Joseph O’Connor: Free State Special
en
February 01, 2025
TLDR: Author Joseph O'Connor discusses challenges of Nazi resistance, female torment, and Kerryman Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty in his book The Ghosts of Rome. A podcast on Free State Special.

In the latest episode of the Free State podcast, host Dion Fanning converses with acclaimed author Joseph O'Connor about his newest book, The Ghosts of Rome. The episode explores the fascinating narrative surrounding the Rome Escape Line, focusing on the extraordinary rescue efforts to smuggle Allied soldiers past the Nazis into the Vatican.
Key Themes Explored
The Rome Escape Line and Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty
- Joseph O’Connor's book continues the story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a notable figure who risked his life during the Nazi occupation of Rome to help save thousands.
- O’Flaherty was deeply committed not only to his religious duties but to the protection of those in danger, showcasing incredible courage and resourcefulness.
- The book highlights the extraordinary lives of individuals like O’Flaherty, who could have faced severe consequences for their actions, including execution.
The Role of Women in the Resistance
- O'Connor shifts focus in The Ghosts of Rome to the often overlooked contributions of women in the resistance. Characters such as the Contessa Giandini and Nori Danhe play crucial roles in the escape line, aiding in rescuing fugitives through their societal connections and bravery.
- These women exhibited notable courage, often risking everything to help others.
- O’Connor emphasizes that their stories add a rich layer to the understanding of resistance efforts during this dark time.
Insights on Writing and Literary Influence
O’Connor’s Journey as a Writer
- Reflecting on his journey, O'Connor discusses how Star of the Sea marked a pivotal point in his writing career, teaching him valuable lessons about creating a compelling narrative.
- His work is acclaimed for its depth and ability to weave intricate historical details with engaging storytelling, themes he explores in his current book.
- He encourages aspiring writers to engage with the texts of their influences, suggesting practical exercises like imitation to grasp the nuances of good writing.
Themes of Identity and Belonging
- The podcast touches upon how identity, particularly Irish identity, is central to O'Connor's work. His writing often explores themes of belonging and the complexities that arise from historical narratives.
- O'Connor reflects on Ireland's historical immigration patterns and how they’ve shaped contemporary views on immigration.
- He observes a disconnect between the country’s past as a nation of emigrants and current sentiments towards immigrants arriving in Ireland.
Historical Context and Relevance
The Famine's Legacy and Modern Ireland
- The discussion reveals a layered understanding of the Irish famine's impact, not only on historical narratives but also on modern ideological perspectives regarding immigration and community.
- O'Connor articulates that understanding Ireland's historical struggles can inform current attitudes toward newcomers, urging a more compassionate approach in societal narratives.
Contemporary Issues and Political Landscape
- The podcast delves into the current political climate in Ireland regarding immigration and public policy, suggesting that political failures have contributed to rising tensions and protests against refugees and asylum seekers.
- O'Connor underscores the importance of nuanced conversations around these topics, advocating for a reminder of Ireland’s own history of displacement and hardship.
Conclusion
Joseph O’Connor's dialogue on the Free State podcast is a profound exploration of courage, identity, and the human capacity for empathy amid adversity. The conversation coalesces around pivotal historical moments, inviting listeners to reflect on their narratives while reigniting conversations about the resilience of individuals who risked everything for freedom.
Key Takeaways
- Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty's story serves as a reminder of the vital role individuals play in humanitarian efforts.
- The courage of women in the resistance during WWII deserves recognition and respect.
- Writing, especially about historical themes, can greatly benefit from engaging deeply with past literary influences.
- Ireland's contemporary responses to immigration should be framed within the context of its own historical migrations, fostering a sense of empathy.
Listeners are encouraged to read The Ghosts of Rome for a more in-depth understanding of these themes and the real-life heroes who shaped history.
Was this summary helpful?
You're the only Dion I've ever met. Really? Yeah. So was it Dion Busicos? Dion Busicos was where the name came from. I don't know how big a fan they were of Dion Busicos, or father was of Dion Busicos, but... Yeah, he was Dionysius Busicos. Yeah. There was a Chicago gangster called Diono Banyan, who I discovered then, when I was younger, I was delighted. That's a lovely name. It's surprising you don't hear it more often. Well, it's a good name now when you're a kid.
He hated it. Yeah. Was there a kind of 1950s very clean-cut pop fellow Dion and the Belmonts? Yes, yeah. And Dion is something the wanderer. The wanderer, of course. And then he went on to make a couple of great albums and he kind of got darker and he ended up, I think he cleaned up but he became a heroin addict and he made a couple of, he made one brilliant album that was much more out there than the kind of, the kind of clean ones.
There is, yeah, I'm the kind of guy who's there. That's the one. The quo did it. That's right. I think we're good to go.
Joseph O'Connor, you're very welcome to the Free State Podcast. It's lovely to be here with you, Dion. Thanks for having me in. No, it's a real honor, and we're not going to talk. He said you were a little bit worried in case we might talk a lot about sport. Yes, a little bit, yeah, because Oscar Wilde was once asked if he played any outdoor sports, and he said, I have sometimes played dominoes outside Parisian cafes.
And that's probably more than I have done. But I was just actually something as we were waiting to come in there, and it's just that amazing thing you see when you see a practitioner come to life. You saw a bit of a script in the studio there, I think it was a bit of John McGarrin, and you were immediately drawn to us.
Yeah, well, it's a story that the text is just on the lectern there, because somebody's coming in to record the piece. And I noticed the title, it's called The Country Funeral, and it's one of John McGahan's truly great short stories. And I love his work. It was very important to me as a kid. And it kind of played a certain role in my own early teenage development as a writer, because there were a lot of books in the house.
And my parents loved the kind of contemporary Irish writers who were around then. And 1972, a book of McGahran stories came out called Getting Through. And I read the book when I was 10 or 12. And I loved it. And there was a particular story in a called Sierra Leone that I used to come back to. And it was around the time I had this longing to write. But I couldn't think of anything to write about. So it's pent up.
feelings of creativity and no subject. I couldn't actually see anything in my world worth writing about. So one night I got the McGahan story Sierra Leone and I wrote it out word for word in a school copy book and there was a thrill and a kind of taboo about that. I was just wanting to know what it felt like physically to write those beautiful sentences and then a couple of nights later
I rewrote it and I changed some of the punctuation and the next week I rewrote it and I changed some of the characters names. It's a story about a couple having a troubled love affair and they meet in a pub in rainy Dublin once a week.
away from the part of Dublin where they work, so nobody will know them. They meet in this little pub and they discuss their complicated affair. And when you're a young teenager, complicated affair is interesting to you a lot. I remember changing the man's name to my dad's name and the woman's name to my mother's name.
And then I changed the man's name to Jack Mulcahy, who was the great name of the man who lived beside us in Arnold Grove, Glen and Geary. And over this sort of next two years, I must have rewritten that story, physically rewritten it a couple of dozen times until at some point.
the balance tilted and it became this beautiful John McGowan short story became my first very bad story and when once in later life I had the privilege of meeting McGowan and I told him this tale of desecration and he replied gravely I think you owe me a pint.
But he's a wonderful writer, and yeah, it was nice to see that little text. That's an amazing story, so that's how you kind of almost gave yourself a belief in writing. Yeah, well, it's a bit like, I suppose, it's the canteenager posing who wants to be a pop star posing in the mirror with the play in the tennis racket. It was just what is it physically like to write out those
um, sentences and then the funny thing that happens when you begin to change things when a comma becomes a full stop, what a huge change that can be and, um, all of that. So, I mean, I just drifted into doing it, but now in my role as a teacher, I run the creative writing program at the university on Emric. Um, an imitation exercise is often something that I would suggest to the students.
Okay, very interesting. Now, we will talk about your new book, The Ghost of Rome and the trilogy, that is the second book in a moment. But I want to go back a little bit before we do that, because I saw you saying that the star of the sea is somewhere you consider it your first book. And like so many people would have read that book and loved it and are resonated with so many people, not just here, but around the world. But could you explain to me what you meant by that?
Well, my early books were kind of slim, funny, trying to be funny. Novels, very contemporary, sat in the kind of Ryanair generation, I suppose, of Irish immigrants to London. A new type of Irish immigrant who was going as much for kind of good times and self-discovery as for any other reason. So they're full of young Irish people in nightclubs in Kilburn, having a great time.
And I suppose that's the kind of prose that I was known for. And you know, I was happy enough doing it, but for a long time I had wanted to write a novel about the Irish famine. And I waited because I knew that I wasn't a good enough writer to do it yet. So Star of the Sea is my fifth or sixth novel, and I had to become a better writer than I am in order to write it.
So it taught me a lot about how to write a novel. It's much longer than my earlier books. It's far more serious. It's far more textured. There's a lot of multiple narrators in Star of the Sea. It's told in different kind of time zones or time sequences. The main narrator who's an American journalist called Grant Lee Dixon is looking back on the events of the famine from an interim of sort of 40 or 50 years.
But there's also, you know, the captain on the ship, the star of the sea is a famine ship, journeying from Liverpool via cove to the United States. He's writing the captain's log, the register, every day. And he hasn't got time to write beautiful sentences. He's writing just very jagged, diaristic style about who's on the ship and how many people die today, who was born today.
All of that, it has newspaper articles, it has the words of ballads, it has little sequences in Irish and different registers of language. So, because I knew it would be this big book that I also knew that it would have to have a page turning quality, because I'm an impatient reader of long books.
So it had to have all of that kind of variety of voice and register and tone, but at the same time have enough kind of propulsive energy that it would make the reader turn the pages. So it was my first novel in that sense, because it was the first time I kind of switched on everything. I was okay at
some of those things in my previous books, but it was the first time I had to be good at everything as a writer. And the subject matter, like when you were writing that, I thought it was 2002, and like, where do you think the famine, our understanding of the famine was then, because it seems to be one of those periods in history that
Our understanding of it is deepening in some ways, but equally it's becoming always, it's kind of been more contentious enough for grabs and people want to understand it more, but at the same time, other people want to simplify it.
Well, it'll always be contested and it'll always be discussed and there's still very important historiographical work being done on the famine in terms of individual areas of Ireland where it affected life and death in other ways than it did 10 miles down the road. And there's an endless kind of academic literature about the famine. I came to it, I suppose.
It goes way back into childhood for me when we were kids growing up in suburban Dublin. My father, Sean, used to take us every year to Connemara on holiday. And we stayed in the same house that he had stayed in when he was a boy, so from the time of when he was eight. And my dad is 87 now. He doesn't travel as much as he used to, but he's still very much in touch with this family in the same house, in the same field, and outside it's biddled in Connemara.
And when you lived in Dunleery, in the mid 1970s, Conomerra was kind of an exotic place. It was a six or eight hour drive to get there. And it was strange and beautiful. The people looked a bit different, and they spoke Askuelga. They didn't have television.
In the early years of our visits there, they didn't have running water. So the banity would go to the well every day. And one of your treats as a visiting kid would be you'd be allowed to go with her and get the water. A very different experience living there, I would imagine, in the middle of November than it was for a little kid visiting in July and August. But locals would talk about this event, the famine.
with an odd kind of recency, as though it had happened a couple of months ago. And they were talking about people who had gone to Springfield, Massachusetts. That's the place where people from this part of Connemara went to. They had all gone there. And they would point to features in the landscape where this kind of
Drumlin' was a mass grave, and there was a deserted village, not far away, where simply everybody had died. And there was this song, and that story, and this piece of folklore. And when you went back to Donneri, you didn't hear about this. You know, it was only something that I associated with Connemara. So does that study history in college and became interested in the kind of political debates about how the famine was?
taught and interpreted. And as recently as my own school days, which isn't a million years ago, I left school in 1981, the famine was still very much taught through a sort of prism of anglophobia. And the famine was a way of teaching young Irish teenagers who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.
And we all knew who the bad guys were, and all of the Irish had behaved with saintly courage and comradeship, and all of the English had been devilish. So I was interested in that kind of debate, and then it was simply the personal thing. I went to live in London, I came back to live in Dublin, my hometown in the early 90s, and it was the beginnings of immigration.
to Ireland. It was the first time people started to come here in noticeable numbers. And if you're someone on my edge, that was just so strange. You know, the idea that people would actually want to come to this kind of funny, rainy, little failed place that didn't really work as a state. And it only kind of functioned at all because a couple of hundred thousand people left every few years.
But what was so odd is that, you know, where I thought people would be welcomed. There weren't quite, you know, there was resistance to people coming to Ireland pretty quickly. Not in huge numbers and it's not that the Irish were racist or xenophobic or anything like that.
But the figures for people's views about people coming here were kind of the same as they were in Britain or France or former colonial countries. And that interested me just as to why. And it made me think, so is this history worth anything when it comes to the point where you might test it. And so out of that, that was the background star of the sea. And then like all novels that are any good, it started with something far more to do with the writing.
which was them. I was actually, I was trying to write a very different book, a contemporary thriller, kind of cop thriller, set in Celtic, Tiger, Ireland, if you remember that. And I found out nice when I was taking a rest from that book that this other character was kind of walking up and down in my head, this 19th century man on the deck of a ship.
And it often happens when you're starting on a book that you get ideas for other books, because your imagination's open and you're kind of trawling round in the depths. And, you know, Yates says, there's an old poetry comes from the foul, ragon bone shop of the heart. And that's a, that's a ragon bone shop. You spend a lot of time in, you know, you wouldn't know what you're going to dig up. But as the weeks went by, I found that that character walking up and down the ship just wouldn't leave me alone. And finally, it was Christmas Eve that year.
I specifically remember sitting down at the desk and thinking, well, I'll write a couple of thousand words about this guy on the ship. And I was kind of hoping he'd go away. I was hoping that would be that. But what came out was the prologue of Star of the Sea and Pius Mulvey, the central character of that book, who ties all of the stories together, a man from Karna in Kanamara. And off we went, yeah.
And then you say, you know, it developed its own story. But the book itself, then like the success of it, I got a life of its own and it seems to mean so much to so many people. Yeah, well, I was very, very surprised by the success of the book. I had written books previously that I thought would be more commercially successful than they were.
I thought started to see that the reviews would be good. Like I knew it was a good book, but it was a kind of out of character for me. It was long and it was serious and historically sat and all of that. So I thought that it would sink like a stone. But, you know, it ended up sold more than a million copies and it's published in 40 languages. And there's still, like it's 20 years ago now, there still is never a week.
where I don't get a letter from someone that started to see. And it was a great kind of blessing in my life as a writer, and it came along at a time when we had two young children, so the security that it brought was great. But the main gratitude that I feel towards Star of the Sea is that it's the book that taught me how to write a novel.
And when you say like, you know, there was a different type of book that when you have that success, do you? And maybe more when you have that when you create a book, as you say, that may taught you how to write a novel like that, do you feel, Oh, maybe I am a serious writer rather than a comic writer or whatever you, wherever you define yourself. Your confidence, you know, and I think all writers live their lives with, you know, on one shoulder, there's overconfidence.
And on the other, there is imposter syndrome, you know, and those two have evil twins, skip along, hand in hand, in Europe, subconscious. But with Star of the Sea, I suppose it did make me feel well I can do this, and it was a number one book in Britain.
for 12 weeks. It was the higher selling literary novel of that year. And that meant something to me in some trivial way. I shouldn't bother thinking about these things, but it mattered to me that it was a number one book in Britain.
It satisfied something, or it mattered to me in some way that I didn't fully understand. I remember my late father-in-law, John Casey, telling me that his car had broken down, and he got it into a garage in slough in Bedfordshire in England. And the mechanic came from the shed at the back of the forecourt in his greasy overalls, clutching his greasy
copy of Star of the Sea, and I remember John ringing me up and saying, forget the Pulitzer Prize, he's made it in slough. And if that's high praise to me, I think every writer wants to write one huge bestseller.
There were weeks when it sold 35 or 40,000 copies a week, which would be more than some of my previous books had sold altogether. And I think it really mattered to people. And a lot of people got in touch with me about it and still do. And I think it's taught on college courses and stuff all over the world.
And it's lovely that something you made up in your study sitting at home out of a mix of uncertainty and skill, you know, ended up doing what it did. So I'm very proud of it.
And does that still precedes that feeling? Are those two forces, the overconfidence and the anxiety? When you start a book or when you're in the process of it, do you still have to wrestle with them? Yeah, but I suppose with time and age and experience, what you do is you just manage them. I mean, you accept that as my good friend and colleague, Donald Ryan, says a successful writer's career is pockmarked with failure and anxiety.
That's just the way it is and in a way that's the way it should be. You should be worried about it. To write a book is a big deal and you should give it your absolute best and if it ever gets to the point where it's less than 100% effort from you you should probably go and do something else because there's enough mediocre books in the world.
already. So it's just, you know, if you go and see a psychotherapist as the concept of the inner child, you know, and what you have to kind of do as a writer is have the inner bouncer. There's the other version of you that stands at the door of the room in which you work. And when the devil of self-doubt comes down the corridor, you need to have bouncer for avatar of you going.
It's okay that you're here. It's okay that you're in the house. You're not coming into this room. You go back to the attic or the cellar and, you know, do your devil thing, but you're not actually coming in here. And that's the way it works. You just deal with it. Can I ask you then, you said there about how Ireland, you know, how you expected Ireland to view immigration and people coming in.
And whatever it was like 20 years ago, that pattern doesn't seem to have reversed in any way. We've seen the rise of people in Ireland protesting. The Ireland is full, all this kind of stuff.
When you talk about that history, we know what is motivating a lot of those people, and we know the combination of anger and hatred and fear that brings people to it. But I'm more interested in what you feel about as a country, why we haven't been able to articulate, given our own history of immigration.
Well, we haven't articulated that in kind of almost in a public level, like in a policy level, if you like, or the government level.
I suppose of Quibble with the word we, you know, Connor Cruz or Brian used to say every sentence about Irish history, which I know isn't what you're talking about. You say every sentence about Irish history that begins with the word we is not true. And I mean, there were communities, the length and breadth of Ireland, where people from other countries and other cultures have been welcomed with open arms. And they're very, very successful stories of assimilation, the length and breadth of Ireland, and in every
I mean, I can remember when my kids were still in school, my eldest son used to play basketball, so I spent a lot of my time driving him to schools around the new towns in Dublin and me then killed air. And you would see kids who'd been born in other countries and who looked as though they came from other places out on the basketball court and usually beat the shies out of people who'd been born in Ireland.
and then all, you know, clapping each other on the back afterwards. So there are great, great stories of success. And I think it's a huge failure of the current government by which, I mean, the government that we've had in some version for the last number of years, and that this non-problem was allowed to be portrayed as a problem largely through the failure of the housing policy and the conflation of those two issues.
led to situations of crisis and protest last summer that I think the moment has passed now. I mean, we've had an election since so people have been given the chance to kind of register the feelings about this and most people did not vote for people protesting against them.
immigration. So I think it's a more complex and more nuanced picture than the media sometimes presents. And I understand why it's because protests are a big story, whereas people going to the local educate together or the local national school in Gort or Ennis are not going to see that as much.
But I think it's mainly political failure. But on the level of kind of culture, I think people have been very welcoming up and down the land and will continue to be. I know that Ireland is not full and that we should actually be doing more.
Because you said before. Just as a final note, of course, one of the things that you notice when you do historical research of the kind that I did for Star of the Sea is that all countries have their founding myths. And the founding myth of the United States is the Statue of Liberty. And, you know, bring your poor and your hungry and your huddled masses.
and they will be welcomed. And that's a beautiful myth, but that's not what happened. The Irish, when they went to the US, cities like New Orleans and New York, were on the receiving end of some pretty barbaric racism, rhetoric. The original copies of Star of the Sea, the original editions, include the kind of hideous caricature cartoons from British and American magazines of the time.
of Irish people portraying them as apes, bringers of disease. You can't trust the men. It's so very, very familiar rhetoric. They will never assimilate. They come here to supplant us. So there's nothing new under the sun in that sense.
And it's sort of, again, it's something that is, you know, and I accept your point about not using the term we, but it's around the world in various forms, this idea that multiculturalism has failed, all these kind of ideas that are actually at odds with most people, as you say, when you go around this country or you go around, I lived in London for 20 years, when you go around England,
You see multiculturalism actually succeeding most places. Yes, and I mean, I do think in Ireland, I think there was a very troubling moment last summer. Yeah. And you will have seen on your walk to and from this studio in the middle of Dublin City encampments and tents were very near the centre where people seeking international protection were camped in large numbers and tents being burnt and
All of that. What I would say is that we're not quite at the stage where, like in France and in other European countries, there are strong right-wing parties whose main policy is a focus on anti-immigration. I know there were some voices and there were some successes in the local election, but we have had a general election now.
and the public have decided in their wisdom that they'd like another version of what we currently have. So I think Ireland has become a kind of radically centrist country. It's very interesting where we are. I think we've kind of decided as an electorate to the extent that you can analyze it at all.
we don't really want extremes of either end of the spectrum for the moment, that we'd certainly like to see how things go, and we'd like to keep it reasonably in the center for the next while. Perhaps I would be very surprised if Ireland ever has a non coalition government again.
Perhaps maybe without too much enthusiasm, they might have just decided a bit like the line about democracy, that this is the least worst option. I think that is what they decided, and I think people can see that while the government, there's no doubt our government contains very admirable people, and I admire people in many of the political parties, and I admire anyone who'd put themselves forward for election.
And there have been huge successes, but there have been spectacular failures that will alter life for all of us if they're not fixed. And housing is the main one. Issues in the health service, particularly around mental health and particularly around mental health among young people, which is something my family knows something about and has been on the receiving end of.
There's an interview in one of the newspapers yesterday from a consultant psychiatrist saying you need to be really, really seriously mentally ill now before you'll ever see the inside of a hospital. So like we're facing a crossroads where like we're a very wealthy country and you know the government are going to have to decide whether giving money to every single child born in the land wealthy or not.
is a morally acceptable priority compared to fixing some of these things that really do need to be fixed. And that is something, you know, you talk about mental health, you look at housing, you look at these things where anyone who, like, housing is something that affects so many people, nearly everybody under the age of 35, 40 is struggling to know how they will afford a home.
But then the mental health stuff, anyone who has to interact with public services knows that awful feeling of being told, you might see somebody here's an appointment in two years time, three years time. It's an extraordinary
way for things to be not functioning. Well, they're not functioning and it's not acceptable and it will have to be fixed. I think the patience of the electorate will run out and then we will be in trouble.
because then people will look to extremes. I mean, the housing situation, it's not actually acceptable that when Ireland was a poor country, when my parents got married in the 1950s, and there had recently been, you know, TB in Ireland. Many families in Ireland had somebody who actually died of this eradicable disease.
and hundreds of thousands of people left the country every year. And we were only relatively recently engaged from or emerged from vicious civil war and were poor. We were able to build the housing estates around Dublin, where my grandparents were moved to, from the liberties out to Keep Road in Kremlin, hundreds of thousands of houses. It was a completely
normal expectation when my parents got married that one salary would be enough for you to have a house. Now, everybody has to work all of the time. It's still not. The town's up and down the west of Ireland where there are no young people. They're all in Australia because they don't want to live in their mammy's box room anymore.
And that's just not sustainable. So I think the electorate have said to the government, okay, like we buy that the rate of house building in fairness is increasing, but it's nowhere near where it needs to be and needs to be a huge national priority.
And it's funny because it's a different type of immigration. You know, when you talked about going to London, when you know, and I went to London, you know, I wouldn't have classed myself as an immigrant in a sense. I was going there for to enjoy myself. And I did that. But now, you know, people are going to Australia and it is, there are jobs for them here, but there isn't a quality of life for them here.
Yeah, well, it's again, I saw another piece in one of the papers last week from the young woman saying she was going to move to Australia because she said, I don't have the energy to live in Ireland. It's just too much of a struggle, you know, all of the time.
There are great things about the country, and culture is one of them, and how people talk is another. And there still is a kind of courtesy and respect among us, and we're still a very stable society. And to share achievements of Ireland, a very young country, are by no means to be disregarded. But I think a couple of areas have emerged where there needs to be serious improvement. And I believe there will be, like when I was a kid,
people used to say, and I used to believe that Northern Ireland would never be sorted out. That's just one of those things that will always be there. That's like Ireland's Middle East, and it'll just always be there. It'll be there when I'm a grandfather and when my children are grandparents. But it was, you know, it was largely sorted because there was political will and there was effort. There's nothing that can't be sorted, but those things need to be.
We might come back to some of those topics, but I want to talk about your new book, The Ghosts of Rome. And if you don't mind also, my father's house, you know, because I know this is the second part of the trilogy. And many people will have read my father's house and loved it and will be eagerly
I'm looking forward to this book, but I want to talk to you a little bit for those who haven't read it and you might, you know, I don't use any need to start with my father's eyes. I think you can read them all independently, but I want to ask you a little bit just about the main character in the first book. First, pure clarity, pure clarity.
Now, I cheated a little bit on this one. I know the Oflarities. So, I talked to my senior of the Oflarities, Grant Nephew, Rory, who will be listening to this, I'm sure, so I need to name check them. And they're very delighted with how you portray them, but his story is an incredible story.
It's an amazing story, yeah. So Hugh was born, he was actually, there's always somebody who comes to a reading from Cork who says he was not from Kerry. I said that, I said that, I said that to Rory the other day, he got, you know, the only thing that mattered more than anything, the only thing that mattered to him is the Kerry identity. He used me, I have learned that, so he was born in Cork. He taught of himself as a Kerry man, through and through. He was brought up in Kalarney, his father was a golf.
professional, and Hugh was carried all the way. He was born in 1898. He, in his 20s, went to train to be a schoolteacher. And in his later 20s, he went to become a Catholic priest, unusual at the time, when most fellas becoming priests went in a bit earlier. He went to news 26 to 27. A very bright man, very scholarly, went off to Rome to work in the Curia, which is the Vatican.
civil service. He did three PhDs in the course of his life and I think he would have liked to be in Rome reading the holy books in the Vatican library and teaching and lecturing in Latin which he used to do. Are you giving the lecture in the Latin language?
I would like to do all that, but found himself in Rome in the late 1930s. The Nazis are advancing into Italy and a little bit later than that.
March into Rome, surround the city, and Hugh is living in the Vatican city, which people have been to Rome will know is an independent country. The Vatican state became the world's smallest country in 1929, and it was neutral during the war. So Hugh realised that if he could smuggle fugitives from the Nazis into the Vatican city, that he would be able to save them because the Nazis wouldn't come across the border into St. Peter's Square.
So he put together this remarkable group of people who, you know, they're not age priests, they're, you know, people of different religious backgrounds, women and men, atheists, Jews, and Delia Murphy, who's a professional singer, the wife of Ireland's ambassador, shouldn't be involved with this group at all because Ireland is a neutral country, but she becomes centrally involved.
And the 7 or 8 of them, through the course of the Nazi occupation, which is about 8 months and saved thousands of lives, will never know the verifiable number, but people have estimated that 7 or 8,000 lives.
So he was cunning, resourceful. He knew the geography of Rome, like the back of his hand. He knew every back street, and every alley, and every hidden room, and every tunnel. And just remarkable personal courage.
that Hughes priesthood would not have saved him if he'd been caught by the Gestapo. We know the Rome Gestapo murdered at least two priests in the course of the occupation to cooperate with fugitives was punishable by death. And he showed amazing courage. So I first heard this story in Kerry.
Years and years ago, like in my 20s, probably the first or second time, I attended the Listole Writers Week. Did you hear it from John B. King? I may have invented that, I've heard it from John B. King, but it might have been in John B.'s bar, you know, I don't know, but the writer in me would like to say, yes, John B. sat me down as a young fellow and told me the story of, you know, a flarity. I can't swear that it's true, but I do know that I heard it first in Listole.
And it was in the context of him being, you know, a great man from Kerry. And it just never went away. You know, in the way it works with me probably because I trained, you know, I was a journalist, the first kind of writing that I did in my 20s. I was working for McGill and the Sunday treatment. So I always have ideas. I don't wait for the muse to kind of come. Like most journalists, I always have a few notions floating around. And Hugh was one of them. So it was something to do with the
Covid lockdown, it kind of intensified the desire that I felt to write Hugh's story, maybe because there's a lot in my father's house about kind of borders and boundaries. And remember, like, it started in Ireland where we could go 5k.
And then at 2K, an unusual thing for us. We're not too mad on authority, and suddenly an Irish police officer could stop you and ask you, where are you going? Very new stuff for us to get our heads around. And by no means compare it to what you and his escape line went through, but something about being confined in a very small territory. And yeah, the heroic behavior of these people to try and save as many fugitives as they could.
And he also, as you mentioned, Ireland, you mentioned it in terms of Delia Murphy, Kiernan, but Ireland being neutral, he was also attracting the ire of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, somebody warned that he might maybe appear in a concentration camp might do him some good.
Yeah, you might learn a thing or two if he was put in a concentration camp, which is an incredible thing for the Irish government to say about one of its citizens. But I think he had that kind of unusual form of courage where, like I don't think you would necessarily have disagreed with that. He was by no means a kind of radical. He was a rather conservative, very obedient priest, like he wasn't a liberation theologian or that. He probably did think.
that he shouldn't be doing it. But the kind of courage where I think even if his friends or his enemies or the pope or if God said, don't do this, I think he would have just had to do it. I think it's the carry in him. He just would have had to do it. He never spoke about it much. As far as I know, in the course of Hughes entire life, he only gave one interview about his work.
The family have been very kind to me, and they've allowed me to see and have copies of all of his private correspondence, which is an amazingly gracious thing to do. So I have a real sense of him that you get from somebody's writing. Just a likable, warm, curious man loves sport. He would have been great on this podcast.
He loves write very passionately about golf and boxing. Listening to boxing bouts from Madison Square Garden on the little radio in his room in the Vatican, which must have been amazing to kind of visualize boxing. Of the radio, played golf was a good golfer, loved rugby, loved the movies, loved gangster movies, the opera, friends who were women and men,
incredibly unjudgmental, you know, just very relaxed about people of other persuasions and other identities. And it was just a great pleasure to spend time with them right in my father's house and then the ghosts of Rome, which is the sequel. And there's a lot of actually knowing, there's a lot of that personality in all the authorities, like, you know, his
Catherine, his grand niece, made a documentary about him. But they do all have that, and they love sport. And you haven't even mentioned Kerry football, which I think is probably the thing that they... Well, he was absolutely devoted to the green and gold, and it's...
It's a lovely thing and his letter is back to Kalarani from the Vatican, how he's always asking how the local little club has done and he loves to kind of town gossip and, you know, twos do and what with who, just really likable. I asked
Judge Hugh of Flaherty is a few Hugh of Flaherty, so it gets confusing. The judge who wouldn't mind me saying is now in his 80s and an excellent gentleman and great company. You're always, when you're constructing a character, trying to find their flaw, because particularly if they're saintly,
They won't work as a character unless you have something about them that's not so saintly. So I went on and on and on, that's Judge Hugh J. Emmett, he was very loyal and he didn't want to tell me. He finally told me, well Hugh had been a schoolmaster and he could be a little bit schoolmasterly, like he could talk to you, particularly about sport, like he had his views and that was that.
And the other little thing is, and he's always writing to people back in Kalarini saying, just send me some tickets for the Irish sweepstakes. So I just loved about him that he had a little bit of the gambling kind of gene. I just really, really likable, warm man.
Yeah. It's extraordinary even not like, you know, his life was obviously incredibly, you know, unusual and heroic. But that thing of the priesthood, like I found some letters of an uncle of mine who was a priest. My aunt has all these letters. I didn't find she found them.
and you know that sense and he was in Africa and he was everywhere but the things that are like and he wrote so vividly and I don't know what it is about like if it was something you do have been taken away from these places and being in solitude but they write so he wrote so vividly about the details of the community he came from which was like a farm and awfully and you write about it's one letter about you know Christmas Eve he'd be remembering
early Christmas Eve in the farm. And there's this incredible detail and he's sitting somewhere in Africa. Same with you. He writes about the shops and the streets and the characters in Clarnie. Somehow he comes across a tenor or a fiverr or tenor and he sends it back one year at Christmas to his father.
His lovely relationship with both of his parents. And he says in the letter, I don't want you to tell a man, but this is for a bottle of whiskey. And I don't want you to spend it on any other reason. I don't want you to give it to the poor. I want you to get a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes. And you know, you enjoy that. And then the great vividness with which he writes about Rome. And he clearly just loved Rome. And it must have felt.
I mean, if you came from a fairly monochrome, rural Ireland, let's say, at that time, and you're a believing Catholic, I mean, to have gone to Rome most have felt like diving into a reef of wonders, and like it's the world capital. But I think he also just loved walking around Rome in kind of civvies and looking at people and looking at food and the market stalls and the smell of
Garlic and tomato sauce and go into the opera. It's in my father's house for a couple of pennies, a couple of lira. You could go to the opera in the afternoons and watch the orchestra rehearsing.
And Hugh used to love to do that. It just got a great kick out of the curiosity of life. It made him a really interesting and likable person to write about. But it means it's my version of it. I know that. It's funny, because my uncle had two great... He went to Dafrika and he loved Africa and he loved Kenya and he almost loved them. But he did love them as much as he loved, awfully. And awfully hurling was his big thing.
But he became so immersed in Africa that it was kind of extraordinary to you. One of the famous stories used in London, when I lived there, the weekend we got married actually, which was the weekend of Narnikil Carnival, and himself, and his nephew, who's from Offley,
found themselves on a far distant street down off Ladbroke Grove, which is very African music. I know as well. Yeah. And on a Monday afternoon, it can get quite intense. Funky. Yeah. And my uncle Michael, who was in his 70s at this stage, turned to my cousin, his nephew, and said, Gareth, you need to go home. You need to leave here. It's not safe for you here anymore. You're the only white person here.
To him, he was among his people, you know, and it's an amazing thing for those people of those generations who were just taken away. And then, as you say, with Rome, with your authority. Yeah, and there might be something about not having a family that affected the way they looked at things. Certainly in the new book, The Ghosts of Rome, which is more of a focus on the women involved in the escape line,
researching some of the real-life women who helped you. There was a woman called Nori and Danhe, who was also from Carrie, who was a nun. It smuggled Jews into the convent where she lived in Rome, which I visited.
And this really remarkable recordings, like in her own voice, for speaking about her experiences on a podcast called, I Think It's Irish Life and Lore, run by two by an amateur historian in Calarney and her late husband.
of Norrie in talking about her life. But she's very interesting talking about being a celibate person as she puts it as meaning a single person that you took risks because you didn't have a family. So you had less to lose and the Gestapo could only kill you once. Of course, they specialized in threat. If they couldn't get you, they specialized in telling you they would get your wife or they would get your kids.
So she's kind of saw not being married and not having a family as a great kind of freedom. And maybe it did mean that people like you just did a lot more walking around on their own, not going to things, you know? Well, let's talk about the ghosts of Rome then, because as you say, the women are more essential characters here in the Contessa and Dini. And as you say, it's 1944.
And things are kind of getting, there's a sort of desperation to the Germans as well and to the Nazis at that stage because the Allies are getting closer.
Well, the Allies are 50 miles down the road in Anzio. So it's a different volume. From my father's house, it's Christmas of 1943. It looks like Germany are going to win. So that's the kind of energy of what's going on in the background. This is set coming into the summer, kind of May, begins on Ash Wednesday, moving towards the start of the summer. And it's now 50-50. But the Allies have landed. And there's a very tough battle. And who knows what's going to happen. So the dynamic has changed.
And a character who is, you know, an important presence in, my father says, the contestant, Giovanni Landini, Joe Landini. She's known as Joe among her friends because of her fondness for Joe March in Little Women.
So she's kind of the central character of the ghosts of Rome. And she's a Roman, not quite an aristocrat, but she's posh, she's married to an aristocrat and she's inherited to palace and she is wealthy and has artworks and business interests and has power as a result. So she's an interesting woman to write about in terms of
women in the past because most women characters did not have power and did not have money. And that's why they are interesting for the writers who wrote about them. But she is in a man's world and she's kind of in control of it as well as being a frail person and having what we would now call issues and being very tough and being very fragile. But again, has this amazing courage. She's based on a number of real life
women. There was a princess Nina Palabicini, who was a Roman aristocrat who became a forger for the escape line, forged banknotes and passports. And there was a woman called Isabel Sunak, who was born in Lebanon and married into a Roman noble family. And she literally fled her palace as the Gestapo came to arrest her and made it into the Vatican and took refuge in the Spanish
embassy inside the Vatican and became one of Hugh's helpers. So it was just very, very struck soon into the writing of my father's house by the fact that, you know, there were very heroic men who ran the escape line, but there's no way that it could have operated without the probably scores and scores of
Roman women, whose names we will never know, who assisted and helped and nursed and ran errands and showed amazing personal courage. Like in some cases, they would have escaped allied prisoners living in their family home, you know, which might have been a two-bedroom apartment. You might have had seven or eight escaped American or British airmen. And the sentence was death, if you recall.
So, just their phenomenal courage. So, you know, as I say, she's an important character in my father's house, but she's the central character in the ghost of Rome because I want to record the massive contribution of the women involved.
Unlike, as you say, the Nazis are making threats, and they're making threats to people's children as well. And I said, for the women involved, that's even more raw and real than it is. Oh, yeah, yeah. And very interesting in terms of our earlier conversation about famine, I was particularly interested as an Irish person in how the Nazis use food as a weapon and rationing.
And, you know, if you inform on your neighbours, you get an extra food ration. It's not that you'll get currency, because currency is worth almost nothing. Would you like to feed your kids? Then inform on the neighbours. You know, and whatever food there is on the black market, we will deliver to your house. And by later in the summer, you have famine-like conditions in Rome. You have stories of people actually falling down and dying of hunger in the streets of Rome.
So the control of information and the control of food was a big part of the Nazi occupation. So there are echoes that Irish readers in particular will feel, I think.
I guess the question that will come to you, how anyone would actually respond in those situations is the thing we all kind of wrestle with. Well, everyone has asked themselves, haven't they, what would I do? And that's why you and the Contessa are very interesting characters to write about, because they're not saintly. And there are many days throughout this 10-month period.
when you can see with you and Joe Landini and all of the other characters in the escape line, we can't save everyone. We just cannot do it. There's eight of us. And there are some days we can't save anyone. But on the days that we can, we will do what we can and we'll do it with dignity and honour and effort. And it's better than doing nothing.
So it's not that they are kind of saintly or martyric. They're very much living in a real world. It's rather murky. I mean, I have a character in the ghosts of Rome who is a Gestapo agent, a woman, a stenographer who's working in the Gestapo.
head office in Via Tasso in Rome and she is secretly feeding information to the escape line and I believe that there were people like that and that it's not possible that in the murky world of war there weren't connections and double agents and touts and you would have often had to deal with people who you didn't necessarily like so this isn't a story of saints but you learn more from a story of sinners you know
And I guess the thing with that as well is that, you know, it's funny when you talk about, you talk about, you know, touts and stuff like that. It seems to be every con, when we look at Northern Ireland, now as you go back over the history, it seems to be, you know, that the entire conflict was about, you know, who was telling what to whom, at what time, like there was, there was nothing was straightforward, like if you look at
Well, intelligence is such a commodity. You know, and you can see, even in the Italian story, I've read a lot about it. I spent a couple of months at the Imperial War Museum in London last year, just rehearsing how the ordinary Italian kind of peasantry, the Contadini, as they're called, how they felt.
about the escapees, because a lot of them helped American and British escapees to hide. But they also, when the German army began to retreat, and individual private soldiers were in danger of being lynched, they also helped them.
So it isn't that there were very strong ideological feelings all the time. It was maybe something of the country persons wanting to stick up for the underdog. So it's always more nuanced than you think it's going to be from the outside.
And the Germans were also trying to put into people's heads, you don't know who you're helping. This could be, we've got spies, we've got people at once. And you probably didn't at the time. I mean, the fellow who ran the room, Gestapo, was a very cunning, intelligent guy, and he figured out very quickly, if you put up a poster saying, you know, okay, hide in a safe house, if that's what you want to do, but remember that the guy in the next room
It's not actually from the British army, he's one of us. And he's writing down everything you're saying, including what you might be saying in your sleep in the middle of the night. And no matter where you are, I can hear your thoughts. And he realized how frightening that would be to guys who were on the run and hungry and frightened and often very young and far from home.
So, you know, it's a murky world rather than a world of kind of very clearly delineated good and bad. But in the middle of it all, you do have this amazing, for me, inspirational courage of people like Given and Andini.
And Hugh and Delia Murphy, people had a lot to lose, you know, including Delia's case like her marriage. Delia's husband is the Irish, the minister, but the de facto ambassador to Rome. I mean, you shouldn't be involved in this at all, that she's kind of smuggling guys in and out of the embassy and giving them false papers.
And she's definitely, she's not a saint at all as well, like she's a difficult one. Absolutely not. And it's very good fun to write about because she likes putting, she is a believer who puts the boot into the Catholic Church very often. She's kind of struggles and does her best.
to keep the rules, but is not a fan of the Cardinals and the bishops and the wealth and the papacy and all of that, you know. And she's at one point at the beginning of the Ghost of Rome. She's been hiding out in the Vatican and she's trying to leave and go back to the embassy. And this has got to be negotiated by the Vatican diplomats and everybody else and it's proposed that there'll be a brief meeting at which she will be censured by a cardinal for her misbehavior in helping the escape line.
And so he will come into the room and you'll kneel down as he is, given out to you. And she says, just hang on one second, you know. I'm Delia Murphy from County Mayo in Ireland and my people kneel before God Almighty and nobody else. So she's both kind of anti-clerical and
religious, of course, you know, Joel Andini is a more very kind of traditional practice in Catholics. So it's an interesting person for me to write about because I'm not. So it has a range of kind of attitudes towards religion. And it's really kind of more about the kind of Venn diagram of what they agree on, you know, and they agree that we're going to do our frail and fragile best in the middle of this awful situation.
and do what we can to help. It's interesting how many people, you know, from who did things like that, never talked about it subsequently. What would you put that down to? Well, I used to say that the reason Hugh didn't was his modesty, and I think that was a big part of it. I think Hugh felt, you know, I've done my duty, and I don't want to talk about it. And funny enough,
When you do research the experiences of people who've been through war, particularly men, they often don't. I mean, I came across this a lot, researching in the Imperial War Museum, often like Dad had been in the war. And in his sock drawer, or the underwear drawer, there'd be a few medals, or there'd be a photo, or there'd be something he picked up in the beach in Normandy, but he just didn't want to talk about it. Probably because Dad had seen pretty awful stuff.
So with you, I thought it was his modesty. Since the book has come out, I wonder was there a bit more to it? And I wonder that in his beloved Kerry, to where he retired? Carisavine. Carisavine. I wonder if there were still people in the 50s and 60s who felt a little bit uneasy that the main cohort of people who Hugh helped were British, escaped.
prisoners of war and there would be strong and extremely understandable feelings in Kerry about the black and tan and British soldiery generally but one of the amazing things about you is that he left his tribe when he went to visit the prisoner of war camps in fascist Italy and he saw young men from Liverpool or Coventry or Glasgow or London he didn't see
Well, he didn't identify them as British soldiers, although that's who they were. But I wondered, was there some anxiety or ambiguity about it that meant it's better just to stay silent about what I did?
I suppose before the war as well, there was that strong anti-fascist feeling in Ireland to the clinical and clerical line about, you know, the communists and the Spanish Civil War and things like that. So I don't know if that would have still been something that when he retired to Cara Savine was there.
It might be something we can't really speculate about, but I think it's a mixture of modesty and wisdom that maybe he just didn't want to talk about it, and he'd probably be horrified that we're here talking about it now. But at the same time, I think you might like it a bit.
It is interesting that that idea of in Kerry and, you know, one of the things I would say about your books, a lot of them, there is that sense of people. You've drawn to people who do step outside their tribe. Yeah. That's a kind of a common feature. Would you agree? Yeah. Well, it's the most interesting thing that we ever do, if any of us or if all of us succeed in it. It's very easy to have loyalty and affection and love.
and solidarity for the people who are like you. But it's hard to step out. We know that in Ireland, like we know what had to be done in the North of Ireland and people who just went and listened. You know, I remember listening to George Mitchell talking once very modestly about his contribution and he said, well, you know, my main
My main quality and qualification for the job is just that I like listening to people. I don't get bored. Like I will sit there for four days and listen to you talking about the battle of the boy. If that's what it takes, if that's going to save one life, like I will do that. And then, you know, the great moves that were made on people on both sides to say, well, like we have our history.
and our wrongs and the terrible things that we're done, but we're going to try and leave the tribe and see what there is that we have in common. And hopefully there's something funny enough, often it's in the area of culture.
Although we'd be talking another time, and you'll have your own views, and Joe Brawley would have his about sport as culture in the North and some very demeaning attitudes over the years towards the GAA in the North from the other community. But it moves forward, and it's a junior minister from the DUP, visited a gale skull in the North, the other week, and small steps. But I admire people who are able to
Love their tribe and love their place. But at the same time, see if there's any way I can love you as well. And it's very, it's not easy, but it's not an input. But it's also, you see that, you mentioned, like you saw when Charlie Burns, the president of GAA, went to a Northern Ireland soccer match. And equally, when Emma Littlepengelli went to a GAA grand and picks up a hurl, the difference, what would seem like a very, very small gesture. It actually has an awful lot of resonance.
huge resonance and it's part of it is the late Queen Elizabeth comes to Dublin, goes to the Garden of Remembrance, lays a wreath, speaks a couple of words in Irish, they're tiny, tiny things but they instill a kind of confidence or at least a hope that maybe there's something to talk about and people of my age will remember it, the phenomenal
moment of Nelson Mandela on the pitch in the spring box shirt and what a gesture of reconciliation and forgiveness and new beginnings that was so like sport and culture and poetry and music and all of these things you know a lot can be done to I hate building bridges as a metaphor but a lot can be done just to kind of
Clear a bit of the ice flow between us and just see what's there. Do you think there's a divide? Because one of the things we've talked about a lot on this podcast is that sense of separation between nationalists in the north and those of us in the south, whatever, about the separation between the unionist community and the rest of us, that there's also, because of the very different experiences, those of us here and people in the north,
from the National Community ad, that there's still a big chasm of misunderstanding. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And it's a harder one in some ways. It's not harder, but because we're both numbly coming from the same side, you know,
Well, we're lucky in my family because one of the ways in which we're lucky is that my stepmother, Viola, who's been in her lives for 50 years now is a Presbyterian from the North of Ireland. And she's married to my father, Sean, who was born a working-class Catholic in France, the street and the liberties. She's no longer a Catholic, but the existence and survival of their marriage gives me some hope for the island.
But there's no doubt. I think a lot of people from the Republic of Ireland probably included myself, if I was totally honest. There are parts of London that I would feel more at home in than parts of the North. I understand why the North is different. I understand, obviously,
why people feel the need to fly flags and paint the paved stones and all of that. And God knows, like in the Republic, we have our own odd things that we do, but they're not the same. And I think that progress will come from sport, culture, intermarriage, friendship, education,
You know, all of those things. I think there's still a lot to learn about the twos. I mean, it's why partition was such a dreadful mistake, historically. The Republic of Ireland would have been a much better place if it had included the Protestant aspects of the North of Ireland. I don't think the abuse, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church would have been tolerated as long as it was.
I think there is a kind of different work at the different kind of set of cultural priorities that would have enriched us enormously. And it's why partition was an awful thing. Now, whether it goes away or certainly whether it goes away in this generation is another debate, but the republic that emerged from partition is a much poorer place than it would have been if we had included the Protestant people of the North.
You keep dangling sport in front of me there, so I'm going to have to ask you a sport question. I'm afraid. No, you wrote about USA 94. Yes, I did.
What are your memories of that? Because one of the things, and I just saw a line here, which I would agree with in general when you say, how load is the lie that the old days were good? Now, that was in a different context. But when we look back at those times, it's very hard not to feel a sense of just overwhelming nostalgia for how
And overwhelming nostalgia is how I would put it. I mean, it was a great sort of cultural moment for Ireland. I think the success of the team, the multicultural element of the team, the fact that people who played for the team and wore the green shirt did not all speak with the Irish accents to put it that way. Something about it being in America, very, very important to us.
And then on a personal level, it was just sheer joy. I mean, I was doing bits and pieces of work for the Tribune at the time, and Vincent Brown called me in one day and said, all the other newspapers in Ireland are sending their kind of serious and very knowledgeable sports people, sports at skies, and they were guys at that time.
And I have this brilliant idea that I'm going to get the biggest football agent in Ireland and send him. And that's probably you, because you know nothing about it, isn't that right? Like you've never played it, you don't care about it. How do you like to go?
And I was really kind of 50-50, and I remember sitting in a pub in Dublin the night before I went surrounded by my soccer-loving mates, and I had my tickets for the games, and my hotel voucher and my Erlingus tickets, and going, geez, I'm not sure if I want to do this. I don't know how they didn't actually kill me.
So, I was sent over with the brief and just write about what you see. Don't, for God's sake, inflict your sports reportage on us. But write about the carnival side of it and the fans and all of that. So, for the first week, it was a particular kind of vibe because I was embedded with the fans and they must have thought, who is this strange?
fella who doesn't be dying as hair green and drinking all day. And by the second week, people had twigged because my stuff had appeared in the Tribune. So the second kind of wave of fans that came out knew exactly what I was doing. And they couldn't have been more welcoming to this complete outsider. And they would almost queue up outside the hotel room door to give me funny stories about things that had happened to them on the way to the matches or on the way home. And it was just a lovely
experience and it went mad. I mean, the pieces were absolutely, I had no, I was over in the States. I had no idea how well they were being received. And I came back to here that it had all gone great. And my friend, Dermot Bulger, who was a publisher at the time said, why don't we publish them as a book? And I said, I just wouldn't have the time to do that. And he said, well, I'll put them all together. Give me a few other bits of your journalism and I'll do it. And I was in a
bookshop. Coming up to Christmas, I came home from London. I was in a bookshop in Black Rock. I walked in and there was the cover of The Secret World of the Irish Mail. It was a picture of me upside down. The World Cup stuff was in that book. I had never seen the cover. I literally never saw the book. It just went mad.
And there's the Faber book of Irish Reportage was published a few years ago, where there's really kind of serious proper stuff by Mary Holland and now McCaffordy and, you know, Connor Grewsabrine. And in the middle of it, there's me talking a bit.
fellas with inflatable sextals painted green at Ireland Games. And this is the one about the tour guide, the rides, wasn't that the thing? Yeah, well, yes, I did hope the experience would go into Disney World with a load of Irish, a bit hung over Irish hands one Sunday morning and this poor local young woman whose job, God love her, was to show us around.
And she was giving us the spiel about Disney World, so you're very welcome guys. And there's a lot of wonderful rides here at Disney World. OK, so a few snuffles of laughter. And yes, some of the rides are big and some of the rides are small. And we have scary rides. We have whatever kind of ride you like. And just to kind of absolutely purile.
snuffling and tittering getting louder and louder and then it came to the giant statue of Mickey Mouse that they have and it's the world's largest freestanding Mickey and you know you can imagine the chaotic scenes and people who were never quite the same again but the fact they were incredibly welcoming to the fans they accepted the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about it I kind of knew who Paul McGraw was because I grew up near Dorky and I knew...
And I love going to the games, but I was not steeped in football culture and I was very touched to be welcomed without being beaten up as I deserved to be.
Well, it says, you know, I think it shows that there are so many ways of, you know, dealing with those issues, especially when it's much bigger than sport. That was a cultural moment. I think one of the endorsements of what you wrote then was when Jack Charlton died, the amount of people who referenced those pieces again as part of the kind of tapestry of understanding that moment.
Well, I think it was hugely significant and important and was part of a kind of coming of age. And we kind of loved the fact that Jack was this kind of taciturn, rather gruff Yorkshireman. And I remember a beautiful clip that might have been from the World Cup moments after we scored. And it was the day Ireland beat England in Stuttgart.
a couple of moments of Ray Houghton. The camera goes to Jack and he just turns his back on the pitch and kind of looks at the camera and just shrugs. I'd rather be fishing. So both the sport is hugely important and it's also so innocent. It's the great thing about sport is that in another way it doesn't matter, which means in another way it can break down.
barriers. So I think we loved all of that about them. It's like the rugby team. I mean, it's tremendous thing that the rugby team is all Ireland. Yeah. Like there are British people playing for Ireland. Hugely important contribution to how we think of ourselves. You know, I work in Limerick, the University of Limerick, and they like their rugby, you know, in Limerick. But people would talk to you about that there, you know, how rugby has kind of opened the doors.
May people just gently think, well, what do these words even mean? What could they include? Why need they exclude? You know, so sport can do a lot. So here I am going on about sport, which I didn't want to talk about at all. Well, we won't let you... Anything you've had to say about sport there, you've passed with flying colors. Well, it doesn't matter if it's not flying colors, but if it's a C minus, I'll take it.
Joseph O'Connor, it's been wonderful having you here. The new book is The Ghosts of Rome, and it's a really compelling read, and thanks so much for coming on free site. It's a great pleasure, Dion. Thanks for having me.
Was this transcript helpful?
Recent Episodes
America’s War Game: How the Super Bowl Became a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning
On Sunday evening, Donald Trump became the first sitting American president to attend the Superbowl. His attendance, in the eyes of many, sealed the union between American Football and American Nationalism. On Free State today, Joe and Dion look at how the NFL became part of the US war machine. From Vietnam to Iraq, the sport embraced militarisation but insisted that sport and politics should never mix. At the same time, Britain escalated the wearing of a poppy from a muted tribute to war dead into a pageant of insistent patriotism, designed to sportswash imperial crimes. Everyone had to bend the knee, including the Cookie Monster. In an America being bent to the will of Donald Trump, they wonder who will provide the resistance and what price will they pay for dissent?Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning is a Gold Hat Production in association with SwanMcG.For more on Free State: https://freestatepodcast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
February 11, 2025
Conquering Hill 16. Paddy Cullen & the Dublin revolution

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning
There are times when, as a great writer said, the past beats inside us like a second heart.The death of Paddy Cullen was, for so many people, one of those moments. It transported them back to the days of Heffo’s Army and the rivalry with Kerry which were the foundation for a million sporting dreams.On a Free State Special, Joe remembers the Paddy Cullen he knew, a member of that Dublin team who weren’t just extraordinary players, but exceptional men.He recalls his encounters with Paddy Cullen and the thread of community that runs from that Dublin team to the great Jim Gavin team. Dion meanwhile reveals his role as a Gaelic football missionary in south Dublin.Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning is a Gold Hat Production in association with SwanMcG.For more on Free State: https://freestatepodcast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
February 08, 2025
Assassinating Peter Robinson: How an IRA hired hitman almost took out the DUP hardliner. With Unionist historian Aaron Edwards.

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning
In 1981, the FBI raided the New York apartment of a 27-year-old Englishman who they believed had been commissioned by the Provisional IRA to murder a unionist politician. On Free State today, Aaron Edwards continues his journey inside the psyche of unionism and reveals the details of that extraordinary story. He talks to Dion and Joe about unionism’s reluctance to change. The goodies and baddies might be different but the attitude is the same. Is it a philosophy or a state of mind? Aaron also talks about his next gripping book and Joe manages to achieve the impossible and rudely interrupt himself.Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning is a Gold Hat Production in association with SwanMcG.For more on Free State: https://freestatepodcast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
February 06, 2025
The Decline of the Loyal Family. How Ulster Protestants were sold out by their leaders. With Unionist historian Aaron Edwards.

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning
CS Lewis wrote that there would be no better to place to live than Northern Ireland ‘if only I could deport the Ulstermen’. On Free State today Joe and Dion talk to the world-renowned historian Aaron Edwards about the predicament of unionism today. Is unionism a philosophy or an anxiety? Do unionist politicians have a strategy or are they trapped by parochialism? Edwards talks about his own upbringing on the hardline loyalist Rathcoole Estate in Belfast and why every victory gets turned to defeat.Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning is a Gold Hat Production in association with SwanMcG.For more on Free State: https://freestatepodcast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
February 04, 2025

Ask this episodeAI Anything

Hi! You're chatting with Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning AI.
I can answer your questions from this episode and play episode clips relevant to your question.
You can ask a direct question or get started with below questions -
What was the main topic of the podcast episode?
Summarise the key points discussed in the episode?
Were there any notable quotes or insights from the speakers?
Which popular books were mentioned in this episode?
Were there any points particularly controversial or thought-provoking discussed in the episode?
Were any current events or trending topics addressed in the episode?
Sign In to save message history