BIOGRAPHY: Tim Pat Cooganreviews RonnieBy Ronnie Drew, Penguin Ireland, 294pp, £20
SUBJECTIVELY, BECAUSE Ronnie Drew was a friend of mine, and objectively, because he was one of the greatest, and best loved, characters produced by the Irish show business world in the last century, I wish this was a better book.
It will obviously be of some appeal to Ronnie Drew fans, but its rather chaotic organisation gives a glimpse, not a portrait of the artist.
Of course some would argue that chaos was an authentic part of a career in which it might take four hours for Ronnie and the Dubliners to drive to a gig - and four days detouring through the Far Yeast to get back.
My brother Brian, who had a distinctive walk, met Ronnie on such a trip one night in a pub in Killarney. Ronnie did not recognise him and got Brian to walk up and down the bar to test his gait. He wasn't satisfied and the pair spent the rest of the night drinking together with Ronnie repeatedly telling Brian: "You're not Brian Coogan!"
In the book, Michael Kane describes how Ronnie reacted in his youth to the strain of having to perform at a Foxrock party given by "a large lady of south Dublin origin who had translated herself into Spanish". He drank too much of the cheap Chianti on offer and, as the lady danced solo, to the accompaniment of her husband's guitar, vomited all over the dance floor.
All his life Ronnie would have to battle with the difficulty of balancing the siren call of "the gargle", which sounded particularly destructively over the Irish folk music scene that he bestrode, against the demands of his talent, and of his family, whom he adored. He was greatly helped by the support of his wife, Deirdre. Deirdre's background contrasted with Ronnie's working class origins. Her father was Dr Patrick McCartan, who helped to re-invigorate the IRB, was prominent in Clan na Gael in the US, and ran for the presidency in Ireland. Her brother, Padraig, has had a distinguished legal career.
In spare, Dublinesque prose, or tape recording, Ronnie gives an understated account of the scars of his psychological battles. He had to check in to Grangegorman intermittently to dry out under Prof Ivor Browne, who looked after the Dubliners. He describes being "sort of poisoned and the nerves would go a bit". But Deirdre "didn't drink at all. But she loved the music scene and I don't know how she did it, but she could ignore all the drinking most of the time. I see the seriousness of it and I don't know how Deirdre put up with me. But she did I'm glad to say."
He first took his guitar to Spain in the company of a group which included my brother, Brian, and another Dún Laoghaire friend, Pat McMahon, an artist who wanted to be a bull fighter. The trio intended to support themselves by teaching English, a task for which Ronnie, with his Dublin-accented voice like a cinder caught under a door, was as well suited as he was to Foxrock flamenco. Of the three would-be teachers Brian was possibly the best prepared. He had learned the Spanish for "a little", so as to be able to respond to the Berlitz school's manager's enquiry as to his knowledge of the Spanish language. However, once in Spain, Ronnie used the trip, the first of many, to teach himself English grammar and flamenco.
To obtrude a personal note I might observe that, before they took off, Brian and Ronnie between them could easily have been responsible for my death. We all used to frequent a café on Dún Laoghaire's seafront called Teddy's. Arriving there one night I was horrified to discover that Brian had taken from our home one of our late father's police revolvers, which my mother treasured (illegally) in his memory. Ronnie was holding it when I arrived.
I swooped on the gun but Ronnie refused to hand it over and we tussled over it for a time until I managed to wrench it free from his guitar-strengthened fingers. I only discovered afterwards that Brian had left the bullets at home.
Ronnie later created a potentially even more lethal health hazard for me, and my wife Cherry, by lending us a tent so we could go camping on the shores of Glendalough Lake into which St Kevin is said to have hurled a would-be temptress. In his war on concupiscence St Kevin would have benefited immeasurably from Ronnie's tent. It had lost its flap and so remained open all night to the perishing lakeside wind and rain.
TO RETURN TO the book: it has to be said that it does not meet the standards one normally associates with the Penguin imprint. For example, what should have been one of its great strengths, the wonderful selection of photographs, is damaged by the use, not of glossy paper, but the technique of blending them into the text, on the same paper, and often in too small a size, so that they sometimes appear blurred and indistinct.
Moreover, while his name is on the book's spine and the title page reads "Ronnie Drew RONNIE" thus suggesting an autobiography, the fact is Ronnie's own contribution takes up only 74 out of a total of 294 pages. The rest is bulked out by reprinting a selection from his one-man shows and the use of fragments of recollection from friends, his children Cliodhna and Phelim, and the copious use of quotations from media interviews with the singer.
Clearly the fact that Ronnie was afflicted by Deirdre's death (in 2007), and by cancer, affected his output, thus leaving the publishers with a dilemma when he died last August. Nevertheless his brief narrative should have been developed and fleshed out into a proper biography by someone with the necessary knowledge and ability - his son, Phelim, for instance, who, with Michael Kane, contributes some of the best of the fragments. While the scissors-and-paste approach has created a work of some interest, it also gives off an air of being rushed out with an eye to Christmas sales.
• Tim Pat Coogan's Memoir has recently been published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. He has written a number of historical works, including The IRA and biographies of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera