INTERVIEW: A building boom gone bust, politicians earning fortunes amid accusations of vested interests, and a nation on the cusp of a major decision: the world of 18th- and 19th-century Ireland in John Mulcahy's novel 'Union' is more than a little familiar, he tells Aidan Dunne
AT AN AGE WHENmost people would be contemplating or, indeed, well into their retirement, John Mulcahy has just published his first and, he suspects, only novel. Unionis a substantial tome, as the publicity has it: "An epic tale of revolution and romance in 18th-century Ireland."
This is 18th- and, one should add, early 19th-century Ireland. In its pages, fictional characters mingle with historical figures. It spans and deals directly with an eventful, decisive phase of Irish history, beginning with the French landing at Killala, and moving on to the circumstances of the passing of the Act of Union, which came into effect on January 1st, 1801, followed by the trial and execution of Robert Emmet, after a chaotically mismanaged attempt at a rebellion.
We talk in the spacious, comfortable room where Mulcahy mostly wrote Union, at his home in Ranelagh in Dublin. A sash window looks out on a prospect of mature trees stretching away in the distance. You could easily believe you're in the country, and not, in fact, close to the city centre, just yards from a busy street. The walls are lined with engravings directly related to the events and the personalities that feature in the novel, drawing you right back into the period. There is a version of Francis Wheatley's huge painting, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, of the Dublin Volunteers in College Green on November 4th, 1779, and several portraits of central protagonists, including Emmet, the barrister John Philpot Curran (whose daughter, Sarah, had a brief romance with Emmet) and Edward Fitzgerald, who doesn't directly appear in the book, and whose life Curran tried to save.
What persuaded Mulcahy to embark on writing a novel? He sighs. "Actually, it's been going on for years," he explains. "It started when I came out of the Sunday Tribune[of which he was the first editor]."
That is surprising, because it means he began writing it in the early 1980s. "Yes," he says, "I did. After the TribuneI had nothing to do, I was unemployed and unemployable. So I started work on it here in this room."
Soon, however, other commitments displaced the novel. He started Phoenixmagazine and, more recently, has taken on the editorship of the Irish Arts Review. This year, however, he has retired from his involvement in Phoenix, which has given him time to put the novel to bed.
One journalist who knows him says that Unionhas been very much on his mind, even through the years when he wasn't actively writing it. "I often felt furious with myself," Mulcahy notes ruefully, "that it wasn't finished. I can't tell you all the characters and chapters that have disappeared along the way." He is particularly enthusiastic about the elaborate cover, which is printed in full colour on two sides and boasts several reproductions of paintings of the time, including the Wheatley. The front is dominated by a partial view of a beautiful woman, young, assured and stylishly attired. She plays a fictional role here, though she is in fact Irish artist Robert Fagan's tragically short-lived first wife, Anna Maria Ferri. "At least," Mulcahy observes self-deprecatingly of his book, "it will look good on the outside."
It’s a fictional work but one with a commitment to fact. “Unfortunately, I started out with a serious intent, and that was to tell the story of the passing of the Act of Union. For nearly all my working life, I’ve been an investigative journalist, that’s what I am at the core. If you’re writing pure fiction, you can make up anything you like. So it isn’t fiction, in that sense. I would say that from an historical point of view, the book is spot on – though when I say spot on, I mean as one deals with historical events through the characters’ experience.”
What strikes him now, much more so than when he embarked on the project, are the parallels between the period and our own. “You had tremendous economic growth, the whole Georgian building boom, and then a collapse just as dramatic as the one we’re now experiencing. There was the question of a commitment to a union, just as we’ve had a referendum in relation to a different sort of union. There was a huge degree of corruption, votes were bought and all sorts of vested interests were involved. At the time, for example, every MP made £15,000 per annum; that’s equivalent to at least €1.5 million now.”
He is completely fascinated by Irish history, and began by researching the 19th century. “You do the Parnellite era, the Fenians, the Young Irelanders. Then I found I wanted to know in depth what happened before that, and you arrive at the union. It hasn’t attracted as much attention from the historians.”
Its implication were, of course, huge. “It was a fundamental mistake. Just at the moment when we had, spreading from Europe, the beginnings of democracy and enfranchisement, an economic self-confidence, the union clamped down on it all.”
It was disastrous, not alone for the Catholic Irish – not immediately against it – but also for the Protestant ascendancy, for Irish-English relations and, in the long run, for Britain. In the book, the main fictional character is, helpfully enough, a journalist, through whose endeavours we discover the dirty dealing and vested interests that push through the union.
Though he has been exceptionally active in Irish journalism for 40 years, Mulcahy was born in Australia, in Perth, in 1932. His grandfather arrived there in the 1880s. Mulcahy’s father was sent to Ireland to study medicine, met his mother, and brought her back to Australia. They had four children and then, aged only 33, his father died suddenly. His mother brought her children, including three-year-old John, back to Ireland. She remarried, another doctor.
They lived at Ballinakill, near Abbeyleix, in Co Laois, a time Mulcahy recalls with fondness. During the Emergency, when rationing was in force, his mother went to town one day to buy a chest of drawers. She returned with a Kerry cow, thus ensuring their supply of milk and butter. They also kept a pig, grew vegetables and fruit, gathered firewood and hunted rabbits. His stepfather did his rounds on horseback. It was, he says, in ways a Dickensian, though curiously and agreeably “self-contained” existence.
He was sent to school at Clongowes Wood College and then studied history and economics at Trinity. After that, he went to Canada and worked for an investment-management company for five years. While there, however, he started to write a regular business column for the Montreal Financial Times. Back in Ireland around 1960, he went to work for Con Smith, widely regarded as the leading Irish entrepreneur of his time, as a director of Smith Holdings. He regards Smith, who was among those killed in the Staines air crash in June 1972, which wiped out 12 of Irish industry's leading lights, as a brilliant financial talent. Whatever he knows about how the business world really works he reckons he learned during his time with Smith.
Among the group's holdings was Hiberniamagazine and, after seven years with the company, Mulcahy moved on and took it over. Under his editorship, the fortnightly Hiberniabecame a vibrant journal with a progressive voice, covering contemporary social and political issues and the arts. Mulcahy remembers the torture of labouring for hours on carefully worded editorials. It enlisted and, in many cases, unleashed a great range of writing and critical talent, far too many to mention but including John Jordan, John Broderick, John Boland, Hugh Leonard, Dorothy Walker and Brian Lynch. It was, Mulcahy, now feels, "better on the literary side than the political". In fact, one observer notes, in Nuala O'Farrell (to whom he happens to be married), it had an astute literary editor with a knack for identifying significant new books and matching them with the right critics.
Then he was approached by the late Hugh McLaughlin, whose business was a major force in Irish newspaper and magazine publishing. "Hugh had bought printing works from the Economist, and brought them to Ireland. The only problem was he had nothing to print on them. He said to me, 'look, you have a fortnightly review with, not everything, but most of what makes up a Sunday paper'. It lacked news, and, of course, sport – which I knew nothing about and still don't." So the Sunday Tribunewas launched.
Within weeks, McLaughlin suggested that he and Mulcahy should have lunch in the Gresham. "So there, over the soup, Hugh looked at me and said: 'Wouldn't this be a good time for you to get out?'" McLaughlin wanted someone to bring money to the venture, and that wasn't Mulcahy. He duly resigned. "Appropriately enough, I left on April Fool's Day in 1981." And it was in the aftermath of this that he began work on Union.
He liked the idea of starting another review journal in the mould of the New Statesman, the Spectatoror the Listener. "But in the early 1980s it was clear that they were in decline. The quality Sundays had taken over from them. Then I thought of a satirical magazine. The content and the slant of Private Eyesuited my growing cynicism at the time." So began the Phoenix, in 1983. Its mix of investigative stories, gossip, and satire found a ready market.
At the beginning of the current decade, he heard that the Irish Arts Review, originally started by Brian de Breffny in 1984, and then an annual publication, was looking for someone interested in taking it on. He liked it, but he felt strongly that it should be transformed into a quarterly. "To my mind, an annual publication makes no impact, and you lose the kind of input and energy that you get from a continual staff involvement."
The review has thrived under his editorship. “We got a good start, with the boom in the art market and so on. Things are somewhat tougher now.” There is, though, a good subscriber base and encouragingly good individual sales. The magazine’s mix of ancient and modern allows it to address the full spectrum of Irish visual culture, although, Mulcahy notes of himself: “I’m old fashioned enough to admire beauty in art. To feel that skill in craft is an important part of art. I’m not greatly taken with something that is not professionally put together.”
He is still addicted to the “pastime” of historical research. His backwards trajectory has continued. “Now I’m more interested in the Williamite-Jacobite period in Ireland.” Might that interest result in a publication? There may be a published conclusion, he admits cautiously, but he’s fairly sure it won’t take novelistic form.
Union by John Mulcahy is published by ABDEF (€12.99)