Ovolution by JJ Toner

If you liked those yellow Gollanz Science Fiction of the Year collections that brightened the middle of the 20th century, you'll love JJ Toner's Ovolution.
This collection of 10 stories brings us back to the world fondly evoked by Mad Men: a world of suited men who are still boyish, with short-back-and-sides haircuts - a world where mad scientists design the perfect woman, and aliens lurk.
Toner's edgy sense of humour lightens this world. In the best of the stories - Short Back and Sides, in which a barber describes an encounter with DNA-hungry aliens; the title story, Ovolution, in which a suburban wife absconds with her newborn egg - reality teeters on an edge of dry wit.
Dancing is great exercise, the sprightly barber tells his customer, not that you need it of course, lovely figure, very Brad Pitt if I may say so. He chats on about the bus journey, his colleague's varicose veins, and of course his abduction by aliens and release. Somehow, it's all horribly believable, and horribly funny.
The warmongers of the army - whose army? doesn't matter - rejig a dead scientist to turn him into a killing machine, but the machine turns out to have more morals than its makers, in Bartlett Rebooted.
In Ooze, humans scouting a new planet and aliens are uncertain about each other, each wondering: are they intelligent? Are they good to eat?
In Scouting Party the shoe is on the other tentacle; the aliens are scouting Earth, but a hideous confluence of golf, tape recording technology and American driving is set to foil their plan for world domination.
A Smashwords collection to while away a rainy day - while keeping a nervy eye out the window for silver spaceships.

MABS and the crisis

So the cousin's in trouble. He lost his job, couldn't meet the mortgage, got a loan from a moneylender, then a bigger loan. Now they're battering on the door looking for their money back.
"Look at all that expensive tech stuff you have," they say, peering over his shoulder. "You could sell that computer. What about those carpentry tools?"
"But I need them to run my life! I can't make a proper living without my tools, and the computer and internet connection get me customers!"
"Tough. Nobody forced you to borrow. Now it's time to pay us back."
This is the position Ireland is in with the IMF and the ECB: the moneylenders are peering past us into the hallway, looking for things we can sell to pay them back: our land (they want us to sell off the forest land that is 7% of the country's territory); our utilities (we already, disastrously, sold the phone company - now they want the electricity and gas, and even the water we drink, to be sold to private operators, greedy grinders for profit).
If the cousin came to you for advice, what would you suggest? Not selling the computer, I suspect. You'd take him to MABS, the money advice and budgeting service (not yet privatised itself...), and the MABS advisers would sit down with him and make out a budget plan to help him to order his money affairs.
They would tell him to talk to his lenders and make an arrangement to pay off his debts more slowly. The lenders will accept this, MABS would say, because they know it's more reliable.
Work is what is going to get you out of this problem, MABS would say. Take anything you can - a nixer painting the neighbour's house, a quick programming job setting up a database for your local school's scheduling of classes.
Grow your own vegetables: it won't get you an immediate result, but it will give you relaxing exercise, a way to think things through without being panicky, and then in the height of summer it will cut your food bills, and you can actually give something back to the friends who are helping you, with gifts of home-grown stuff.
If you have a skill, you can offer night classes to the same local schools and share your skill with others.
What MABS wouldn't say is "sell your tools to pay the moneylenders".
The European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are also telling the government to cut wages at the bottom - to make our poorer people even poorer - but to maintain salaries at the top.
This is a disastrous plan for the country.
I loved the Celtic Tiger - oh, sure, the arrogance of a small country that has suddenly got rich was embarrassing, but that would have passed. But I spent the Tiger years doing interviews for business magazines, mostly talking to tech entrepreneurs.
I loved it when someone running a company said "My dad was a trucker, my mam cleaned houses. But when the free education came in I was able to stay in school, and I turned out to have a real gift for programming and management."
This is something that was seldom heard in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s or 1980s. Then, if your family was poor, you stayed poor. Because poverty smothers creativity. Poor people don't have the leisure or sense of relaxation - or the sense of ultimate possibility - that allows their children to dream, and to have the facilities to fulfil their dream.
I was in a suburb last night, an area that used to be dodgy when I was growing up. During the Tiger, it was gentrified, and the remains of this still show, in some beleaguered streets with gardens of penstemons and ceanothus and irises. But the sense of terror has returned. Turn a corner and the next street is filthy, with a group of teenagers jeering at the bus stop, a line of takeaways, and - I jumped to one side to avoid it - a syringe with blood clotted in the mouth lying on the street.
A wide division in salaries creates resentment and a dull anger that stops people working. "If that talentless swine is paid €300,000 a year and I'm paid €80 a shift, why should I bother working," people think. Even if they do work hard, out of pride in their trade, their simmering fury poisons the workplace.
(Even in the Celtic Tiger years, exploitation was rife, and not always at the bottom: for instance, one newspaper bare-facedly paid its casual sub-editors as "suppliers" to avoid PRSI and tax.)
In societies where incomes are relatively equal, there is not this resentment. You're valued for your skill rather than your earnings.
Ireland needs MABS thinking, but at the moment, the government is obeying the moneylenders' every instruction. If we look forward 20 years, what kind of country do we want?
The ECB and the IMF would like a privatised state run by capital for capital, with money as the motivator for all work.
I would prefer a country with relatively level salaries, where the bus driver takes enormous pride in his job, as does the surgeon and the childminder - and it's pride in the job itself, because the money is not an issue: because we all earn enough to live well.
Surely it's time for the government to take the MABS approach?

Kavanagh Country

The perfect conjunction of genius has come together in this book: Patrick Kavanagh's poems and a little prose; a sensitive and learned introduction to Kavanagh and his work by PJ Browne, the photographs of David Maher, and the design of Syd Bluett.
David Maher is a sports photographer, whose pictures every week capture the moment of triumph of despair. But here, he photographs stillness: on the cover, Kavanagh's statue on a seat by the canal, deep in the meditation of composition. Or maybe terribly hungover.
Horses grazing in a mist-shrouded field, a postman wheeling his bicycle up Raglan Road, tufty grasses, a half-broken wooden farm gate, a statue of the Virgin railed off, a ladylike Grafton Street - the photographs in black-and-white enrich the poems without outsmarting them.
The introduction understands Kavanagh - his hunger for poetry, his small-farmer mentality, his acerbic Catholic Standard film reviews, his arrogance and kindess - without patronising him.
The layout is the best I've ever seen - utterly understated and graceful, the photographs perfectly chosen for each poem, the typeface exactly right to give the poems their voice, the titles - in large and small upper-case - gently exact.
And the poems... Raglan Road, The Great Hunger, Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin - to read them again is to learn them anew.
At the back are short notes on each poem - the place and circumstance of their writing, fascinating.
If you can get this book, snap it up. I hear there are a few copies left in Dubray.

A Preparation for Death by Greg Baxter

GLOOMY and hilarious, Greg Baxter's mocking novel about a failed novelist (himself, in a wryly-created version of the dank Dublin bedsitter life of the exiled American artist) will have you whooping as you reach for the Luger to end it all.
He lays it all out at first: the arrival in Dublin, crushed by failure, his acquisition of a job teaching creative writing (no! not that!) in the Irish Writers' Centre, his smothering, humiliating memories.
But it's not long before he opens the gun cabinet, with a rib-busting, vicious description of a session of the Sewanee writers' week, carefully calibrated with the use of forgotten, once-famous writers.
"A group of white-haired and weathered figures were standing around looking like Southern writers," he writes, sharpening up his stiletto. "If you've ever seen a group of them together, you'll know what I mean. The closest I can come to describing it accurately is a highbrow and slightly effeminate fishing trip."
It was at this stage that I actually put down the book and laughed out loud.
Baxter has a killing eye for the telling detail, and watching him poking fun at the writing scene is like watching a horrid, intelligent little boy poking hopefully at the corpse of a putrefying lizard with a pointy stick - what can you do but snicker.
His mentor, it soon turns out, will be Barry Hannah - a fabulously typical character: the novelist as liar. Barry is in the middle of chemo, and eats only pink stuff through a straw. But when he drags Baxter off on a search for a burger, mitching from the conference, Baxter - blind as a bat - ends up driving them along the country roads, and is gobsmacked when Barry meets a coven of rednecks, moustachioed and survivalist, inspecting their Stars and Bars and ammo and reliving their defeat; Barry, whose books are awash with moustachioed Deep South villains just like these, agrees vociferously with their hogwash. Aha, so are all his promises of publication for Baxter lies too? Mm? Hm? Mm?
From this villainy Baxter delves further, into the death of his grandfather, a Waffen SS man, and his grandmother's marriages of convenience - material any writer would give his right ear for, of course - and we're back to the flat in Dublin, now shared with an Icelanding playwright for whom everything is part of her stories.
Anyone who's spent any time in the horror subgenre of writers' retreats and hope will love this book, or else find it so terrifying that they run for their life.
Terribly funny; perhaps too sharp for anyone but the brave.

Ireland's banks

Back in the day, I took a morning off and went into my bank, Allied Irish Banks, to borrow some money.
I had a loan of £15,000 from Dublin Corporation to buy the inner city cottage I was living in, I told the executive.
He hadn't invited me into his office but was leaning an expensively-clad elbow on the mahogany counter and desultorily leafing through my account details and cancelled cheques, which he had brought out with him.
"Why do you want to borrow this money?" he asked coldly, emphasis on the 'borrow'.
"The Corporation want me to rebuild the kitchen and bathroom to meet their standards, so I need another £3,000," I told him.
"You should have saved the money up, in that case," he told me. "Your account shows you as quite unreliable."
I was indignant. I don't think I even had an overdraft; money went in and money went out, but the balance stayed steady.
Apparently the problem was that I tended to cash my cheques in pubs - as people did in those days. I wasn't a drinker; a glass of Guinness or a Coca-Cola was about my limit. But the bank hours of the time - 10am to 3pm with a generous lunch hour during which they closed to customers - made it impossible for those who worked all day.
"But... but..." I stuttered. I'd been led into that very bank - then the Munster & Leinster in Grafton Street - at the age of five to open my first account. My great-grandmother, grandmother and mother had all had accounts there before me, reliable women all.
He told me with a lifted lip that neither factor had any bearing on the bank's likelihood of lending me money.
Off I went back to the office where I toiled in misery at the time.
I had another account that I used for savings, in the TSB as it was then. I rang them up (conscientiously tearing up a stamp so my State employer would not bear the cost of my private call), and made an appointment to see the manager.
The TSB at the time was a tiny Dublin bank. Their ads, causing tearful scenes in cinemas and homes, showed an old lady tottering into her bank with an equally elderly golden labrador. Called into the manager's office, she attaches the dog's lead to the umbrella stand outside - and the manager opens his door and leads the dog inside.
But the TSB really was like that, then. "This looks grand - we'll see if we can get it past Head Office," the manager of the nearest branch told me. I got bridging finance, got the kitchen rebuilt, bought the house, and paid back the TSB loan, and the Corporation loan.
I borrowed again, this time to buy a roomier three-bed semi. The full loan was from the TSB.
A few years later I was working in the Irish Press Group when it collapsed. I spent three months as office manager for the chapel and journalists as we tried to find a new buyer, then the usual fortnight or so of blinded terror and grief that follows losing any work, then made an appointment to see the bank manager.
I was shown into the manager's office, clutching my mortgage documents and a list of direct debits, and so on. A new manager - I hadn't met this one.
After introductions, I gulped, and started: "Well, as you may know, I was working in the Irish Press."
"Now, pet," said the bank manager, "will you sit down and have a cup of tea and a biscuit, love?"
He looked calmly at the figures, and suggested that the bank give me a year's rest on the mortgage payment, until I'd get back on my feet.
I walked out of there on air - knowing that the year's respite would buy me time to find other work.
The very best thing was knowing that my bank was at my back, defending me against the trouble that had come against me.
A few years later the bank was sold to Irish Permanent. Another manager told me that the staff were getting a nice payoff, and that this was scarcely fair - the shareholders were us, the customers, and we were the ones who should have been paid. I didn't mind; it was good that such decent people were getting their reward.

Radio review March 4 2011

Wonder what the Greeks are saying now, when they go out to riot: "We're not the Irish. We're not like that. We don't use democracy."
Democracy in Ireland, though, is different. The politicians stalked the streets like exiled princes in the days before the poll. On the day, white-faced - or unbelieving and delighted - they stood in the count centres while the radio journalists feasted on them.
There was a palpable air of schadenfreude as the interviewees - or in some cases, anticipatory schadenfreude, for who knows what the future will bring. Will it be premature coalition, or coalition interruptus, ending in tears and slaps?
High points on the day the cleamhnas was set up were Newstalk's breathless early reporting - "Envision the picture: Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and in the seat directly opposite him (pause) Arise, Baron Gerry Adams" - Ivan Yates with a chuckle in his voice at 10am.
I don't know who said it, but I choked on my tea, at home in the Dublin South Central Soviet, at "The blue bloods of Dun Laoghaire have turned blue for Fine Gael, while working-class Dublin South Central is red for Labour."
By mid-morning Radio 1 was as avid as a cat looking at a bird and making that unnerving chattering noise with its teeth. The noon news reported: "Every Fianna Fail seat in Dublin is in danger.... the Greens are in a fight for their political lives".
The most unconsciously telling statement for the fallen princes was from Sinn Fein's Dessie Ellis. Revealing how Fianna Fail's fortunes have changed, he said: "We're not going to be like the three main parties - and I include Fianna Fail in that."
Radio 1's was a master feat of reporting, going on through the day, relentlessly circling from constituency to constituency, and Rachael English and Sean O'Rourke finally staggered off to bed at 4am, leaving those last few centres still counting, counting.
It's all a dream - could it really be the end of the Tammany Hall fixing that has been the curse of Irish politics since the 18th century?
By midweek, Fine Gael and Labour have their match well on the way, and the two stations were reporting Enda, spurning the Enda-pendants for the fine reliable farm of Labour, murmuring "D'you want to be buried with my people?"

* A made match can work better, sometimes, than a mating in the full heat of passion; as the Indians say, in a love-match the kettle is boiling and is only going to cool; in a made match the kettle is cold when it's put on the fire and keeps getting hotter.
Labour and Fine Gael, though, will have to have the same careful trust that goes into any marriage. They may get help from the book Little White Whys - about why men lie. Brian O'Connell gave David Harvey the skinny on it, having talked to author Ish Major.
Everything you want to know about a man is in first three conversations, said Brian. He gave some helpful questions to ask a man if you're interviewing: Have you any legal problems? If you hear "Not that I care to discuss" or "Nothing that affects me now", run a mile.
The texters were speaking tough love. "Little white lies will lead to big black eyes," texted Dave. Texter M was indignant: "I don't think that writer's going to have many male friends." David pointed out: "Giving away trade secrets."
Listener Marie said bitterly: "Men are animals but some make better pets." And her ideal match, Noel: "Women's place in kitchen cooking - and they shouldn't be allowed on the road."

Election coverage, Newstalk, Saturday
Election coverage, Radio 1, Saturday
David Harvey, 4fm, weekdays

Bust, by Dearbhail McDonald, Penguin Ireland

TIGER cubs didn’t come any more tigerish than Breifne O’Brien and Fiona Nagle. The well-connected couple owned a family home in Glenageary, an apartment on Dalkey’s Vico Road and a golfing villa in Barbados.
They were always in the social diaries - Nagle with her exclusive PR and event management company (€2,500 minimum for organising a private party for six), and O’Brien with…
With what? Most of us have only the vaguest idea of how the complex financial dealings of the property and bank bubble worked.
But Dearbhail McDonald, legal editor of the Irish Independent, was in the catbird seat for all the court cases. She lays it all out in its squalor in Bust: How the Courts Have Exposed the Rotten Heart of the Irish Economy.
Ireland watched it all with a mixture of horror and schadenfreude: Nagle’s humiliation as she lost everything; the collapse of O’Brien’s investment schemes.
The fraud squad raided the family home; O’Brien handed over his Aston Martin DB7 to the County Sheriff and his art collection to Adams - it was the end of a glittering life.
“Why, Gardaí wondered, had O’Brien’s banks missed the signs,” McDonald writes. “Gardaí were staggered by the vast sums of money entering and leaving O’Brien’s bank accounts, of which he had close to 100.
“At the time of writing, O’Brien has not been charged with any offence, and investors are still being interviewed.”
McDonald segues from O’Brien’s Ponzi schemes to people like Caroline McCann, a barely literate young mother who was sued by a credit union - after borrowing over €18,000.
Between 2003 and 2008 the state jailed 1,138 people for debt-related offences, writes McDonald. In 2009, 4,806 were jailed for failing to pay court-ordered fines.
Readers start Bust with astonished laughter that gradually subsides to a sickened terror. McDonnell writes about developer Sean Dunne’s €1.5m party on the yacht Christina O to mark his wedding to former Sunday Independent gossip queen turned barrister Gayle Killillea.
She covers Liam Carroll’s Zoe Group’s 51 companies owing €1.1 billion to its creditors - and Carroll’s estimated debts of €3bn through his various business interests.
And she describes the suicides, including developer John O’Dolan, found hanged in a disused horse shed after his investment in Dubai’s The World archipelago went wrong, and he “felt under siege” from the bankers.
Seanie Fitzpatrick sauntered grinning out of the Four Courts last Wednesday. McDonald remembers how he was forced to resign after admitting that the bank had for years been transferring personal loans it made to him - worth more than €80m at their peak - to the Irish Nationwide Building Society balance sheet at Anglo’s year end, so their existence would not be discovered.
Anglo later turned on Fitzpatrick, and he was questioned by the Gardaí, just as it was revealed that Anglo was set to transfer at least €28bn worth of toxic property loans to NAMA.
The collapse of the economy leaves not so much a victimless crime, in Irish minds, as crimeless victims. But Dearbhail McDonald’s devastating scour of the courts shows otherwise.
Here were many criminals, and a plethora of hapless victims convinced by their sleight-of-hand, lies and scams.
The hero is High Court judge Peter Kelly, who followed the criminals down the dark trail of deceit and shameless greed.
If you buy one book about the crimes and schemes that underlay the Celtic Bubble, let this be the one.

Dearbhail McDonald interviewed by Matt Cooper on Today FM radio show The Last Word