#ireland – the shiny diaries

📍 Ireland 🇮🇪

It’s Christmas of 1985 in the town of New Ross. Bill Furlong is a coal merchant toiling away feverishly to provide for his wife Eileen and five daughters. The Catholic Church is very influential in the town and Bill regularly supplies coal to them. The nuns know Bill well and admire his work and the commitment towards his family. There’s also a Magdalen laundry attached to the church which is believed to provide shelter to young girls, especially unmarried girls who are pregnant. Rumours abound about the clandestine activities at the laundry and also about the girls who are sheltering there. Most of the townspeople know the workings of the Magdalen laundry and how the church is tacitly involved in its iniquitous affairs. Eileen, doesn’t want to affront anyone; she believes that being a mute spectator would protect her daughters from any future troubles. One day, Bill while dropping off the coal at the church, stumbles upon a young girl who has been locked up in the freezing coal shed without food, water and covered in her excrements. Even in her indisposition she pleads Bill to rescue her and her child who has been forcibly taken away from her by the nuns. As Bill confronts this predicament, he has to simultaneously decide between antagonising the church and his church loving wife, and doing the right thing.

The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, also known as Magdalene asylums, were institutions usually run by Roman Catholic orders, which operated from the 18th to the late 20th centuries. They were run ostensibly to house “fallen women”, an estimated 30,000 of whom were confined in these laundries. Given Ireland’s historically conservative sexual values, these were a generally accepted social institution well into the second half of the 20th century. They disappeared with changes in sexual mores and a loss of faith in the Catholic Church due to repeated revelations of scandals. Ireland’s last Magdalen asylum imprisoned women until 1996; it’s only in 2001 that the Irish government acknowledged that women in these laundries were victims of abuse and much later in 2013, that a formal state apology was issued.

Claire Keegan, is an Irish writer known for her short stories and the recipient of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature among various other awards. Small Things Like These won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and was the shortest book to be shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. In December 2024, it was Oprah’s Book Club pick. It has been adapted into a film of the same name starring Cillian Murphy.

This novella is a crisp, succinct take on how human beings falter, ponder and ruminate over doing the right thing even when faced with obvious wrongdoings. Most of us don’t want to disturb the status quo. We are ready to be consciously blind to such scenarios and even to wonder if the victim/s rightfully deserved what they endured. Our hypocrisy becomes jarringly evident in our chosen silence. Our activism and our fights are very conditional, provided they don’t cost us our peace and don’t disturb our lives. This is the advice Bill is subjected to from Eileen and others who had his best interest. If you look closer home, the rising Islamophobia and the general intolerance for criticism, though a different issue from what happened in Ireland, hasn’t prompted the majority of us to take a stand, because of the fear of being ostracised by the increasing number of zealots which may include our friends and family, and also the overbearing fear of an almost autocratic, authoritarian government that is trying its might to police secular voices. It is the acceptance of Small Things Like These that lead to big things like xenophobia, genocide and totalitarianism.

The book ends on a cliffhanger moment. Even Oprah, in her podcast, wondered what would happen next. So Claire, please let there be a sequel to Small Things Like These.

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🥺

Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, Prophet Song is deliberately dark and perversely poignant. Set in contemporary Ireland, the story is about Eilish Stack, who is a molecular biologist by training and working in biotech in Dublin. She has four children, one being an infant, Ben. The story begins when Larry, her trade unionist husband is taken in for questioning by government officials. While Eilish receives no news about Larry despite her umpteen attempts to contact him or the officials; the country is soon descending into a political quagmire. A right wing “National Alliance Party” stakes claim to be the government and begins attempts to fight the anti-nationals and the rebels. Totalitarianism sees a rapid ascent and fascism soon starts dominating every aspect of civilian life. Freedom becomes conditional, defence forces become authoritarian, paving the way for a deadly civil war.

Eilish remains forever worried about Larry, wondering whether he’s even alive. Her eldest son Mark joins the rebels and soon disappears. Her other son Bailey, remains angst ridden and obstinate. Her daughter Molly remains her only support through this ordeal. As Eilish battles her anxieties, her insecurities, her losses, her grief, her helplessness, her hopelessness, and simultaneously care for her infant and a rapidly progressing dementia suffering father; she needs to make a decision if she has to leave the country or cross the borders illegally; as the society around her continues to disintegrate, and life becomes an endless cacophony of gunshots, sirens and missile strikes.

Paul Lynch’s prose can be generalised as an urgent and compelling commentary on the steady rise of totalitarianism in the world. His writing has a claustrophobic atmosphere, a sense of foreboding and is suffused with an unrelenting uneasiness. Lynch evocatively translates Eilish’s impuissance and anxiety into his words and onto every page. The scenes where Eilish expectantly awaits Mark’s phone call and when she goes hospital to hospital in search of her injured child are especially gut wrenching, depicting an awful sense of dread. The writing almost feels like a stream of consciousness; there are sections and chapters in the novel but no paragraphs. The dialogues between characters are without any punctuations; so much so that, there’s no difference between a thing said and a thing thought.

Now, Prophet Song may have been set in a dystopian Ireland, but closer home dystopia may soon become a reality. Economic development has been used as a tool to conceal fascism and autocracy. Jingoism and zealotry are being given a free run while any form of dissent is being deemed antinational and subsequently penalised. If you are one amongst many who still chooses to look the other way as this is happening right now, and thinking ‘this won’t/ will never affect me’; read Prophet Song. Paul Lynch was probably imagining an Ireland like that, but we don’t have to imagine it.

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 👿