First Person: From hack to fiction: ThePost.ie


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First Person: From hack to fiction
Sunday, May 20, 2007 - By Andrew Lynch
Mischievous satirist and former newspaper editor Garbhan Downey explains why, in Ireland, politics can be stranger than fiction.

In the opening chapter of Garbhan Downey’s new novel, Running Mates, the editor of a Derry newspaper reflects on the great love of his life.

‘‘Not feelgood stories or song contests, or flower shows, or, Jesus help us, bridge notes. For him, there was one subject and one subject only. Politics. The eternal war to determine who owns society.

‘‘Politics. The poisoned milk that flows through our every vein to assure us that we are always better than the next guy. Politics. The anti-sex - it doesn’t matter who you screw just as long as you come first.

‘‘The problem with living in the North was that serious people like Stan didn’t do politics. Not as players at least. They realised the futility of it. The Brits, cynical bastards, had devised the perfect system to cope with the natives - give them all the responsibility and none of the power. So the smart money had all opted out of the process and stood at the sidelines making smart remarks, while the lower orders fucked everything up.”

Sitting in the front lounge of Buswell’s Hotel, a stone’s throw from the Dail and a favourite watering hole of thirsty TDs, Downey confirms that he holds roughly similar views on the great national bloodsport. A former editor of a Derry newspaper himself, he’s been watching politicians up close for most of his life - and he seems to regard them with a mixture of awed fascination and amused contempt.

‘‘In any other profession you need certain qualifications,” he observes. ‘‘If you want to be a teacher or an accountant, or have any sort of role in society, you need to undergo training to make sure that you’re fit to do the job. And yet, we demand nothing at all of the people who actually run society. Of course there are a lot of very good politicians out there, working hard and doing their best. But let’s face it, there’s an awful lot of chancers as well.

‘‘Still,” he admits, draining his coffee with a grin, ‘‘if it wasn’t for those guys, my job would be a lot harder!”

Downey is the sort of hack who turns other hacks into green-eyed monsters, the one who gets to give it all up and make a living writing books instead. His journalistic CV includes stints at New York’s Irish Echo and BBC Radio Foyle, as well as three years at the helm of the Derry News.

But it’s as the author of fast-paced, outlandish and funny satirical novels about Irish politics that he’s really made his mark.

Genial and relaxed, he’s an engaging interviewee whose only irritating habit is an insistence on going off-the-record when relating the most outrageous gossip about some household political names.

His latest book is the story of a race for the Irish presidency, featuring a bizarre cast list of corrupt characters. A handsome and charismatic journalist has an affair with a curvaceous but foul-mouthed High Court judge, culminating in the two of them standing against each other for tenant’s rights in Aras an Uachtarain.

Meanwhile, Derry’s first female chief of police is carrying a torch for a local IRA leader who is mellowing under the effects of the ceasefire but struggles to keep his psycho brother under control. The leader of the Ulster Unionist party is consulting a priest about his psychological problems, while a Fianna Fail taoiseach is prepared to put a northerner in the Phoenix Park in order to defuse a rightwing conspiracy in the Dail.

If it all sounds a bit unlikely, Downey points out with tongue in cheek that it’s not much more jaw-dropping than some of the scenes we’ve seen with Ian Paisley over the last few weeks.

‘‘I work on the Raymond Chandler principle,” he laughs. ‘‘Whenever you’re not sure where the story’s going, have a man walk into the room carrying a gun.

‘‘The books are fiction, but they do provide a quirky view of a world not all that far removed from our own. Of course they’re not history - the fact that they’re black comedies full of murder, mayhem, half-witted paramilitaries and thieving politicians is just coincidence.

‘‘One of the ideas of Running Mates was to write about the way in which northerners and southerners relate to each other. When I first went to live in the south, I had this preconceived notion that everyone here was waiting for us with open arms. Then I discovered the reality, that a lot of southerners just wanted to put a big plastic bag over the north and hold it until the feet stop kicking.”

Born in Derry in 1966,Downey is a product of St Columb’s College, the Catholic grammar school whose past pupils include John Hume, Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel. He studied French and Latin at University College Galway where he met his wife, got involved in journalism and had his first really close-up view of how politics operates.

‘‘On my first day I was sitting in the corner of class, minding my own business when a very pretty Monaghan girl came in and sat down beside me, claiming that she had no book. It fell out of her bag on the way out! But we got married anyway,11 years later.

‘‘I spent four years in Galway, watching the way cute Fianna Failers pulled their strokes and got away with it. In the 1980s,you got the feeling that Ireland as a whole was being run out of a giant brown envelope. Now we know that we were right.”

After graduating in 1987 he moved to Dublin to become deputy president of the Union of Students in Ireland (USI).He lived in Lad Lane between Baggot Street and Leeson Street in an apartment that he later passed on to fellow SU activist and now RTE political presenter Mark Little.

‘‘That flat was actually the headquarters for a takeover of Fianna Fail’s offices in Mount Street on Budget Day in 1988,” he recalls fondly.

‘‘Around 40 students barricaded themselves into the building after one of them dressed up as a courier to get past security.

‘‘As you’d expect, my team had the strongest blockade and we were the last to be ejected. The revolution had to be put on hold, but I did get a brilliant souvenir - a Fianna Fail membership card that I used to present as ID whenever I was stopped at a checkpoint north or south.”

If all this sounds as if he has a grudge against a certain party, he’s quick to set me straight. As it turns out, he has huge admiration for Bertie Ahern and is faintly disbelieving of the notion that voters here might be about to replace him with Enda Kenny.

‘‘I always vote for individual candidates, not parties,” he says. ‘‘I like people who think for themselves and aren’t going to embarrass me in public.”

The highlight of his years as a newspaper editor came when he was hauled before the courts after refusing to voluntarily hand over photographs of the Real IRA attacking an army spy-post. He quit the day job because he had a dream of eventually filling a shelf with his own books and wanted to try it while he still had the energy.

His first two titles, Private Diary Of A Suspended MLA and Off Broadway, satirised the peace process and were well received, but he’s hoping that his new work will have a more universal appeal.

‘‘The first fiction I wrote definitely had a journalistic edge,” he says. ‘‘Working in newspapers was a great background because it taught me how politics works. You know yourself, for every story that you print there are ten you can’t.

‘‘But I feel that the longer I go on, the more I’m writing pure fiction. I think the public enjoy that more; they get enough realism on the news.”

When asked to name the contemporary writers he admires most, he mentions Carl Hiaasen, Christopher Brookmyre and his fellow Derryman Stephen Price. ‘‘In general, I like American, dialogue-led fiction that isn’t too realistic,” he says. ‘‘And obviously Raymond Chandler is the giant of them all.

‘‘But I’d say the greatest influence on my writing is Derry itself. A lot of my stories are about difficulties with borders, which is obviously shaped by my background.

‘‘There’s a bit of a second city syndrome in Derry and that tends to make people a wee bit authoritarian. You get it in Cork as well - that’s why Derry people and Cork people get on so well because they’re always that little bit disrespectful of the main city. I think that’s definitely found its way into my writing. I’m always looking for that little bit of edge, I want to find the craic in any given situation.”

He’s busy working on a sequel to Running Mates called Across the Line, in which the taoiseach and British prime minister are compelled to join forces to prevent gold-digging Northerners from redrawing the border.

‘‘Strictly fictional, as usual,” he says solemnly, before unleashing that mischievous laugh again.

‘‘But there’s a serious point there as well. Politics on this island has become so ridiculous, it’s like the weirdest sport ever invented. It’s got to the stage where if you’re losing, you can just change the rules and nobody seems to care.

‘‘Whenever I try to come up with a story, someone in the real world goes off and does something even more bizarre. There’s nothing I could write that couldn’t be capped by someone in Stormont or the Dail.

‘‘So it’s hard to keep up with these guys. But I’m having fun trying.”

Running Mates is published by Blackstaff Press, priced €10.30