What is your earliest memory of being interested in writing or the arts in general?
The most important memory I have is one of Raheny Library, which was about a twenty minute walk away from my house. I grew up in a very impoverished area on the north side of Dublin. We moved there when I was seven, so I was probably eight when I discovered this little library. There were no books in my house and I didn’t know anybody who had books, so it was at the library where I started reading books.
Raheny Library
Books were your starting point?
I do remember a book called Amazon Adventure which was the first big book I read and I can remember, vividly, the first time I bought a book. My family was going on a holiday to the Isle of Man and I bought a science fiction book by Ursula K. Le Guin, at the duty free of the day. I read that book on what was quite a long trip, it took 6 or 7 hours to sail there. I had finished the book by the time I got off the boat. These are still very fresh memories to me now. They are still very poignant.
You obviously loved reading, what about writing. Did you move on to writing?
I starting off writing letters to my grandfather in Tipperary. He wrote back and said I needed to learn how to dictate a letter. I was about eight or nine and that phrase, “you need to learn how to dictate a letter” has stuck with me all these years. What he meant was, that I didn’t have the formal skills needed to write a letter. There was a sense that writing was a skill you had to learn.
Sean O’Connor
You were starting to write at this point?
Yes I was. In fact, I found an example of something I had written when I was a child, just recently. My father died about a year ago and I discovered in his briefcase a fake letter I had written to Santa, a joke really, asking for absurd things for Christmas. It was a fictitious list and it would have been one of the first things I wrote. My father kept that letter till he died.
This is the man who thought I was daft for reading books, for spending money on books; at the same time, he kept one of the first things I had written. That was very striking to me. I could see my own handwriting from more than fifty years ago. It was clearly something that was very important to my father.
Did you get any support at school?
Not really. School was a bit weird in that I didn’t feel like I was learning how to write, I didn’t feel I was learning about literature. You were given a bunch of very diverse material which you were expected to read, but to me it wasn’t very coherent. I understand why they were doing that, they were giving us a range of material and so I wouldn’t criticise them, but at the same time I was in a parallel universe with people who were just following our instinct in terms of what writing was attractive to us.
I had a friend at school, Matthew and we were both into writing and reading. Matthew wrote a poem which won the Irish Times Young Poet of the Year. He was the first person to say to me, and he was 14 at the time, that he wanted to be a full-time writer. I also wanted to write, and full-time or not, I wanted to write really seriously.
Sean O’Connor
Were you writing in the background, despite school or home?
I think so. I was very conscious, already, about the question of craft. As I said, I was eight when my grandfather alerted me to craft, that you had to learn how to dictate a letter, and so we weren’t learning the craft of writing in school. That wasn’t on the curriculum. I was much more focussed on what was outside the classroom than what was going on inside the classroom.
Did you go on to do any university or academic study?
Not at that point. It wasn’t something that was encouraged. A soldier came to the school, an officer of some kind, to try and convince us to join the army. They were not encouraging us to become officers, they were encouraging us to become privates, the “grunts” as they say.
I distinctly remember one teacher mocking us, saying, “You guys will all be digging holes in the future and I’ll walk past you some day while you are down there with your shovel.” We were given the clear message that we were “the scum of the earth”. We were the future criminals of the world.
A lot of people I grew up with did go into crime, and a lot of them died very young as a consequence of drug overdoses or getting killed in the course of their lifestyle, but we weren’t encouraged to do anything with any ambition at all. And we were actively discouraged from going to university. Only one person in the whole area made it into college.
So, I didn’t go to college. I didn’t start any formal education until I was 30 years old. I left school at 17, so I lost 13 years of educational possibilities as a result of my background
