Review of Guys and Dolls from Stomp Tokyo

Still online here Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando are both icons of natural cool, so it comes as a surprise that their one appearance in the same movie is so (relatively) little known and less celebrated. The received wisdom is that the spirit of the musical (adapted from Damon Runyon's short stories) was lost, and that Frank and Marlon lacked "chemistry", perhaps because they detested each other (Sinatra couldn't stomach Marlon's multiple takes - literally so in the cheesecake sequence; while Marlon said of Frank "he's the type of guy that once he gets to heaven he'll give God a hard time for making him bald." These points are valid, but nevertheless Guys and Dolls is a loveable, big shaggy dog of a movie. The film opens with a rather stylised dance sequence in a strangely deserted Times Square. Assorted dancers represent the feckless (but loveable) characters of Times Square as they do their various things: gambling on horses, pilfering the odd watch or wallet, avoiding the NYPD and the like - all in a very feckless (but loveable) way. In other words, very much pre-Rudy Giuliani. We are introduced in short order to Nicely Nicely and Benny, among the most amiable henchmen in motion picture history, whose boss is none other than Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra), proprietor of what is celebrated in song as "the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York." Unfortunately for Nathan, the NYPD, in the stern form of Lieutenant Brannigan (Robert Keith, a spectacularly glacial presence in an otherwise sunny film) are breathing hot down his neck. Nathan also has to contend with his fiancée Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), possibly the most dizzy piece of vanilla to be projected at twenty-four frames per second, who has ambitions for Nathan to become an unspecified "normal businessman". In the face of these twin threats, Nathan is reluctant to abandon the game, after all: "I have been running that crap game ever since I was a juvenile delinquent" and more pertinently there's a lot of very big money in town. One of the most endearing features of Guys and Dolls, incidentally, is the precise, formal way the various feckless (but loveable) low lives who inhabit the film speak. No one ever says "It's" or "I've" or "I don't"; it is constantly "It is" "I have" and "I do not" which gives a strangely courtly air to proceedings. Early on Nicely Nicely asks "If it can be told, where did you collect this fine bundle of lettuce?" which is typical of the how the characters speak - politeness and slang mixing in the same breath. Nathan finds himself needing $1000 to be in a position to hold the game, at which stage we encounter Skye Masterson (Marlon Brando), the highest roller of them all. Nathan tries to engage Skye in an all too transparent sucker bet for the $1000, which fails. At this juncture Skye holds forth on the fair sex, lecturing the soon-to-be-ex-bachelor Nathan that "The companionship of a doll is a pleasant thing even for a time running into months, but for a close relationship that can last us through all the years of our life, no doll can take the place of aces back to back." Just as two cops who hate each other will, as part perhaps of an undiscovered Law of Physics, become best friends, with this speech Brando might as well have tattooed "I'M GETTING MARRIED IN THIS FILM" on his forehead. And one of the major pleasures of Guys and Dolls is having your expectations fulfilled, and the wit and style with which it happens. Nathan sees his chance and bets Skye $1000 that he can't take any doll he cares to name to Havana with him the next day. The doll in question is Sergeant Sarah Brown of the Save-a-Soul Mission, a particularly unsuccessful evangelist (despite being played by the ever-radiant Jean Simmons) Sarah Brown is constantly buttoning and unbuttoning her blouse button, particularly in the presence of Marlon Brando, a habit that the greatest minds in psychoanalysis would fail to decipher. Skye manifests himself at the mission to insinuate himself into the good Sergeant's good books, despite her best efforts to repel the self-proclaimed "unhappy sinner." Skye demonstrates his superior knowledge of scripture, since "I would imagine there's only one thing that's been in as many hotel rooms as I have - the Gideon Bible." The rest of the plot of Guys and Dolls is at this stage probably eminently predictable to the average moviegoer. It isn't perfect - some of the dancing sequences are a trifle stagebound and at two and a half hours, there are occasional longeurs. And Brando and Sinatra do lack a certain naturalness together that we see in Brando's scenes with Simmons and Sinatra's with Blaine. The sets are cheap and cheesy, but this is part of the whole charm of the piece - a Technicolor never-never land of fast talking guys and their dolls.

Postmodern Culchies. University Observer 1998

From 1998, mirrored here and I think more than a little prophetic. the ag way is the only way Only the most blinkered Hot Press subscriber who still believes that they're radically redefining Irish society by not going to Mass of a Sunday can fail to see that the old jackeen/culchie divide, characterised in the past as thrusting, hip modern Young Ireland versus backward, unhip Old Ireland, has disappeared. If it ever really existed in the first place. Instead today we have a new class of culchies or boggers or "country folk" or whatever animalistic metaphor you prefer yourself who are as well-informed, as well-dressed, as articulate and as capable as anyone from within the Pale (this won't sound like a Public Service anti-discrimination ad for much longer) Like the cocky young buck I am, I have tarred this apparently new class with the epithet Postmodern Culchies, and they are everywhere you go; on the streets, in the bars, biding their time. They are the nation underground, under-represented in the media (including the national media) but their time will come; blessed are the young men and women of from Tipp and Clare and Laois and Longford for theirs is the Kingdom of Dublin. Postmodernism is the most fertile source of academic waffle since Aristotle; it has given a grateful world such completely incomprehensible and basically useless concepts as "deconstruction", "intertextuality" and indeed "postmodernism" itself. For self-styled cultural commentators bankrupt of particularly original ideas (like, eh, me) postmodern is a handy label to attach to anything in order to create the impression that one is saying something really radical. All this is helped by the fact that essentially no-one understands what postmodernism means, and therefore anything remotely contemporary can be tagged "postmodern." The Simpsons is "a postmodern look at family values and late Twentieth Century culture." Titanic is "a postmodern revival of the romantic Hollywood epic." Tony Blair and New Labour are "a postmodern approach to politics after the death of ideology" Adrian Langan is "a postmodern approach to the death of Radical Student Politics" The only coherent link of the varying uses of "postmodern" in what could be termed the pretentious press (as opposed to the popular press) is as a term meaning both new and old, opposed to "modern" because of the conviction that nothing really meaningful can be said about our times. Postmodern Culchies is a perfect term because the essential meaningless of the word "postmodern" as commonly used suits the fact that the Culchies were always dead cool. But why "post" modern? That other cliché, the Information Revolution, means that new fashions and new styles in popular culture can reach every part of the Western World (for want of a better term) Now Clonlara in the County of Clare can be as "with it" as California. This of course means that in many respects we are becoming increasingly homogenised, cultural colonies of the USA or part of some beige EuroCulture. But there's a flipside to that coin as de Niro said to Pacino in Heat. The Postmodern Culchie may have all Radiohead's albums and be perfectly MTV- (il)literate, but they have a strong culture of their own. The GAA, for example, has become increasingly wise to the value of media exposure. 1996 and 1997 were the years when Gaelic Football and (especially) hurling became, especially in counties like Wexford and Clare, "trendy" to use a rather 80s term. Yes, hurling has followed comedy and landscape gardening and become another media cliché, "the new rock'n'roll." With its blend of a very traditional ethos and a very professional ethos; widespread corporate sponsorship, the ambitious new Croke Park (that favourite target for whingers everywhere) and the roots in a few lads kicking an auld ball around a field, the GAA could really be termed postmodern. No longer is the GAA a kind of social embarrassment; the new stadium and the new support reflect a newfound confidence and maturity. Irish Dancing and Traditional Music have never been healthier. Or is it really so newfound? The GAA was right from the start a very self-confident organisation (quite possibly too much so) Indeed all this "new confidence" allegedly brought to us by that other Great Cliché, the C***** T**** has always been there. (By the way, please please please SHOOT anyone who ever uses the phrase C***** T**** again, or what's worse extensions of the metaphor, involving cubs and stripes and the like) Only the ageing Mullahs of Hot Press, the likes of unreconstructed Dub bigot George Byrne, can still cling to the cultural assumptions of the not too distant past. So who exactly can be a Postmodern Culchie? Let me give you an example. I was born and educated in South County Dublin. I am a Postmodern Culchie. How postmodern can you get? Like Texas, it is more a state of mind than anything else; a self-confidence in who you are that transcends fickle fashion and the residual snobbery of D4 types. The one thing that Trinity College needs is a Faculty of Agricultural Science; there we could see fine upstanding examples of Irish manhood and fine portions of Gaelic womanhood display Postmodern Culchiehood in all its glory. In the Science Block in UCD I once saw a piece of graffiti which read "The Ag Way is the Only Way" You could call it the Tao of Ag. And what better philosophy to live your life by?

Hotel George, a short story I wrote in 1999

I think I tried to get this published, but didn't. hotel george My first summer job was in Videodrome, which was apparently Ireland's first video rental, but had singularly failed to capitalise on this advantage and had let first Xtravision and now Chartbuster corner the market. The staff consisted entirely of other students and occasionally the boss, a haunted woman with an infinite sadness in her manner. This was only a few months before Videodrome went bust. Generally there were two working the evening shift, two too many considering the usual business. Mostly I worked with a guy called Dermot, a couple of years older than me. One evening we got talking about our boss and Dermot started talking about his various part time jobs over the years and the bosses he had there. And Dermot told me about "the nicest boss I ever had", his boss when he worked in a grocers in Sligo town, where he was from. "He was called George, and the people called him Hotel George. He worked from 5 in the am to 10 in the p.m., and he lived above the shop, where he had a bed and a bathroom and a radio and some books, all second-hand - no TV or video or anything more elaborate. On Sundays he would go to Mass in the morning and go visiting in the afternoon. He was in his middle fifties, and wasn't married - all the young ones coming in would tease him like, so when are we getting married Mr. George and the like. No one knew his surname. He would just smile at all this - he was so quiet, so laid back, but you knew he enjoyed his life." "His thing was this: to save up his money for a year or more even, and then travel to a really really expensive hotel, for no more than a week, sometimes less, sometimes just a night. He usually went to a hotel in Ireland, in the North sometimes. We all used to slag him about the orgies he must be getting up to, but all he said was that it was nice to be treated like royalty every once in a while." The story of Hotel George became one of those memories not quite forgotten, but lying dormant under our consciousness. Sometimes passing a fancy hotel, whatever chain of thought I was following would come round to a frugal grocer in Sligo Town, possibly living the high life just in there. Generally I never thought about him. Until I came to Boston. It was just coming to the end of August, which in the J1 routine is the time you quit your tedious, menial job and see America. So I left Chicago and spent a few days hanging around Boston being a tourist, lounging about on the couch in my friends' apartment. They were still working as furniture movers, and hinted that if I wanted a wee bit of extra money there was always a need for an extra pair of hands. Then one morning I awoke on the couch to find myself confronted by an unfamiliar figure with something of a lean and hungry look. "Will you work, will you young fella?" he asked in a high West Cork accent "Ah, good man yourself," he said without giving me time to answer or indeed form a coherent thought. In the truck my friends explained the situation - there was something of a crisis in the moving company. It was the busiest time of year, with students moving into new accommodation, and with leases expiring on September 1st, so it was all hands on deck. And they also had a big job - a mansion in a place called Quincy, which was a good distance away. I would go to Quincy in one truck with Mick, as my waker was called, trying to round up more workers en route, while the rest of the moving firm did the student jobs in the other truck, and if possible come out to Quincy to help. I would be well rewarded for my labour - indeed the boss said if I abandoned my plan to travel on to New York two days later, I could make upwards of $600 - well in excess of what I made in a week in Chicago. Barely awake, I assented, and the other truck motored merrily away. Mick had parked the truck at something of an awkward angle, and my first job would be to back it up. So off I went, waving away frantically and then making a stop sign even more frantically, for the truck was headed straight for a streetside sign. The very middles of back of the truck hit the sign, sending it flying. The truck stopped and Mick ran out. He regarded the stray sign with rather more nonchalance than I felt the situation deserved. The sign was neatly cut off just above the base. Back in the truck Mick began to introduce himself. He had been in Boston for three weeks, before which he had never driven a truck before. The conversation drifted around the Cork hurling team and football and America and the physical characteristics of young women passing by and somehow turned to prison. "Have you ever been in prison?" asked Mick "I'm afraid I never had the pleasure." "I remember the Legion threw me in prison once" "What legion?" "The French Foreign Legion. I turned up five minutes late after leave. Then they threw me in solitary. Only a hole in the ground and a canvas sack. Here, young fella, " and now he threw me a map "find the way to Quincy." I was more curious about what exactly he had done that got him thrown in solitary by the French Foreign Legion, but this new task threw me. After all, I was only familiar with the nice, touristy, historic parts of Boston, and the New England aquarium. Much consulting of indexes later, I deduced we had headed exactly the wrong way out of Boston, and then when we were on the right way, I worked out the right exit to take only after we passed it two miles before. As well as asking for directions, we also shouted at any passers-by who looked Irish passing by "Do you want a few hours work there at all?" Surprisingly enough, we received no takers on that front. Finally we reached our destination and my furniture moving career began in earnest. As work it was actually quite enjoyable. I enjoyed physical work, probably because I never had to do it usual. The problem was time. With only two of us, and a seemingly infinite amount of tables, chairs, couches and other paraphernalia, it took three hours to load the truck, and even then we had twice as much again left to move. Thus we had to take our first load to its destination, an equally salubrious suburb not all that far away it turned out, after we had managed to drive back into Boston again. Twice. Another four hours to unload, which was far harder since it involved going up steps. It was now eleven hours since I had received my unusual wake up call, ten and a half since I had eaten anything. I started to plead imminent departure to New York, but Mick's response was "Ah no, young fella, sure just a couple more hours and the lads will be out to help me, and then you can go." Fifteen hours of continuous moving, driving and sweating later, the lads arrived. The boss gave me two hundred dollars for my 18 hours of actual work (we weren't paid for driving) and, to encourage me to stay a while longer, 60 dollars in advance for a few hours more work, and told me what a good worker I was, and how much money I could make in those few days. This charm offensive was doomed to failure, since at this stage I felt like I had been kidnapped by a strange ex-Legionnaire with a definite tendency for road rage - and who, indeed, had been driving his truck without sleeping for at least twenty-six hours - and only lack of willpower and lack of assertiveness and greed was now preventing me from just walking away. I rehearsed assertive, angry voices in my head, imagined myself saying "No money and no plamás will stop me getting on that bus for New York.", standing up to the men who had subjugated my will. Six more hours later, after completing a student move, I was let go at last, with none of my speeches ever spoken. Mick shook my hand, and wished me luck with genuine emotion. I was sorry for some of the less charitable things I had though about him while he had sped around in no particular direction, shouting obscenities at motorists and various passers-by. I was free and naturally had a certain nostalgia for my captivity. Now it was too late for me to go to New York, and in the tumult of the thirty plus that had just passed, my friends had also moved, as their sublet had expired overnight, and I didn't know where they had gone. Thus I had to trudge around Boston, with my worldly possessions on my back, sweaty, unshaven, and alone. The first place I passed was the Boston Meridien Hotel, with the Stars and Stripes and the French Tricolour and the Union Jack waving above the entrance. Why not just see how much a single room is, can't be much more than a hundred bucks. 245 dollars before tax for a Queen size bed, 265 dollars before taxes for a King size bed. I asked the receptionist (more than a hint of a French accent and an expansive, beatific beauty) to factor in the taxes. 300 plus for the king, 280 odd for the queen. Oh well. I picked up my bags, a chunky sports bag and a black garbage bag that carried all the assorted material goods I'd acquired in the states, and walked out. I passed a corporate type at the entrance, made eye contact (doubtless he was looking at my bloodstained T-shirt and general air of dishevelled grandeur), and cracked 'Well, I'm off to the Holiday Inn." A pretty lame witticism, but the guy looked at me as if I'd confessed to some dreadful, sociopathic crime. A block or so away, I realised that I could certainly afford a Queen Size room. But wouldn't it be an awful waste of money, since I could surely find a fabulous hotel for under a hundred? Then all of a sudden I wanted to show the suit at the hotel entrance and I wanted to show the boss and I wanted to show Mick that here was a man for who money wasn't everything or even anything and I wanted one magnificent stupid extravagant gesture. And hadn't I made enough money to do me in Chicago? And hadn't I enough books and CDs and clothes and God knows what else to do me, all too many bundled into that black garbage bag which I had lugged around Chicago and Boston on buses and subways and who knows what streets. It would mean that financially I would be just where I was 48 hours before, except with experience of both slave labour and luxury. I turned back to the Meridien. For my money I got a little credit card key and a key to the minibar full use of the swimming pool and gym, and a complimentary shoe shine service. The receptionist asked if I wanted someone to take my luggage up. I knew what this meant - a tip, and in a place like this a rather hefty one. So I carried the old kit bag and the old black plastic sac up the elevator myself. The room was paltrier than I expected, but right now my ambitions centred on the bathroom. The bath was filled and the complimentary toiletries ransacked in a trice. After about half an hour, I suddenly realised I hadn't slept in about forty something hours, and I'd spent most of that time "straight picking" and "twisting" and various other activities in the not especially obscure arcana of the furniture moving trade. But I wanted to get full value for my money. Thus I had to balance the bliss of sleep with the joys I assumed lay elsewhere in the hotel. Out of the bath I perused the cost of the minibar. Three dollars (before taxes) for a Nantucket Nectar, which would be no more than $1.25 a few hundred metres away! Eight dollars (before taxes) for a beer! Then the breakfast options - a wide choice of exotic French names and prices which seemed to be in Francs. The movies in the hotel room would cost, laundry would cost something laughable, room service would cost big time. So this is how the rich live. It was alright for expense account freeloaders, but my money had only bought me entrance to the outer limits of paradise. I accidentally selected a film from the pay per view list messing around with the remote. Go - I wanted to see it anyway. As I watched the movie I fought off fatigue and vague regret. Think how many CDs I could have bought with that money. After the film I forced myself to explore, and remembering the swimming pool, took a pair of shorts. The fitness centre/swimming pool was an hour away from closure, and a lone Chinese woman manned the desk. Chinese massage was offered at a typically prohibitive rate. The Hotel was an "affiliate" of Air France, and I had seen various not exactly unattractive air hostesses around the lobby, which had been more than vaguely in my mind as I had come down here. But I had the facilities all to myself. A jacuzzi. Never been in one of those before. I fiddled with the switch and went in. At first the water was too warm, the motion too vigorous, yet after I while I saw the appeal. And after another while failed to see the appeal. It was boring, just sitting here, at least without the benefit of employees of Air France or any other airline. To the pool then, which seemed cold after the jacuzzi. Only 4 foot deep all over, so no danger of being out of my depth. The time passed pleasantly enough, practising my ungainly strokes, letting the water take the strain off my back, which had suffered all too much. And then a shower and wandering around the hotel, through the corridors and bars, one drink here would make quite a dent in my Chicago money, looking at the expense account people and thinking, if only they knew what I was doing last night. If only they could see the floors I've slept on, if only I had moved furniture from their house, if only they could then see me here, washed and shaved, perhaps not part of the social scene of the Hotel, a Gatsby maybe, mysterious, inscrutable, walking with kings yet keeping the common touch. As I walked through another corridor this delusion fell away. Who was I trying to kid? It was just an expensive mistake, leaving me a lost soul in the paradise of riches. I wandered aimlessly through the hotel corridors, identical deserted floor after identical deserted floor, locked conference suite after locked conference suite. As you can imagine, I tired of this and decide to head to bed; one last wander to the lobby would do me. A few businesspeople were hanging around the lobby, sleek as seals in the New England Aquarium. And there I saw him, wearing a rumpled shirt, talking to the concierge in a soft Southern States accent. It was Hotel George - perhaps not the man himself, but nevertheless him. What difference do a few proper names and four thousand miles make? Here was the humble shopkeeper, hard-working, God-fearing, gentlemanly. With unhurried kindness he cast his eyes over all he surveyed. No one had ever earned the right more. And I too had earned a little slice of this place. Even if only for a night and part of a day, it was still mine. There was no question of a waste of money. And as I went back to my room to finally get some sleep I was overwhelmed by the sheer magic of geography, countless cities and towns and neighbourhoods and boroughs and villages scattered across the globe, each perhaps with a Hotel George or some other character. From Green Bay to Sligo town to Chattanooga to Heath Row to Strasbourg to Corpus Christi to Cordoba to the Bronx to Stillorgan to Haifa to Yokohama, all over the world shy, diligent men and women, working dutifully and dreaming of hotels.

A pre Euro piece about coins. I am not totally sure where this was for.

I think this was for the University Observer. It was possibly in the 'zine I briefly produced to no fanfare whatsoever in 2000, "The Magazine" 

  "I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin whatsoever (let us say a coin worth twenty centavos) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures. Money is abstract, I repeated, money is the future tense. It can be an evening in the suburbs, or music by Brahms; it can be maps, or chess, or coffee; it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold; it is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the isle of Pharos." -Jorge Luis Borges, "The Zahir" As a collection it is paltry - eight not especially rare coins in two small clear plastic bags. It probably could be assembled with about three pounds in the stall on the top floor of the Stephen's Green Centre on Saturdays. Yet it has an evocative quality well beyond its monetary value or quantity. It's my collection of coins from vanished states and regimes. One bag contains currency from the USSR, East Germany, Communist Hungary and (in contravention of the rules) still-extant Red China. In the other bag (for this ideological divide is rigorously stark) is Franco's Spain and Vichy France. The coinage of the Soviet Imperium is replete with stars and hammers and sickles, as you might expect. Another prominent feature is sheaves of wheat and corn, symbolising the alleged plenty Marxism would bring in its wake. The 1991 coin from the CCCP (USSR) is in actual fact identical to one from the Russian Federation a year later, as the Soviet system timidly ceded to a new order. A 20 Kopeck piece from 1967 is more typically upbeat about Soviet technology, as a beam of light illuminates the way forward for a large boat. 1967 was of course the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution and comes complete with a hammer and sickle atop a globe surrounded by the ubiquitous garland of wheat. The contrast between the breezy coins of post-war France with half-naked women scattering around flowers, and the severe coins of Vichy France is striking. Instead of "Republique Francaise" we have "ETAT FRANCAIS", below the image of an axe. Instead of "libertie, egalitie, fraternitie" we have "Travail Famille Patrie" - work, family and fatherland, suitable virtues in Petain's new regime. Once again much foliage is in evidence, this time oak leaves. Obviously totalitarian regimes liked to convey an image of fertility. The shocking thing about Franco's coinage is how recent it is - as recently as the mid-seventies, well within living memory, a fascist regime reigned in Western Europe. "FRANCISCO FRANCO CAUDILLO DE ESPANA POR LA G. DE DIOS" adorns one side with the face of the eponymous caudillo. On the five peseta coin an eagle flies purposefully through the air, clutching the inapt words "Una Grande Libre" in its beak and bearing a matrix of somewhat Medieval symbols on its back. Of course coins have since time immemorial been used by the state to assert its power and cement its iconography in the mind of the people. Coins are vital sources of information about the leaders of the past - the Romans in particular included quite detailed portraits of their leaders which have bequeathed us much valuable information about their appearance. The coins of the USA are of course rich in the symbolism of government - the presence of Presidents adds to the imperial mystique of the role. Suffragette Susan B Anthony is the sole woman represented on US currency, a prim and rather proper presence on the resurgent dollar coin. The rest of the coins feature a cavalcade of dead white males, accompanied with the words "Liberty" and "In God we Trust", while "E pluribus unum" (from many, one) features on the otherside with one of an array of the many icons of the American State. Our coins carry the official symbol of the Irish Government, the harp, and an array of animals. These were chosen in the early years of the state by a commission that included WB Yeats. In a way these innocent fauna are a sign of Irelands' placid political nature; by contrast with the axe of Vichy France, the official fertility of the Soviet Imperium and the Caudillo's stern eagle, Irish coins are really quite charming.

Review of Adaptation for Limerick Event Guide, 2003

adaptation Once I was trying to write a short story and was stuck. The old advice to budding writers “write about what you know” came to mind, and what I knew about at the time was a budding writer trying to think of an idea for a story. So I began to write a story about a budding writer who was stuck and began to write a story about a budding writer who was stuck and began to write about … you get the picture. There were various other twists, by the way, if that summary sounded exceptionally boring (you don’t think I’m going to reveal them here, do you?). But I abandoned the story, because of the ridiculous belief that fiction should be about Emotions and Great Themes and The Famine and Difficulties With Girls. Adaptation is the best film of the year so far and made me wish I stuck with my story. It is manages to be intricate and amazingly clever but also, through not even trying, moving and emotionally true. It begins on the set of Being John Malkovich with a (real) out-take of Malkovich ordering the crew to cut the dead time between takes. The camera follows various real-life figures from the Being John Malkovich set, finally focussing on “Charlie Kaufmann”, the screenwriter (he really was) who is played by Nicholas Cage. The Charlie of Adaptation is a neurotic bag of self-loathing and doubt, hired to adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s elegiac, and apparently action-free, tale of orchid obsession The Orchid Thief. Charlie’s happy-go-lucky/annoying (delete according to taste) twin brother Donald (also played, naturally, by Cage, with a winning sweetness in my opinion) decides to become a screenwriter too and becomes a devotee of a screenwriting guru, much to Charlie’s initial disdain. I don’t want to give away anymore of the plot, as much of the joy of the film lies in the brilliant way it perfectly predicts itself and contains itself, the way the Adaptation of the title refers not only to adapting a book into a film but to Darwinian natural selection, to personal change, and most dizzyingly of all to the film itself. Reality and the world of the film merge confusingly; for example the screenwriting credit goes to “Charlie and Donald Kaufmann, adapted from the book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean”. Characters within the film talk about their portrayal in the script and constantly wonder who will play themselves. Oddly, despite its cleverness the structure of the film is actually quite linear, aside from flashbacks that are more traditional than they seem. And for all its avant garde, mess-with-your-head aspects, Adaptation gives the same kinetic rush of joy as Singin’ in the Rain and Bringing Up Baby. It manages to be hip and vastly thought-provoking while “having a heart” in the most unsentimental and least manipulative way possible. In the last issue I wrote about a film I hated, Punch Drunk Love, and now its my pleasure to write about one I adored. In both cases, in the end one has to stop writing and lay it on the line: see this film now, five times at least.

Essay on the art and science of medicine which I very assiduously recycled

This is one of those pieces that I read now and think "ah, youthful idealism..." corny as that sounds. It won me the Irish College of General Practitioners Shepperd Memorial Prize in 2001, was published in the New Statesman in a version, and also I published a longer version in the University Observer. the art and science of medicine “The practice of medicine in its broadest sense includes the whole relationship of the physician with his patient. It is an art, based to an increasing extent on the medical sciences, but comprising much that still remains outside the realm of any science. The art of medicine and the science of medicine are not antagonistic but supplementary to each other. There is no more contradiction between the science of medicine and the art of medicine than between the science of aeronautics and the art of flying.” - Francis W Peabody From the most cursory glance at the newspapers and from even the most inattentive listen to the news, it’s obvious that the medical profession faces many and varied challenges. Yet while the logistical, political and organisational issues that face us are severe, the most profound challenge facing General Practice and medicine in general is a philosophical one. Where once medicine was seen as the royal road to a safe, respectable position in society – along with the priest and the teacher, one of the three traditional pillars of a stereotypical Irish community – now most people all too aware of the problems facing the profession. Perhaps the first issue any lay person would identify is the system where doctors in training work hours that take on the qualities of Dantean torment. It’s undeniable that many intelligent and compassionate people, who would make excellent doctors of every sort, but perhaps particularly GPs, are put off from even considering medicine by this situation. As the old system whereby a medical graduate could simply set up as a general practitioner are replaced by structured training schemes, the situation in hospital medicine profoundly effects GP training. The changing demographics of medical school intake is another challenge to be faced by medicine. Increasing numbers of women in the profession will face a career structure still rooted in the days when fathers were all too often strangers to their families. Ireland is occasionally called the “51st State of the Union” because of the high number of incidents of medical litigation that take place here – it’s estimated that Irish doctors are four times more likely to be sued than their English colleagues, and eleven times more likely than Hong Kong doctors. Does this lead to the practice of a risk-averse, defensive medicine; does it destroy the relationship of trust between doctor and patient? There are signs that the political will is there to establish a less adversarial process for resolution of disputes; I personally know many people who would make excellent doctors who are put off not by the prospect of long hours but of being sued while trying to help their fellow human beings. And doctors will have to face the changing public perception of doctors – high profile scandals both here and in the UK involving not only malpractice, professional arrogance but also deliberate homicide have strongly affected the public imagination. I earlier referred to the “pillars of the community” that were the priest, the teacher and the doctor – all three have fallen from their eminence. We are constantly told that Harold Shipman was an isolated case, but an isolated case that murdered at least fifteen and probably over two hundred of his patients will certainly crack public confidence in all doctors, but especially in the General Practitioner. Perhaps as a function of this increasing public climate of assertiveness and scepticism, many patients will now supplement the information they get from their GPs with research on the Internet, from sites of varying quality. As primary health care providers, General Practitioners are faced with these issues on an ever-increasing basis. In the rest of this essay I would like to deal with what I believe is the most fundamental issue facing both general practice and all of medicine, not only in Ireland but internationally, in the future. This is a more philosophical, the cynical would say a more airy-fairy, point; but one that has a vital relationship with general practice and indeed all of the issues above. It is the fundamental question, what is a doctor? Presumably something more than an individual with the required qualification and certification, who pays the appropriate annual retention fee to the Medical Council and displays their certificate of registration. During the narrowly-averted junior doctors strike, we could see in the public pronouncements of many NCHDs a drift away from the sense of medicine as a vocation to a more hard-headed view of it as a job like any other. In fact, many of those interviewed responded with anger and derision to the notion that medicine was a vocation; many referred to the market value graduates of their status would have in the private corporate sector. The beloved cliché of lazy feature writers and pundits, the C***** T**** (I refuse to give further exposure to the defining phrase of our time) has had far-reaching, and in some respects very positive, effects on Irish society. But as Puff Daddy and the Notorious B.I.G. put it, mo’ money, mo’ problems, and whereas once medical graduates had the ego boost of knowing they had well-paid, prestigious employment, now they look at their contemporaries working in the sexy industries de jour, Information Technology and the wonderfully vague Management Consultancy, and feel underloved by society. Of course this may be a force for good; part of the changing demographics of medical graduates that may force long overdue changes in our health system. Perhaps the more idealistic doctors leave themselves open to exploitation from healthcare managers, allowing even more corners to be cut, and ultimately their patients are the victims. But am I alone in seeing a risk here? Might this new hard-headedness become a new hard-heartedness? There is a tendency in medicine and medical education that has perhaps been ever-present, to downgrade the "art" of healing in favour of the "science" of medicine. Personally, it’s obvious that many of my fellow students regard subjects like Public Health and General Practice, with their emphasis on the overall picture of medical practice with at best indifference and often contempt, while seeing the technocratic, science based subjects as true medicine. “Every profession is a conspiracy against the public, every profession has a language of its own,” said the American novelist William Gaddis, and the specialised vocabulary that is popularly caricatured as “doctorese” derives from the world of medical science. Allow me to digress a little on this subject of the language used in medicine. It is an oft-repeated truism that there is a deluge of ever-increasing information; a figure of 2 million biomedical papers published per year is often cited. Yet how relevant is much of this information, and what are the motivations of those who produce it? The editor of the British Medical Journal once told a conference that “only 5 per cent of published papers reached minimum standards of scientific soundness and clinical relevance and in most journals the figure was less than 1 per cent.” In 1976, the Dublin physician J B Healy suggested that “we should for an experimental period of a year, declare a moratorium on the appending of authors’ names and of the names of hospitals to articles in medical journals. If the dissemination of information is the reason why papers are submitted for publication, there will be no falling-off in the numbers offered … But if far less material is offered to the journals, we shall have unmasked ourselves.” In other words, the culture of research-for-the-sake-of-research, of publish-or-perish, means that many papers are not written to be read but written to be cited, to become fodder for a CV. How is this damaging to medical practice? Aside from the obvious diversion of resources and effort from other areas, a culture that exalts personal ambition above all is entrenched. And the use of “scientific” language which can create an artificial mystique around the doctor, can thereby also create a new barrier between doctor and patient. In 1885 the surgeon William Marsden wrote the following straightforward sentence: “A hospital devoted to the treatment of cancerous disease seems to me to hold out the only prospect of progress in the treatment of the malady; an institution conducted by those who recognise in medicine and surgery but one art.” And in the year 2000 Dr. Michael O’Donnell “spread a month’s supply of journals across a table, opened them randomly, then used phrases plucked from the opening pages to encode Marsden’s original message." The sturdy High Victorian prose of Marsden is transformed into: “It would seem to the present author that only a specialist centre organised on the basis of concentrating its resources solely to address the treatment of the malignant disease process could offer a potential for realistic improvements in treatment outcome. Furthermore, such an institution would be a de facto resource centre under the direct line management of personnel sensitive to the fact that multifaceted disciplines of medicine and surgery are each essentially manifestations of the same entity.” Indeed. Although it would be naïve to believe that “journalese” is a new phenomenon, many journals seem to be written by people for whom speaking plainly isn’t an option; perhaps they are motivated by a nervous fear of not seeming “scientific” enough. If the medical profession is losing its eminence, than perhaps the rise of mystifying jargon represents a subconscious (or perhaps conscious) attempt to maintain some of medicine’s power and mystique. It is a near-cliché to define medical practice as a combination of the art of healing and the science of medicine. Many students (and doctors) would place the emphasis on the science term of the equation. But patients don’t exist as black-and-white illustrations of physiological phenomena. And if we are to communicate with our patients on a truly empathetic way, we have to realise that human experience is not like reducible to purely scientific phenomena. As John Fowles wrote "our fallacy lies in supposing that the limiting nature of scientific method corresponds to the nature of ordinary experience. Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic … made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse." And patients live their lives and come in to doctors’ surgeries enmeshed in this web of strands that we call life. If we are to practice patient-centred medicine, we must resist the temptation to transform the stories we hear into a means to an end – as Brian Hurwitz wrote in a recent article "the traditional medical view of the consultation is to see it as an opportunity to fashion a clinical case history … a story that begins with a succession of events or experiences relating to the patient, which then becomes progressively abstracted from the patient's control and the context of the original telling …[and] transformed by a medicotechnical vocabulary not likely to be understood by the patient. The patient tends to lose control of the story as the case history develops and becomes a tale that only someone else can tell, taking on a life of its own in staff rounds, case conferences, and the medical literature. Meanwhile, the patient as the person from whom the story originally arose becomes increasingly incidental to it, maintaining within it only the anonymous presence of a ghost." And it’s general practitioners, as always, who are primary health providers; primary meaning both the “first line of defence” but also the main practitioners most people will encounter. As Francis W. Peabody said in 1927 to the Harvard Medical School: “the essence of the practice of medicine is that it is an intensely personal matter, and one of the chief differences between private practice [by ‘private’ meaning general practice] and hospital practice is that the latter always tends to become impersonal. At first sight this may not appear to be a very vital point, but it is, as a matter of fact, the crux of the whole situation. The treatment of a disease may be entirely impersonal; the care of a patient must be completely personal.” It is a mark of Peabody’s wisdom that it wasn’t until after reading his address that I discovered it was written in 1927, for example he writes “the amazing progress of science in its relation to medicine during the last thirty years,” a sentence that anyone could utter today. This is an illustration that sometimes in medicine, like in many spheres, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose – every era sees itself as unique and pivotal, doctors will always be busy, medical science will always be shattering old dogma and producing new dogma to be shattered in turn, and the doctor-patient relationship will always be at the heart of medicine. That may be true, but equally there is no room for complacency – it would be ostrich-like behaviour of the worst order to imagine that we’ll all muddle through somehow, that all our problems are purely imaginary, or simply part of some sort of natural order. In the same speech as that quoted above, Peabody said “medicine is not a trade to be learned but a profession to be entered.” The most profound challenge for general practice in the coming years is to maintain the balance between the art of healing and the science of medicine, to resist the temptation to view patients in mechanistic terms, to retain the special character of the doctor-patient bond despite the pressures from both within and without the profession. The various challenges that I have listed above are all serious, and are all inter-related. They all both contribute to and result from a new mood in society – a general suspicion of the institutions of the past, a new assertiveness. All the above challenges can be seen as a opportunity for growth and renewal; the old paternalistic medical order has crumbled, so let us build a new one in partnership with our patients.

Interview with Bret Easton Ellis, University Observer, Spring 1999

This was evidently before Christian Bale was particularly famous. Originally published in two parts, I have handily merged them together like so:
an interview with bret easton ellis, feb 25th 1999
"Ask him to roll up his sleeves," said an acquaintance when told I was to interview Bret Easton Ellis. “He has his name written in trackmarks on his arm.” This is typical of the myths surrounding Bret Easton Ellis. Since Less Than Zero, written while still a twenty-year-old freshman in Bennington College, Ellis has been a consistently controversial figure. 1991’s American Psycho was dropped by Simon & Schuster, boycotted by the National Organisation of Women and Ellis received death threats far more graphic than anything in the book. The Satanic Verses is the only other novel of the last decade which has caused comparable outrage. His new novel Glamorama deals with the fashion industry and our infatuation with beauty, as he has been quoted: "the fact that so little of our infatuation has to do with genuine accomplishment - but with what's basically known as 'cuteness' - is ugly"
Bret Easton Ellis is bigger and healthier-looking than expected, laidback and with a languid Southern Californian drawl, and in conversation has the same slightly rambling, slightly unfocused way of expressing himself of many of his characters. The interval between American Psycho and Glamorama has been filled with the whole Psycho controversy, the death of his father, the breakup of a seven-year relationship, a short story collection, and as he put it himself “a small problem with drink and drugs.” Despite all this and the rigours of a book tour, Ellis is relaxed and friendly, although he confesses to be nervous at the prospect of speaking in Trinity College's Edmund Burke Theatre: “it seems uptight to me; I just went into the hall and it has a very severe, academic aspect and all the dons are going to be there and I’m gonna be reading about supermodels and doing dope by this pool and breast implants and group sex… “ He trails off, waves a hand in the air, and emits a very So-Cal "HELLO?"
He is also slightly anxious about his plans for the evening: “I’m supposed to have dinner with Irvine Welsh. About half an hour ago I was supposed to do a photoshoot with him but he disappeared into a pub. I’m kind of thinking, ‘This cannot be an Irvine Welsh night, I cannot have what I think Irvine Welsh probably does on an average Thursday night. I have to get up very early, do some more interviews and catch a plane.” He is also slightly amused about one of our own cults of celebrity; "Everyone keeps telling me I'm staying in the 'Bono' Hotel.[presumably the Clarence] I don't get to see any of Dublin but at least I'm staying in the 'Bono' Hotel."
The last time he was in Dublin he didn't even get to stay the night. Do the rigours of book tours take their toll? “I find them incredibly stressful. And I noticed that when I took a bath earlier that so much hair had fallen out of my head that the bath was ringed with it, forgive the disgusting imagery. I get nervous rashes on my hands. The only time when stress really isn’t there is when you meet the people who come to see you read and are interested.”
The words "cult reputation" and "voice of a generation" are among the great media clichés of our time and have been applied to Ellis since his debut. I wonder did he ever feel like emulating that other "cult voice of a generation" JD Salinger and becoming a media-averse recluse? “I suppose if I had that inclination I would do it. It’s not a part of who I am and maybe later on I’ll feel that way. I guess I have a little bit of guilt when a publisher pays me for a book that I owe them to go out and promote the book and communicate my ideas about it. I tend to it for the publisher in many ways. In the best of all worlds I would love to be a John Grisham and stay at home in my room and let the book sell itself”
Ellis has been quoted as saying that Joyce’s Ulysses, which he read in college, was ‘the most exciting thing I ever read.’ I ask him how it affected his ideas about literature. “I can’t say it was an influence,” then he qualifies this, “Although in some ways I think everything you read does become an influence, an unconscious. What was so exciting about reading Ulysses was that there seemed to be no boundaries to what a writer could do. In so many other novels there seems to be a list of rules that you must follow in order to make a coherent novel. Breaking apart those rules is really thrilling for a young writer. People often find it funny when I say that Ulysses was the pivotal reading experience of my life because they can’t directly locate it in the work. I don’t think you can, but the inspiration that that book supplied was," he pauses, for the right word "limitless.” Don deLillo (who he regards as "the greatest American Writer", Joan Didion, and Hemingway are among his more direct influences.
Ellis did not intend to take eight years to write Glamorama, indeed he confesses to being "slightly embarrassed about taking that long to write a book about supermodels." Asked if the novel would be radically different if he had finished it in 1992 or 1994, before the OJ Simpson case and the Internet's magnification of the cult of media celebrity he replies “Well maybe there wouldn’t be this level of intense paranoia. The question really is would it have been a different book if American Psycho had been just another novel that came out without all the hysteria. There’s a definite paranoia that began to enter into the book after that whole debacle. But would it have been different. I don’t think so, it was very carefully structured from the start.”
The lingering impression left by Ellis’ fiction is the sheer superficiality, emptiness and spiritual desolation of American life; the title of Douglas Coupland's "Life After God" seems apposite. I ask if he feels that America is a post-religious society. “Underlying all the wildness in America is an incredible puritanical streak. It is a very religious country with over half of the population attending some other religious services. I think people now are more separating their religious life, finding peace in a higher being, but still understanding that all the constraints don’t need to have to apply in order to have a belief in religion. Finding a way to adapt religion so it’s not so strict. I don’t know is that’s ever going to happen, this post-religious mood. I guess the post religious mood is that people are now adapting religion to their own personal feelings and personal lives.”
Are you in any way religious yourself? “I was raised an agnostic and growing up in Los Angeles doesn’t help with religion. There's very little religion going on in LA. I have many Jewish friends in New York and there is something interesting to me in Judaism, although I wouldn't convert. But I’m not religious myself.”
The controversy that surrounded American Psycho was certainly similar in magnitude to that which surrounded The Satanic Verses, and was just as shocking since it took place among the liberal Western intelligentsia in this very decade. Patrick Bateman, the psycho of the title, lives in a world of awesome superficiality, where detailed descriptions of Armani suits and Whitney Houston albums are given equal weight to detailed descriptions of horrific murders. Few other novels so divide their readership. The comment board at www.amazon.com ranges from ". It justifies what (sic) the Nazis' burning of books. The one high point in the book is a scene in which the protagonist goes to a U2 concert. This book is just really bad" to the perhaps equally disturbing " this is my favorite book ever. anyone giving this a bad review should beware bateman..... american psycho rules....period! "
Unsurprisingly enough, next in my notes is “The Inevitable American Psycho Question” - do you look back in anger?: “The longer I read about the book and think about the book perhaps there’s a bit of me that thinks maybe I should have toned down some of the gore a little bit because it was so gory and upsetting for some people that it distracted them from what my intentions were. You can’t go back. The book is very representative of where I was in my life at that point. That was me and my feelings about my life and the world and I stand by it.”
Do you think that American Psycho will always be the first thing people associate with you? “I can’t imagine twice in a career a book having that kind of impact. I assume that book will be talked about more than anything else I have written. In a way, there’s nothing I can do about that. That’s fine. If people want to associate with me that book, at least there is a book they associate with me.” Have you heard the Manic Street Preachers song “Patrick Bateman”? “I heard it very late. It was recorded a long time ago but someone just slipped me a tape during the American tour. I put it on in the car driving from Milwaukee to Chicago and I was thinking, “My God, my life has turned out very strange” He is also curious about “some band called The Divine Comedy who mentioned my name in a song.”
Finally I ask him about the forthcoming film version of American Psycho, and specifically the prospect which had existed of Leonardo di Caprio jeopardising his matinee idol status by playing Patrick Bateman: “I was happy with it, I think he’s quite a good actor, I’m sorry, call me an idiot but I thought he was quite good in Titanic. His character was such a goody goody kind of guy, and I know he wanted to play it darker. I was quite happy, then quite disappointed when he pulled out.” But he pronounces himself happy with English actor Christian Bale (Jim in "Empire of the Sun" and more recently in Velvet Goldmine and Portrait of a Lady) …"he's very big, very physical"… and with the direction the film is following under the direction of Mary Harron ("I Shot Andy Warhol") Interesting that a woman is directing the adaptation of a book of which the National Organisation of Women urged boycott.
Are you worried about people seeing American Psycho as a film rather than as a novel? “Not worried at all. The version of script I read is so faithful to the book; all the dialogue is from the book, 95% of the film is from the book. In a way, I’m not worried about how people choose to see the work.” Ellis seems quite indifferent to how people perceive his work. Perhaps American Psycho and its attendant media hoopla have bred a sort of fatalism. He says that he "grew up" while writing Glamorama, going from the precocious author of Less Than Zero to a thirtysomething writer.
One of the characters in Ellis' short story collection "The Informers" talks about "a boredom so monumental it humbles." Ellis' American lives are extraordinarily empty and vacuous. Satirical and despairing, Ellis' insight into the cocaine heart of America and the Heart of Darkness in all of us makes him a writer worthy of attention.

Taking It Up The Banner

From my University Observer days, presumably written in late 98 or early 99. I'm not proud of the article title. 

Mirror from my former Geocities site

taking it up the banner

 When I came to College, I knew next to nothing about County Clare. They had won the Hurling All-Ireland the year before, Ennis and Shannon were there, and that was about it. Little was I to know that Clare would become the perfect illustration of the strange, postmodern blend of old and new cultural forces that have created the Ireland of today. The white heat of the information revolution and the white heat of All-Ireland hurling would merge in the banner in a massive, super combination of white heat. White heat that would burn indelibly into the National Consciousness that the Banner had arrived, and to prove it, it was here. It was once said that the Irish peasant of the 19th century may have been materially poor, but was as politically informed as any citizen of any land; the newspapers of the day were au fait with the latest trends in political thought. The information age perhaps isn't as new as we think. The award of the Information Age town title to Ennis in 1997 (beating off the considerable challenge of Castlebar, Kilkenny and Killarney) may have been an exercise in corporate PR (and possibly an exercise in various other activities as well, if rumours in Castlebar are to be believed) but it is symbolic of the New Ireland of the C***** T**** and an armada of lazy magazine articles and promotional copy for industry; young, dynamic, forward-looking blah blah blah. This New Clare was also seen in the 1992 election of Dr Moosajee Bhamjee of the Labour party as a TD. Whatever your political convictions, the idea that Clare, which at times has been a Fianna Fail four-seater, would elect a Labour psychiatrist of Indian Extraction to the Dail would once have been as likely as an International Airport in a bog in Mayo. Dr Bhamjee's subsequent attempt to combine his consultancy with representing the people of Clare in the Dail and unwillingness to fight another election may tamper my theory somewhat; but nevertheless the principle remains that things would never be the same in Ireland again. Shannon has developed a sizeable community of refugees, which in a perfect world would only enhance the cosmopolitanism of the place. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. 1995 was the breakthrough year for Clare hurling in one sense, yet the game was an obsession for generations. Clare's victory, their colour, spirit and panache, was the moment when the GAA threw off the shackles of the cultural inferiority complex and stood up and took its place as possibly the greatest and most vibrant part of Irish culture. Clare hurling, for so long an endless story of heartbreak and humiliation, became the most extraordinary epic of Irish sport. Clare hurlers became like rockstars in the Banner County; the Sparrow, Jamesie, Davy Fitz, Brian Lohan, and the Brian Epstein to the team's Beatles, Ger Loughnane. Loughnane helped shake off the inferiority complex the team had towards the so-called aristocrats, the Tipps and Corks, and instilled a new-self belief. Last summer saw Clare go from media darlings to villains and Lougnane go from a generally popular manager to being demonised as snarling and arrogant after his energetic defence of his team and attack on his enemies on Clare FM. Loughnane's bile was hilarious (who could forget his ridiculous claim that the treatment of Colin Lynch was "the worst human rights abuse of all time", or his account of three priests in Semple Stadium who were overheard announcing that "Clare were tinkers, Loughnane was a tramp and Clare were on drugs") yet it was hard not feel that here was another aspect of the New Ireland; the media dictating simplistic, stereotyped roles. Clare's story was a romance; their label was "plucky underdogs" and when it became obvious that their success owed much to ruthlessness and toughness they had overstepped their defined role and the knives came out for Loughnane. But the colour and sheer spirit that Clare hurling brought out was the most heartening aspect of the New Ireland; a pride and love of life rooted in the local community. Recently former GAA executive Jimmy Smith published a collection of "Ballads of the Banner" in a book of the same name. These lyrics were sung unaccompanied and contain considerable wit and insight. Think how much social history is contained in the lines "Sue Ellen like a Turk on the farm is working/Without getting a great deal of help from the men." Or "The men who founded the GAA/Would scorn the modern parasitic way." Or the romantic vision of "Her step is light, her waist is slim/The lass that loves a hurler." These Ballads of the Banner are full of life in all its facets. Clare is a microcosm of the New Ireland in many ways, not all positive; the Brendan O'Donnell murders in 1993 (EDITORS: NOT SURE ABOUT THE DATE) seemed to mark the beginning of an era of increasingly horrible murders. It was portrayed in the media as murder in Paradise, in "God's own country." Yet again this is not really anything new; delve into the archives and you'll find that, far from being a haven of purity and virtue, a demon seed of violence always existed. The fratricidal killings of the Civil War have been erased from our memory, but not from our collective unconscious; barely a lifetime ago this country was torn by as bitter and vicious a Civil War as has been seen anywhere. Yet Clare is a great place. It epitomises many positive aspects of the New Ireland better than anywhere; with the Information Age town, with the very Sean Lemass-era Shannon Airport, and with a new self-confidence in their hurling team, in the traditional music and dancing which has always been strong there. A New Ireland in touch with the wider world and aware of it yet also unafraid to be itself and proud of its own uniqueness. A New Ireland that isn't perfect, but then again we like people for their good qualities but love them despite their faults. Clare is the lab for the New Ireland, the arena where the future of this country is being forged. And the people are dead sound