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Authentic Voice of Another IrelandAuthor(s): Aubrey MaloneSource: Fortnight, No. 302 (Jan., 1992), p. 38Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25553260 .

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If the sales of his book are anything to go by?it's into its third reprint after two

months, topping the Irish best-seller lists for weeks? the Irish Times columnist John Waters (below) has touched a popular nerve.

AUBREY MALONE finds out what makes him tick.

Authentic

voice of

another

Ireland

JOHN WATERS' odyssey from Innocence to

Experience through the medium of newspaper/

magazine journalism has never been less than

controversial. A couple of years ago, in an

editorial in the Dublin magazine Magill, he

came to the conclusion that the only way to deal

with the national debt was to "simply liquidate the country as it currently is, and set it up again as somewhere else under a new holding com

pany". Some time afterwards, when some

American surveyors asked him what he thought Dublin had to offer potential tourists, all he

could come up with were the dubious delights of joyriding and glue-sniffing.

He has now written a book, Jiving At The

Crossroads (Blackstaff, see Fortnight 300), the content of which will come as little surprise to anyone in the habit of reading his choleric

columns in the Irish Times. Here once again he

shows himself to be an adept catcher in the wry, as he attempts to tell?from the vantage point

of a bashful Co Roscommon lad only gradually

learning the rhetoric of ambiguity politicians use to secure seats?the associated stories of

such luminaries as Sean Doherty and Brian

Lenihan, two figures cast rather in the role(s) of

sacrificial lambs as his thesis develops. Because of his oblique view of issues, Wa

ters has, over the past couple of years, garnered as many naysayers as disciples. When I asked

him how he felt about the former, he replied,

perhaps surprisingly, that "begrudgery is very

important in a society to keep it ticking over".

But how does he feel about his image as a kind

of upmarket culchie? How would he deal with

people who say you can take the man out of the

bog but you can't take the bog out of the man ?

"If you accede to that kind of definition, in

effect you consign yourself lo the bog. I find I

have to keep one step ahead of my detractors, to

keep them confused so they haven't time to trip

me up." This doesn't mean changing his be

liefs, but altering his mode of expressing them.

"Somebody said to me the other day, 'Ah, I see

you've changed your line on Haughey', and I

said, 'No, it's your perception of my line that's

changed'." In an interview some years ago with the

taoiseach, Mr Haughey almost committed po litical suicide by letting loose not only an

excessive amount of vitriol to Waters, but also

one or two expletives too many for the public's

liking. How does he feel about that man now ?

"I haven't stumbled on the full truth of

Haughey or anybody else. I can only reach

towards it. Language is a very crude instru

ment?it has to be treated delicately because

everything you say is loaded, contaminated.

Life is too short to say what we really need or

mean to say, so we do injustices to ourselves

and get misquoted." As well as being the story of a burgeoning

political consciousness, Jiving At The Cross

roads is also the tale of an impressionistic

young man's relationship to a father 50 years his senior. Waters' father died in 1989, and

after it happened he couldn't write for over a

year. "He dominated the landscape for me. I

couldn't imagine the world without him. After

he died I drifted into television work, into

writing articles that weren't really me, that

were a pose I adopted to cloud my real feelings.

Everything I did all my life was designed to

please him and when he died there was nobody to please any more. So I stopped writing".

He tells a related story of an incident that

happened when he was nine years old. "The

father of a friend of mine had died and I had heard before he did. I saw him coming up the

road and heard his mother crying and I knew

what he was going to hear. From that day on I

perceived myself in the same situation. I be

came almost paranoid about it. I used to stay awake at night trying to hear him breathing so

that I'd know he was still alive. Then, when I

heard him getting up the next morning, I'd be

relieved again and fall into a deep sleep." Was there a sense of anti-climax when he

actually did go ? "Maybe. I was shocked and

stunned, but I was sort of watching myself

being shocked and stunned. I haven't fully worked it out yet."

In the book Waters speaks about his father

storing up some land which he says will be for

his own use but is, in fact, earmarked for the

next generation. Why was he not up-front about

this ? "I suppose it's a kind of Famine mental

ity, a colonial throwback. It's like what you get in the writings of John McGahern and Tom

Murphy, the folk memory of loss being so

strong that you accumulate, accumulate, accu

mulate". Neither is money any good for the

syndrome: "My father always preferred tools

and instruments. He had the idea you had to

have ten of something because something might

happen the other nine."

Is that not a tendency that also appears in the

writings of John B Keane, The Field for in

stance? "That's right. But we wrongly think of

it as greed and acquisitiveness. In his case at

least it was the desire to provide for others?

and of course fear."

Would he like to have children himself? "I

don't have a lot of control over my life, to be

honest".

And will he continue in journalism? "I don't

know," he said, smiling. "You're only as good as your last column. Sorry?let me rephrase that. You're only as good as your next column."

From his record so far, John Waters needn't

have any worries on that score.

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Charles Haughey (and, in the

background, his press secretary, P J Mara)?still depths to fathom

38 JANUARY FORTNIGHT

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