Why do writers make Ireland out to be so gloomy? I had a gentle, uplifting childhood in Dublin, says Mary Kenny
Every Irish novel or social history that I read – and there’s now a plethora of Irish writers commanding the written word – tells me how dark, depressing and repressive Ireland used to be. The novelist John Banville – who I’m obliged to admit is a brilliant author – seldom publishes a story without painting this sombre picture of the dreadful country in which he grew up, dominated by the Catholic church, which he has said practised a form of ‘terrorism’. I’ve come to realise I made a bad career move by not getting in on the act, and penning a misery memoir about being beaten by cruel nuns, abused by paedophile priests and raised in a tenement slum. Unfortunately, I grew up in an agreeable Dublin suburb, in which people were usually kind and gentle, nobody beat me and I neither saw nor experienced any form of sexual abuse...
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