“I think we should keep going and show the bastards…”
It’s an uncharacteristically aggressive line from Michael Flavin, or at least that’s the way it reads in black on white, text on page. But on hearing Michael it’s not so much a call to arms as a rallying flag – a crie de coeur to consider just how far we’ve come over the last half a century and, by implication, how much further it is we as diaspora might go.
Michael’s novel, One Small Step, takes us back to an era when achievements such as his were, if not impossible, then certainly without precedent in mainstream British society – except where solitary individuals from Dublin may have been concerned. The idea of the son of a bus driver from Limerick making it to three masters degrees and two doctorates would have been beyond comprehension in the era of Frank Carson and telephone warnings.
Yet, in some ways, that was the 70s all over. Younger readers may find it difficult to imagine an era of quite so much dichotomy. An age when certainties spun off in all directions. We’d landed on the moon but still gathered round candles. Revolution was in the air but telly stopped before midnight. Hairy-arsed bikers wore lipstick and pearls.
Mystics and forkbenders jostled for attention with resignation presidents and racist MPs. If you had a crackpot enough theory, you too could have it broadcast by the BBC.
Pyramids built by Martians? Yup.
Nazi gold buried in the Swiss Alps? Sounds good.
Gay Irish talk show host becomes British national treasure and novelist? Not this week.
It was an era of paranoia as well as of wild imagination, and Michael’s novel encapsulates that sense of uncertainty with just as much skill as it does the wonder that the age of Apollo missions offered. In our conversation, Michael talks about how he road-tested One Small Step with friends and readers who had no direct diaspora connection, and his surprise at how readily they “got it”.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have been quite so shocked, for in many ways the tale of the Irish Diaspora from the 1970s to now is as much the story of British society as it is anything else. Equal parts hope and despair, as much a triumph as it has been a compromise. Perhaps that answers his question as to why Father Ted, a documentary to some, was a Channel 4 hit. We know them, and they know us.
When this softly-spoken (and, like yours truly, apparently highly-Anglicised) man talks of his ancestors surviving 1845 and of “getting the bastards” in the same sentence as describing his various academic achievements this comes from neither hatred nor pride. It’s ambition. It’s expectation.
We’ve come some way in 50 years. We’ve a long journey yet to travel.
But we’ll do it one small step at a time.
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