too well. There is also an uncoupling of cause and effect. The beauty of the child, the fact of the child, has very little to do with the ease or difficulty with which they came into the world, and novels are all about cause and effect.

Birth is so melodramatic. It is, in a funny way, an accident, the way a car crash might be an accident, and accidents make us question the fiction – Who made this up? you say. This is one of the reasons why there is a lot of sex in novels and very few babies. Paradoxically, modern fiction describes many, many sexual positions, and almost no contraception. Babies themselves make poor characters in novels: they may have personality, but they have very little moral agency. Actually, let’s face it, mothers make poor characters in novels: they have limited choices, and there is always something on their mind other than the plot. It is very difficult to think of novels – or, indeed, of Shakespeare plays – that have a mother as the central character.

Of course, when the novel shades into genre – historical fiction, sci fi, and horror, it deals with childbirth alright, but in the gothic, spooky, or sweaty-screamy way: there are birth scenes in Gone with the Wind and in Rosemary’s Baby, and Danielle Steele is rarely without one, apparently. But the history of the modern novel is the history of the individual in society, and childbirth, I would argue, is not about the individual. It is about … something else.

Still, you might think that Ireland should be, in this matter, a special case. So much of our energy, over the years, has been spent trying to wrest control of the process back from a celibate church, and there have been important tragic births in grottoes and fields. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne deals with infanticide in her story ‘Midwife to the Fairies’, as Seamus Heaney does in his poem ‘Limbo’. ‘Sarah’ by Mary Lavin, published in 1943, deals with the death of a woman in childbirth, in a ditch. But most of these births happen off camera, between paragraphs, in the past. No Irish writer has tackled the subject, merged female suffering with national suffering, with the verve of Toni Morrison in Beloved, in a remarkable scene where a runaway slave gives birth on ‘the bloody side’ of the Ohio River.

Fiction is full of orphans and the problems of inheritance, but pregnant women are few and far between in the Irish tradition as in every other – despite the fact that women used to be pregnant all the time. This may be a case of the writer covering his eyes, the way everyone else covered their eyes, when they saw a bump. It is, of course, possible to ignore the nonsense and just write about the way people live their lives. Frank O’Connor describes a pregnant character, safely married and glum, smoking a cigarette and complaining that she feels like a yacht who has been turned into a barge.

Another exception is Edna O’Brien, who is always amazing for the things she will say. In A Pagan Place, which is set in the fifties, the mother saves up crinkly tissue paper to use as a barrier method of contraception. And to the question ‘Do we really need to know that?’, the answer is, Oh yes we most certainly do.

A Pagan Place deals with the pregnancy of the narrator’s sister, Emma, who comes home to the farm in an interesting condition. ‘Are you bleeding?’ says her mother. ‘Spotting,’ she says. Emma is confronted, in the kitchen, by her alcoholic father and his drinking companion, the local doctor. ‘From the way she shivered,’ writes O’Brien, ‘it was evident that she thought they were going to kill her.’

Your father asked if it could be prevented. The doctor said that was a moot point. Your father said wasn’t there ergot. Your mother uttered an ejaculation …

The book is written in the second person, which makes it feel more chaotic, and intimate:

Your father said he wanted something done and pronto at that. The doctor said Indeed. Your father said it was a little matter of circumventing nature. The doctor said there was such a thing as professional ethics. Your father said to ethic his arse and play ball and do something.

The doctor, drunk as he may be, refuses. Emma spends the rest of her pregnancy confined to the house of an accommodating landlady in Dublin. When the family goes up to visit, her father asks to be sent a telegram once the baby is born. The only problem is how to phrase it: ‘He hit the palm of his hand with his fist, said he had it. He said to Emma, Now suppose it’s a boy, we’ll call that a Volkswagen; and suppose it’s a girl, we’ll call that a Hillman Minx. Then overjoyed with himself he worded the telegram, Arrived safely in Volkswagen or Arrived safely in Hillman Minx. He and Emma repeated it like it was a couplet.’

The telegram, when it comes, says ‘DIFFICULTIES WITH VOLKSWAGEN’, and ‘they were demented trying to interpret it, trying to decide who was endangered, it or Emma’. They send back ‘REQUIRE FULL DETAILS CONCERNING VOLKSWAGEN AND DRIVER IMMEDIATELY’.

Emma, in fact, has done a bunk, leaving the baby in intensive care. They track her down and write a letter. ‘Emma’s reply was in a brown business envelope and marked personal. It was succinct. It said she was not bursting to see her mother, pointed out that she had just gone through a neo-Victorian confinement and the loss of her child. Your mother said did anyone ever hear such impertinence, neo-Victorian and the loss of her child.’ She says it is time her daughter toed the line and came down, not just off her cross, but also ‘off her high horse’.

O’Brien is capturing a key moment of social change. It is arrogant of Emma to use such phrases, to criticize the institution where she gave birth, and to hint that a mother’s love for her child gives her any rights in the matter. One way or another, that accusation of arrogance has been levelled at speaking reproducing women ever since.

It’s not about you, you know.

In the past fifteen years, there has been a flood of non-fiction accounts of labour and birth – my own among them. Perhaps the Edna O’Brien scene shows why many of us seem a little defensive. Some of these non-fiction accounts are full of affront – and indeed there is much to be affronted by. There is, for example, the fact that at this moment your existence is being pulled inside out: that you are, as a person, beside the point.

The debate about labour and birth is more difficult to negotiate in individualistic cultures, such as America and Britain, or in individualistic enclaves of those cultures, such as the middle classes. But our anxiety is not all a few painful hours: the greater the loss of status that motherhood brings in the long term, the greater the sense of grievance about the birthing process. When you become a mother some of the doors in your life shut with a bang, and you do not know what lies beyond the one that has opened for you now. There is also a philosophical pain: birth is not, in fact, ‘about you’. It is about a new kind of biological entity, one we have no name for, the mother-and-child.

Perhaps nine years ago a piece I wrote about the experience of being pregnant was published in the Guardian newspaper. There were some very angry responses, of the ‘who does she think she is’ variety. ‘Very interesting to read about the first woman (she just had to be a writer) ever to get pregnant. Myself, I just looked under a gooseberry bush three times,’ said Doris Barrett – I am so glad she was called Doris. And this, from a much sadder person altogether: ‘Thank you so much for the details of Anne Enright’s extraordinary pregnancy (her timing of digestion was especially engrossing). Next, can we look forward to a heartwarming account of a humdrum miscarriage, or “What One In Three Pregnancies Really Feel Like” (the figure last given by the Miscarriage Association)?’

The letters are interesting to me because it is difficult to tell what the writers are angry about, or most angry about. The anger slithers around. But they share a sense that it is highly presumptuous to speak about being pregnant.

The novel as a form does not like pregnancy and childbirth because the novel is concerned with the individual and the choices that people make. And though sex is a choice, and conception is sometimes a choice, childbirth most certainly is not: it is a consequence, and one that is hard to define. Is it terrible or glorious? Or is it just, in a strange way, not about you?

Much of the modern debate about childbirth deals with ideas of agency and ownership. Who is doing this, the mother or the doctor, who is in charge of it? If we say ‘the body does it’ then who is in charge of that body? I think that birth is not about being in charge, is not an activity of the ego; that it takes place at the limits of story, at the limits even of language and what language can say.

‘I am having a baby.’ This is such a simple sentence, but who can make sense of it? We bring our ideas of the sacred, the scientific and the personal, and they are not enough.

How do you tell a woman this? How do you tend to the person, when her ideas of what it is to be person are about to change?

Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 40 Autumn 2010.