UFO Info Week-End

As recently as 1997 Tony Blair issued an official apology to the

As recently as 1997, Tony Blair issued an official apology to the people of Ireland,” says O’Connor. “When you look at it closely, you see how little the wealthy and powerful Irish did to protect the poor. The people who benefited most, economically, were the merchant class and slightly wealthier farmers. Vast fortunes were made out of the Irish Famine, almost invariably by Irish people who shut up and joined the chorus of anglophobia.”As he ploughed through nearly 10 years of research, the major shift in O’Connor’s understanding was a recognition of how little seemed to have changed. When a stowaway couple is found in the novel, their decomposing bodies hidden in the ship’s sewerage culvert, it’s hard not to think of the poor Pakistani boys frozen to ice last year under a jumbo jet’s wheel carriage.”We like to tell ourselves we’re terribly different and morally superior to the Victorians, but in fact we’re very similar,” says O’Connor. “Round the time of 11 September, when the novel was beginning to take shape, it struck me very powerfully that the world is still organised into a pyramid of the people who matter, and the people who don’t.

The New York Times has been running obituaries on every single person who died in the Twin Towers – quite properly and movingly – so that they will all be named and remembered. But we still have no idea of the numbers who died in Afghanistan, and we’ll never know their names or anything else about them. “More than 35,000 children die every day of famine-related conditions, and we say we care, but we’re not prepared to change our own standards of living. We’re not prepared to accept that people are poor because a small number of people have so much.”The interesting thing in Ireland now is that we’ve started to have immigrants to the country, which is a huge change,” says O’Connor. “You’d think because of our history we’d be incredibly welcoming and nice to them, but we have the same levels of racism and xenophobia as any other country in Europe – it’s as if our history means measurably nothing. Ireland is going to become a multiculture very quickly, and I think it’s going to enrich the country enormously, but a small number are resistant.They don’t seem to realise people from Africa and Eastern Europe are pretty much in the same position their ancestors were in the 1850s.”Addressing the slipperiness of “the authentic” in O’Connor’s novel is Pius Mulvey, the wily charmer and vicious chancer. Seduced by his countrymen’s reverence for singers and storytellers, and realising that in Connemara a starving man will give his last farthing for a rousing song, Mulvey sets out to write a ballad.

For years he lives off the proceeds of his verses about a recruiting sergeant as he learns to re-jig the words to suit his audience: Catholic or Protestant, Galwayman or Londoner. On his travels, he even passes it off as an ancient Cockney ballad to Mr Charles Dickens, scavenging the East End for stories. In return for a jug of ale and a chophouse dinner, Mulvey gets carried away with his creativity, and weaves a yarn out to explain its provenance: learned from an old Jew who ran a school for pickpockets. As an act of inspired revenge, he names his villain after an anti-semitic priest of his acquaintance – Father Fagan.”The Irish ballad is a very cunning form,” explains O’Connor, who penned Mulvey’s own song after the 1840s ballad Arthur McBride “There’s no room for greyness, or subtlety.