I wrote my new, autobiographical book About Being Normal: My Life in Abnormal Circumstances for a number of reasons. In the first place I decided on reflection that my life makes a good story.
Thinking back on it from childhood Christmases in Belfast when, one night, leaning out an old-fashioned sash window to see the lit-up Christmas tram go by, the sash fell down and pinned me; from that to time spent in Japan and Sweden and seeing my children, five of them, grow up on Maoinis island off the South Connemara coast speaking Irish, and then on the night before the night of Brexit, the death of their beloved mother in Galway, it makes a partly happy, partly sad story as good stories should.
Because that decentralising scheme was rejected by the Dublin government ie the civil service, the midlands, west and northwest of the Republic, in particular their towns and villages, are now in unstoppable decline
That settled, several other reasons piled in. In the first part – the book has three parts – I wanted to preserve two accounts I had written which I thought could be useful to future historians. One is of the Gaeltacht revolution of the late 1960s and early '70s which happened and won all-Ireland attention while we were living in Maoinis, and which I and my wife Mary took part in. I included in this account the notable historical detail that because I was then an admirer of Mao-Tse-Tung's revolutionary doctrine I changed the spelling of the island's name from Muighinis – Flat Island to Maoinis. which while pronounced the same can be read as Mao-inis, Mao Island.
The other preserved account, requested by a German magazine in the 1960s, was of Irish Catholicism when it was still a power in the world, supplying other English-speaking countries with 200 priests a year and sending men and women missionaries to the colonised countries of Africa and Asia to join the thousands of Irish missionaries already at work there, many of whom had taken part in the War of Independence.
From the 1960s through to the 1980s I had participated through my writing in some general Irish public affairs and I wanted to throw some extra light on these. For example, on the campaign led intellectually by Tom Barrington, director of the Institute of Public Administration. which argued for the removal of much public decision-making power from Dublin to regional and district councils. Because that decentralising scheme was rejected by the Dublin government ie the civil service, the midlands, west and northwest of the Republic, in particular their towns and villages, are now in unstoppable decline. Then, in the 1970s and ’80s when some thinkers and schemers, myself included, worked to bring peace to the North at war, I wanted to convey to readers that years of delay were caused not only by the IRA but also by the Dublin neoliberal media which were pursuing their own ideological agenda for the Republic.
There were some precious emotional or spiritual experiences that I wanted to share with others. For example, my falling in love with Germany in the first three months of my stay in Bonn where I had gone to write my MA thesis at its university; later, how I learned. in a three-quarter-hour interview with a Zen Buddhist monk in the garden of a temple in Japan, the importance of stillness and of living in the here and now. And how, in a fruit and vegetable market in India I encountered Ganesh, Hindu god of art and literature, in his everyday sculptured form of a small man with a large elephant’s head and trunk, and that he became an inspiring friend.
Then, last year, as my story moved from part two to part three, I wanted feedback from my readers to views of the world and of Ireland that I was expressing. I was describing a long visit I made in 1995 to the US and how I came to the conclusion that the unrepented atomic massacres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had begun the end of European or Western civilisation; and that this process was and is continuing around us with the result that we are living in the abnormal situation of being without a civilisation.
As to Ireland, the year of writing being 2016, I wanted to make clear two things: my firm allegiance to the aim of the Irish Revolution to normalise the Irish nation – by making it politically sovereign, intellectually and culturally self-determining and economically self-sustaining – that, and my regret that we have not yet achieved this national normality.
Of course, beyond these particular reasons for writing the book – a work which took three years from start to finish – there has been the pleasure of being able to narrate and explain one’s life publicly in one’s own terms as one sees it and has experienced it.
Not that there has been any serious alternative version to refute or combat; but in the course of my long life I have been involved in mild controversies where the position I was taking may not have been adequately clear. It has been a pleasure now at some distance to clarify such matters.
I think that readers will realise that I end up smiling at my life and at all who have participated in it. Or as I put it in the final words of the book: Bhí saol maith agam go dtí seo, buíochas le Dia. Sláinte coirp fós agam agus m’intinn ag obair go maith. Gura fada beo mé le Mel, mo chlann agus mo cháirde! Tá mo scéal go dtí seo inste agam.
About Being Normal: My Life in Abnormal Circumstances is published by Somerville Press
