Joseph O Connor
Speech at The Ark, StorySpark launch, 22 November 2010
As the proud son of a Dubliner, it’s a great pleasure for me to be here this evening, and a particular pleasure to have my son James with me. He’s a boy who loves reading, a boy who loves stories, and he sometimes asks me how a story is written. I tell him the only thing I know about writing a story: it has to have an ending. You have to know where you’re going. Whether it’s Harry Potter or Cuchullain or the ancient Greek myths, a story needs to have a plan and a good ending to work.
Each of us has a story. And each of us is a story. And the stories that compose us are sometimes inspired by the stories of those we love. There’s been a lot of talk recently about hard times, new challenges. I find it’s got me thinking about my father. Sean was born in 1938, in the Liberties of Dublin, the city’s oldest neighbourhood, a place of great independence and amazing stories. In Sean’s childhood and teens there was mass emigration, a sense of the celestial irrelevance of the poor to the fantasies of the Republic they lived in. We think we are in challenging times now, and so indeed we are; but we are not in the times of my father’s childhood, when hunger was a daily reality for a good many people in Ireland.
Francis Street, now, has antique shops and cappuccino-bars. But in the years of Sean’s childhood it wasn’t like that. He grew up in a safe home where there were strong values of loyalty and family – where music was valued, and reading, and dependability – keeping your word – being there for one another – but in the streets beyond that home he saw sad sights. A restless, questioning boy, he had a talent for story-making, for English, at school. It was an ability encouraged by his beautiful sisters, who adored him. My aunts bought paperback novels and shared them among themselves. Indeed, such avidly hungry readers were those gorgeous young Dubliners that when one of them would become impatient for her turn with the paperback, another would sometimes tear out a page and pass it across the kitchen table, so that often you had five or six siblings all reading the same book, each on a different chapter. A magazine, The Bell, containing short stories and poetry, was often in the house, and Sean availed of it. He was the sort of boy who enters contests, learns definitions, runs in races, gets sometimes into fights, feels promises deeply, believes the answer to almost anything can be found in a book and is sometimes impatient as a wasp. I see him in many Irish men and women of his own generation. And I see him in my own beautiful sons, James and Marcus, and in my brothers and sisters. And I am happy when I see him in myself.
He left school at the age of thirteen and worked to help support his family. Later, as a young father, he dived into his books again. He studied at night, did exams, worked by day, in time qualifying as a structural engineer. He opened a little practise in Dublin and in time it grew.
Churches, schools, office-blocks, libraries – they formed themselves on the drawing board he kept at the house. Often, when I went to bed, he would be working at that board, in shirtsleeves, his tie flung over his shoulder. And often in the mornings, as I got ready for school, he would be there again – his eyes raw with tiredness -- so that it seemed to me, as it may have seemed to him, as though he had stood there working all night. He sang as he shaved; little Dublin songs that told stories, or bits of Italian arias. And at night he would read to me before I slept. He loved the Victorian writers, the old poets like Lord Tennyson, to whom he had been introduced by Brother Thomas Devane, in Francis Street school, in the Liberties. And I can never read any poem without hearing Sean’s beautiful Dublin voice. Calming as a hearth on a rainy night, it was a voice that revealed whole worlds. It was how I had learned to read, or certainly why I wanted to; his finger tracing capitals on the yellowed old pages of books that seemed to breathe wonder into life. That I wanted to be a writer one day, I owe to Sean -- to his voice, his love of learning, to his stories.
What fantastic stories he had, but there’s one in particular I remember still. It was about a Francis Street boy who bought a goldfish. And one day, to see what would happen, he took it out of its bowl, just for the briefest second. And it didn’t die! So the next day he took it out for two seconds. And it still didn’t die. (Please don’t try this at home!) And every day he would take it out, for a little longer each time, until soon he could take the goldfish out of the water for thirty seconds and it wouldn’t die. And he continued like that – one second longer every day --- and the goldfish got slowly accustomed to these longer periods out of the water. And soon, he could take that goldfish out of the water for nearly a full minute, and still it was healthy and well. And then one day, he was taking the goldfish in its bowl to school, because he wanted to show the teacher this remarkable thing – a goldfish that can remain out of water for, like, five minutes! But he stumbled while walking alongside the banks of the canal. And didn’t the goldfish fall out of its bowl and into the water. Where it drowned. “And that’s a true story,” Sean would smile. And somehow, I still believe it is.
And I also believe, without his solidarity and courage, that his life, and therefore mine, would have been different indeed. All my life I have been given chances he did not have. The same is true of many of us. It’s hard not to be scared when times change very suddenly, as they have for many of us in what seems only a few months. But to read with a child can never be taxed, to believe there are deeper solidarities than the merely financial. Things were not better in the old days. Nobody sane could say that. But the example of that generation of Irish people has much to offer. It could be a time to remember the story of where we came from. It will help us write the story of where we’re going. For a story, in order to work, needs to have a good ending. And the story of our country and of our city is far from over, despite these times. The story gives us back our dignity, our passion, our pride, our courage, our solidarity, our pleasure, our sense of wonder, and to know there are young readers here in this room tonight is a cause of pride and celebration for all of us. I am honoured to be among them, and blessed, and fortunate. They represent the greatest values we have, the values that will see us through, and the future of the Irish story.
CBI's Tom Donegan welcomes Derek Landy
