Steve MacDonogh, without doubt, is one of the most resolute and venturesome publishers in Ireland. For the past 18 years he has been running Brandon, a Dingle-based publishing house whose commendable risk-taking is out of all proportion to its modest size. But then there is nothing modest about Steve MacDonogh. The quiet life is not for him. In getting his books published, he has fought battles, against the odds, which might have persuaded less tenacious publishers to seek out a different line of work. And he usually wins.
MacDonogh was born in Dublin, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, and was educated in England. He became a publishers' agent shortly after finishing college and joined the Irish Writers' Co-operative soon after its formation, rising to become its chairperson for a four-year period. Running the co-op was hard work, wholly unremunerative and frustrating, so he left in 1981 to set up Brandon, taking many co-op authors with him.
Running Brandon has proved no less difficult. In publishing British Intelligence and Covert Action, he ran up against the British Ministry of Defence, which wanted to ban it. He managed to get it into the shops only to find that his British co-publisher had gone broke - without contributing to the costs. Brandon published Joanne Hayes's My Story, her version of the Kerry Baby scandal. It sold well but attracted a libel writ from three Gardai which cost £100,000 in damages and fees and nearly bankrupted the company. In 1986 he published One Girl's War, an interesting memoir of a female British secret agent operating in World War Two London. The British Attorney-General said the book threatened Britain's national security, and tried and failed to stop its Irish publication but delayed its arrival into British bookshops for six years.
Steve MacDonogh is perhaps best known as Gerry Adams's publisher. Not surprisingly, much of the book concerns this relationship, which is clearly more than that traditionally enjoyed by author and publisher; minder, confidant and sometime soulmate might be more accurate to describe MacDonogh's role in it.
MacDonogh doesn't hide his own ideology, describing Official Sinn Fein and the Communist Party as "progressive". Reconciliation on this island and elsewhere will come with the help of a vigorous antidote to the "competitive, exploitative values of capitalism". "The free market is not a free market for ideas". Well, there are those who would argue that centrally-planned markets weren't great for ideas, either.
MacDonogh has published many fine books - for example, John B Keane's The Bodhran Makers and Bob Fisk's In Time of War. This autobiography, unfortunately, is not in that league. It paints a revealing picture of a hyperactive and combative publisher (whose health has suffered as a consequence), but it is a self-justificatory life story which will have little appeal outside the world of publishing. The style of the book is close to that of a "Dear Diary"; the trivia gets in the way. MacDonogh is a man of many accomplishments, but this book is not one of them.
Eoin McVey is a Managing Editor with The Irish Times