My working life as a writer this far has been ‘bookended’ by two books, which contrived to sandwich the last three, critical, decades of Irish life, culture and politics. One, Jiving at the Crossroads, an exploration of the cultural and political underbelly of ‘Haughey’s Ireland,’ was published in 1991; the other, Give Us Back the Bad Roads, is a leery trip through the ‘progressive’ Ireland of the pre-Covid epoch, published in 2018. Both books centre on my father, an anomalous man who might have strayed into the modern world from some adjacent century, and therefore embodied an emblematic human archetype whose deceptively minor influence straddled, in effect, three centuries of Irish life. Jiving at the Crossroads I think of as a ‘love letter’ to him a year after his death in 1989. Give Us Back the Bad Roads, is a very long but literal letter to him, written nearly three decades later, describing to him what has happened to the country he loved.
In the past few weeks, the astute cultural observer Christian Morris has read both books and invited me to join him in a conversation about them and their meanings and implications for where we are now. This extended dialogue is the result.
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Author John Waters
