Gébler to speak at Scariff Harbour Festival

AUTHOR Carlo Gébler knows East Clare well. The Fermanagh-based writer, a son of Edna O’Brien, spent much of his childhood at his grandparents’ house in Tuamgraney.
Gébler will be in Scariff Library next month, when he will speak at the Harbour Festival.

Speaking to The Clare Champion on Monday, he said he will talk “about my childhood in my granny and grandfather’s house, books that I’ve written and what it’s like living in the North. I’m doing a mix of a reading and a talk about myself.”
Born in 1954, his father Ernest Gébler was also a well-known novelist so it was perhaps inevitable that he’d go into the family trade. “I suppose that’s probably the case. I remember the sound of the typewriter clacking, day and night.”
His first book, The Eleventh Summer, was published in 1985 and a stream of both non-fiction and fiction has followed over the years, including Work and Play, Life of a Drum, The Cure, How to Murder a Man, A Good Day for a Dog, W9 and Other Lives, Driving Through Cuba: An East West Journey, The Glass Curtain: Inside an Ulster Community and The Siege of Derry.
The Eleventh Summer is set in East Clare and was informed by his own childhood. “It’s just a novel about an 11-year-old child living with his grandparents in East Clare and the things that happened. It’s a very, very simple, very modest, straightforward, I would like to say unpretentious, novel.”
Carlo teaches creative writing at HMP Maghaberry, where he is writer in residence and he says he enjoys the work with the prisoners.
“A very wide variety of people get sent to prison and they all have different levels of education and different levels of literacy and so on. My job is to help them to write, not literacy but I help with the organisation of complex text. I help people write poems, or stories or memoirs or plays or whatever they’re interested in. I help people with their Open University degrees, A levels and GCSEs. I do a whole variety of different things.”
He arrived in the North several years before the ceasefires, just before one of the annual flashpoints, on July 11, 1989. “We just travelled on the 11th because we didn’t really think when we were booking our ticket. What brought me here was to write a book and then it took much longer and we ended up sending children to school and buying a house and that was 23 years ago. You end up stuck somewhere.”
While there is now peace around his home, Carlo doesn’t see much reconciliation. “It’s definitely different, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t think society is much less polarised than it used to be but it is much more pacific. It’s quieter, that’s the difference. You just don’t have people killing each other… There are enormous wells of antipathy and reservoirs of grief, which nobody has done anything about.”
He doesn’t expect things to become much better during his own lifetime.
Carlo’s work isn’t known for being particular hopeful and he acknowledges he isn’t very optimistic about human nature.
“I just look around, just look at Ireland. What has happened? We were incredibly rich and now we’re not. That was because Government was not properly competent. Look at the Catholic Church, look at what it is guilty of. Look at the industrial schools, the things that have happened.
“Let me put it like this. In the last 50 years, people in Ireland were in charge of our lives and they didn’t make a very good fist of it and they did some truly appalling things. The people who should have known better, the politicians and the Church, absolutely fell down on their duties and they still don’t really get it either. They don’t really accept how badly they behaved. And you ask me why I’m a pessimist?”
Carlo will speak at the Scariff Harbour Festival on Saturday, August 4, from 3pm to 4pm.