As a child I would have seen myself as a lone-ranger type, an outlaw. I grew up in Limerick city in the 70s and 80s. My most vivid memory of Limerick in the 1970s is walking down to school, to the CBS in town, and walking past the gutters all flowing with blood, because there were still loads of slaughterhouses in town. It was pig city. The gutters were just full of blood. I haven’t written much directly about Limerick city, but it’s come into my work disguised in westerns.
I lived in cities until I was 38 or 39, but I’m a country mouse now. I moved to Sligo in 2007. It takes time to get used to living in the countryside: there are physical things like the sheer dark at night and the noises from the ditches. We travel a bit, but when I come back to Sligo, when I cross the bridge in Carrick-on-Shannon, I feel myself deflate: it’s lovely.
I’m a very sentimental creature, and I miss Ireland when I’m away: I get a bit glassy-eyed thinking about what’s going on with the weather back home. In Sligo the days drift. It’s a very good place for a writer because there is nothing else to do. It’s just me and the cows and the lake across the road.
The first thing I do every morning when I get up is write fiction. Most days it’s not going well; you’re sat in the Sligo rain coming down on the Velux window, going, “Jesus, I’d rather be doing anything else.” But that’s the pact you make with your subconscious: plays come from the back of your mind. My part of the deal is showing up.
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Despite myself, I’m quite a joyous person. I whinge, but I’m generally happy. I get very wary if I ever find myself acting tortured. If I’m clutching my head, like a tortured artist, I move away from the desk because I don’t want to read that stuff.
There are a lot of people whose stories aren’t being told. When we think about class in Ireland, we think about cities, because class is very obvious in the city: you can tell by the accent and the school someone went to. In the countryside, it’s more vague. There’s often only one school in the town and everybody sounds the same. You can almost fool yourself into thinking there’s no class system in rural Ireland, but there is and it’s even more rigid. It’s there, silently policed.
Just before my Leaving Cert, one of our teachers came into the school and gave us this speech. He said: “Because you’re working class lads in a working class school, you’re going to end up working in jobs where your bosses are going to be the lads from the better schools in town. They’re no smarter, but that’s it.” We were all amazed by this, the fact that it was systemic.
Joan Didion said anytime you write something good, you’re selling someone out. I think that’s true. The ideal situation is if you’re selling yourself out. When you write fiction, it comes out on the page: you’re giving yourself away. There has to be something about yourself coming out to make it real and good. With friends and family reading your work, you’re always more worried because they know where you’re getting it from.
The fundamental question hitting anyone now in the creative world is: how am I going to live? Where am I going to live? It’s really going to affect your work. I would have been amazed if somebody had told me 20 years ago you’re going to be writing plays and short stories in rural Sligo. But I moved here because we had a small mortgage if we bought a house here. It didn’t seem like a creative decision. But of course it colours the work.
Living in the west of Ireland feels very different than it did when I moved here. The place, like every other place, is saturated by digitalisation. Everyone is enslaved by their phones. It’s warping a sense of reality.
In [my new play, The Cave], these two misfortunate brothers live in a cave: their biggest problem is their obsession with this Mexican actress on a Netflix show, and they’re obsessed with what she’s getting up to because she might be getting engaged to a fellow from Offaly. This is the whole plot of the play, but they’ve lost all grasp of what’s real and what’s not real and what impacts their life and what doesn’t.
It’s really cool to be doing a Sligo story on the Abbey stage given one of the founders of the place [WB Yeats] had that connection. For the opening night of The Cave, I’ll be sitting bang centre in the audience. If anyone is there and they don’t laugh, I’ll be taking names. I have a desperate thing where I laugh very loudly at my own material. It looks a bit unbecoming, but what can you do?
In conversation with Nadine O’Regan. This interview, part of a series asking well-known people about their lives and relationship with Ireland, was edited for clarity and length. The Cave by Kevin Barry stars Aaron Monaghan, Judith Roddy and Tommy Tiernan and runs at The Abbey Theatre until July 18th.
