There Is an Isle: A Limerick Childhood, by Criostoir O'Flynn, Mercier Press, 350pp, £9.99
`They dressed me in my black velvet First Communion suit with the white frilly shirt, the short pants, the white stockings, the black patent leather shoes. Around my arm they tied a white satin bow and on my lapel they pinned the Sacred Heart of Jesus . . ." Frank McCourt's picture of his Communion rig-out in Angela's Ashes describes to a tee the photo of young Criostoir O'Flynn on the cover of There Is an Isle. But although both books draw on the same general background - growing up in lower-class Limerick during the 1930s and '40s - the suit is where any similarity between them ends.
In fact, Criostoir O'Flynn launches a few haymakers in passing at McCourt's bestseller (all the more striking as the book is never referred to by name), but also by the overall sense of homage that suffuses his recollections of his family, "the Island parish" and the city of Limerick generally.
The author's memories may not be quite be "rare oul times" brand of kitsch, but all too often they very nearly are. On parade once again are swims in the river, wren boys, Hallowe'en, ball games on the street, and all the fun and frolics that were to be had in the days before electricity.
The author's parents are decent, respectable people. His father works away steadily delivering coal and supplements the family income playing the sax in a dance band. The minute family home is presided over by a mother who is always singing. Both parents are shown to be nothing if not dutiful and unassuming, much as the peasantry used to be represented once upon a time. Local characters lend the usual kind of colour. Local sayings are reported and explicated, often with an Irish gloss, a practice which when accompanied by a wide variety of mostly familiar ranns, riddles and folksy rigmarole, raises questions about the book's intended audience, and makes There Is an Isle seem more like an ethnography than a memoir, or perhaps an "island" anthology.
SO far, so nostalgic. Not that everything goes smack smooth, of course. If there was no actual want in the O'Flynn household, hunger was an intermittent visitor; two of the author's siblings die of TB; class discrimination is not unknown; and there's a brutal Christian Brother. Distinctive musical and sporting features of the community are also mentioned. These are a little more interesting. The O'Flynns had a gramophone, and the two local marching bands have found their historian here. It's a pity, though, that more is not said about the funding, organisation, taste and cultural significance of the bands. On the sporting front, the status of rugby is noted. In Limerick, "it is played by the working-class as well as by the types who play it anywhere else". But here again, unfortunately, the point isn't developed, unless the debatable statement that "Limerick is the only place [in Ireland] where sport is truly democratic" constitutes development.
"I thank God that I was privileged to grow up in that community and in those years," writes Criostoir O'Flynn. But for him there's more to the past than privilege. There's principle also. The past is a better place. Its nationalism and Catholicism are much to be preferred to today's liberalism and "the waffling inanities of the homily at Mass nowadays". A case is sketched for the social efficacy of corporal punishment in schools, as is one for the contribution to the commonweal of that "very decent man Eamon de Valera".
Commentary of this kind has the valuable effect of revealing the ideological skull beneath nostalgia's ostensibly innocent skin, though it also shows the author to be, when he comes to think about it, less a celebrant of bygone days than a lineal descendant of The Citizen in his glory-hole.
George O'Brien wrote the introduction and notes to the recently- published The Ireland Anthology