A look at books: Ireland’s recession, sci-fi adventure and Copenhagen

Fingers: The Man Who Brought Down Irish Nationwide and Cost Us €5.4 Billion
By Tom Lyons and Richard Curran

When you allow your banks to become multi-billion euro property lending casinos, you should probably anticipate that the good times will inevitably come to an end.

But poor Ireland, used to a generational diet of recession, didn’t want to receive that memo. Prosperity, even illusory prosperity, was better than privation.

The Celtic Tiger era saw the rise of many homegrown masters of the financial universe, but Michael Fingleton of the Irish Nationwide Building Society was one of the most celebrated. Fingleton shepherded Nationwide from its days a sleepy mortgage provider to a major national player, earning over €2 million a year for his efforts and reportedly building a pension fund worth €27 million.

But with great power comes great opportunities for impropriety. In 'Fingers: The Man Who Brought Down Irish Nationwide and Cost Us €5.4 Billion,' Tom Lyons and Richard Curran point the finger at the failure of the society’s internal systems and controls, and the overweening dominance of one man.

Fingleton lent out money to a small golden circle of property developers, with the society taking stakes and shares in the profits of the ventures it bankrolled.

The outcome is as ghastly as it was predictable. No one was held to account, then or ever. No banking enquiry was ever held to explain to the Irish people what went wrong.

Ordinary borrowers were treated ruthlessly while the golden circle of the mega rich stuck the nation with a bill in the billions and walked away. No politician, regulator or civil servant wants to acknowledge that they let the society run riot. Since we all let this happen, it’s everyone’s fault, apparently.

Lyons and Curran hold the mirror up to the Irish establishment, and the image thrown back is hard to look at.

Dufour, $29.95.

On the Razor’s Edge
By Michael Flynn

It's a startling thing to hear someone say aye in a big sci-fi adventure tale. Just think of Scotty from 'Star Trek.' He brought a bit of welcome earthiness and Celtic charm to the vastness of space and became one of the show’s most impersonated characters into the bargain.

Fans of Michael Flynn’s successful space opera know that they can expect a similar blend of high tech and old school Irish myth in the unlikely but strangely compelling saga that has now reached its fourth and final book.

In 'On The Razor’s Edge' Flynn’s gnarled hero Donovan buigh is back and about to begin the most dangerous quest of his life. Well-drawn characters and a mordant wit define this epic series, and names and conventions of the Irish source myths lend themselves fluidly to this tale of good versus evil.

The plot is so thick a spoon could stand in it, but Flynn weaves his tale with the skill of a Donegal tweed maker. It’s the grand finale so true allegiances are reveled and the stakes are at their highest.

The hopes and fears of the distant past and the far future are also woven into this galactic battle, which increasingly becomes a prose poem as it reaches its finale.

Tor, $25.99.

Kerrigan in Copenhagen
By Thomas E. Kennedy

Like Dublin, Copenhagen has been a city for a millennium, and like Dublin it has just been immortalized by a polyglot Irish writer.

In 'Kerrigan in Copenhagen' Irish American author Thomas Kennedy fashions an enduring love note to that most insular and unfathomable of European capitals.

Along the way he tells a poignant story of budding love to match the descriptions of the city as it begins to blossom in spring.  Alongside the romantic intrigue Kennedy creates a working guidebook to the 1,500 public houses in his adopted city (don’t be surprised by the number, it gets cold and dark in the winter there too after all).

This is the third and most distinctive book to date in his planned Copenhagen quartet, and it’s a stand alone entry for anyone approaching this remarkable author, whose Joycean celebration of the city takes in its cobblestoned streets, its distinctive art and architecture, and the “treacherous blue eyed people, those blond liars,” who inhabit the place.

For Kerrigan, an American ex-pat fleeing a disastrous relationship, the fabled home of Hamlet is a provocative place to fetch up and soon enough the city and its inhabits are restoring his shattered faith in a tale that’s as quietly rapturous as a glass of the Akvavit they serve in the local pubs.

Bloomsbury, $26.95.

A Look at Books: From JFK’s assassination to homelessness in the US

Assassination and Commemoration
By Stephen Fagin

We will watch President John F. Kennedy’s fateful progress from the Dallas Love Field to Dealey Plaza until the end of time, I imagine. But not everyone shares our impulse to commemorate the events of that dreadful day.

Stephen Fagin, associate curator and oral historian at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (the very spot where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots) is to be thanked for continuing the tradition of preserving both the building and the difficult memories of that day that it records.

After Kennedy’s assassination there were many who called for the demolition of the Texas School Book Depository building, the better to sweep away the memory if not the legacy. But in his new book Fagin documents the struggle to maintain the building and the museum on its sixth floor, the better to understand the volatile political climate of the period and the madmen it inspired.

It’s hard for those who don’t live there to understand how a lingering shame affected the city for decades after the fatal shots rang out, but local unease over the circumstances doesn’t rule out the historical importance of the site or its place in wider American history.

Fagin’s scholarly and immensely readable new book indicates he’s an impassioned and brilliant champion of the museum and the sorrowful history it records.

Oklahoma Press, $29.95.

Almost Home: Helping Kids Move From Homelessness to Hope
By Kevin Ryan and Tina Kelly

Kevin Ryan is president of Covenant House International, which reaches over 56,000 at risk and homeless youth in more than 20 cities across the U.S. In his advocacy work he’s appeared on the Today show, Good Morning America and Anderson Cooper 360.

Tina Kelly was a staff writer for The New York Times and shared a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the 9/11 attacks. In this book the pair tell the remarkably compelling story of six young people that offers a life into the daily lived reality of the estimated 1.6 million runaways and teens kicked out of their homes each year in the U.S.

Family violence, exploitation, prostitution, teen parenthood, anti-gay rejection after they come out, or being aged out of foster care without finding an adoptive family – the reasons why kids end up on the streets are as plentiful as the kids themselves.

But the good news is with a little empathy and guidance you can see changes in their fortunes that can even appear miraculous.  There’s a lot of talk about the sanctity of life, but once you’re born and on the streets your life is often in your own hands.

That’s where Covenant House comes in. It can give teens back the dignity that their experiences have robbed them of, and in the process of saving them we should remember we’re saving our own society too.

If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to make a real difference in people’s lives, might I suggest one place to start is with this remarkable book and the inspiring tales it tells of young people finding their way out of personal hells with the help of some of the most quietly Christian people you will ever meet.

Wiley, $16.95.

Dick Carmody

In the Shadow of the School
By Dick Carmody

Growing up in rural north County Kerry in the 1950’s author Dick Carmody found himself enjoying the most elusive of all gifts, a happy childhood.

Raised in an era where many thousands of other Irish children were having a much darker experience of the values and traditions of rural Ireland, he was one of the lucky ones, one whose kind family and supportive community raised him in the warm glow of watchful circle.

Carmody’s memoir is a love letter to Clounmacon, Listowel, Co. Kerry and to a vanished world of rituals, communions, confirmations, turf cutting, farming and folklore. Even by the fifties electricity was still a novelty in many parts of Kerry the book records, although motorized transport and farming practices were already beginning to change the ancient rhythms of the place.

But it’s the local school, more than the church or the public house, that is the anchor of Carmody’s community, and it’s one he claims is synonymous with the aspirations and resilience of the people who built it.

Proceeds from the sale of this book will support the local work of the Kerry Emigrant Support Group.
Then as now the shadow of emigration cast the darkest shadow over Carmody’s community.

DC Publications, $20.

Reviews by Cahir O'Doherty, Irish Voice Arts Editor

A summer look at books - history of Irish language, New York’s Catholic Irish, fiction from the west of Ireland

On an Irish Island
By Robert Kanigel

Toward the end of the 19th century the native Irish language was being exiled to all but the most remote parts of the island. In fact sometimes it was literally driven off the land entirely to island communities like the Great Blasket.

It’s one of the ironies of the Victorian century that soon the local residents found themselves being sought after for the unadulterated Irish they still spoke. In short order big city poets and scholars were rubbing shoulders with rustic fishermen and farmers as the Irish Literary Revival took flight and the world of the Industrial Revolution found itself stepping back into ancient time for the duration of a summer, stepping into a time they consistently found sweeter and more rewarding.

In Robert Kanigel’s immensely readable and passionate exploration of the inspiration the natives provided to the artists and thinkers who visited the island, he has crafted a love letter to a vanishing world as it is slowly engulfed by the siren call of modernity.

Lives like the ones described in this book are no longer possible; from the craftsmanship that built their boats and knitted their garments and mended their nets to the language they spoke and the spirit it expressed, all are lost to time if not to literature. For a brief moment in Kanigan’s masterful study they live again. This book is literally spell binding.

Knopf, $26.95.

Bishop John J. Hughes, His Church and the Coming Age of New York’s Catholic Irish
By Richard Daniel McCann

New York’s first Archbishop John J. Hughes ought to be as widely known and celebrated in the Irish community as John F. Kennedy’s. An early architect of the Irish century that saw the rise of the Kennedy clan themselves, he was utterly central to the lives and dignity of the tens of thousands of Irish fleeing the great hunger to arrive on these shores.

Thanks to McCann’s scholarly and thoughtful new study, Hughes’ life and legacy are in no danger of being a forgotten chapter of the story of New York City.

Born in Annaloghan in Co. Tyrone in 1797, Hughes grew up in a townland where his legal second-class citizenship made an enduring impression on him. Later moving to the U.S., Hughes’ lifelong quest was to see Irish Catholics take their place at the head of strong religious, political and social organizations, the keys to power and influence nationally. Along the way he defended his people from the nativist mobs who sought to marginalize and even kill them.

He had serious shortcomings. For someone so committed to social justice for the Irish, and to battling anti-Catholic sentiment and xenophobia wherever he found it, Hughes remained opposed to abolitionism, the movement to end slavery.  He opposed slavery, but not the massive social upheaval he argued it would cause were it to be ended.

A reactionary conservative, he also opposed the work of the Fenians, the Young Ireland Movement and every other organization that agitated for the removal of English rule in Ireland. They always failed in their efforts, he warned his flock. Besides, many of them were influenced by French revolutionary thinking, which included anti-clericalism and atheism.

But nonetheless Hughes’ stewardship of the Irish community in New York had national implications that rippled outward for decades after his death.

Hughes literally put the Irish on the map, laying the cornerstone of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1858, but his influence and legacy stretched even further and McCann explores it with particular emphasis on the man and his decades long ministry.

E.Booktime.com, $13.50.

Long Time, No See
By Dermot Healy

It's wonderful to witness what the west of Ireland can do to an unprepossessing English sentence. I’m tired becomes I’m destroyed, which is altogether more theatrical. There’s a storm raging outside becomes she’s windy, which is more economical and amusingly understated.

If you can make sense of the alternating Irish desire for flamboyance and economy, without getting whiplash, you’ll love Healey’s deeply felt and tender new novel about family and forgiveness, this time across generations.

Healy knows and writes about the west and Galway like no other Irish writer and his novel is a marvel from start to finish, an epic tale of love and contrition, but creaturely and homespun too, and sure to cast a spell.

Penguin, $18.

Reviews by Cahir O'Doherty, Irish Voice Arts Editor

Ciaran Collin’s debut novel “The Gamal” exposes the dark heart of the Irish small town

Ciaran Collins

As generations of Irish writers have warned us, nasty things can happen to you if you don’t fit the mold in small town Ireland. Ciaran Collins’ remarkable debut novel 'The Gamal' tells the story of one such misfit, exposing the dark heart of the Irish town he lives in along the way. Collins talks to Cahir O'Doherty about the critical hosannas that have greeted the book’s arrival and what inspired him to tell this dark tale.

Once in a while a novel from Ireland appears that has the power to make you reassess how you think and feel about the country. This year that head turning distinction belongs to Ciaran Collins, 35, the working school teacher whose debut novel 'The Gamal' has garnered more praise in six months that most authors hear in a lifetime.

Charlie, the 25-year-old gamal of the title (from the Irish word for fool) is a weird kid. He’s usually on his own, he’s awkward in public, he makes people feel uncomfortable. Even his parents think he’s a bit thick.

There’s more than a hint of The Catcher in the Rye at work in this absorbing tale, but Collins has the skill to make you welcome the comparison. The fact is 'The Gamal' describes Irish rural life and manners so evocatively that you’ll be spellbound from the first to last page.

Unlike most people in his Northern Irish village of Ballyronan, misfit Charlie genuinely doesn’t care if you don’t like him. But his attitude is a form of sacrilege in his rural community, where being liked or at least admired is usually central to a sense of self worth.

Not Charlie though. “You won’t like me,” he confidently tells the reader. “Mainly because you know I don't care whether you like me or not.”

But the thing is, for someone who spends so much time assuring us he doesn’t care, Charlie spends an awful lot of time trying to convince us he’s telling the truth.

People don’t rate Charlie, so they let their guard down around him, saying things they may later come to regret. Because they pay no attention to him they rarely ever notice how much attention he’s been paying to them, until it’s too late.

“I have always been attracted to literature that always has an element of the outsider in it,” Collins tells the Irish Voice. “From writers who try and develop a character who’s telling the story from the outsiders perspective, you know?”

Collins’ own Cork accent is strong and clear on the telephone line.

“I’m from a village called Inishshannon in West Cork.  It’s a typical rural village within half an hour of Cork City,” he says. “It’s the countryside really. I’m looking out the window of my back kitchen here at open fields.”

No wonder he can write about rural Ireland so convincingly. In person Collins looks like he’s played GAA games for most of his life because he actually has.

His to-the-point speaking voice sounds distinctly level headed and smart, and the impression he gives is of a modest, decent skin. That impression is further solidified by the realization that he doesn’t know another living Irish novelist on a first name basis.

“I don’t really know any writers except those I’ve come into contact with through my publisher Bloomsbury and the publishing world,” Collins explains.

“My father is a retired schoolmaster. There would have been books and music in my home growing up. My mother was very interested in music and my father was interested in books and sport. I’m one of eight children. I grew up reading, although I’ve always loved sports and the outdoors life as well.”

With a writing style that at times faintly echoes Roddy Doyle’s and Pat McCabe’s, Collins is still very much his own man, an immensely assured writer confident of his narrative gifts and in his ability to beguile the reader, making 'The Gamal' one of the best debuts I have read in a decade.

Collins studied English at University College Cork, where he also got his master’s. “That gave me the time to read up on stuff that I was interested in myself,” he says.

That included works by Eugene O’Neill, John McGahern and Cormac McCarthy, all of whom he lists as influences. But his own efforts found him an agent and a publisher – he simply sent out excerpts from the new book until he got a bite.

With determination like that it’s no wonder he was attracted to storylines about Irish outsiders and the challenges they face. In 'The Gamal' Charlie’s own little narrative pushes back aggressively against the bigger narrative of his tribe, and his imagination refuses to be constrained by the narrow claims of his community.

“I probably am guilty of dreaming big myself,” says Collins, considering if there’s any similarity between himself and Charlie.

“As a 16-year-old I assumed that I’d at least be a rock star. That said, I never felt to be an outsider, but as a writer and an artist you do step back from the social world.”

Collins admits he still has great friends from Inishshannon, most from the secondary school there.

“They’re probably amused to hear I’ve written a book. I wouldn’t have told them I was writing it, I just did it,” he says.

Like most compelling novels about small town Irish life, bullying, depression, suicide and erotic obsession make early and unforgettable appearances in 'The Gamal.' But it’s the depth of Charlie’s passion for emerging young singer Sinead that most impresses the reader. With its sincerity and heartache it’s the kind of adoration that’s rare in literature now, which makes it all the more memorable.

“It’s an unrequited love. Charlie has the pleasure of Sinead’s company, but he knows that he will always be the third wheel, the fly on the wall, as opposed to his friend James who Sinead does fall for.

“It was interesting to write about the jealousies that arise between them. Charlie’s obsessed with her in really unhealthy ways too, of course.”

Crucially, Collins writes about the intensity of teenage passions in 'The Gamal' without patronizing them. In fact, he believes they become central to our identities as adults later on.

“Our teenage experiences inform and shape us for our whole lives, regardless of where you were at the time,” Collins says.

“The jealousies and disappointments and coming to terms with the adult world. The way that you carve out your own corner. I think these things are universal.”

Along the way the book also lifts the lid on contemporary Irish life, particularly when it comes to teenagers in the post-Tiger era.

“I love the fact that it reflects a truth about small town Irish life,” says Collins. “The portrayal of hopelessness of Irish young people is something people have mentioned. This book was started before the recession came about. But there is a kind of hopelessness around now.”

As a schoolteacher and a novelist Collins writes and speaks about what he calls the disaffection of Irish youth, which he can experience first hand in his own class room.

With the collapse of the Irish financial industry and the exposure of the Catholic Church for the decades of abuse it covered up, it can be hard to see the silver lining some days he says.

“Irish teenagers live in total disappointment with what the adult world has provided for them. You hope that through sport and creative pastimes that they’ll go on to be fulfilled. Part of that disaffection is the normal teenage attitude to life but I think it’s prevalent,” he says.

“We’re hearing stories of young Irish people in Australia getting drunk from one week to another. It isn’t a happy drunk; it’s an angry kind of drinking. The insular nature of the Ireland of the past 60 years hasn’t helped us.”

A sign of the times for Collins, who is an avid sports fan, is that he found he could not field a Junior B hurling team for his local GAA club. Too many kids had emigrated to make the numbers work.

“That pervasive sense of crisis and collapse finds expression in lots of ways,” says Collins, not needing to add that they aren’t always positive.

“In small Irish towns you see humanity up close. Almost in a fishbowl in a village like that. That’s probably why they’re so attractive for writers. In big cities people aren’t really thrown together in the same way.”

A tragicomic awareness has shaped Collins’ hilarious and terrifying new novel, the first truly accomplished work of post-collapse Ireland. In 'The Gamal' he holds up a bright polished mirror and shows us our own faces.

London Irish Women’s Center is the focus of new documentary film - VIDEO

Still from "Breaking Ground: The Story of the London Irish Women's Centre"

On Friday, July 12 you’ll have a wonderful alternative to the watching the endless lines of bowler-hatted Orange men parading to a big drumbeat on the Internet and on satellite news.

If you’re in New York, why not pop down to the Irish Center in Long Island City, Queens to see a contrasting image of what’s possible when spirited Irish women decide to make a difference to their community.

Breaking Ground: The Story of the London Irish Women's Centre , directed by Dublin-born artist and editor Michelle Deignan, is the absorbing tale of what happened when droves of suddenly displaced young Irish women began arriving in London in the hopes of making a new life for themselves.

As the film shows, the biting recession of the eighties in Ireland compelled many of them to  emigrate, but there were deeper privations at work too.

The Catholic Church’s grip on the politics and culture of the nation, and in consequence on the daily lives and choices of Irish women, copper-fastened an oppression so pervasive it seemed impossible to dislodge.

For many women London seemed to offer an opportunity to live a life free of clerical interference.

It also offered a measure of economic independence from the often conservative and controlling expectations of Irish families.

Whatever the allure was, there’s no doubt that throughout the eighties Irish women emigrated to London in their droves, and towards the end of the decade they made up an astonishing 10 percent of the capital's female population. Whatever was driving them out was working.

In the past Irish county societies in London had offered new emigrants a necessary hand up.

But this new generation of arriving Irish women found that the welcome had strings attached.

In particular, they discovered that the attitudes and ways of life they had sought to escape were being faithfully replicated overseas.

So in the end the creation of London Irish Women's Centre, a self-described radical organization located in Stoke Newington, provided thousands of Irish women with the community they were actually seeking throughout its long life from 1983 until 2012.

But the center didn’t just exist to help the new arrivals. It also successfully sought to represent and support previous generations of Irish women in London.

It insisted on doing this on its own terms of course, without clerical or government interference shaping or attempting to influence its agenda.

By creating an alternative cultural and political space for women to be Irish, they found for the first time a place to discuss and make public the issues that were pertinent to both women in Ireland and Irish women in London.

They didn’t do all this in a vacuum, the film shows.

There was a strong and serious backdrop of anti-Irish racism to contend with from within the U.K. There was also pushback from the more conservative Irish community in London.

But the center persevered and it began to carve out a new space for discussions to occur where previously there had only been silence. Chief among the grievances was the fact that Irish women were among the most disadvantaged ethnic and gender groups in terms of housing and employment.

As the film shows, what the London Irish Women's Centre did was tackle all the inequalities and difficulties faced by Irish women in London, actively agitating for change and providing practical services to support Irish women to live daily lives along the way.

Last year Deignan was approached by Claire Barry, the director of the London Irish Women’s Centre, to make a film about it.

“She was actually in process of winding up the center,” Deignan tells the Irish Voice. “It wasn’t
sustainable in terms of maintaining its funding anymore. It was single ethnicity; single gender and it had been going for 29 years. So they were in the process of changing its mission but they were very keen to document what it had been.”

Deignan understood what a remarkable opportunity it represented and almost immediately said yes. Initially she planned to make a 30-minute film, but she discovered the source material, which included original videos of the conferences held by the group in the eighties and nineties, made it twice as long.

“What we have now is a document of a real Irish success story in London,” says Deignan.

“They weren’t just dealing with the legacy of oppressive ideas about femininity and womanhood in Ireland at the time. They confronted how difficult it was to be Irish in London.“

They also confronted their own community’s expectations about how women should behave.

The center became the place where they thrashed all that out. It worked.”

The film starts at 7:30 p.m. Visit www.newyorkirishcenter.org for information.

Here's a trailer for the movie: