There is a speech in Roddy Doyle’s 1987 novel, The Commitments, I’ve long wanted to ask him about. “The Irish are the N-words of Europe, lads,” the band’s manager, Jimmy Rabbitte, tells his charges. He’s trying to explain to them what a bunch of pasty wannabes from the wrong side of Dublin have in common with African Americans and why they should play Black soul music, rather than emulate Ireland’s then leading cultural export, U2. “Say it loud,” Jimmy tells the perplexed Commitments, “I’m Black and I’m proud.”
By the time that speech was delivered in Alan Parker’s 1991 film adaptation, it was amended to: “The Irish are the Blacks of Europe.” Why? “Alan Parker was saying: ‘You just can’t have a white character using the word,’” explains Doyle.
But even that bowdlerised line made me queasy when I saw the film 30 years ago. Surely the Blacks were the Blacks of Europe? Doyle demurs. “The line was written in 1986 and at the time Ireland was an economic basket case. It’s hard to imagine now.” Fair point: in 1986 the Celtic Tiger was yet to be born, as was the liberal Ireland that legalised abortion and same-sex marriages. Today, you might well think the basket case is this side of the Irish Sea.
“Ireland was probably by a distance the poorest country in the EU,” Doyle continues. “The unemployment rate in that part of Dublin where the fictional suburb is based was 40%. I was a teacher in a working-class estate for 14 years and in all that time I taught two Black kids. So when I was thinking of the line, Jimmy says it in a tongue-in-cheek way but he’s also trying to superimpose a form of Black music on Dublin. He’s trying to get the band into that state of mind, the Blacks of Europe.”
The Commitments was Doyle’s first book, self-published with the help of a £5,000 bank loan. It could have been his last. The novel was trashed in Ireland’s music bible, Hot Press. “I think that the lads at Hot Press – and they were all lads – thought I was encroaching on their territory. They knew everything that there was to be known about music in Ireland and I knew fuck all.”
But one of the 4,000 copies printed wound up in the hands of Elvis Costello, living in Dublin at the time, who gave it a more positive review: “If you want to know what it was like being in a band when I was a kid,” he wrote, “just read The Commitments.” Soon the novel was republished by Random House and The Commitments went on to become a multimedia franchise.
“It’s not an astronomical amount of money,” says Doyle guardedly when I ask him if it made him rich. “I tell you, going back to when the film was released, we – when I say we, my family – were in a position to buy the house outright and that coincided with me deciding to give up teaching, so that lifted a big anxiety at that time. I was going into the gamble of writing for a living.”
The gamble paid off. Within a few years his first four books had made him a household name in his homeland. The Barrytown trilogy about the working-class Rabbitte family – The Commitments, The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991) – as well as the 1993 Booker-winning novel inspired by his childhood, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, gave voice to the foul-mouthed and witty urban-underclass Irish sensibility he was steeped in.
That voice even penetrated the inner sanctum of Craggy Island. In one episode of Father Ted, Ted asks Ardal O’Hanlon’s dimwit Father Dougal a civil question. “I wouldn’t know, Ted, you big bollocks,” Dougal replies unexpectedly. “Have you been reading those Roddy Doyle books again?” asks Ted. Doyle laughs at the memory of that sitcom canonisation. “If you were to ask my kids if there is anything cool about your dad, they’d say: ‘Only then. Only then.’”
But Father Ted’s implicit if jokey suggestion is that you are responsible for corrupting Ireland. “Oh, I hope so,” he laughs. “Single handedly.” You could trace a line from Doyle’s unleashing of working-class Irish experience in all its glorious vulgarity and beguiling truculence in his novels through to Derry Girls. Is there anything in that? “I wouldn’t say that unless you’re having difficulty with the word count,” he says drily.
Doyle doubts his influence has been so profound. “There was the thing that there was going to be this whole raft of Roddy Doyle writers because of the success of the first three, four books. There are plenty of people who write about life in working-class Ireland but I don’t see them as overly inspired by me.”
In any case, Doyle has been damned as well as praised in Ireland. One day, he was getting his round in after watching his beloved Chelsea get stuffed 4-0 by Man Utd in the1994 Cup Final. Suddenly a crowd of worshippers from Saturday-evening mass poured into the pub. “Full of grace, they come across the road to get pissed,” recalls Doyle. “And one guy said: ‘Jesus, it’s you. The priest was talking about you. You were the sermon! He was giving out shite about you!’
What prompted Doyle’s denunciation from the pulpit was RTÉ’s broadcast of his TV drama Family, which, though seen by some as a valuable exposé of domestic violence behind closed Irish doors, was viewed by others as unfairly maligning the working-class people living where it was filmed.
“In a way, I thought: isn’t that why I wrote the thing in the first place?” he says. “Not to annoy the priest and the parish but to really have a dig at official Ireland, to have dig at the authority of the Church and the authority of the state and their definition of the nature of Irishness, which didn’t really tally with anything I knew. To a degree, I thought: ‘Job well done.’”
The furore resulted in Doyle getting death threats. We are meeting days after the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie. Doyle wants to make clear that parallels are scant: “There was no money on my head, no need for security. What has happened to him for the past 30 years is appalling and what just happened is shocking. I’ve met him a couple of times – the night I won the Booker he came to the party. Two burly lads came in, looked around and then he came in. He couldn’t have been nicer. He just wanted to chat with people who like books. I saw him years later walking in north London and I thought, he’s got to the point where he can live something like a normal life and that’s great. Now this.
“What really gets on my wick more than anything else is that all of this was designed by people who had never read the book [The Satanic Verses].” But what about the offence to some Muslims who see Allah and his prophet slurred by an apostate? “There is nothing wrong with offending people – sometimes it’s a really good thing to do.” Doyle certainly knows about the risk and value of offence, but the key word surely is “sometimes”. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour, as when, for instance, Doyle agreed to remove the N-word from his Commitments musical.
For all that, Doyle believes the play he has just seen in rehearsal – and which he wrote the script for – is no historical curio about an Ireland that no longer exists. “They were saying lines that are just as valid today. It’s still the story of a bunch of young people who get together to express themselves, the joy of that and the sexual tension. None of that has gone away.”
Rereading the novel after many years, he also noted a glancing reference to priests’ sexual abuse of children long before it became a national scandal. “It comes up just as a little joke between the people in the band as they’re getting ready for the first gig.” After the interview I flick through the book to find it. Jimmy and Outspan are reminiscing about one Father Molloy. “Did he brown ye, Jimmy?” Outspan asks. “No,” Jimmy replies. “He just ran his fingers through me curly fellas.”
“Jokes were how you dealt with things like that,” says Doyle. “When people said: ‘Oh, we didn’t have an idea then,’ that wasn’t true. Somehow Irish society did have an idea – not of the scale perhaps, but a sense it was happening. And it was in the book.”
Today, the 64-year-old man of letters is rather distant from the young gun who poured something of himself into his plucky gobshite character Jimmy Rabbitte. Doyle has 11 novels to his name, eight children’s books, plays, screenplays, short stories for the New Yorker, Bookers and Baftas, even a Don Giovanni libretto.
Sometimes, he admits, reading what his younger self wrote can be discombobulating. “From the perspective of a 64-year-old man, it’s hard to get to the perspective of a 27-year-old who wrote The Commitments, or the 36-year-old who wrote Family. But is there anything I would do different, writing wise? No.” What about the death threats? Would you have tried to avoid them? “I think if it happened today I’d be down to the Garda station and ask for their advice, but I wouldn’t let it get to me too much. But then again there was no fatwa. My writing life hasn’t involved much suffering.”
The Commitments tours the UK and Ireland from 26 September.
