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Go raibh míle maith agaibh. There's a Dublin phrase "you're in your granny's". It means
you're home. I feel like I'm home now. Thank you all so very, very much.
Lord Mayor Gerry Breen, City Manager John Tierney, City Librarian Margaret Hayes, cultural
Ambassador Gabriel Byrne, a dhaoine uaisle go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir as uacht
an duas seo a bhronnadh orm i measc mó mhuintir féin, agus mó chlann féin, agus mó chairde.
Tá mé iontach, iontach bhróduíl as. Tá mó chuid gaeilge...tá an cuid is mó do
mó chuid gaeilge cailte agam. Tá brón orm ach anois tá an cuid is mó do mó Béarla
cailte agam freisin.
I basically just said that I am completely floored by this – I am stunned and exhilarated
and proud, and most of all humbled –I mean truly humbled – and very nervous...humbled
not just by the experience of being here, but by the whole history, local and international,
that this award encompasses: all the writers, all the readers, and all the libraries, all
the guests here tonight, and, all the writers down through the years who have written about,
or dreamed about, this very fine city, this country of literature.
So I’d like – in deepest thanks – to talk a little bit about Dublin, the city itself,
and all the Dublins that are found around the world: the imagined, the dreamt, the forgotten.
I’d like also to talk about libraries and fathers and mothers and children and those
we love, and how they guide us into the future by giving us access to the past: that we who
are here because we were given our voice by many, many, many others.
But before I do that I want to mention that I was on a spectacular list of writers whom
I love and admire… over 100 that came down to ten, including two Irishmen … William
Trevor and Colm Toibín … and then there was Michael Crummey, Barbara Kingsolver, Yiyun
Li, David Malouf, Joyce Carol Oates, Craig Silvey and Evie Wyld. So my sincere thanks
to the nominating libraries who put my name forward along with all the other names. And
my thanks to the outstanding jury in terms of their work that they do outside of this
and also the work they then did with this award. I promise there were no brown envelopes
involved. But no, it's an enormous amount of work and I am deeply, deeply grateful.
Two years ago, after I'd finished writing my novel, Let the Great World Spin, I fell
ill for a little while and I ended up in hospital in New York City for a couple of weeks and
I had a chance to bring a book with me, and I took James Joyce’s Ulysses. I had read
it before, of course, but only in spurts, bits and pieces, never the full journey. And
so I sat there, in the hospital bed, and I read. I descended the stairhead. I ate with
relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. I wandered along Eccles Street. I glimpsed
what Leopold couldn’t experience anymore. I inherited the book and inhabited the book.
In fact I was even here in the Oak Room, in this very place, the Mansion House and I moved
through what I would call probably the greatest compendium of human experience ever written.
And then at one stage, early one afternoon, an anonymous little moment, my late grandfather
climbed out of the book into the hospital room and sat himself on the side of my bed.
I mean this in a very real sense. It felt like a physical presence. I knew it was him
even though I had only met him once, thirty years beforehand. Now sure enough, there was
a little bit of morphine involved, a little bit of Percocet…. but the thing was, there
he was my grandfather, my father's father Jack McCann, with his hat on his knee, his
suit jacket crumpled, flakes of tobacco in his pocket, and he just sat there alongside
me, and watched me read. And I was, in fact, I think reading him. The deeper I got in the
novel, the more alive my dead grandfather became.
What I mean is that the book transported me to Dublin on June 16, 1904, a year my own
great-grandfather and my grandfather – a boy then – would have walked these very
streets. I was there with them. They were the spectators of that book and somehow they
were carrying me along … riverrun, riverrun.
For me, Ulysses is the greatest of all books, and it creates the most viable of worlds … but
then again all books do this, or all books should want to do this. This is the value
of literature: plays, poems, journalism, biography, that curious word fiction. Literature can
carry us to the far side of our bodies – we can become alive in another way.
Perhaps literature doesn’t cure anything, but it is on its deepest level, an inner need
that is designed to refuse despair. Is that enough? Well yeah, I think it is enough. I
believe in the power of the story. I believe part of our peace process came through poetry.
I believe we value our lives more profoundly because we have the likes of the theatre companies
that we have the Abbey, the Druid, the Gate, Fighting Words, Roddy Doyle's Fighting Words.
I think we keep the wounds of emigration closed by having ours centres in London, New York,
Melbourne. I don’t think we could shoulder our current difficulties unless we thought
there was a word waiting around the corner, a Heaney word, or a Marina Carr play, or a
Bolger sentence.
It's an incredible thing for me to think about: what we can experience through literature.
We can experience violence, but not carry the scars. We can go on an extensive journey
of joy. We can inhabit a landscape that others before us have even ruined. We can learn how
to live in a place even if we aren’t there. Literature gives us access to a very real
history. We are allowed to become the other that we never dreamed that we could be. It's
the best democracy that we have. The things that we tell one another, the things that
we want to tell one another they survive. Not even sickness, not war, not even death
can take our stories and our words away …
What is your nation? Leopold Bloom is asked this in Barney Kiernan’s pub on the long-gone
Little Britain Street …. 107 years ago …. and A nation says Bloom is the same people living
in the same place. Be God then, says one of the characters in the pub, I’m a nation
for I’ve been living in the same place the past five years. And then Bloom amends it
to: “Or also living in different places.”
So what is our nation? All of us living in different places. So what is our nation? All
of us living in different places. I never left this country. I have always been here,
even when I was away. I am like countless millions of others who have made our country
into a global elsewhere. I’m so very proud of it. I’m not unaware of its faults, its
follies, but we’ve had enough talk of that in recent times. If I had to talk of my own
faults and follies we'd be here all night too. But we are the accumulation of our voices:
the ones we heard and the ones we have yet to hear. They real beauty of literature is
that in its mystery it has been able to join us all together. To be Irish and to get this
award, well, I’m doubly, triply, quadruply proud … an international award in my hometown,
in the year that we become the UNESCO City of literature. It makes me, it makes me a
little bit teary-eyed, well it doesn't make me teary-eyed at all. (laughter) Well it does,
it does a little bit. I mean I could not have dreamed this. I honestly could not have dreamed
this. And that’s why it seems that it belongs to so many others. So that financial analyst
from Cork in Paris, and that bricklayer from Limavady living in Cairo, and that young dancer
from Castlebar plying his trade in Barcelona, and that radical Jesuit in Mexico, and that
violinist in Milwaukee, all those Irish voices that have scattered all over the place, those
we hear and those we don’t, I would like to say thank them for giving us a whole new
accent.
So, I say I’m not sure that this award belongs to me. I am indebted to an extended diasporic
nation, so many people, a myriad of voices. Sure I get some of my voice from Joyce, I
steal a line or two, though in truth everything I write sits in his shade. But I get it from
Ben Kiely. I get it from Jennifer Johnston, and Paul Muldoon, Edna O’Brien, from a list
of other writers I shouldn’t mention because I’m sure if I went on and on I'd leave someone
off the list and I don't want to do that. But I also get my voice from this city. I
get it from New York. I get it from the libraries and the librarians who so generously allow
the most spectacular collisions of voices every day, in different parts of the world.
I get it from my friends. I get it from my teachers – in fact I have two teachers who
taught me here tonight: Brother Kelly from Clonkeen College and Pat O’Connell, from
Saint Brigid’s National Thank-you. Stand up. (applause) So the thing is our teachers,
our librarians, our public servants and people who do that sort of anonymous work, they are
the ones who voice us. They give us access to that what I call that grounded democracy,
not something flighty or ridiculous, but something on the level, on the boards, something true,
in the shoes, the people who do the real work that isn’t always sung. I'm lucky to be
sung but I hope to be able to sing about them.
So too for people in the literary world. And particularly tonight my publishers – Alexandra
Pringle, from Bloomsbury and Jennifer Hershey from Random House in New York – and everyone
here on the ground who sells the books, and especially the people in Repforce, and Cormac
Kinsella, thank you all so much, deepest thanks, honest thanks.
And then there are the readers. The truth is that I’m nothing without my readers.
and readers are always wiser than writers … I try to create a landscape however flawed
and they inhabit it. But I want to say that I wrote this story in response to 911 and
what happens to us with that strange involuntary muscle that we call the heart. I believe in
optimism as an antidote to cynicism. I don’t think optimism is easy. Far from it. In fact
I think the best optimists are cynics first, but they’re grown up cynics if you will.
There’s no point flailing about talking only about only the dark ... And the fact
is that the light belongs to the small anonymous moments and we can’t always see it. But
its there. We have to acknowledge the dark and get through it..... A few weeks ago here
Obama said "Is feidir linn" …. you know "Yes we can" … and I think that all of us
would add, fair enough, yes "Is feidir linn" yes we can. But it’s not only yes we can,
but yes we must … nach cinnte go gcaithfaidh muid … There is a moral force in being allowed
to tell your story.
The late great John McGahern used to say that the universal is the local with the walls
removed. It has long been so for literature. It hasn’t always been so for politics or
business but I don’t know much about politics or business and I don't really care to know
much about politics or business right now. Yet I do know that the purpose of literature
is to try to knock down the walls and keep what is treasured within.I treasure that I
have been taught and allowed to deal with words here in this country and in my family
... Our education system and our library system and our arts councils, who gave me a grant
really, really early on and our attitude towards art in this place, in this country have allowed
that ... They have been our scaffolds these people not in a high-minded way but also as
entertainment ... Lets not forget that it’s a good thing to have a laugh ..... I also
treasure the fact that I was allowed to go abroad without any rancor and still maintain
my Irishness and come back and raise a glass tonight ... It seems to me that that’s the
height of generosity to watch someone go and then have the beauty to invite them back.
I think we have to hang on to that very much so....I know I’m up here singing to the
choir but Christ we have to look after our young artists … It's wonderful to see Daniel
here from Malaysia here tonight. Thank you all for the support that you've done for the
arts. My gratitude is endless.
And last but certainly not least there are those to whom I am most deeply indebted.....
These voices may not appear on the actual pages of my work, but they are there in the
way the words are placed. And then there’s the ones who gave me the voices from the beginning.
My Mum Sally McCann, from Derry who used to bring me up to Derry as a child. My father,
Sean McCann, as a journalist and author, a fantastic journalist and author in his own
right, and also the man who fathered this rose called Bloomsday. There they are right
there (applause). He'd stand up only for he was disco dancing last night and ended up
in that little chair. No but there are my brothers and sisters. There are my own children,
Christian, Johnny Michael and Isobella back in New York. And most of all, most of all
there is my wife, Allison, my first and most eloquent voice, who wishes that she was here
tonight, but, as a teacher, and as a mother, she is busy looking after other voices. But
she is here, like we are all here in so many ways. and I will raise a glass of deepest
thanks to her and to everyone else. Go raibh míle maith agat go léir arís.