He may not have believed. I don’t. Dreary coughing, the smell of wholesale cleaning fluids, tap-tapping boots under the gaze of weeping statues. A large scuffling woman panting at the Virgin. I give no offering. I have no money for the Infant King. One full circuit of the chapels and I’ve found no suitable saint. I opt for the brightest corner of the church. There are spring flowers there.

Peter Hynes was twenty-three years old in 1911 and shared a one-room tenement with his mother Eliza and his brother Patrick at 37 Clarendon Street. The house is gone. Now there is a Fas centre. The Hynes brothers worked as messenger boys for local grocers. Peter was adopted by Eliza. She was my mother’s grand-aunt. Peter Hynes is nothing to me.

Clarendon Street today is a quiet street between busier ones. Through a restaurant window I see plastic bowls circulating between tables on a conveyor belt. A few boutiques, a hotel, and this church. Under these scagliola columns on hard pews, is the last place left to look for Hynes.

The brewer William Williams named this street for a former viceroy. That was in 1782. Twenty years later the Act of Union separated the city from its wealthy patrons. The townhouses of Clarendon Street became penny hops, cheap dance halls, and there were brothels and bars, and a one-cell police station.

St Teresa’s opened in 1797 but most of what I see is late nineteenth century. Daniel O’Connell came here often, this was the church of his confessor. In the old chapel his Catholic Association met and planned.

When Hynes was 19-years-old Michael Davitt’s body was brought to the church. History does not record if Peter Hynes was one of the twenty thousand people who filed past the coffin in respect. Shutters closed, shades drawn, the body was taken to the Broadstone station. To Mayo.

Davitt’s deathbed choice of St Teresa’s was peculiar. Carted here without a public fuss at nine o’clock one night in May. But he had his reasons and carried them for thirty years. It was the friars of this church who took the body of his friend Charles McCarthy when none else would have him. An excommunicated Fenian, paroled and on his way home, a victim of penal servitude and a heart attack. Another martyr. At nine o’clock one night in 1878 McCarthy’s body was brought to this church. Davitt didn’t forget and made his choice.

And Hynes made his one too. As a boy I had his brassy medal in my hands. A medal he never saw and that I lost. ‘Ypres, 1915’.

‘Ypres’. I didn’t know about French then.

There had been no trace of Hynes in the bookshop on Dawson Street. I found only one book on the Irishmen of the Great War. There are more I know. They can be found. But here, on the shelves packed with revolution, a tome on every ambush, there was but one. And no books at all on the tenements. No record of the April and May battles of 1915 that took so many Irish lives. No record of what the women that wore black that year had said in response to the news. And oddly, only the one book on Davitt.

So I came to Clarendon Street looking for Hynes, where, when he was 15-years-old, crowds gathered to see Maud Gonne enter St Teresa’s Hall for the first staging of Cathleen Ni Houlihan. That play was strong on national blood sacrifice. The Abbey theatre was coming together. The play’s creator, W.B. Yeats got lost on the way and AE Russell arrived eating a bun and fell down some steps. History does not record if Hynes saw that.

Maud Gonne was well known in Dublin, and worked with the well-known Mrs Despard to improve the lot of the poor, who in turn called them ‘Gone Mad’ and ‘Mrs Desperate’. Despard’s brother commanded the army at Ypres. John Denton Pinkstone French, later, the Earl of Ypres.

But I am not looking for him.

The gas came in the darkness of 24 May 1915. A cloud three miles long and forty feet in depth bleaching the grass white. Near the village of St Julien, not far from the town of Ypres, 666 men of the Dublin Fusiliers, among them Lance-corporal Peter Hynes, had the bad luck to be in the front line. Only 21 of them survived unscathed.

Chlorine gas is nasty. It smells like a mixture of pineapple and pepper. Your bronchial muscles spasm, your lungs and throat fill with a thin yellow fluid, you puke, you have a headache, you die. One surgeon reported “we know little of it’s effects in the fatal cases, just that the dead are found with their faces twisted and a blue-green colour’.

By breakfast time that day 143 Irishmen had become nothing but names for the chiselers of the War Graves Commission. Twisted faces turned blue-green.

Nothing records the reaction of Eliza Hynes. With no body to bury she would not have been offered the option of the 66-character epitaph for a headstone she would never see. It is unlikely she could have afforded it anyway. It was not free.

So it is, that near the spring flowers, in the sunniest part of the church, I light two candles for a messenger boy and his mother’s grief. I have seen photos of his war, all drained of colour and life. And I do not like the sanitised green fields and blue skies of it’s memory. I don’t hold with candles much either. But I did my part in erasing Peter Hynes. I lost his medal. The blitz burned his army service records, being poor and dying in a national embarrassment did the rest.

His name is on an arch in Belgium where the Last Post sounds and he is a name among thousands remembered as soldiers. I wanted to find the 28-year-old who knew Clarendon Street. Play openings, Fenian funerals, bumps in the landscape of history that Hynes may have touched.

His is a name among thousands, all boys with no graves in a landscape of graveyards, all those bones and battlefields just proof of man’s defeat. I won’t find out more. Look further. The flames of those candles on Clarendon Street are full stops. I had forgotten Peter Hynes. I will forget him again.

…A man creaks in the doors,
Up a dim aisle his footsteps falter
Into a shuffling on the floors
And all is still again.
But in the rumbling street
A million muffled feet,
the myriad beat and tramp of distant men
Are heard. Outside a world roars
On; oh ! cannot ye
Spare but a moment for Eternity?

Oliver MacDonagh, from his poem, ‘Clarendon Street’.

Spits of wind lifted leaves onto the car. There was no swirling. From plough-black fields lone crows rose and fell. Above Strokestown hundreds of jackdaws swarmed. On village main streets solitary children walked, hunched, slouching on wet-grey pavements.

At speed in a car a man has no burdens. The landscape is a reflection of his thoughts, the radio a soundtrack. But on the cusp of winter, on a day like this, thoughts are born gasping. I see the plywood eyes of dead old houses and exhaust fumes on the verge.

On the sides of roads hoardings hang from lifeless cranes and digging machines. Improvised advertisements for mustard-coloured shells of housing that lie huddled on empty streets, at wet crossroads, beside animal feed centres and tyre repair shops.

I stop in Tulsk.

Two days from Halloween, four kilometres from the entrance to the Celtic Other World a girl is standing on the street wearing enormous, pink-framed sunglasses. She is alone and still. Outside the heritage centre a woman shakes bread crumbs over screaming ducks. Inside a genial younger woman says:

“The guide is off today.”

“I wanted to see the cave of the Morrigan,” I say.

“Oweynagat, the Cave of the Cats. It’s actually on private land.”

“Is this it marked on your map?” I ask.

“Yes. There’s not much to see. It would be too muddy to climb into. Your clothes would be ruined.”

“And it’s on private land,” I say.

“Yes,” she says smiling.

Down a boreen past a wrecked bungalow to a dead end. There is a padlock on the turnstyle, so I climb through the barbed wire and sink into the mud were the cattle have churned up the field. Two holes in the embankment are the entrance to the cave. But this is not an entrance. It is a hole. Growing above it is a hawthorn tree upon which two pieces of ribbon are tied. In the mud at my feet is a candle.

Pigs of magic come from this cave, and red birds whose breath withers the world. The vulturous triple-headed Ellen comes, and the three daughters of Airitech in the guise of wolves, the last of the grievous company. And the Morrigan. Once a goddess, of war, fertility and sovereignty, “Great Queen”, the crow on the shoulder of a dying Cuchulainn; or ‘mor’ from ‘maere’ in Old High German, surviving in ‘nightmare’, and in French ‘cauchemar’. Night-hag, screech-owl, a cattle sweating monster.

And this was cattle country. A cattle-fattening landscape of esker-ridge grasslands. From Rathcroghan queen Maeve launched the raid for the bull of Cooley. From the next field that same beast tossed the loins of another to Athlone and his liver to Trim.

In every direction there are great mounds, tombs and forts. This is Cruachán, the Tara of the West, cemetery of the high kings, the most mentioned royal site in the old texts and a forgotten place.

In the next field is the main mound of Rathcroaghan. Recent explorations have confirmed it is an unexcavated passage grave in the vein of Newgrange. For many centuries a wooden henge spiralled on top. Posts driven into the ground leave their trace. So do vandals and the information sign in the nearby visitors’ car park has been torn down. Only bumps in the field to explain the place now.

Building a royal site so close to the gates of hell might have seemed like asking for trouble, but the kings of Rathcroghan were semi-divine. Maeve was not a historical person, but the goddess queen of Ireland, wife of the priest-kings who drank her in long drafts to marry the land.

In 1310 A.D., according to the Annals of Lough Ce, Feidhlim O Conchobhair was proclaimed king of Connaught near Rathcroghan… in a style as royal, as lordly and as public as any of his race from the time of Brian son of Eochu Muigmeadoin till that day. And when Fedlimid mac Aeda meic Eogain had married the Province of Connacht his foster-father waited upon him during the night in the manner remembered by the old men and recorded in the old books; and this was the most splendid kingship marriage ever celebrated in Connacht down to that day.

Irish royal sites are often found near gateways to the other world. The ‘Sid’, the mounds, homes of the fairy folk, Tuatha de Danann. They live out of time and space, neither living or dead, just different, and at Samhain, the least Christianised of the Celtic festivals, the barrier drops between worlds; they can die in ours, and a man can hide from death in theirs.

Cruachán is heavily associated with Samhain. Great feasts where held, men fought battles with demons, spoke with ghosts, and made love to supernatural women. The gods whispered secrets from the cave of the cats. The harvest was in.

As children we harvested too, and had secrets. “Go early in small groups.” Households that gave sweets were rare, and word passed fast. The streets were ganged with black-bag clad competition. There were many children then and we roamed. I was a cardboard knight Templar, tatty Robin Hood and a Dinny from Glenroe. Tiring of the black bag, foundation of all costumes, I donned a flat cap, grabbed a walking stick, and feigned an arthritic limp. But the neighbours were narrow people, and they didn’t understand.

In 1779 Gabriel Beranger climbed into the Morrigan’s cave on all fours. He had heard the story of a woman whose calf had dragged her into the cave and all the way to Sligo.

We examined closely, but solid rock was everywhere - no door, window nor crevice, where the woman and her calf could pass;… we joked the country people on their belief: but the answer was that the devil had stopped it up, and this statement we could not contradict conveniently’.

A man who gave up much convenience in his passion for the site was Samuel Ferguson, an antiqarian, who in 1864 found an Ogham inscription in the cave that read ‘RAICCI MAQI MEDVII’. ‘Fráech son of Medb’.

A Connaught champion called Fráech does appear in mythology. His story involves a woman, a water monster and stolen cattle pursued to the foot of the Alps. He ends in a supporting role, in a ford at the hands of Cuchulainn.

But the Ogham was not written in the Morrigan’s cave. It was written on a stone taken into the cave by men of later years. Originally it would have stood on a hillock, like the dull wet pillar of Dathi’s grave, which still stands on a mound near here. The last pagan king of Ireland, it’s held he died by lightening at the foot of the Alps.

All this action at the foot of the Alps. Perhaps it was as far away as could be imagined. I do not know but I wonder. Samuel Ferguson wondered too. All the way to Switzerland in search of footprints in the snow.

Ogham is not the only thing written in the cave. The young Douglas Hyde scrawled his name there. Not just a moustache and a banknote, but also a boy with a knife in cave.

The first President of Ireland grew up near here. His teenage diary records his shooting expeditions across this landscape, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t shoot. Along with lists of curlew, snipe, woodcock and more, are his first stumbling attempts in Irish.

Teaching himself day by day, phrase by phrase the future co-founder of the Gaelic League learned his Irish from the family servants and the diary is a remarkable record of this. In English his father is ‘Pa’ or ‘the Governor’, and his mother is ‘Ma’. In Irish they are always ‘An Moisther’ and ‘An Moistrass’. ‘The Master’ and ‘The Mistress’.

Back on the road, I wonder who tied the ribbons to the hawthorn above the Morrigan’s hole, and about the new Halloween costumes I saw in shops, sexy nuns, hot nurses, and very wicked witches, Made in China for an American Halloween; there are some who think even the festival is a U.S. import. And few children come knocking now. Some years none.

Eleven kilometres from Castlebar, with dreary bogscapes in my bones, I pass more mustard housing among it’s builder’s rubble. A small girl is hauling a tricycle out of a puddle. She pauses. And then she’s gone. The inheritor.

Someone has defecated and neatly wrapped the result in black togs. It’s in the showers now, prone and glistening, it’s odour a fresh contrast to the scent of stale urine.

The mens’ changing room is often full of harassed women. They catch their little naked boys and rub them dry with big towels. They have no time to be embarrassed that they are here as I strip for the afternoon swim. I accept the presence of these fraying mothers in the way animals share watering holes. Besides, they seem close to collapse and I’m afraid of them.

I swim with old ladies under the absent eye of a fat lifeguard with an oiled perm. She is enormous and bored and she is eating from a huge bag of crisps. I wonder how she will save us. Perhaps she won’t. She will finish the bag of crisps and watch for bubbles.

On Fridays some boys come from the special school to thrash the chlorine-blue water. One old lady told me she doesn’t like them.

“They swim all over the place just like loonies,” she said.

“Erractically,” I replied.

“Like loonies,” she said.

That was before I saw them. One of them shouts “Fuck! Fuck!” and slams his hands palm down into the water. Another looks alarmed. He wades around the shallow end shouting things I can’t understand. Perhaps he has noticed the lifeguard eating from the huge bag of crisps.

I walk home through a strip of woodland, cleared of brush where a blackbird is hunting worms and two schoolgirls are smoking a joint. The hedgerow killer and the girls watch me warily. I hiss at the blackbird. My woods too.

The forests are all gone from here now; reduced to clumps of trees lining roads and sprouting as wind-breakers on housing estate greens. This is what is left of the Great Scaldwoods. A huge forest, first home of the Firbolgs, the mythical first settlers of Ireland. Elim king of Cnucha hunted through it’s clearings, and the last high king ran naked through these woods to escape the Normans. Now Ebay and Google live here and the Normans could hop on the 39.

The record is a silhouette. We know that in 1652 the local population were called out for a great wolf cull. The War of the Three Kingdoms was over. Gradually the landscape was tamed. When Wordsworth walked here in 1829 the woods were still wild. It possessed a melancholy he said. And a wildness peculiarly striking he said.

It is still melancholic I say. Where once I lay on a boulder in the sun, picked blackberries and counted skylarks, hollow apartment blocks grow green-black from mould behind gates. From the mud of greed sprouts progress, and it’s unrented.

Here, housing estates are landscape and the natural world a source of addresses. Roads are named after trees, and houses after famous roads, and in heavy rain and grey light one can see the last of the Mohicans attempt to overthrow it all. Big trees standing alone at dusk on a wild night, raging in the wind.

Most of the time though, they serve as places to hide. Places to climb into other worlds. The children have them. Those naked little boys have the time. There was a tree near me where I grew up and I thought a big python lived inside it. It’s still there. With it’s bulgy scarred trunk.

The poachers are gone from here as well. As a boy my father scaled the walls of the local grand estates in search of eels, pheasants, perch and trout. He sold rabbits poached in Luttrellstown to get money for pipe tobacco. The Luttrells who gave their name to the estate are remembered for the sins for which they eventually left.

One Henry Luttrell was a Jacobite turncoat who they say cost Sarsfield and St Ruth the Battle of Aughrim and who switched sides at the Siege of Limerick. He was shot dead in a sedan chair on Wolfetone Street in 1717 by those with long memories and a pistol.

It’s said that many years after his death his skull was dug up and smashed to outrage his descendant Henry Lawes Luttrell. A leading light in the burning purge of the 1798 rebellion he was so disliked he sold the estate and moved on. In 1811 the Dublin Post reported his death. Being alive Lawes Luttrell demanded a correction. It duly appeared in the paper under the heading ‘Public Disappointment’.

Two estate workers tried to kill Luttrell in 1797 but a man named Ferris gave them up. They were hanged. On the estate is a bridge called the hanging bridge, and here, my father and mother came courting before they were married. Here too it seems likely, the conspirators Dunne and Carthy met their ends.

Queen Victoria had tea in Luttrellstown, and that other Victoria, Posh Spice was married here. These days my parents aren’t up to scaling walls and the estate is a high-end golf course which the owners cannot make pay.

Soon they may seek to build houses. And perhaps the residential roads will be called Poachers Drive, Carthy Lane, Dunne Avenue, Hanging Bridge Road and even Beckham’s Woods.

The great Scaldwoods are gone, but wolves still roam. The new firbolg - Gaelic for ‘bagmen’ - are well settled in the barony of Castleknock.

Prowling, the populace has yet to be called for the cull.

“It’s about this bird who finds a book and it’s the doomsday book and these geezers start chasing her.”

“Is it really?”

“Yeah and it could mean the end of the world.”

“Really?”

This continues as the train pants into Vauxhall.

The girl is getting louder. I know her kind. She is one of the office mice. They are small and fast and they dash for doors in a scurry. They hit people with bags, poke them with umbrellas, they dodge and weave with their pale faces pulled tight on their bones. Men cannot behave like this. They would be called to account.

She is getting louder. “I texted Matt right, about this article in the paper, right, and I told him READ IT! READ IT! Because it was so funny, and he didn’t and I was actually quite annoyed with him for that! He should have read it!”

The train arrives in Waterloo and off we shuffle, shuffling down; into the tunnels beneath London. From above we might look like we’re queuing. But we are not. We are commuting. We are stuck-pushed in great piles, on steps, in tunnels, on platforms and trains. Ours is not an over-riding urge to be at all those theres but to avoid being at this one here. Commuting. Going faster. Faster. We are pushing and shoving. We are not patient. Not queuing. We are simply stuck.

Later, and I come into the light. Outside the British Library I join a real queue. There is a dread-locked black man and a very clean man with a bag of sandwiches and eyes like foam. There are Asians, and jolly spindly women from Wales who look like witches. In turns we are swallowed by the great block.

The library is the one part of this city in which I do not feel clammy. In London I sweat constantly. Not in great rivulets, but in a damp, layered way. It’s the climate, the commuting. It is the tunnels underground. On my desk are old maps and in my nose the smell of musty books, their covers marbled and embossed, bound with animal and wheat-paste glue. In my hands these books are adventures, these maps an alluring suggestion. Maps with blank spaces invite geographical fantasy. They feed our geographical imaginations. The empire that amassed all these books fed on blanks in maps. That is why Africans, Asians, spindly old women from Wales and Irishmen queue outside in the mornings, which are quiet. It is only in the afternoons that recorded birdsong is played in the foyers.

The power of maps lies in how they enclose and define space and in what they ignore. I begin to think about what Europe was like before it was a map. From caves the earth would breathe, mountains were altars to the all-father of the gods, the sky, Poeninus, and islands were undying lands. Hills, woods, rivers and streams, roads, enclosures and piles of stones were holy and the only map you had was the one in your head. The world as you remember it and at your feet with the wind in your face. But mountains are contoured numbers now, and lakes no longer doorways.

There is a map of the world where I am staying. Korea is at it’s centre; it bulges pink and bigger than Japan. A graphic illustration of how peripheral my world is to the Korean one. I ponder the possible effects of flooding Irish classrooms with Korean maps of the world.

My mind a jelly of new ideas I leave the library and go back into the streets and tunnels. I do like maps but the geography of London oppresses me. The map of this city comes in thick books. It’s overwhelming and doesn’t fit in my pocket. Underground a blonde woman in her thirties is on the last page of ‘The Audacity of Hope’ and a man in denim is reading ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’.

I am reading an article about adventure. Adventure it says, is defined as a series of events, partly but not wholly accidental, in settings remote from the domestic and probably from the civilised.

I would not call these tunnels domestic nor this shuffling existence civilised. I must be having an adventure. I look up. On the tracks black mice have dashed out to grab food before another train comes.

James Joyce does not lie beside Jewish writer Elias Canetti. I read that he did and he does not. The grave in between the writers is covered in green moss and cannot be read. There is fresh cat shit on it’s small shrub and the grave number 80427 marks it out. A cat pads among fine-clayed mole hills and I sit on a bench in front of the grave and eat tomatoes with thick hunks of bread and cheese. The small hedge around the Joyce plot is tadpoles turning to frogs for me. I saw it only once before in the garden of the house I grew up in and do not know its name. Small green leaves. Joyce liked to throw over the time-bound structure of words, to maul words like plasticine into each other, and crops’ and ‘corpse’ become ‘cropse’ and so death becomes life and I like his hedge.

The animals of Zurich zoo stare like the people and their zoo is getting depressing in a dimmer-switch dusk. The buggy mothers are gone now. It had been me and congregating buggy mothers. Now it’s just me and the snow leopards and the wolves that are left staring into the space of snowy enclosures. But Zurich zoo animals look at you and I have enjoyed myself here. In Dublin zoo the lion only roars before the gates open. The monkeys only look you in the face before the buggy mothers come. And I only saw the tiger at full tilt, ten-foot stretched and staring, when I drove the red mules by him on the morning bin run when I worked there. And that was before people.

The tram back down the hill is busy. A woman looks at me nervously. Her suitcase is nearby. She looks at me. She looks at it. She looks at me again. Suitcase. Me. Suitcase. Suitcasemesuitcase. She has no control over the suitcase or her own wild imaginings. I look at her. I look at the suitcase. When she looks at me I look at the suitcase. I do this until I get off the tram and she takes one last watery look.

No one stares like the elderly women of Switzerland. They are implacable. On the train platforms they have opportunity to stare for anything up to 17 minutes. I know. I time them. I laugh at them too because I do not know what else to do and I am the fool 17 minutes early for a train. They are implacable. Perhaps they find me impalpable. Not perceivable. Incapable of being grasped or comprehended. I blame the cheese. I wonder about their gods too.

Byzantine icons are for sale in a shop near the James Joyce Foundation. Some of them look very old. Next door there is a man restoring a silver chalice and nearby a ghost tour of the old town. A bald Englishman is saying something about a fella called Rudolph and walls but I give up earwigging when he catches me out. The ambling is cold until I discover a pyramid of singing children dressed as elves and beneath them I drink mulled wine and eat bratwurst. Two American girls stand beside me. One talks like the rush of a broken sewer main. The other is an occasional ‘yes’. I eat more bratwurst and go to an book shop where the only thing in German is the shop assistant. I struggle with myself and finally buy Scoop by Evelyn Waugh because I feel I should read it and it is not too expensive.

The year I was born Jury’s Hotel on Dame Street sold the interior of their bar to a Zurich banker and there are not many Victorian era bars left in Dublin so I go to have a look at the one that got away. The James Joyce Pub on Pelikanstrasse is a dull and cold place from without and inside bright and lavish. I push through the crowd of dull-cold looking bankers who might be elegant and lavish on the inside but who are still as soulless as this place and I go and have a drink in the train station beneath a 40-foot man with a coffee on his face.

On the train back I think about 40-foot men and why one and not another and about how myths do not explode but sag like soil settles hard on wormy truths. And I wonder on the epic of 80427 who adds up to 21 which is not exactly the number of return but on its way back around all the same. And getting off the train in Yverdon, with blankets of dark laid onto a plastic dream language every girl hanging around the station is a gilded fawn leg in booted disdain and I think Jesus. Why do they even publish Evelyn Waugh.

• Baffle-gab: The ambiguous, verbose, and sometimes incomprehensible talk or writing often done by bureaucrats. Officialese.
• Boom boom: A bowel movement.
• Yatata yatata: Monotonous talk. Idle chatter. To talk idly and at length.
• Dude-heaver: A bouncer, doorman.
• Scram-bag: Suitcase packed in readiness for any necessary sudden departure.
• Cut a rusty: To show joy, to show off.
• Shiever: A double crosser.
• Schnook: A dope, a sap.
• Beewy: Money, especially coins or small change.
• Snollygoster: A politician who relies on oratory rather than ability or knowledge.
• Snoff: A weekend girlfriend.
• Snurge: To sneak away, especially to avoid work.
• Splifficated: Drunk.
• Solid Jackson: Great, wonderful, marvellous, to announce complete agreement.
• Uncle Dudley: Myself, me.
• Umpchay: A chump, a sucker, a dupe.
• Winkus: A wink, sign or spoken code word given as approval, warning or the like.
• Donkey roast: A large, elaborate, festive, or noisy party or celebration.
• Yentz: To cheat, to fleece.
• Zoftig: Plump in a sexually attractive or appealing way. Said of a woman.
• Schmendrick: A completely foolish, awkward, inept person.
• Zex! See also Cheese it! A warning or command to cease an improper activity in order to avoid detection.
• Zool: Anything attractive, well made, or satisfying.
• Charley goon: A police officer.
• Ookus; ooks: Money.
• Overland trout: Bacon. (Not common).
• Bitch-box:A public address loud speaker.
• Slut-lamp: A makeshift lamp, a container of grease or oil with a rag for a wick.
• On the shikker: A habitual drunkard.
• Your mother wears army boots! An exclamation of strong derision.
• Stillion: An indefinitely large number.
• Stewbum: An unemployed homeless street beggar, or hobo, who has reached this lowly position through alcoholism.

The forward describes the dictionary as “a pioneering work devoted to establishing a comprehensive reference book of the substandard level of American language”. An odd sentence. The back cover has a startling diagram detailing some of the “sub-groups” that generate this “substandard level” of language; the underworld, railroad workers, financial district employees, jazz musicians, hobos and tramps, students, immigrants and narcotic addicts, among others.

It’s an engrossing read and leaves one with the impression that Monsieur Wentworth and Mister Berg-Flexner may well have been smoking the same stuff as the fella who designed their book’s cover; a lurid red and yellow affair which looks like it was dipped in blood and smells of fungal infections.

On that note… there is still a pile of bubble-dancing to do before scrowling off for further vocabularisation.

Okay… so that last word was mine.

I have just been to Cheap Shop. Another taste of home on the high street, which lives up to it’s big block print name; peeling black on yellow plywood. A woman with a sagging face and a warm smile sold me rubber binoculars to watch the buzzards with. There are a lot of buzzards here. They are large and conditions are good for them with plenty of woodland bordering tillage and pasture. Sometimes I sit on the wall of a small graveyard in the foothills from where I can see them circling on the thermals.

Once I saw one on the Menhir. The sun was rising over the Alps as I rounded a bend between Fiez and Grandson. Slowing the car to look at Mont Blanc I saw a large buzzard perched on the big standing stone. We watched each other as the sun spread itself like warm yellow butter on the lake, then he spread his wings and flew. The Menhir stands alone against a magnificent backdrop. Across the lake at Cledy dozens of standing stones were unearthed in the 1970’s and reinstated in their original positions. Their sizes vary and some are formed to cast human silouhettes, which as the day lengthens sees the gods stretch and contort. Neolithic man lived all through this valley and in the shoreline woods, and through the reed beds, there are still boar, deer and ghosts at dusk.

Menhirs, it appears, are still a going concern in the canton and a few weeks ago I was told the Menhir man was coming. In the garden a Menhir erected by a lesbian couple to channel vibes or some such needed recharging and the Menhir man - who also does fridges - was called on. The young man sat with his hands on the Menhir murmuring to it like a man calming a horse. But for all my sceptiscism the dark-featured fellow succeeded in fixing the standing stone just in time for dinner, to which he was invited; afterwards collecting his fee and leaving.

The people were feeling good and credited the Menhir’s restoration, I, the wine. And I was thinking too about those dark evasive eyes above a latin nose which had put me in mind of McCarthy. The chairbreaker. And oh, what a chair. Plucked from a skip on Fleet Street and wheeled for want of a taxi fare the mile and a half to Blackhorse Avenue it had been installed as my pride and joy. A little rip had been enough to have it consigned to the skip, but it was quiet something else to wheel it past the laughing ushers of the Four Courts, through gob-dawed traffic, down the Luas tracks and up Manor Street to the jibes of yellow-hacked men hunched in pub doorways.

My colleague had done a Peter when he saw Judge Alan Mahon coming up Fleet Street. He had abandoned me and the chair, crossed the street and affected an air of ignorance. Reckoning Judge Alan Mahon a man of more depth than my colleague I continued alone, wrestling the chair from the skip: A man walking his chair. That green-fabricked freebie lasted until Christmas drinks when, with one gyration too many of McCarthy’s huge arse, the chair lost a wheel,  and as anyone who’s worked in an office knows, that’s the difference between a good chair and a bad chair.

The day after the Menhir man’s visit I stopped on a bridge over the black waters of the Thiele and watched the Grebes gorging themselves on perch fry. The sun was stretched out for bed in a watery way and as I cast around for things to draw breath on I noticed I had dog shit on my left boot. Sighing I moved off and as I neared the apartment leaned against the bins to poke at the shite with some card from my pocket.

Beside the bins was a black leather office chair.

It is one of the more civilised aspects of Switzerland that there is a designated day once a month for the disposal of furniture, and if you want something, you just wait. I was exilharated, and later, topless in the kitchen cleaning the shit from my boots, I gestured triumphantly at the chair when my companion came home.

 ”Look! I found a new chair!”

“Oh god,” she groaned, “I saw that thing this morning on my way to work and I knew it would end up in my apartment!”

I am sitting in it now. And the Menhir man’s alright by me.

McCarthy… not so much.

I walk through the village to the post box. Cats stalking the fields stop to stare, one paw held above the ground, frozen. I see the burning man. He burns straw, cardboard and rubbish. He is always burning things. I am not surprised by this even though this village of 40 people has a better recycling facility than greater Blanchardstown. That is what people are like. To look at he is a young man getting old, with fresh blue eyes in a balding head. He seems to love his long-horned cows. I saw him stroking their noses one day before crossing the field to burn things.

The cats of the village are scruffy. There are too many of them and I am told the farmers do not have them nuetered, instead finding it easier to drown kittens. The gander gang are up early this morning. A black duck with a scar on his eye is the lieutenant of the group. He waddles at me, the pack at his back. From behind their wooden shelter comes the boss, a big gander who builds up to a loud crescendo. He stops when I sit on the trough to take in the view. Across the lake there are ripples and wind lanes, beyond that the wall of the Alps rise over the Swiss plain like a frozen wave.

There is a man in the village everyone says is an alcoholic. Every time someone mentions him, they tell me he is an alcoholic. “Oh that man is an alcoholic” they say. They tell me that after ever municipal meeting whoever is driving him home has to stop the car so he can be sick. I have never seen him in his cups but his car lights are always left on and he sometimes has the shakes. But he may just not like committee meetings. I don’t. His dog is a mongrel, a big dollop of border collie and something else. He comes at me teeth bared. I don’t like collies much. Funny in the head, like someone on a three day amphetimine binge. Too close to their edge for comfort. I introduce myself to the dog. He stops snarling and begins to pant. “You see, he is smiling” says the neighbour. We talk about the dog. We talk about honey.

The neighbour makes delicious honey. He explains the two types. The brown one comes from bees who have been using forest flowers and the pale one is from the flowers of the meadow. We talk about fishing and he tells me his brother-in-law is a great fisherman and whenever he visits it’s “poissons, poissons poissons!” Then he makes a joke about his sister I don’t understand and he and the dog go to pick raspberries leaving me to the mercies of the gander gang, here, on the balcony of the Jura Mountains, where the fog hangs in the trees.

I feel I should be impressed with the highest fountain in the world. I am not. Impressed. And I feel I am somehow missing something. Perhaps I am the one who is not impressive. Many of the tourists in Geneva are impressed. I stop to watch them at work. Big, blonde and booted, three happy girls compete with Japanese men in immaculately ironed clothes to be filmed and photographed in front of a clock, the face of which is a flowerbed. Watching them, I miss the green man. For a city with so many clocks there is very little time and I do not miss the green man again.

In the river Rhone there are eight bicycles and four trolleys. I am impressed. That’s just from were I am standing. The water is clear and I can see the eight or ten feet to the bottom. A big metal pipe is just discernible. The bicycles and trolleys are lying along the pipe at intervals like ritual offerings.

I start walking again. I go to the old town. There is a grand air to the place and though it is dead like many old towns, there are no ghosts whispering melancholy here. Money still greases the wheel. I get excited by the price of cameras and I buy a nectarine. There are big orangey fruit that look very juicy and are called ‘kai’. I have never heard of them so I buy three. On a cafe terrace a man jokes loudly about being in a Lebanese jail for 17 hours. He is American, wears a fur trimmed coat and dark glasses and sits with a friend. Two slender men stand over him in the stiff pose of chance encounter.

In the cathedral I see Calvin’s chair; a posture-producing wooden yoke, and I wonder whether his sermons were long and if so, was it because he couldn’t face sitting back in the chair for the rest of the service, or is it one of those deceptive chairs, designed to look uncomfortable so your friends don’t sit in it and only the cat and you know the truth.

I bet the fat man knows.

The fat man sells me a ticket to see the tower and I mount the steps. There are a dozen other nationalities squeezed into the tower and it seems the fat man has sold us all tickets and left us to it. Now I am trapped between a Mexican family and a cold-eyed man with sweat on his face. I squirm to one side and let the Mexicans barge and trample the cold-eyed man.

Escaping the tower I make my way to the Museum of the Reformation. It consists of old bibles and portraits of solemn reformers. Then I find a diorama of all the main players lighting the candle of the Reformation. This is great. Pulling on the levers makes them nod their heads, transforming them into rock-band reformers. Martin Luther and Calvin are lead and rhythm guitar, Zwingli is on the drums and there’s the Scot Knox just nodding along. Must be a roadie. Wrenching away on the levers in search of a bassist I spy a member of staff looking pretty close to agast. Matthius Illyricus will have to do. A nearby wall turns out to be a door and opens automatically onto a worn-carpeted staircase descending into gloom. It is not long before I am in the subterranean ruins of the old Roman cathedral, a confusing pile of rocks, pits and iron walkways amid which the occasional mosaic causes pause. The baptismal font is well-preserved and I ponder all those lives of which a moment was spent here in the waters, and wonder what they would would have made of the diorama.

Waiting for the train out of Geneva I find myself earwigging again. “But why?” A teenage American is crying. She keeps grabbing at her damp blonde hair. In front of her is a shuffling boy in baggy trousers, hands in pockets, eyes casting around in slow resignation. Waiting. The girl takes a ring from her finger and throws it to the tarmac platform. “I hate you!”

“I need to know!” She put her hands to her head and sobs. When she sobs she shudders. “I know I’ve been terrible. Is it me?” She sobs hands to head again. “I’ve had times when I wasn’t so sure about you. I don’t know why.” A group of Swiss Germans in lurid matching raincoats mill around like penned bullocks. They are also watching the breakup. Then one of them says something and they all laugh. A passerby steps on the ring. I am willing the boy to pick it up but I am not even sure he noticed the girl’s gesture. Apart from this the breakup is going to script.

“You’ll be just fine, you’re just gonna go home and watch movies,” says the girl with as much reproach as she can muster. She takes a phone from her bag. “Hi Corine, can you meet me at the station?” She sobs for effect. The train comes. All that is left on the platform is the cheap plastic ring. Their tattered relationship has a few more stops to go. Poor Corine. She is in for a long night.

Back in bed, I begin the drift into another man’s words. This book holds out promises of journeys to me in cupped hands. Page one and already we have ‘…the intricacy and divergence of paths, the fortuity of delays, the uncertainty of evening, and the asymmetrical quality of any journey…’

Still on page one I hear my companion murmuring to herself beside me. Then, ‘Clack!’ The room is filled with gas and my skin begins to burn. I run from the room naked. My eyes are on fire. My nose is running. She has found a mace gun under the bed. It belongs to the woman subletting the apartment to us. In the kitchen with my head in the sink I hear her say, “I didn’t know it was pepper spray. I mean, who keeps that kind of thing under the bed!” She says this as if I am an idiot. I do not respond; she still has the mace gun. Wrapping a wet towel around her face, she goes back to the bedroom to take down the curtains and decontaminate the room.

Having abandoned everything in my flight I sit naked and bookless in the kitchen. The burning has now reached my testicles. Ignoring it I try peeling a kai. Like many new discoveries they are not peelable.

Corine is not the only one in for a long night.

I was upset about this. I realised the depth of my attachment to this belt over the course of a morning spent holding my pants up with my hand. I considered my options. I tried to repair it. I had few tools and the job did not hold. I could throw it out and buy a new one. I shuffled around the town periodically hitching up my pants. I asked people in shops, “How much is that belt?” But I could not bring myself to complete the betrayal. I went home beltless. I was going to have to buy a belt. A new one, and it would no doubt be inferior.

It is not just belts. I had a pair of trousers once the like of which I have never had since. I think of them sometimes; the most comfortable trousers in the world. They are gone now. My mother said she was too embarrassed to bring them back to the seams and stitches woman. “They are just patches now! When the next tear comes, off they go!” They finally went. When the tear came all along the buttocks they began their new life polishing tables, mantles, shoes and boots.

There was a hat too. A fisherman’s hat. I wore it everyday of my college years. Everyday. And it was a dirty white hat. It had stains to beat the band; blood stains, beer and wine stains, grass stains, and dark, damp sickly mushroom stains from that time on the golf course. I loved that hat and when it was time for it to go it was so thread bear it was see-through. I had not the heart to bin it, or even to put it out to pasture in the rag closet with the dream trousers. Instead, I gave it to a friend who agreed to dispose of the hat in China.

I was giving the hat one last great adventure. I saw it churned atop a great pile of rubbish by bulldozers driven by leathery-skinned Chinese binmen; a tiny white piece of me, stained with stories of home, in a vast landscape where the seagulls weren’t seagulls and the pickaroonies spoke Chinese. And when people asked me where it was, I could answer China, and leave that hat with the last gasp of a mystery, which I felt it had earned.

That friend did not, as I had planned, land that hat in a bin. Instead I began to receive emails from the hat. It told me it had been to see the great palace of the Qing dynasty and the mausoleum of it’s founder Nurhachi. It told me that Nurhachi had changed the family name from Manchu to ‘Qing’ meaning ‘clear’ or ‘pellucid’, a re-branding that worked because 30 years later they were in control of most of China. The hat told me it preferred my friend.

True to the saying ‘there is life in the old hat yet’ my friend used the hat to impress a local girl whom he gave the hat to, and who years later, while waiting for him in his living room, I saw smiling in a photograph with my hat on her head.

Over the years I have thought about those trousers and that hat, but the belt had never got a look in. Now it was gone though, I missed it more, for the belt was the only necessity of the three. I resigned myself to the purchase of a new, inferior belt. Good belts, the kind you can slide down ropes with and wrap around your knuckles in a bar fight are rare, as are hats with character and truly comfortable trousers. In the age of consumption things are made to break. I recall feeling humble with my head in a fifty-year-old fridge in Havana, and what a repairman from Clonee told me about today’s white goods, designed to break just after the warranty’s up, by well paid engineers.

I went to buy a new belt. As I walked out of the apartment, onto the shining square cut slabs toward the steps, my mind full of thoughts of my own wasteful habits, there, on the ground, was a black leather belt.

I stopped. I stared. It lay there. Then cautiously looking around, I picked it up and sidling through the flower bed of red carnations, I slipped into my new - inferior, but free - belt of the gods.

The pebbles I could understand, I have seen the cairn of Ailil, a stone each for those that care, but the metro tickets… perhaps a token of the pilgrimage. And what small transcient mysteries, secret idiocies, incantations or prayers were contained within those notes? And why? Why write those notes.

I sat on a bench in the shade of a maple remembering a hangover in the Louvre; dragging it from salon to gallery past so much priceless art it all seemed worthless. I recalled in particular crashing through a crowd of Nikon-wielding Japanese to behold the Venus de Milo, armless and helpless before the yowling mob, my only thought, did the Turks really break her arms off in a fight with French sailors.

Near the bench where I sat was buried the man who found that Venus, arms outstretched to goats in the backyard of a Greek peasant. Jules Dumont D’Urville was a man of accomplishments. He spoke eight languages, travelled to the South Pole, south seas and South Island, had a sea named after him, as well as a couple of islands and a cape, and died, in the first ever French rail disaster, along with his entire family. That was in 1842, 18 years after Montparnasse opened.

I wondered how many goats where in the peasants goat pen and did they wee on the Venus de Milo.

I do not know if Porfirio Diaz spoke many languages, but given that Mexico is a country of hundreds, it wold be nice to think he did. The former president was born in Oaxaca and is credited with saying: “Poor Mexico, so far from god, so close to the United States.” I have been to Oaxaca. I wondered, if like me, Diaz preferred the dust on the roads to Hierve el Agua to the poodle shit on the Boulevards.

On that bench beneath the maple, I saw a smiling cross-eyed boy leaning a shotgun against a thatched-hut as his father menaced us for a toll. I had hitched a ride with two French lads into the mountains of Oaxaca and the ragged family had changed the road signs for a local beauty spot to divert tourists into their village. The French argued with the ragged family over the equivalent of a euro while I gazed from the car window out over the mountainside covered in mescal stills, patches of maize and maguey.

Diaz died in Paris while the Mexican Revolution was still in its full blood. He went in for assassinating his opponents. Chapour Bakhtiar on the other hand, was assassinated. Former prime minister of the Shah, he was of the ‘too little too late’ variety, and the reforms of his 36 days in office did nothing to stop Khomeini finishing the job. He was murdered in 1991 by Iranian agents; his throat cut and his bodyguards bumped off. Born to the Zagros Mountains, buried in Montparnasse.

A close neighbouring corpse of Beckett’s is the documentary film maker, Joris Ivens. In 1931 he went to Russia to film the building of the city of Magnitogorsk by forced labourers. His film, Song of Heroes, depicts them as ‘volunteers’. Ivens later referred to them as ‘weed’. Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo also shares the plot. A formative fellow by all accounts all I know about him was he was once arrested and charged with the “intellectual instigation” of a riot. He must have been alright.

I wondered what he would have made of Ivens.

Poet and whoremonger, Charles Baudelaire shares a grave with his stepfather near the wall of the cemetery. Jacques Aupick, former ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, would, I felt, not have appreciated the pokemon keyring, notes, pebbles and metro tickets covering his grave in honour of his dissolute stepson. They did not get on.

I recalled that it was Baudelaire who had said: “Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.” He obviously never worked in a basement office. He also said something about all love ending up as a fat, greedy baby sucking on a breast. And I do not think he was a cat lover given his views on Wagner: “I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the pains of glass with its claws.”

An open note lay on the grave. It read in English: “Just thanks.”

I wondered did Jacques Aupick like cats.

Beckett’s grave had less Metro tickets and pebbles than the rest, and no notes. I wondered where the notes went. Were they dumped in the bin or were they kept in a giant pile somewhere for an artist of the future to put on the Wall of the Tate and call art? I imagined some hoary North African night watchman of the cemetery grounds pouring over them in a porter cabin to while away the time.

Sometime ago I went to see a selection of short plays by Beckett. Rough for Theatre I & Neither, Rockaby and something else. A woman in the third row unwrapped a sweet and it seemed to take forever. Afterwards, I heard French people complain about the symetry of the performance and a woman with big blue cube earrings complained to the ushers that the plays were too short. Outside in the night a woman told her friend that she had seen the performance done “with European actors two years ago. You simply can’t beat it with European actors! The difference! Irish actors are just not the same.”

Beckett had a wicked sense of humour.

I was thinking about teeth and sex when a group of Italians approached Satre’s grave. He wrote that he had no more interest in sex than he had in brushing his teeth. I felt there were two ways to look at that. The Italians rummaged in their pockets and bags to produce pens and scraps of paper. Notes were written, folded and deposited on the grave. As they moved off another group of Italians came toward the grave.

They immediately began reading all the notes. Tossing through them in handfuls as if looking for the lost receipt of an expensive mistake. I exist, I thought to myself.

It was time to leave the bench, the cemetery and Paris. In a dead city, spend the day with the dead, but my companion had indulged me, sharing as she does my father’s view that we’ll all spend enough time in graveyards. She was walking toward the gate.

“So, you’ve seen dead Beckett,” she said.

“I have indeed,” I said looking after the Italians.

It was a bream. He was about four pounds in weight and and his dorsal fin protruded from the water as he circled. The nudists were much heavier, with things protruding from them also.

The rock-built jetty on which I stood emerged from the wooded glade in which the nudists sat and continued for about 40 yards out into the lake. There are a number of such jetties between the towns of Yvonand and Yverdon on the eastern shore of Lake Neuchatel and they are ideal platforms for spinning or float fishing. The lake itself is the largest lake entirely in Switzerland and sustains a commercial fishery, which deals mainly in perch and bondelle. The latter is a relative of pollan, a fish that can be found nowhere else in the world but Lough Neagh.

I considered my position while observing the bream. He was moving in wide circles feeding on particles of algae. Every time he went down to suck one up, his tail would come out of the water, the sunlight glinting off it. There were about ten nudists of all shapes and sizes. Immobile like lizards in the sun. Stumbling out of the woods in chestwaders and khaki I had not phased them at all. They just stared impassively. I shuffledmy way through them weighed down with gear.

I set up the fly rod and prepared to cast into the path of the bream. I tied on a fly made with green floss in the hope of tempting him. With the wind against me I cast toward him and slowly retrieved the fly. He followed it for a couple of feet so I slowed my retrieve to let him catch up whereupon he lost interest.

Every five minutes I tried a different fly, the bream paying scant attention. This continued for half an hour occasionally interrupted by a nudist strolling up the jetty to catch a breeze. I was eager to avoid impaling one with my back cast. Neither the bream, nor the nudists, appeared to see one another.

I was beginning to feel I had intruded on this scene somehow. Beyond the gentle lap of the swirling bream it was almost silent. Then it struck me; almost a dozen people a few yards away and no noise. No low murmur of conversation, no words. No talking.

As the fierce heat of the afternoon mellowed into evening and yet another nudist, his arse hanging on his hams like an old leather purse, hands clasped behind his back, set off for a stroll, I quietly acknowledged the bream’s victory and departed, leaving him still swimming in circles, ignoring the nudists, in possession of the field.

If only I’d had some bread crumbs. I hear they like that.

The lane forms the back entrance escape route from the Georgian townhouse on Fitzwilliam Street in which I work. It is not to be confused with the lane of the same name that runs parallel to Waterloo Road. This one is off Pembroke Road. A few quiet garages, formerly stables, face a single cottage in which Mr O’Donnell has lived all his life. When he was a boy 120 families lived in the lane, and, as he told me, getting a place in a game of football was not easy.

Myself and Mr O’Donnell have struck up an affable and conversational acquaintance and it was during the course of a recent escape from the office that I asked him about Patrick Kavanagh, whom I knew had lived nearby on Pembroke Road.

“He was a filthy man,” he told me. “Oh he was a filthy man. Myself and another fella were given the job of cleaning out his apartment after he died. You’ve never seen the like of it. The smell was terrible. There were stuffed monkeys hanging from the ceiling covered in fleas.”

But the smell was the worst thing about the place. “He used to shit in newspapers, and roll them up and throw them in the corner of the room to use later lighting the fire. When we opened the door there was a big pyramid of these scrunched-up newspapers in the corner. The fella I was with had to go outside and he got sick with the smell.”

Mr O’Donnell then rang his boss to refuse the job. “He told us, look, I’ll get you the gear, overalls and masks. It has to be cleaned. It has to be done. And I’ll pay you what you want.”

With that an agreement was made and a skip procured. “We put the shit in sacks and one of us threw the sacks out the window to the other one who put it in the skip.”

“That was my experience of Patrick Kavanagh. A filthy man,” said Mr O’Donnell.

I grew fond of the students, particularly the ones who were really engaged, and I made a big effort to point each one in what I thought was the right direction for them. I know how hard it is to get started.

Most of them enjoyed the course and found it helpful. I suspect some merely left with a better understanding of the hyphen and the remnants of their romantic notions in a plastic bag. Some got published though and one even got a job on a paper.

I made it my ultimate aim to get all of the 29 students to write a 1,500 feature by the end of the ten weeks, and try to get it published. To that end I juggled things around a bit on the syllabi I had inherited from the previous lecturer and I gave assessments that built up to writing the feature. The average attendance was 18 and of those, 15 wrote a feature article. Just over half the class.

The class edited several news stories and a feature article. I got them to write a feature brief for one good idea of their own. They analysed newspapers and magazines, looking at the sources of stories, and the ‘news values’, of various publications. I pushed the three ‘R’s on them, “Read, Research and Write”. I gave them handouts, exercises, PowerPoint presentations, page layout plans, suggested reading, job hunting tips and case studies from a bunch of working journalists. To focus the course more clearly I surveyed them on what they read, journalists they admired, what they wanted to write and why they wanted to write it.

And for my part I learnt you cannot teach people to write, particularly if they do not read. In fact, you cannot really teach people, you can only facilitate them learning. Talented people, such as those who got published, will generally succeed even if you’re rubbish at teaching, and the untalented will remain pretty much as you found them, though with perhaps a better appreciation of punctuation.

I was surprised at how many of them didn’t read newspapers, even though they were doing a class in journalism. And for every one of them who understood that journalism was about honesty, fact checking, accuracy and the public interest, there was another that didn’t see the problem with junkets, regurgitating press releases and unverified third-hand reports. In this, the class was a perfect reflection of the professionals they aspired to be.

The class notes I had inherited talked about ‘the changing roles of journalists’ with the advent of new technology, saying that ‘there are more opportunities than ever for freelancers’ but failing to mention the collapse of trade union power that complemented the shift. No mention of ‘outsourcing’ and the subsequent deterioration of working conditions. The books and notes were silent on some of the realities of freelancing, talking about ‘discipline’ and ‘persistence’ but failing to mention ‘set-up capital’ and ‘nepotism’.

Some of the notes and text books I consulted were equally selective when discussing career opportunities and the relationship between journalism and public relations, treating them as two branches of the same tree, which is perhaps the reason why so many students were unreflective about the role of PR in news production. I found myself wondering who is writing these textbooks, and deciding there is certainly a need for a ‘no bullshit’ how-to book covering the Irish print media.

I showed them the results of a rough content analysis of The Irish Times I had done. Out of 56 stories in the first 10 pages, most domestic news, something like 24 were based on press releases, 18 on court reports, a couple on wire copy, five from the Dail and the rest were original reporting. Most of them were shocked, and I suggested that, were they try the exercise for other papers, the number of stories based on press releases would be significantly higher.

In DCU, where I did an MA in Journalism, ethics was an hour-long class squeezed into the dog-end of the schedule. And as my class learnt, it is even harder these days to squeeze ethics into the newsroom or editorial office, where a journalist might be producing ten or more news stories a day, and relying more than they should on wire copy, press offices, marketing managers, and ‘corporate services’ as the local authorities call them. I showed them the weekly diaries of reporters on dailies and weeklies. I asked them what they would do if they were in the newsroom under pressure to pump out stories.

Then I told them how bad the money was.

Back when I was an undergraduate in Maynooth I did a Certificate in Journalism in Griffith College. I was repeating first year anthropology and working in a video shop. One night a week I would take two buses, a kebab in hand, out to the class. The following year I took what theory I had picked up on the course and applied it to the college publications. I have undoubtedly learnt many of the essentials on the job since, from the days of getting paid in pints on Friday in my first subbing gig, to the more lucrative present.

Both the MA and certificate courses I studied gave me three advantages. They brought me into contact with working professionals, who often treated the course syllabus with a slight disdain or bemusement I found revealing. They taught me the mechanics of writing for newspapers, which comes easily if you read a lot of them. And they also lifted the lid on the industry; somewhat disillusioning but nonetheless vital.

Do journalism courses produce good journalists? I think the answer is of course they do. But they also produce exceptionally bad journalists. More…The quality of the course is invariably dependent on the amount of practical training provided, which leads one to conclude that – given the chance – a lot of it could be picked up through work experience, which the students will have to do anyway. I made my students edit, write, research and pitch precisely because that is the only way to learn it. Plus you only make a mistake once; the only way to learn is the hard way.

That aside, there is a danger that what courses teach in terms of best practice is balanced out by what they engrain in terms of bad practice; over reliance on PR and the failure to seek out the ‘why’ behind a story. A big challenge for anybody who goes straight from school to spend several years studying journalism in university is to actually understand the ‘why’ of what they then go on to report.

PR is fabrication. Pre-packaged material for the easy consumption of journalists, whatever the subject matter is. If students aren’t taught to automatically treat it as highly suspect then they aren’t getting the best training.

But with the industry so utterly reliant on PR fodder, there is the distinct possibility their new job will be one where they spend a large chunk of time rewriting press releases, making a couple of calls, slapping a headline on it, and calling it news.