At the stroke of midnight, South Sudan becomes the world’s 192nd independent nation. In the new capital, joy is unconfined. In the mud huts that stretch for miles in every direction, residents can be heard singing and ululating well into the night.

By 7am, the BBC World Service is reporting a crowd of a hundred thousand already gathered at the Dr. John Garang Mausoleum. The speeches here will last late into the afternoon. But despite a complete lack of respite from the sun, the people never once cease to sing, sway and chant the names of the new state, its new president and his army.

“South Sudan… oyee!”

“Salva Kiir… oyee!”

“SPLA… oyee!” After fifty years of civil war, today feels like deliverance to the people of South Sudan. Amid all of the rejoicing though, it would be easy not to notice the small, sunburnt Irishman visibly perspiring on the edge of the podium. He is neither a soldier nor a statesman. But he has done more to bring this day to pass than any other outsider. He is the rebel priest, “Commander” Dan Eiffe.

A WEEK EARLIER, on the trail of Commander Dan, I find myself perusing the modest selection of duty free Irish whiskeys on offer at Nairobi International Airport. (Well, call it a hunch.) Ringing up the purchase, the cashier is obliged to see my boarding card. “You are travelling to Juba, sir?” I admit that I am. He seems astounded. “That is a bad place,” he says. “Lots of killing.”

Technically, the cashier incorrect. Right now, a precarious peace exists in South Sudan. But for more than half a century, this vast, sweltering wilderness was the scene of one of the world’s bloodiest, most protracted and least understood conflicts. Three million civilians died in two Sudanese Civil Wars, four million were forced to flee their homes.

In 2005, a peace agreement was signed. To the surprise of most observers, the deal has held and, in January 2011, the people of South Sudan voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence.

For the old bush fighters of the SPLA, the task ahead is daunting. Home to over a hundred (often warring) tribes, South Sudan becomes one of the world’s poorest, most dysfunctional nations. More than ninety percent of the population subsists on less than $1 a day. Three quarters have no access to basic healthcare. There is no electricity, no running water and a fifteen year old girl here is more likely to die in childbirth than she is to have completed primary education.

The tropical diseases nurse in Dublin had asked if I was going to South Sudan on holiday. No, I told her. I am not.

JUBA AIRPORT IS BEDLAM. The largest gathering of foreign dignitaries ever assembled on east African soil will soon be traipsing through these doors. Already, a sense of nervous anticipation is palpable. At the centre of the room stands a brand new baggage scanner, into which passengers jostle to feed their suitcases. On the far side, the bags are dumped unceremoniously to the floor. Since there are two (surprisingly expensive) whiskey bottles in my bag, I elect to walk around the thing entirely. No one even notices.

The gift shop is selling loose raw eggs and salt. This is, by some distance, the most foreign place I’ve been in my entire life. Standing amid a sea of young African faces pressed against the glass outside, Dan Eiffe isn’t difficult to spot. The young recruits at the door don’t recognise him. But the airport’s chief-of security does and my visa is processed with a flick of his wrist.

“Commander Dan!” “Commander Dan!” The soldiers and politicians clamour to shake his hand. Most of them, he greets by name. Occasionally though, he comes up short. “You don’t remember me?” asks one wide-eyed army officer. “Of course, of course,” Eiffe apologises. “How is your wife?” The two exchange pleasantries and part on the warmest of terms.

It is only afterward that I realise the “Commander” still has no idea who the man was. When you’re a white renegade Catholic priest turned gunrunner in the land of the Dinka and the Nuer, it seems, people remember you, even if you don’t remember them.

“APPROACHING A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN is like capturing an enemy village.” The young army officer is drunk. He leans across the table and grabs my arm. “First you make a reconnaissance.” He puts an imaginary spyglass to his eye. “Then you lie in wait.” He sinks his chin below table level. “Then you strike!” He leaps from his seat, upsetting our drinks and laughing so hard he almost falls off the stool.

The DaVinci is one of a dozen or so Western compounds constructed since the 2005 peace deal brought aid funds pouring into Juba. Right now, it’s getting late. But Dan is in reflective mood. He was born in Ratoath, Co. Meath, to a family of sixteen children. “The most important person in our village was the parish priest. So that’s what I wanted to be.” He laughs. “Some people want to be jet pilots. I always wanted to be a priest.”

After finishing school, he entered Maynooth as a seminarian. There he learned about the injustices of Apartheid and came under the influence of liberation theology. “I just couldn’t believe that a situation would exist where two human beings, a black person and a white person, could not sit together, could not eat together, could not love each other.”

Upon his ordination in 1977, he decided to go to South Africa where he worked as a Missionary of the Sacred Heart. A decade later, he decided upon a rather dramatic change of scene.

“When I landed in this here town of Juba in 1987,” he says, “All the NGOs were gone. I was the only white man in the place. There was one road out of town and it was closed. So this was basically an open air prison.” Eiffe found the town occupied by the Sudanese regular army, but under siege from native SPLA fighters operating in the surrounding countryside.

“I couldn’t eat the food here. Every morning I would get on my motorbike at 6am and rush to meet the morning relief plane from Nairobi. They would give me whatever they had leftover: croissants maybe and some jam. For five years, I didn’t eat any meat. I lived on beans. There are only so many things you can do with African beans. Believe me, I could write a book about it.”

How did this diminutive priest go from providing humanitarian aid for the victims of civil war, to taking up arms in support of one side? The 1980s were one of the bloodiest decades in the Sudanese conflict. After an eleven year lull in fighting, Arab horsemen (forerunners of the janjaweed that would pillage Darfur two decades later) had resumed attacking southern villages, killing men, raping women and taking their children as slaves.

“All the international press wanted to talk about was apartheid, apartheid, apartheid,” recalls Dan today. “Well, I’d worked in South Africa for eight years. And the worst excesses of apartheid were a tea party compared to what was happening here. This was a hundred times worse. This was genocide.”

ON THE GRASSLESS PLAYING AREA outside Juba One School, nine hundred barefoot children are being put through their paces by an unsmiling drill instructor. The children are preparing for Independence Day celebrations. We’re shooting documentary footage. There is a call from Dan. “It’s here,” he says. I flag down a passing boda-boda motorcycle taxi.

Fifteen thousand copies of The Sudan Mirror have just landed at Juba airport. The publisher celebrates with an early afternoon beer. The Kenyan journalist Aidan Hartley once wrote that “few have faced the dilemmas, seen the evil or risked death and destruction the way [Dan Eiffe] has.” Yet in person, Dan is less imposing, less adapted to his surroundings, than you might expect.

He speaks in a thick Irish accent. With a mobile phone constantly at his ear, he is constantly barking orders at people who seem not to understand what he is saying.

Did he ever consider making a life in Ireland? “No. I was fed up of the clericalism there. If you didn’t wear your collar, or were seen talking to a girl, that was looked upon unfavourably. I thought that was ridiculous.” So his decision to become a missionary priest was partly inspired by anticlericalism? He flashes me a cheese and onion smile. “You could say that,” he laughs.

The Sudan Mirror is published with the support of Trocaire and other international aid agencies. When Eiffe founded it in 2003, South Sudan was taking its first tentative steps toward nationhood. “These people had never had a newspaper in this country, let alone a TV station.”

This special independence edition includes articles celebrating the triumph of the South Sudanese liberation movement. But on page nine there is a piece recalling its nadir. Nimule, in 1994, might well have proven the SPLA’s last stand. Instead it marked a turning point in the rebels’ fortunes – one that would cement the legend of “Commander Dan”.

“WELL, I WAS NEVER NEUTRAL,” he admits. “From the beginning, I was giving the rebels blankets, fuel and food. They had nothing. Our president didn’t even have a car.” Eiffe was employed by Norwegian People’s Aid, a maverick aid agency with ties to the rebels. By 1994, government advances had pushed the SPLA all the way back to the town of Nimule, on the Ugandan border.

The rebel position was hopeless. Across the Ashwa River, 8,000 government soldiers were massed. To the south, in the jungles of northern Uganda, Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army were lying in wait. Stranded in the narrow corridor between, three thousand SPLA fighters were facing annihilation. As government forces prepared to attack, Eiffe distributed hooks, intended for use in a fishing programme, in a desperate attempt to snare government scouts crossing the river.

“We were being bombed every day. The soldiers told me ‘Dan, you have to leave.’ But I refused.” His bravery surprised even himself. “On the hurling field as a boy, when someone started a fight, I would walk away. I was a coward. But here I was ready to die.”

In desperation, Eiffe visited the mud hut of rebel leader Salva Kiir and offered to petition the Ugandan government for aid. “He told me I was wasting my time. I said, Salva, let me try.” So the Irishman undertook a perilous journey to the northern Ugandan city of Gulu. To his surprise, he was received in person by the Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

“For three hours, I hammered away at Museveni. I said, if we lose Nimule, the Sudanese army will be here in Gulu in three hours. Their policy is to come into Uganda and overthrow you.” The president was sceptical, but Eiffe persisted. “I said, Your Excellency, they are talking about you every day on Khartoum radio. Don’t you have any Arab language speakers on your staff? Aren’t you even listening?”

The Ugandan leader was persuaded. “He said, what do you need? I gave him a shopping list, like my mother would have given me.” Eiffe requested RPGS, mortar rounds, howitzer shells and other weaponry.

Had he any qualms, I ask, about running guns to an army that included child soldiers among its ranks? “None. There were half a million people in that corridor. If these people were forced back into Uganda, they were dead. The LRA [Lord’s Resistance Army] would have cut their heads off.”

Neither was there any reason to expect mercy from the Sudanese army. “There was no UN here. No NATO. No television cameras. I’d been in Africa for sixteen years. I’d seen what happened in Northern Bahr el Ghazel. If these guys had crossed the river, it would have been a massacre. I had a moral obligation to defend them.”

He has no doubt, either, about the success of the mission. “I used to tell people, I will lose my faith, I will cease to believe in God, if these people continue to suffer like this. And then suddenly, God rescued them. That was a turning point in the war. That visit.”

AN ESPECIAL PRIDE IN ONE’S PHYSIQUE is required to barbecue sausages shirtless. But if young Desmond Eiffe has a reckless streak, there is no great mystery where he takes it from. He and his twin brother Daniel were born in Juba in 1989, at a time when SPLA shells were raining down upon the city. On one occasion, their father flung himself on the two boys to protect them from a mortar blast.

How did their parents meet, I ask? “The story we’ve heard,” says Desmond, “is that our Dad was driving around Juba on his bike when he saw our mother Nouna walking to the market. So he offered her a lift.” (“She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” their father recalls. “I mean, to me she made Tyra Banks look ugly.”) The two began seeing each other regularly. “My Dad only knew English and my mother only knew classical Arabic. So my Dad had to bring an Ethiopian friend along on every single date.”

Unexpectedly, Nouna fell pregnant. “There were no condoms in Juba,” Dan admits. “To be honest, I barely knew what condoms were. So I went to my religious superior and his reaction was very humane. He said that in difficult circumstances, it was not surprising that I would look for companionship.” Dan left the church and he and Nouna were married. Thought he still has dreams about saying mass, he has never regretted his decision.

“I’d managed to escape marriage a few times previously. Now here, in the very worst place in Africa, God gave me a lovely wife and two beautiful sons.” Once Dan’s links with the SPLA became known, Nouna and the boys were forced to flee the Juba to Nairobi. “So many Sudanese refugees would come to our house that Dad built a waiting area outside,” Desmond recalls. “While he was off fighting in the war, our Mum was always helping people.”

The war remained a dim presence in the children’s lives. “I would walk into the sitting room and my Dad would be playing videos,” recalls Daniel. “There would be massacres. There would be piles of bodies. He would say ‘Go to your room!’ He would act strong and tell us not to worry. But you could see the worry in my mother’s face every time he left.”

MANY OF HIS FOMER COMRADES enjoy lavish lifestyles today. But Dan lives in the heart of one of Juba’s largest slums. There are no streets here, let alone street names – just a succession of landmarks and directions to be memorised and regurgitated. Around the corner, a traditional doctor’s clinic offers patients relief from asthma, syphilis, bad luck and “bewitched people”.

Corrupt on a mind boggling scale, with power concentrated in the hands of one tribe (the Dinka), and one city (Juba), independent South Sudan already seems intent on replicating the very mistakes that made Sudan a failed state in the first place. But traumatised by the faction fighting that precipitated the Bor massacre of 1991, Dan’s newspaper is reluctant to criticise the new government.

His more pugilistic rival, Nhial Bol at The Citizen, is far dogged in highlighting official corruption. His reward has been official persecution, but also higher sales. Today Dan Eiffe is broke. His compound has a generator, but no fuel. A pump, but no water. He does not own a car. In a city swarming with Western profiteers, a less scrupulous person in Dan’s position might put a higher premium on their friendship than a few drinks and the occasional lift home from the pub. But Dan is a true believer, in the best and worst senses.

His sons Desmond and Daniel are both studying business in Ireland. Dan Sr. jokes that one day his boys will return to home Juba and make him rich. Desmond has even spoken about enlisting in the SPLA. But that seems a remote prospect, for now at least. In conversation, both boys express a desire to return to Juba some day but also scepticism at the prospects for doing business in such a corrupt environment.

On my final day in Juba, I call around to bid them farewell. The twins are joined by their cousin and former school friend Menut Kiir. I’m surprised to find that the son of President Salva Kiir, the quintessential Dinka warrior, dresses like a London hipster. When I tell them I’m returning to Kenya, the boys make no attempt to hide their envy. What’s the first thing they’d do in Nairobi, I ask? See their friends, they reply. Have a cup of coffee. Watch South Park. Have a shower.

The old bush warriors of South Sudan have won their freedom. But the challenge of building a nation in which their own children would choose to live has only just begun.

Photographs by Ross McDonnell

He looks me up and down and trails off, somewhat despondently. The adults talk amongst themselves. Copeland turns to his assistant Cathal O’Brien. “Something dressy?” he suggests. The photographer certainly concurs. “We’ll be doing before and after shots,” he advises. “So the more you can smarten him up, the better the contrast works.”

Lads, I’m standing right here. Although best known as Ireland’s tailor to the stars, Louis Copeland will be holding a Style School workshop for ordinary schlubs this lunchtime, as part of the Dublin Fashion Festival. What, I ask him, is the most common fashion blunder committed by Irish men?

“Not getting fitted properly,” he reckons. “Not selecting the proper colours. Not choosing the right label. There are different manufacturers out there and every pot has a different lid. Without professional advice you won’t get the suit that’s right for your particular body type.”

As you’d expect, Copeland is a firm believer in the maxim that it is the suit that makes a man. Personally, I think a schlub in an expensive suit is still a schlub in an expensive suit. Either way, our respective theories are about to be put to the test.

While we await O’Brien’s return, Copeland asks how long I’ve worn a beard. Only a few months, I tell him. Why does he ask? It makes you look older, he warns. But on the other hand, it does deflect attention from the fact that you’re bald. I laugh. Believe it or not, that was my thinking too. I call it the comb-under.

O’Brien returns with a pink Eton shirt, black Louis Copeland suit and a pair of shiny black dress shoes. Copeland helps me with the buttons and cuff-links, but draws a line at fastening the top button for me. (They’ll traipse around my groin like its Heuston Station, but heaven forbid someone trespass upon the sanctity of my Adam’s apple!) I turn to face the mirror. Good God, I look like Zorro’s gay uncle.

Why this particular cut, I ask? “Well, compared to a striped suit,” begins O’Brien, cautiously. “This might be more flattering, you know.” He pauses a moment. “Don’t get me wrong or anything,” he adds. Huh? Copeland spells it out a little more plainly. “Not to put it in as many words,” he says. “But this might bit a slimming look for you.” Ah come off it Louis, I scoff. Do you want me to fade away entirely?

The tie O’Brien has selected compliments the shirt perfectly, at least insofar as it takes everything that I feel uncomfortable about in the shirt, and multiplies it by a factor of ten. It is an explosive purple, like something Burt Reynolds might have worn in Boogie Nights. “The tie is a Duchamp,” O’Brien informs me. Well, be that as it may. Ceci n’est pas une item I would be caught dead wearing.

After Zorro’s Gay Uncle, the next outfit we assemble is one I’m calling College Professor Gone Wild. It’s is less ostentatious, but no less expensive than its predecessor. The brown slip-on shoes alone cost €340. This is definitely more my speed though. As O’Brien helps me into the grey Gant jacket, I ask if it would be okay to wear the shirt outside my trousers. “Maybe when you’re falling out of Copperface Jacks at half three tonight,” he says. “But for now I’d tuck it in.” Oh yeah, he thinks he has my number alright.

As we pose for more photographs, Copeland again stresses the importance of wearing clothing that is fitted to one’s own particular body type. Which of his illustrious clients, I ask, might be cut from the same cloth as me? He mentions two celebrities, twenty four and twenty eight years my senior respectively. Not mentioning any names here, but if Brendan Gleeson or Dan Aykroyd ever fancy swapping fashion advice, I’m buying the chips!

Across town in Hacketts of South Anne Street, assistant manager Alice Dunne has different theory about Irish men. “They’re very traditional. They don’t take risks. They stick with bland colours like navy and grey. Whereas at Hackett we would stock things like coloured flannels, moleskin trousers and merino knits.” Truthfully, I share the qualms of my fellow countrymen. But there is no photographer in tow with me this time, so I invite her to, by all means, make an instrument of change.

The check shirt she offers has some nifty elbow patches, which have a cool, mid-Seventies Woody Allen air that I very much appreciate. Of course, I’m not sure anyone will see them under the fitted chalk stripe jacket she helps me into, but at least I know they’re there. The chinos test my resolve, but that’s nothing compared to what comes next: a cravat.

In what social context might I wear a cravat, I ask? (The unspoken postscript to the question being “…and not get beaten up?”) “Social clubs,” she replies. “Race meetings. A lot of people would wear one instead of a tie if they were going to a slightly casual wedding, particularly abroad.” I turn around and have a look in the mirror. Oh, I’m lord of the manor alright. Definitely abroad though. Definitely abroad.

Before I go, I have a peek at some of the price tags. Like Zorro’s Gay Uncle and College Professor before it, the Who’s Taking The Horse to France? look is absurdly out of my price change. It’s been an interesting day. But barring an unforeseen windfall of some sort, I’ll be rocking the Unemployed Lighthouse Keeper for some time to come.

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Zorro’s Gay Uncle

Louis Copeland suit (black): €499
Eton shirt (mauve): €129
Duchamp tie (purple): €85
Hankerchief (purple): €29.50
Shoes (black): €160

College Professor Gone Wild

Gant jacket (grey) €339.50
Jacques Britt shirt (check): €149.50
Gant jeans (navy): €120
Stamar slip-on shoes (brown): €339.50

Who’s Taking The Horse To France?

Chalk stripe jacket: €575
Contrast elbow patch shirt: €132
Chinos (navy): €156
Cravat (optional): €150

Unemployed Lighthouse Keeper

Writer’s own

Style School For Guys with Louis Copeland takes place Fashion HQ, Dawson Street (former Waterstones building), Dublin 2 at 1pm. Free fashion consultations available all weekend at Hackett (London), South Anne Street, Dublin.

He flicks a light switch in the wheelhouse and fires up the diesel engine. Mike McCarthy, his crewman, busies himself with the moorings. Our passage out of Kinsale this morning will be with the help of a baffling array of technologies: Decca plotter, echo sounder, radar, Sodena plotter, autopilot, GPS and compass.

“I might also look out of the window occasionally,” adds the skipper, deadpan. Large, good humoured and loquacious, Murphy is an easy man to like. He has left his wife, Karen, at home tonight while he sails the seas. But with nine-month-old twins to contend with there, he might actually have got the cushier end of the deal.

We slip alongside the ILV Granuaile, soon to embark on an exploration of the wreckage of Lusitania, and past it out on to the open sea. The prawn-fishing grounds we’re heading for are more than an hour away. “So the first thing we do,” Murphy begins, ominously, “is put the kettle on.”

Aurora Borealis is not designed to accommodate spectators. It has two bunks, two cups, two chairs and two spoons. During the Celtic Tiger years, when Irish labour was in short supply, Murphy spent four lonely years working with a Romanian crewman who didn’t speak a word of English. When that man returned home two years ago, a friend recommended McCarthy, a local.

McCarthy comes from fishing stock. His late cousin Ger Bohan skippered Honeydew II, which was lost off the coast of Waterford in 2007. Murphy doesn’t come from a fishing family. His father was an insurance broker. It was a summer job on a fishing trawler that inspired in him an enduring love for this hard-scrabble life.

At 19, Murphy borrowed £8,000 from the Credit Union and purchased his first boat; he has now owned six or seven of them. Over the years, he admits, he has tried his hand at other jobs. But he has always come back to this one. “You have to love it,” he says. “There really is no other reason you’d be out here.”

Today about 14 fishing trawlers operate out of Kinsale. That figure has held steady, more or less, in recent years. But Kinsale is the exception. Up the coast, Dingle has about 20 boats, down from 60 or 70 a decade ago. If commercial fishing is a calling, the industry is experiencing a serious fall-off in vocations.

Rising fuel prices are at least partly to blame. To recoup their costs, large trawlers must now remain at sea for seven or eight days at a time, placing strain on crews’ family lives. Smaller boats, such as Aurora Borealis, meanwhile, have had to diversify into lobster potting, which is more fuel-efficient than trawling but also much more labour-intensive.

Lobster pots are expensive to buy and maintain, leaving Murphy (who also had to replace his ship’s propeller this year) with just enough income for his young family to get by on. “As I said,” he repeats, “you have to love the work.” And it’s obvious he does. As the lights of Kinsale Harbour fade into the distance he grabs a tin whistle from the shelf and plays a familiar tune.

Me and my cousin, one Arthur McBride,
As we went a-walking down by the seaside,
Now mark you what followed, and what did betide,
For it being on Christmas morning…

AT 4.40AM, MURPHY announces that it is time to clutch in the hydraulics. I have no idea what that means, but I follow the pair out on to the deck. Murphy unwinds the trawl net using a mechanised hauling system while McCarthy guides it into the ocean. About 150m of steel cable follows the net down into the grimy surf.

Stocks of white fish are low in these waters, Murphy explains. But this has meant a corresponding rise in the number of prawns. A box of them sells for about €100 back at the harbour, so a couple of boxes would cover our diesel costs for the day, with a little change to spare. But prawns are most numerous at dawn, hence our extremely early start.

His work done for now, McCarthy goes below deck to bunk down for a couple of hours. Murphy and I repair to the wheelhouse for another round of tea. At 5am, news bulletins report that the world’s economy has just tanked, or cratered, or whatever it tends to do these days. But the skipper is not unduly concerned. He seems much more interested in practising his tin whistle.

Just above the horizon, to the east, the first flicker of dawn is breaking. I suddenly feel very tired. Murphy offers me his bunk downstairs. I don’t need to be asked twice. The sleeping quarters are cramped and claustrophobic, but I drift off soon enough. When I awaken, sunlight is streaming in, and, even above the din of the ship’s engine, I can detect the sound of Murphy’s tin whistle.

“Good morning! Good morning!” the sergeant did cry.
“And the same to you gentlemen,” we did reply,
Intending no harm, but just to pass by,
For it being on Christmas morning…

IT’S 8AM NOW. The skipper and Michael Mac Sweeney, the photographer accompanying us, are resting below deck while McCarthy and I man the bridge. He’s not a talkative man, Mike McCarthy. In fact you’d get more chit-chat from a Mafia hood in an interrogation room. After a couple of failed opening gambits, I give up and find something to read. He watches television.

So engrossed is he in Ireland AM, and I in a copy of the Tide Tables 2011, that we scarcely notice a rigid inflatable boat from LE Emer speeding in our direction. It pulls alongside and two naval officers hop aboard. Ensign Dubheasa Ní Cionnach and Petty Officer Jason Whelehan are conducting a routine inspection. They examine the ships’ logbook, its licence and its registration. They check the crates on deck to make sure we’re not carrying excess fish. The skipper rises from his bunk to greet them, then sees them off in good humour.

“Any other excitement?” he asks after they’ve departed. McCarthy nods in my direction. “This fellow puked,” he says. Well, so much for omerta. Murphy can’t believe it. “Did you really?” he asks. I nod. “Sure, this is as calm a morning as you could ask for. You’d want to be out here in December.”

What can I say? I’m a medical wonder.

Murphy wipes his penknife on his sleeve and offers me a slice of apple. I politely decline. “You didn’t get much out of Mike, I’d say.” I shake my head, still feeling nauseated. A seagull dropping splats on the deck and I’m up again. Murphy has a point, though. As I lean over the side of the boat I can actually see my own reflection in the water.

At 10am, the crew don oilskins and begin hauling in the nets. With considerable effort, the catch is dragged on board. We may have been trawling for prawns, but these nets don’t discriminate. McCarthy pulls at a piece of cord and, suddenly, every sea creature imaginable is flapping and wriggling about on the deck: prawns, monkfish, brill, megrim, dogfish, starfish and something that looks like (but presumably isn’t) a hedgehog.

It’s an awesome sight. A ling slithers at my feet, its mouth petrified in an expression of existential anguish. McCarthy shovels about two-thirds of the catch, both dead and alive, back into the sea, sparking a frenzy among the gulls that have been trailing us for miles. Like James Coburn’s character in The Magnificent Seven, he doesn’t say much. But he’s useful with a blade, gutting and sorting hundreds of fish in a matter of minutes.

IN THE WHEELHOUSE, Murphy is peeling potatoes. As well as its two bunks, two cups, two chairs and two spoons, the trawler has two plates, two knives, two forks and one pot. Today’s dinner is pork and potatoes. Once that’s cooking, he comes outside to inspect the morning’s catch. It’s a disappointing haul. All counted, there is less than a box of prawns and maybe a box and a half of other, miscellaneous catch. Scarcely enough, in other words, to cover the cost of the day’s diesel. But we press on. From here on, it’s all profit.

McCarthy returns to his bunk while Murphy sits down and serenades the gulls. He took up the tin whistle only recently, he explains, but he is determined to perform at a session at the Spaniard pub the following evening. There have been times, Murphy admits, when he has regretted not choosing a more secure living. He is 42 now. He will be almost 60 when his children reach third level. Will he still be able for this work at that age? He doubts it.

For a soldier he leads a very fine life,
And he always is blessed with a charming young wife,
And he pays all his debts without sorrow or strife,
And always lives pleasant and charming…

DURING THE CELTIC TIGER years, he says, “I used to meet guys I knew who were making all sorts of money doing this or that. And I wondered what the hell I was doing.” He takes a sip of tea. “Of course, a lot of those guys are out of work now. So I don’t feel so bad.”

At noon, dinner is served. The onboard hygiene regimen might not quite be of Michelin-star standard, but we’re hungry and the food is delicious. Why, though, I wonder, are we eating supermarket pork when crates of fresh fish are sitting in ice outside? “Mike doesn’t eat fish,” replies Murphy. Why not? “He just doesn’t. Never has.”

After lunch, Murphy and McCarthy drag in another catch. There is lots of seaweed this time, and an empty can of beer, but also plenty of cod. Piled high in a crate, they look like enormous elephant ears with mouths. As Murphy and McCarthy get to work sorting through the haul, I begin to wonder if I’m getting in their way. Murphy is quick to reassure me. “Sure, you’ve been in my way all day,” he says with a laugh. Well, let me know if the situation becomes critical or anything. “I will.”

Although we may be single and free,
We take great delight in our own company,
And we have no desire fine places to see,
Though your offers are perfectly charming…

IT’S A DIFFICULT LIFE these men lead. They work long, lonely hours, for low pay and with little or no job security. When the cod are all boxed, and in ice, I ask Murphy what makes all of it worthwhile. “I like it,” he replies. “I enjoy the work. There’s freedom. I’m my own boss. It’s rewarding when you have a good day. And a good week is even better.”

It sounds like the life of a freelance journalist, I tell him, just with higher overheads. I put down my notepad and pen, and he picks up the tin whistle. On the horizon, Kinsale Harbour and The Spaniard pub are looming.

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Photo by Michael MacSweeney.

Recent years have seen a mini-industry of reborning manufacturers and collectors spring up online. Tynemouth railway station in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, however, is one of the few offline locations where members of the public might unexpectedly stumble upon these bizarre creations. At her stall in the station’s bustling flea market then, (self-proclaimed) ‘Reborn artiste’ Rosie Scott is in a unique position to witness people’s reaction to her work at first hand.

Their sometimes negative comments, though, don’t seem to bother her particularly. “People say they’re freaky. I just say ‘You mustn’t got any mirrors in your house then, pet!’ They say they’re scary, and I say ‘Not until they start climbin’ out of their cots – then I’m away!’ You break the ice that way. No matter what they say, I compensate with laughter and I never retaliate. Ever.”

1.

Rosie Scott founded the Angelwing Nursery with her partner Kevan in 2002. She was inspired, she says, by a vision that appeared to her at a spiritual retreat. (“The spirit showed me baby booties. At first I thought ‘What thee hell are they giving us this for?’ I knew they weren’t mine cos I’d already had my babies.”) Working out of the attic in their modest council house, Rosie and Kevan create their reborn dolls by removing the factory paint, re-treating the skin and then individually threading thousands of hairs through the doll’s scull to create authentic looking baby hair and eyebrows. The doll’s body is reconstructed out of specially made silicon-vinyl, so that it feels and weights just like a real infant. It’s an incredibly laborious process, and one that both insist can only be undertaken as a labour of love.

Running the business is a challenge for a couple with little formal education and no business training. The various materials required have to be imported from Germany, Spain and the United States. “It used to be very inefficient at the start,” Rosie admits. “I’d put in an order in Spain and it’d take weeks to arrive. I’d ring ‘em and they’d say ‘We have holiday, we have holiday.’ You ‘ave more bloomin’ holidays than the Queen, I’d say. I couldn’t run my business like that. But I’ve found my own couriers now. They’re very good. If I put in an order, it’s on my doorstep two days later.”

As well as the doll, Angelwing customers receive a Moses basket, nappies, a shawl, soft toy, a brush and comb set and a special birth certificate. Rosie calls the dolls ‘babies’ and her customers their ‘Mammies’. “We deliver our babies to their new Mammies in person,” she says. “They come in little boxes that say Our New Baby. The boxes are specially designed… so as not to have a lid.” She pauses significantly, and I gaze back blankly. Then she spells it out for me. “It’s so they don’t resemble a coffin.”

Christ.

2.

The extremely creepy (but hitherto un-referred-to) subtext in all of this is something I intend to raise with Rosie and Kevan at some point. But it wouldn’t upset me too much if we tiptoed around it for a little while longer yet. Kevan and Rosie, though, are not nearly so squeamish. Some of their Mammies are specialist doll collectors, Kevan tell me. But the collectors wouldn’t be their biggest customers at all, he hastens to add. He lists their biggest customers in his thick Geordie accent. “Grandmothers that never had grandbairns. Women that lost bairns. Couples that can’t have bairns… They might have a little nursery built, so the doll would be left on the bed… There’s one woman, Beth, who’s had something like nine miscarriages. She’s got one.”

At some point, I know, I’m going to have to raise the possibility with Rosie and Kevan that what they’re actually doing here is exploiting the misfortunes of vulnerable people for their own profit. And that, for the record, they would appear to be doing so in the most breathtakingly macabre manner imaginable. Rosie may have already latched on to this, because whenever the subject appears to be heading in that direction, she lobs another conversational hang grenade into the mix. “The Sun asked to interview us about dead babies,” she announces matter-of-factly. “I says no way. I says no reborn can ever replace a child. Everyone has to have a grieving period to deal with the loss of a beloved child”.

What kind of a gap does she advocate leaving? “After a year or so, yeah, we’re happy to make a reborn. But not from a photograph or nothing. We call it Empty Arms Syndrome.”

I try a different tack. Reborn dolls don’t come cheap. Rosie and Kevan’s retail for Stg. £130-£300 stg each. Elsewhere on the internet they sell for as much as US$2-3,000. Aren’t they concerned about profiting from tragedy, I ask? Rosie scoffs at the idea. “We’re lucky if we make fifteen to twenty seven pound on a doll. That’s not including labour. People think we make a fortune, but we don’t at all.” She proceeds to explain that Reborning is much more of a vocation than a lucrative commercial venture and that profit margins are very low. It’s a convincing case she makes – albeit one in which she depicts herself as a sort of New Age amalgam of Florence Nightingale and Geppetto.

She tells me that many of her Mammies suffer from blindness, Down Syndrome or diabetes. “I havenae got a single healthy mother. I’m always on the other end of the phone to them. They talk about their selves, their aches and pains.” She mentions one customer, Bernadette, who suffers from severe Dystonia. It makes her feet turn in and leaves her in terrible pain. She requires regular Botox injections but can’t always make her appointments at the hospital. “She came down with the baby and I looked at [the doll] and said ‘Ah God, what’s wrong with ya pet?’ [The doll] had no colour, absolutely zilch.” The doll, Rosie believes, had taken on Bernadette’s pain. When Bernadette’s real daughter held the doll, pain suddenly shot through her body in turn. “See that” Rosie told the girl. “That’s the pain your Mummy’s in every minute of the day.”

Rosie has told me that people either love or hate her dolls. But after three hours at her stall, by far the most common reaction I’ve noticed from people is morbid fascination. They stare at the dolls. But they’re very reluctant to touch them. Children especially. Rosie catches my eye and returns to one of her earlier themes. “Folks sometimes say stuff like ‘Ohh, they’re just like dead babies’. I say ‘No, these babies are very much alive, thank you. They’re just sleeping’.” She takes a drag on her rollie cigarette and, almost as an afterthought, adds:

“Dead babies look like they’re made of candle wax. I should know – I’ve buried three of mine.”

3.

Down the coast in Sunderland, Jackie and her friend Ronnie are enjoying a glass of cider in their local Weatherspoon’s pub. They’re newer to the Reborning scene than Rosie, and they’re also much more wary of speaking to the media. Newspapers have stitched Reborners up in the past they tell me. “Our friend Wendy had a really bad write-up in a magazine, didn’t she?” recalls Jackie. “She gave a story and they took it totally out of perspective. Said she finds it’s better to sell to women who’ve lost babies, cause that way she gets more money. Made out like she was doing it purely for the money, not for the art. What bollocks!”

“She was really devastated about it,” confirms Ronnie. “She never thought they’d tear her to shreds like they did. She just told it as it is. And that’s what I’m doing with you here Eoin, ‘cause I don’t know what type of things you’ll print.” In truth, even the most cutthroat tabloid hack would have trouble painting these two in a sinister light. After a short chat it becomes quite apparent that Jackie and Ronnie are from Reborning’s Make & Do wing, rather than its Twilight Zone.

“You just take pride in knowing that you’ve accomplished something,” says Jackie. “That applies to any art form, whether its sculpting, oils, pastels or whatever.” Ronnie concurs: “You start, basically with a blank slate and you work at it until it looks like as much like what you want it to.” Ronnie believes that Reborning phenomenon started out originally with a group of enthusiasts who created customised dolls. As years went by, they began attempting to make them more and more accurate in appearance and detail.

“It’s no different,” reckons Jackie “to a filmmaker wanting to make his film as realistic as possible.

In a way then, it could be argued, that there really isn’t that much difference between what Jackie and Ronnie do, and what those men who collect model aircraft from World War I do. Or what those guys who build functioning model railway networks in their garages do. Jackie likes the analogy. “Yeah, men just have a different perspective from women. Women tend to go for dolls, whereas men tend to go for vehicles and machines and things.”

“Exactly,” agrees Ronnie. “I know you were talking to Rosie yesterday. She tends to do babies as portrait babies for women who have lost them. That’s what she mainly focuses on. She feels that she’s helping them with their grief. But from my point of view I’m just a collector who enjoys displaying them in a room at home”.

So then, the girls probably don’t do that other crazy stuff like giving their dolls birth certs or any of that nonsense? “Well, you would do the birth certificate alright,” Jackie hastily corrects me. “We’d do all the paraphernalia – dummies and bottles and stuff.”

“Baby’s first photograph” Ronnie chips in.

“Everything you’d get with a real baby” Jackie elaborates. “It adds to the realism. Also for displaying them, the collectors like to have all the paraphernalia next to them. You’d have mobiles as well. As if the baby might reach up and grab the mobile. You want as much realism as possible basically.” Ronnie goes back to the model train analogy. “It’s no different from the train line with the signals and the little figures on the platform.”

Neither woman is a full time Reborner. I ask Jackie how many dolls she makes a year Only six to ten, she says. “It’d be concentrated at the holidays – Easter, Christmas… Maybe a few at Valentine’s Day for boyfriends to give to their girlfriends as a present.”

I spit my beer out onto the table.

“Well, it’s better than a box of chocolates!” she laughs.

Let me get this straight. I’m going with a girl. Everything’s going great between us. Then one day I decide to give her a freakishly realistic pretend baby as a Valentine’s gift. What the hell is she supposed to read into that?

“Oh, I don’t know. It depends on the girl. People are different from each other, though, in their reactions.”

“Some fellas might get their girlfriend a puppy, you know…”

“Doesn’t your girlfriend like babies? Well, doesn’t she?”

4.

Back in Newcastle, Rosie is at the wheel of the Angelwing transit van. She’s taking us for a look her workshop, leaving Kevan in charge of the stall. “I did everything for myself,” he tells us, out of the blue. “I can do a job better than any man. I took down two walls to put in my kitchen. Designed it and everything myself. They put me in a home when I was 18 months old. Was going to be adopted by a couple, but they didn’t adopt me. I can remember, you know? I remember everything. I remember the day I was put in that home and I didn’t cry.”

She leads us through her rough and ready kitchen and sitting room, up the stairs and up an actual wooden ladder into her attic. She’s out of breath for a couple of minutes after climbing up the ladder, but it’s obvious that this is her sanctuary. She talks to her dolls up here, and clearly believes that they respond. She introduces us to one particular doll named Rosepetal. “Sometimes when I pick her up, or give her a cuddle, she talks to me. Or she smiles at me, put it that way”. Kevan mentioned earlier that Rosie sometimes comes up here in the middle of the night. I can sort of imagine it.

The nominal purpose of this trip is to see how Rosie and Kevan’s Reborn dolls are made. But what actually happens is that Rosie instead proceeds to fill us in on large chunks of her life story. “At the age of four I went to school. I remember everyone had a little nameplate on their desk. Like ‘John Smith’ or ‘Joe Brown’. Mine was ‘Rosemary Teresa Bernadette…’ Everybody used to call me Rosie, but when I got in trouble with the nuns it was always RoseMARY…” Her personal history, as it turns out, is one of almost unimaginable horror. But she prattles through it like it was supermarket gossip.

She talks of incest, rape, sexual abuse, alcoholism and suicide. She reveals that a brother and nephew of hers who were both born severely mentally handicapped. Years later researcher from the University of Newcastle discovered that a strain of Fragile Chromosome X was running in their family.

Rosie was tested and was shocked when the results came back positive. She couldn’t understand, she says, because her own sons were both perfectly healthy. By some anomaly, though, she was had passed the deficiency on to her daughters instead. One daughter died at six months of age. Another died an hour after being born, while a third died in the womb. “I poisoned each one of them, because their blood system was killing them. They were making too many red cells and not enough white.” Another daughter, now aged 31, has survived. But she has been seriously ill for most of her life and recently underwent a bone marrow transplant.

Eventually, Rosie indicates that it’s time we wrapped things up. She needs to get back to Kevan. But, as we pack up to leave, she continues chatting a mile a minute. The rest of her family haven’t spoken to her in years, she tells us. “They think I’m too stuck up, too posh. I don’t drink, you see, and neither does Kevan. I put me money into me house, me family. Is that wrong?” She and Kevan sound well matched, I offer. “We’re soulmates,” she replies wistfully. “We sometimes sit in this nursery for hours and we never say a word…”

Photo Credit: Linda Brownlee

Some background on this story here.

The Englishman is researching a book about his own Morrissey fandom. “I suppose I’m as bemused as anyone” he says, “Firstly, that he should be taken so seriously in an academic context, but also, that the symposium would be held in Limerick of all places.” As it happens, there’s a straightforward explanation on both counts. And he’s standing right beside us. Dr. Eoin Devereux is Head of Sociology at UL and the organiser of this event. A Morrissey devotee since his first Smiths concert in 1984, he cuts a distinctive figure in jeans, a baggy t-shirt and cherry red Doc Martins. Hell, that quiff itself is probably symposium-worthy in its own right. “This is the second year we’ve been doing this,” he tells me. “Last year we ran a half day seminar with two papers and a brief discussion. This year we decided to something on a much more ambitious scale – with performances, screenings and a lot more papers. It has really taken off.” He isn’t lying.

1.42pm: In the queue for registration, I get chatting to Erik Askeroi from Norway, who is a PhD student in Popular Musicology. He tells me he finds an “intense ideological struggle” between the vocals and guitar on Morrissey’s latest album. I can’t say that I had noticed. Registration complete, I’m handed a laminated MOZ POSSE pass, which I’m told I’ll have to wear all day. We’ll see about that.

2.03pm: Approximately 120 people are in attendance – mostly male, aged between about 30 and 45. There are a smattering of quiffs, but not too many gold lamé shirts. The P.A. is playing Will Never Marry, a b-side from Morrissey’s 1988 Everyday is Like Sunday single. The track segues smoothly into Let Me Kiss You, from his 2004 comeback album You Are the Quarry. Yip, when it comes to being a Morrissey nerd, I’ve still got it.

2.20pm: “My name is Eoin Devereux and I’m a Morrissey fan.” Our host’s opening remarks set the tone for the day. This may be an academic setting, but no pretence of objectivity will be attempted. This is a gathering of fans. Devereux refers to the subject of the symposium, as he will throughout the day, simply as ‘Moz’. (An article in yesterday’s Limerick Leader made repeated reference to ‘The Moz’.) After a short speech, Devereux introduces Kerri Koch, the American film maker behind Passions Just Like Mine.

2.26pm: Koch’s film documents the fervent following Morrissey enjoys among Hispanics in California. It opens with a five year old Mexican boy singing and preening along to Morrissey’s The First of the Gang to Die, and gets progressively weirder. A barrel-chested teenager talks of how, upon hearing his first Morrissey album, he immediately went out and bought every album, read every interview and took up every cause the singer has ever espoused – including passivism and vegetarianism. (That gets a big laugh – the kid is about seventeen stone.)

It seems incredible that songs inspired by the red bricked streets of Manchester should resonate so strongly in the dusty barrios of Los Angeles. But they do. This really is a fascinating story and a wonderful film.

3.27pm: Make that a fascinating story… but an incredibly overlong film. Having established that Morrissey enjoys a fervent following among Hispanics in California, the film essentially threads water from there on in. Further insights are thin on the ground. Some interviewees draw parallels between Morrissey being raised Irish and Catholic in England and their own experience of raised Mexican and Catholic in the U.S. Most adore the singer with an intensity that seems to say more about the deficiencies in their own lives than it does about his work. No one mentions the singer’s outspoken anti-immigration stance in the UK.

3.29pm: This film synopsized in fifteen words or less: Disaffected Hispanic youth (HEART) Morrissey. No one knows why. But there are several theories.

3.31pm: In photographs with ecstatic Latino fans, who religiously copy his hairstyle, dress and mannerisms, Morrissey appears utterly bemused. I suppose the whole phenomenon must be pretty weird for him…

3.38pm: Dream sequence: I’m descending onto the tarmac at Benito Juárez International Airport, greeted by the ecstatic screams of 500 unshaven Mexicans. “Eoin, Eoin… we love you” they scream. They are scruffily dressed and brandishing breakfast rolls…

3.53pm: At the official reception, beverages are served in cups emblazoned with the legend “Share some grease tea with me.” I try to chat up an American girl, but she prefers to make eyes at a nerdy looking guy in a Meat is Murder t-shirt. Great, I’m the social outcast at a Morrissey convention. A new low.

4.21pm: On my way back into the lecture hall, I’m asked to display my pass. It’s in my pocket. “Just the place for it”, the lady sarcastically replies. In the next lecture, Erin Hazard of the University of Chicago recounts a “pilgrimage” she undertook to Fairmount, Indiana, the setting for Morrissey’s Suedehead video. It’s riveting stuff.

4.46pm: Martin Power of the University of Limerick talks about Representations of the Working / Underclass in the Works of Morrissey. Mr Power does not formally announce where his own allegiances in the class struggle lie. But that bright red t-shirt, with the letters CCCP emblazened in bright yellow, does offer a tantalising hint.

The global hegemony of neo-liberalism is his great bugbear, with references to Morrissey’s lyrics seeming somewhat tacked-on in places.

4.51pm: Mr Power cites Morrissey’s anti-Thatcherite diatribe Margaret on the Guillotine as evidence of the singer’s laudable solidarity with the working classes. This is a bit much. The song is not one of Morrissey’s better efforts. A far more interesting discussion might centre on why unpopular female politicians, such as Thatcher or Hillary Clinton, are so often characterised as demons to be slain; whereas unpopular male leaders, like John Major or George W. Bush, are written off as idiots or buffoons.

4.59pm: Someone really should explain to this guy that Morrissey’s fascination with working class ‘hard men’ is not necessarily, ahem, politically motivated. Still no mention is made of his anti-immigration stance.

5.01pm: More waffle about neo-liberal hegemony. After some creative biro-work, my laminate pass now reads, MOZ POSSE: DO NO RESUSCITATE.

5.07pm: In the Q. & A., an audience member suggests that Morrissey’s is an outdated vision of working class culture, repackaged for middle class consumption. The speaker does not contest the charge. “After all,” he says, “Morrissey’s most powerful statement against neo-liberal hegemony, The Slum Mums, was only made a B-Side. What does that tell you?” Erm, perhaps that Morrissey chooses his singles based on other criteria?

5.31pm: As a teenager, Peter Finan of the Morrissey-Solo.com website found that the Smiths song Back to the Old House perfectly captured the unrequited love he felt for the girl who worked in his local snooker hall. It’s an utterly pathetic story – something all Morrissey fans can relate to.

5.45pm: Meetings With Morrissey author Len Brown has known the singer for 25 years. He provides some valuable insights into the singer’s personality but, at times, I suspect he’s just taunting the assembled hardcore devotees with casual references to their friendship. (“So Morrissey rang me up the other day…”)

6.30pm: Someone finally brings up Morrissey’s controversial views on immigration. The panel squirm. Most express discomfort about his views, but admire his willingness to take unpopular stances. Kerri Koch admits she’s just too adoring a fan to offer a critical view.

7.11pm: The Moz Bus leaves for Dolan’s Warehouse, where Smiths/Morrissey tribute act These Charming Men will be performing. Since I have no idea of the way, I follow in my car. At the very first set of traffic lights, I lose the bus and have to weave in and out of traffic at speed to catch up. This is by far the most exciting part of my symposium experience.

8.35pm: In Dolans, I get chatting to a cute lesbian couple in matching pompadours and NHS specs.

8.36pm: On closer inspection, they are a heterosexual couple. Oh dear Lord…

10.31pm: It’s getting late, so I decide to make tracks. Before I do, Peter Finan relates how things wound up between him and the snooker hall girl he had a crush on. It turns out, he eventually did workup the courage to ask the girl out. He took her Sylvia Plath’s grave, where they got drunk on cider. One of his friends – “a complete bastard” he recalls – insisted upon tagging along. On the train home, the friend ended up getting off with the girl and Finan never spoke to either of them again.

As Morrissey symposium anecdotes go, this one is almost too perfect.

It’s a white knuckle ride.

Pilot Eddie Goggins mentioned that one of the keys to success in aerobatics is an ability to make precise split-second calculations. Well, right now, I calculate that there’s a 50/50 chance the contents of my stomach will be splattered all over his pristine canopy by the time this flight is over.

Eddie Goggins is no shrinking violet. But as an Irishman who defied tragedy to claim bronze at the Advanced World Aerobatic Championships last month, you’d hardly expect him to be. He is a born show off: a square-jawed, Steve Silvermint-type who thrives on adrenalin and relishes danger. Over the years, the Dublin-based dentist has tried his hand at parachuting, bungee-jumping and even motor racing. What attracted him to competition aerobatics, he says, is the challenge of competing solely on his own terms. “You’re in the sky on your own so it’s all down to your own performance. You can never achieve the perfect flight. But you can get very close.”

Barrelling down the runway at Kilrush Airfield in Co Kildare today in his Extra 300L plane, we shoot into the sky with a stomach-churning vertical ascent. Four seconds after leaving the runway we’re levelling off at an altitude of 1,000 feet and continuing our climb at a more leisurely 3,000 feet per minute. All the while, the 39-year-old Roscommon native keeps me entertained with a succession of unannounced rolls and loop-the-loops. The view is extraordinary: fields, forests, lakes and bogs – stretched out above, below, behind and (at times) directly ahead of us – like some enormous, spinning tablecloth.

On the headset, Eddie maintains close contact with the pilot of the helicopter that’s tracking us just a short distance away. “What type of lens is the photographer using?” he asks. “She might want to adjust her shutter speed in this light.” For a while I wonder if he even remembers that your nauseous correspondent is even in the plane. “Let’s head over to that cloud formation due east,” he instructs the chopper. “We’ll get some fantastic shots over there!” Eventually, he acknowledges my presence. “How you feeling there, Ian?” he inquires. “Terrific,” I reply. “Really terrific.” “Grab a hold of the joystick in front of you then,” he says. “I’m giving you control of the aircraft!”

That’s one of the snags with irony. It doesn’t always translate at 4,000 feet.

From the time he was a little boy, Goggins dreamed of flying. His father was an engineer in the US Air Force and photographs of fighter planes adorned the walls of their house. As an 18-year-old dental student, he eschewed late-night carousing to save up for flying lessons. But it wasn’t until he graduated that he could afford to pursue the sport in earnest. Flying is an expensive hobby. Since gaining his instructor’s licence, he has been able to offset some of the costs involved by giving lessons. But they’re steep nonetheless. The plane we’re flying in today – which he co-owns with three other pilots – cost €220,000 to purchase secondhand.

That’s just for starters. There are also hangar costs, fuel costs, maintenance costs and insurance costs. “There are a lot of regular mandatory checks that have to be carried out,” explains Goggins. “A lot of parts have to be dissembled and inspected. We’re lucky we’ve got an amazing organisation in Sligo airport doing our maintenance for us, that’s really a huge help.” Events such as the Salthill Air Show in Galway bring in revenue, but the associated insurance outlay is very high. “At air shows the public want drama. So you need to get low and you need to get close. The risks are higher because the margins for error are smaller.”

The risks involved in stunt flying are, unfortunately, something of which Goggins is only too well aware. At an Aero GP in Malta in September 2006, he found himself involved in a tragic mid-air collision with another pilot. While executing a climbing turn in an air race, Goggins and Gabor Varga of Sweden collided. Both aircraft were critically damaged. The Irishman managed to save himself by gaining enough altitude before his aircraft disintegrated to parachute safely. In dramatic footage that’s available to access on the internet, his parachute can be seen opening a split second before he hits the water. The Swede, meanwhile, plummeted to his death in the Mediterranean Sea.

Understandably, the accident is not something that Eddie is very comfortable talking about. “All I’ll say is that it was a collision that happened at one of the corners,” he says, quietly. “I bailed out and landed in the sea. The other pilot . . . didn’t get out.” Does he feel at all guilty about the other pilot’s death? Goggins considers the question for a moment. “Look,” he answers, “I have to be careful how I put this. But I was racing him. Anyone who participates in any motor racing sport understands the risk they’re taking.” For a year afterwards, he gave up flying completely. “I wasn’t nervous about it, I wasn’t afraid for my own safety,” he says. “That wasn’t the reason. I just felt that for the sake of my wife and two children I should give it up. I have a great family life and that has to be the number one priority.”

Aviation, though, is Goggins’ lifeblood and without it he soon became morose and withdrawn. In the end, it was his wife who coaxed him to get back up in the sky. “She was the one who encouraged me,” he smiles. “I think she was fed up having to deal with grumpy Eddie all the time.”

The accident, however, was never going to be something that he could just shrug off. He would no longer take part in air races, for starters, he decided. He also reassessed his own safety limits. “I’m comfortable with what I do now,” he says. “I don’t feel that I’m taking any unnecessary risks. I’m sure some people will find it funny to hear me say that. But in the past, I would have been comfortable with tighter margins. Now I like to leave a little extra for the wife and kids.”

A few months before the tragedy occurred, Goggins had finished 22nd at the bi-annual Advanced World Aerobatic Championships in Poland. Returning to flying in November 2007, he decided to see if he could improve on that finish at the 2008 tournament in Pendleton, Oregon. With only eight months to prepare, training was intensive. As a birthday gift, his wife arranged for a renowned international aerobatics coach to visit Ireland to assist. “That was a big help. To gain expertise you need someone on the ground giving you feedback on how your shapes look. A good coach is a rare thing.”

At the competition in August 2008, Goggins describes himself as having arrived as a “Johnny No-Mates”. Most national teams had a coach, a mechanic and an extensive entourage of hangers-on. Goggins travelled alone. Worse, because of the distance involved, he couldn’t bring his own aircraft. Valuable practice time was spent adjusting to a new plane he had hired. In competition aerobics, pilots have to fly different sequences, some of which they get to practice in advance, others they’re only presented with on the day. “There are hundreds of thousands of manoeuvres you could be asked to do. So when the sequences are published, they might include things you haven’t tried in months.”

The key to Goggin’s success was attention to detail. “Taking into account wind speeds, making sure the shapes appear symmetrical from where the judges are sitting, at least. Those are the things you concentrate on. Every five degrees you are off, you’re going to lose a point. Each manoeuvre has a maximum score of 100 per cent. So if you over-rotate by stomping on the rudder too early or too late, you can easily throw away 10 per cent.” Goggins’s other great strength in Oregon was his consistency. In all of the rounds he contested, he never achieved a top-three finish. But, while other pilots all made mistakes that cost them places, he was always thereabouts.

In the end, Goggins’s status as an unknown quantity may have worked to his advantage. In aerobatics, all manoeuvres must be executed within a defined performance zone of a 1,000 metres cubed. Pilots who stray outside that box are penalised. But the top pilots tend only to scrutinise the calls on pilots they consider a threat. If a perceived infringement is not penalised they’ll contest the call, and if protest is upheld they can knock an opponent down a few points. Goggins was the only pilot in the first three sequences to have no highs, no lows and no zeros. “I don’t think they even noticed me until the final round!” he laughs.

False modesty aside, taking the bronze at a world championship event was undoubtedly a stunning achievement for the Irish pilot. So where does Goggins’ career go from here?

The first priority, he says, is to attract more sponsorship to the sport. (”We’ve had a great year with our existing sponsors, Unipipe Ireland and Aviation Ireland. But it’s time to start planning for the 2009 season now.”) He also plans to establish a school for advanced aerobatic pilots which, he hopes, will attract students, not just from Ireland, but from farther afield. If all goes according to plan, dozens of wannabe daredevils may soon be benefiting from Goggins’ undoubted expertise.

Whether that ambition is ever realised or not, it is to be hoped that Goggins is never again forced to instruct a pupil as reluctant as the one he’s coaching this morning. In the clouds above south Co Kildare, he is giving me a quick run through of what I need to do in order to execute a loop-the-loop. To be honest, I’m so nauseous I don’t even care how you execute a loop-the-loop. But I’m too sick now to complain. I take hold of the control column and pull it slowly back toward me. I wince as the nose of the plane suddenly veers upwards.

The years to come seemed waste of breath/ A waste of breath the years behind . . .

[P.S.: The reason I'm not wearing a helmet was because there wasn't one in the entire airfield big enough to fit my head. That's not a joke.]

THE northern gate at Birkenau is deserted as the taxi driver shoos us out into the snow. We stumble forward, bleary-eyed and dumbfounded by the sheer scale of what’s in front of us. Symmetrical rows of huts stretch out as far as the eye can see, and the barbed wire skeleton encasing them vanishes into the mist in each direction. It’s the world’s largest crime scene and the largest mass grave. And it’s fucking huge. Rob grimaces and pulls a crumpled joint from his jacket. He rummages in his pockets for a light. Antoine sways, mumbles something incoherent and, for a moment, seems to contemplate getting back into the car.

Then we pass through the gates and a hush descends.

This place demands silence now as unmistakably as once it inspired fear. Silence as we trudge across the snow-covered sleepers to where the people disembarked (expecting the worst, said Charlotte Delbo, but not the unthinkable). Silence as we stare at the ruins of the gas chambers where they were murdered, and at the crematoria where their bodies were burned. Silence in the car on the journey back. And over dinner in Krakow we hardly say a word. What’s there to say? Harry had said: “Go there. You should see it.” He was right.

1.
Rewind to eight o’clock that morning and it’s not silence that assaults us. It’s not solemn contemplation that comes blasting out of Harry’s surround sound speakers with such violence that the ashes in the ashtrays dance and the empty cans on every surface rattle. It’s Welcome To The Jungle and it’s fucking loud. “Get up you guys!” he roars. “COME ON, WAKE UP YOU BASTARDS!”

And with the first stirrings of consciousness come the first inklings of remorse.

Rob slumps forward in the armchair and starts skinning up. He mightn’t be awake. He doesn’t have to be. “No way, you fucka!” Harry plucks the reefer from Rob’s mouth. “You can take it with you. We’re going!” Our antipodean host is pissed off. He has a right to be. As houseguests we have all the manners of a marauding medieval army.

Krakow Central Station is hopping. Moustachioed men sell hot food from wooden stalls. Gorgeous college girls mill about the place in every direction. It occurs to me that a strategically timed Lech Walesa Look-alike Contest could effectively paralyze this country. Harry marches us to the counter and buys three tickets on the next bus to Auschwitz. Transaction completed, he relaxes a little.

“Look guys, Ewa’s just going a little bit mental about last night.” He says it like they do on Home & Away: Men-tal.“But it’s cool. I’ll sort it. You just need to get out of here for a bit.” He hands me the tickets and vanishes into the haze, leaving us high and dry in the Friday morning rush hour.

Over breakfast in a nearby cafeteria we take stock. Only a deranged individual would undergo a 70km bus journey in the circumstances. And only a deranged individual with a morbid sense of humour would consider the train a preferable alternative. (“The train to Auschwitz?” hisses Antoine. “Isn’t this little outing grim for you enough already?”) Rob eyes the line of fun-sized Polish beers on the counter behind the till. I shake my head. No, it’s obvious why Harry’s sending us to Auschwitz. It’s the only place in Poland we might actually return from sober.

“We’ll just have to bite it”, I tell them. We take a cab.

Minutes later we’re shooting through the suburbs with our new friend Boguslaw at the wheel. Rob and Antoine are dozing in the back. I’m up front, taking the brunt of the conversation. “Two hundred fifty euro per month my son in Krakow earn, yes? First month in Buncrana is two thousand euro.” Like practically everyone we meet in Poland, Boguslaw has family working in Ireland. His new grandson is even an Irish citizen.

“Of course, Donegal very beautiful. Atlantic Ocean very beautiful. But Spire of Dublin? Why you waste all money on this piece of shit?” He seems to expect some sort of answer. Oh, God… He’s doing about a billion miles an hour. And he’s not too fussy about which side of the road he drives on either.

In Big Sur, Kerouac talks of a hangover so severe that he begins to feel remorse over the birth pains his mother endured bringing him into the world. For a moment, I think I might be on the brink of such a horrorshow. But then slowly – inexplicably – I come around.

He’s actually a bit of crack, old Boguslaw. One thing is immediately apparent: he lives to drive. (Days later, when it looks like we’re about to miss our flight back to Dublin, Rob suggests giving him a call: “He’d do it cheaper than fucking Ryanair. He’d do for the price of the petrol!”) When his children were small he’d drive them to Bulgaria for their holidays each year. To recoup some of the expense he would fill the boot of his car with pairs of Wrangler jeans – which were easier to come by there – and sell them on the black market back home.

He made so much money doing this that he ended up bribing state doctors for sick leave so that he could make further runs. And, because prices for most commodities were fixed, the money he was making was worth a fortune. No wonder he sounds almost nostalgic for communism. Eventually the conversation dries up. “Auschwitz very close now” he says.

2.
Of the three sites known collectively as Auschwitz-Birkenau, only Birkenau was a purpose built extermination camp. The smaller administrative section known as Auschwitz I (with the infamous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign) was originally a Polish military barracks. Although thousands died there, it functioned, ostensibly at least, as an internment camp. The larger Auschwitz III was a manufacturing plant. There the able-bodied were taken to be wrung for labour before being sent on to the gas chambers.

Only Birkenau (or Auschwitz II) was custom designed for the industrial-scale slaughter of human beings. Well over a million people perished here. If that number is too vast to get a handle on right away, stomping around it a while does offer some perspective.

The outer perimeter fence is thirteen feet high and over five miles long, all around. Within it stood about 250 long wooden shacks. (Less than fifty of these survive today). These draughty hovels were designed to stable fifty horses, but instead slept as many as a thousand people each night. The S.S. ran the place with ruthless efficiency. Trains from all over Europe dumped their wretched cargo on one end of the camp. On the other, in four massive crematoriums, the furnaces burned constantly.

At the height of the slaughter, up to 24,000 people were gassed and cremated here in a single day.

Everything in this godforsaken place – every railroad sleeper, every sprig of barbed wire, every nut and bolt – is mute testimony to the cold blooded nature of the slaughter. It’s fucking disturbing, then, to discover that the camp was built mostly by the labour of the prisoners themselves. Why, I wonder, didn’t they just say ‘No. You may kill me, but I refuse to help you kill others after me?’

It was, I suppose, pretty uncharted territory for humanity. It must have been hard to believe that even the Nazis were capable of such barbarity. Mooching around in their misery awhile though, I still can’t help wondering what else the prisoners might have done. A very small number of them did escape, of course. One man even made it to London. But escape was a long shot. The prisoners were a long way from home and couldn’t necessarily count on the support of the local population.

The ruins of the gas chambers lie in a heap beneath the snow, destroyed ahead of the advancing Red Army in January 1945. I wonder what it’d have taken to knock one of them out of action. It would have cost you your life to find out. But death was the likely next step whichever way you turned in this place. If you could have taken out one of the gas chambers on your way, you would at least have put a spanner in the works of this awful machine, if only temporarily. The slower the S.S. were able to kill prisoners the more would be alive when the Russians arrived. And while this place was operating at full capacity the Russians were most definitely on their way.

A few kilometres down the road at the Holocaust museum I discover that this is pretty much what did happen. On October 7th 1944, about three hundred Jewish Sonderkommandos blew up crematorium IV using explosives smuggled into the camp. They fought off the S.S. for as long as they could with stones, improvised grenades and even machine guns. By nightfall the revolt was crushed and all of the insurgents dead. But despite their heroism that day, many Jews still regard the Sonderkommandos as traitors for assisting the S.S. in the running of the camp.

It is claimed that they only revolted when they discovered that they were about to be exterminated themselves.

The museum is tough going. In one corridor we come across an old lady intently examining a line of mugshots on the wall. Stopping at one young man’s photograph, she takes a rose from her bag. She tries to wedge it into the narrow gap between the frame and the wall. But she’s old and she’s frail and it’s too high for her to reach. I stand a few feet behind her desperately hoping some member of her family will materialise to assist her. When no one appears, I reluctantly step forward and she hands me the flower. I slide the stem into place and she nods absently but barely even notices me. She’s a thousand miles away.

The mammoth piles of confiscated shoes and clothes are horrific, but it’s the suitcases that are really upsetting. There are thousands upon thousands of them with names and addresses printed neatly on the sides: Bermann, Goldstein, Kafka, Morgenstern.

One of the torture devices in the infamous Block 11 catches my eye. It’s a wooden frame about six feet high. Prisoners would first be handcuffed (with their hands behind their backs) and then hung up by their wrists from this apparatus, with their legs dangling in the air. I notice it because recently I read about a suspected Iraqi insurgent named Manadel al-Jamadi who died after being interrogated in this way by the CIA in Abu Ghraib prison in November 2003.

The museum walls are adorned with pious quotations from dignitaries who’ve visited here through the years. All agree that what occurred here must never be allowed to happen again; that wherever evil rears its head again the righteous nations of the world will mobilise to bring swift and impartial justice. Does anyone seriously believe that? Similar atrocities have happened many time since and will happen again.

Even Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who has campaigned against genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans, pointedly refused to condemn the barbaric Israeli assault on Sabra and Shatila in 1982. (He said he felt “sadness with Israel, not against Israel.”)

Maybe Max Von Sydow’s character in Hannah and Her Sisters said it best, when he mocked the intellectuals who agonise over how the Holocaust could have happened. “Given what people are”, he sniggered “the real questions is ‘Why doesn’t it happen more often?’”

3.
Back in Krakow, Harry has been busy. First he convinced Ewa to go visit her parents in the countryside for a few days. (Well, not exactly. First he made her breakfast and cleaned up the apartment. Then he convinced her to go home to her parents.) Next he did the rounds of the local wise men. Now he’s back home cooking dinner and bouncing off the walls.

Some of his mates have dropped by to meet us. They’re fellow ex-pats, TEFL types. Nice lads, if a biteen harmless. Bottles are cracked open and introductions made, but Rob and Antoine have renounced the power of speech. They ensconce themselves within a cloud of smoke, leaving me once again to host the show.

The main thing I remember about this dinner is that we’re sat on one side of a large table and Harry’s friends are on the other. They have these wide expectant grins, like they’d heard about these crazy Irish guys and they’d turned up for a helping. And I’m sinking, sinking, sinking…

An American guy, called Brad or Chad or something, asks me what I thought of Auschwitz. I tell him it was a real barrel of laughs. He just nods politely. I ask if he’s ever been there himself. He hasn’t. But he definitely intends to some time. I tell him he should, they do a two-for-one cocktail promotion in the museum bar. Wow, he says, he’s surprised they have stuff like that in a place like Auschwitz. But it might be weird to sit there partying in a place where all those people died. “I guess you Irish guys like to drink, huh?”

Harry’s a perceptive fucker. Usually I have to fight him tooth and nail over the music we listen to. Tonight he sits at the PC putting together a playlist composed exclusively of song he knows I like. “Jack he is a banker and Jane she is a clerk / Both of them save their money and when they come home from work…”

I get to thinking about Ireland, about how Yeats once despaired of us for believing that we were born to pray and save. Now we don’t even bother with prayer. We snapped out of Catholicism like a drunken stupor. A three bedroom semi-detached in Tyrelstown – the measure of my dreams! Oh, God… Harry catches my eye and gives me a discreet nod. I’ve got a feeling I’ll come around.

4.
It’s Saturday night and we’re barrelling down the street on our way to a club, where Harry’s friend is DJing. We’ve picked up a little entourage along the way. One of their number, an affable older guy called Joe from Belfast, is regaling us with deranged anecdotes about his sexual escapades across the former Soviet bloc. Our progress is stalled by a beautiful, smiling girl in the middle of the footpath.

She’s looking for directions to the Hotel Grand – although, as Harry points out, she’s actually standing right in front of it. She continues smiling. It’s like she is already very fond us for some reason. She really is beautiful, but she couldn’t be any more than fourteen years old. “I think she’s a prostitute” mutters Rob, somewhat unnecessarily. Joe moves straight in. “How’s about ya, love?” He gives her a squeeze and they link arms.

We start moving again. “She might be a bit young… do you not think…?” someone says. Joe doesn’t answer, so Harry lets it go. It takes me a moment or two to comprehend what’s going on. “But she’s just a kid…?” The big guy is smiling broadly. “And?” he asks. Neither of us really appreciates, I think, that the other is quite serious.

The penny drops.

“She’s a fucking kid, you arsehole!” Joe turns around sharply. He wouldn’t be averse to kicking the shit out of me. But he’s the outsider here and he’s outnumbered so he smiles and says “Nah, nah, she’s fucking, whadiyacallit, nineteen or twenty.” “No she isn’t!” I look around for some support. But the lads want to be sitting in the warm club, not freezing their balls off on the street.

Harry reluctantly intervenes. He talks to the girl in Polish (although he later says she was probably Belarusian) and asks her age. She just smiles and shrugs her shoulders. The issue is surely settled. But Joe is defiant. “She’s fucking nineteen or twenty.” By now he’s copped it that no one else really is that bothered what age this girl is. In fact, most of them reckon that I’m the one causing the problem.

He gets up in my face like a caricature or a grotesque hallucination. “What you gonna do about it, bucko? You gonna call the cops, you cunt?” We’re starting to attract attention now. “Cos maybe the cops would have more business talking to you boys than to me?” I punch him hard in the mouth, but it’s like he sees it coming before I do. Because he lands two blows in retaliation before I’ve even realised I’m in a fight.

Mayhem ensues. I score one more punch against him before Harry and Antoine pull me off, inadvertently leaving me open for his third. This one really hurts. Everyone’s going crazy now. Harry’s mates are shouting to get the fuck out of here. Harry’s telling Joe to get lost, to just get lost. The young prostitute scarpers down a side street and Joe disappears after her.

I have no intention of following them but Harry pins me against the wall anyway. “THEY WILL LOCK YOU UP, MATE. THEY WILL FUCKING LOCK YOU UP IN THIS TOWN. TURYSTA OR NO TURYSTA.” I push him off me. He pushes me back. “You fucking dick” he sneers. “If she didn’t go with him, she’d have only gone with some other fucka’. What the were you gonna do, huh? What the fuck were you going to do?” I don’t have an answer.

Humiliated, I strike out alone back toward the Market Square. Although I’m burning with anger, I’m relieved to hear Antoine pacing after me. Already I realise I have no clue where I’m going or what I’m doing. He pulls up alongside me and guides me into a cafe a few yards up the street. I put my head down and duck into a dark corner toward the back. Antoine goes to the bar and by the time he gets back I’ve got it all worked out.

There’s no way of putting any logical order on it so I tell him everything, the whole story: line by broken line, row by jumbled row. I let it all out. I even mention Nietzsche at one point. Antoine listens in silence. He’s sympathetic and all, but he really doesn’t give a fuck. Eventually, I ask what he has to say for himself. “Your nose is bleeding, mate” he says, with a benign, narcotic smile. “Go to the bathroom, clean yourself up.”

When I get back, I notice we’ve got company. “Eoin, this is Magda and and this is Alina” says Antoine. “When they finish college in the summer they’re thinking about moving to Ireland. Why don’t you should tell them about the, ah, whadiyacallit, the two-for-one drinks promotions…”

Photographs: Antoine Roquentin

Zack Snyder’s last film, the mock-historical epic 300 , grossed almost half a billion dollars. His new offering, the eagerly anticipated Watchmen , is an uncompromisingly dark superhero romp, exploring such grizzly themes as violence, sexual assault and erectile dysfunction, and features perhaps the most gratuitous exhibition of male full-frontal nudity (in a non-pornographic context) since Borat .

Yet none of that is what has the assembled press pack in a tizzy. Earlier in the week, billboards promoting Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen went up all over Los Angeles. The original graphic novel, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, was nominated as one of Time Magazine’s “all-Time 100 greatest novels”, and the campaign to promote it is hardly excessive for a $100 million blockbuster. But eyebrows were raised at the film’s tagline, prominently displayed above the title, which refers to Snyder as “the visionary director of 300 ”.

The 42-year-old director might have attained godlike status among comic-book geeks and action nuts, but some critics remain stubbornly underwhelmed by his body of work. “A director of two films is suddenly a ‘visionary’ by his third” sniffed a headline in the New York Times. Wired magazine, meanwhile, speculated that the hyperbole over Snyder’s film-making credentials might actually be intended to muffle word that the imminent Watchmen movie is not quite up to scratch.

Happily, for a man whose films have been criticised in some quarters for being humourless and bombastic, Snyder in person is easy-going and self-deprecating. He takes the ribbing with good grace. “It’s embarrassing, of course,” he smirks. “But the marketing guys have a job to do, I guess.”

Surely he was consulted on the marketing strategy? After all, his own wife is executive producer. Snyder shifts uncomfortably. “Not . . . really,” he squirms. “They just came up with it and I thought, oh great, now I have this to deal with.”

Hubris could explain Snyder’s elevated billing. But a more likely motive is simple economics. For all its bells and whistles, Watchmen lacks big-name stars. Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Jude Law and Keanu Reeves were all linked with the project at one time or another during its long gestation. But once Snyder came on board, he quickly opted, just as he done had on 300 , to cast lesser-known actors.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan ( Grey’s Anatomy ), whose dark turn as the Comedian is one of the best things in the film, is here to meet the press. He exudes the cocksure attitude and easy charm of an actor who knows his star is on the rise. So, too, is Jackie Earle Haley, Oscar nominated in 2006 for his role in Little Children. Menacing onscreen as the right-wing vigilante Rorschach, he is shy and quietly spoken in person.

Only Swedish-Canadian starlet Malin Akerman ( 27 Dresses ) strikes a bum note, drawing shocked gasps with a poorly chosen quip about the film’s brutal rape scene. Her colleagues Patrick Wilson (Lakeview Terrace) and Carla Gugino (Night at the Museum) quickly jump in, insisting their co-star was only joking. But Ackerman seems unperturbed.

Overall, if the director set out to choose a cast whose star power would not eclipse his own arsenal of digital effects, then he has probably succeeded.

“Visionary” or otherwise, there’s no denying that Watchmen packs a hefty aesthetic punch. It is as rich and textured a spectacle as one would expect from the director of 300 . Virtually every frame is crammed with minute details for fans of the graphic novel to pour over when the DVD comes out this autumn. The action scenes are also formidable. A prison-break sequence near the climax of the film – in which Danny Woodburn (Kramer’s diminutive sidekick on Seinfeld ) has a malevolent turn as crime lord Big Figure – is genuinely stunning.

Even some all-too-familiar rock standards ( All Along the Watchtower, The Sound of Silence and the recently ubiquitous Hallelujah ) sound reinvigorated when soundtracking Watchmen’s alternate history of a 20th century in which the US wins the Vietnam war and Richard Nixon enjoys five terms as president.

The plot, meanwhile (and my there’s a lot of it), centres upon a group of costumed superheroes, the Minutemen, who unite to fight crime in New York in the 1940s. Only one (ahem!) member of the group, the supernatural naturist Dr Manhattan, possesses genuine superpowers, specifically an ability to “bend matter to his will”. All the rest of the troop can muster is an ability to ascend fire escapes with a tad more aplomb than you or me, so certain tensions were probably inevitable. The group disbands in the early 1950s, only to be reunited in an alternative 1985, following the brutal slaying of one of their number.

Attempting to summarise any further would be fruitless. For fans of the graphic novel, no synopsis could do justice to the breath of its vision. For the rest of us, well, the whole thing is frankly too preposterous for words. Costumed superhero dramas are inherently silly to begin with, but they only become sillier the more seriously they take themselves.

Snyder’s devotion to his source material, though, is slavish. According to some reports, he kept a copy of the graphic novel on his monitor at all times during filming, with the cast and crew referring to it as though it were a holy text. Although faithful to the spirit of the novel, the film’s ending is slightly different. That aside, the sheer volume of detail from the original novel that survives the transition to the big screen intact is extraordinary.

And yet, almost the first question Snyder is asked in every interview is whether he was nervous about the one minor change he did make.

“Of course I had some anxiety about changing the ending,” he confirms. “Honestly, I’m a huge fan of the Squid.” (The original ending involved a giant squid that . . . well, it’s a long story.) “But to keep the Squid in, I would have had to explain where it came from and that whole back story.” He remains, he assures us for the umpteenth time, a huge fan of the original novel.

What about the opposite question – why feel compelled to remain true to the original material at all? Historical dramas routinely feature composite characters and indulge in conjecture and outright invention; Frost/Nixon , for example, has the former president drunk-dialling David Frost in the middle of the night. Why are campy comic book heroes sacrosanct? It’s just a film. Audiences will understand that.

Snyder shrugs. This isn’t anything he hasn’t considered a hundred times before. “My favourite example is No Country For Old Men . That’s a frickin’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The movie is vastly different from the book and nobody gives a damn.”

Could it be that the director is nervous about alienating Watchmen’s notoriously fanatical fanbase? “Absolutely,” he agrees. “Because those guys are so vocal and, absolutely, they have the ability to do damage and shake opinion. They have to be acknowledged. You can’t just write them off.”

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this film, then, from an outsider’s perspective, is to witness the awesome power of online opinion. At every stage in Watchmen’s development, casting and production, fan-boy and -girl opinion was courted assiduously.

The first Watchmen trailer premiered at last summer’s Comic-Con International in San Diego, the so-called “Super Bowl for geeks”. When word leaked online that Warner Brothers were pressuring Snyder to stick with a two-hour running time, a fan petition called “Campaign for a three-hour Watchmen movie” was launched online.

“ Watchmen is a landmark work in the graphic medium,” it stated. “It should be treated with the level of respect any great epic literary work is afforded, not like the average superhero movie.” The finished picture clocks in at two hours and 43 minutes.

Back when Snyder was first announced as the director, fan communities were sceptical about his credentials. “These guys were saying, ‘All he’s made is 300 , how in the hell is he going to do justice to this great Alan Moore book?’”

The greatest asset Snyder brought to the project, as he points out, was the artistic clout of someone whose last film made $456 million (€363 million). He is a genuine fan of the original text and had the power to get his own way.

“My attitude was, if I didn’t make 300 , there might be a Watchmen movie. But it would be PG13, Adrian would die at the end, and there would be a sequel called Search for Manhattan within two years. I guarantee it.”

The director has certainly struck a blow for the geeks. All that remains to be seen now is whether that translates into box-office success.

[Emma asks: What did Malin Ackerman can say at the press conference that was so gasp-inducing? I’m intrigued!

Spoiler: One of the key scenes in the film is a flashback depicting the brutal attempted rape of Carla Gugino’s character. It later transpires that Gugino’s character goes on to have a relationship with the man who tried to rape her. In a further twist, Ackerman’s character turns out to be the product of that union.

It’s a really brutal scene in a film that aches to be taken seriously. The two other journalists in the roundtable were female and middle aged, a Russian and an Israeli. They were both clearly troubled by this element of the story, asking what kind of message this sent out etc. etc..

Gugino was bending over backwards to talk about the issue sensitively. Then one of them asked Ackerman why she thought a woman would have a relationship with a man who had assaulted her so brutally. She just giggled and said “I dunno, maybe she liked it rough!”

Ackerman is currently starring in Couples Retreat with Vince Vaughn. She is a complete airhead.]

Sadly though, a lot of my ideas turn out not to be very good. Or they’re good but I can’t quite get them to work. Or they’re brilliant but I have no fucking clue what to do with them. You see, I’m not really a can-do, know-how, bobs-yer-uncle sort of man… I’m more of an ideas man.

Each of the nine original inventions outlined below have been registered with the Irish patent office. The relevant paperwork is available to view upon request. If you see anything you like, get in contact and we may be able to do business. This is on the level – everything’s for sale!

wireless electricity

I got this idea while out hill-walking near Tourmakeady in Co. Mayo. The countryside is pretty wild out there, with a very small population scattered over a large area. It struck me how inefficient a use of resources it is that we have to physically connect with electric cables each of the tiny homesteads that dots the landscape. If a house is two kilometres from the main road then two kilometres of electrical cable and about one hundred wooden poles are required to connect it to the national grid. In many instances the people living in these houses are elderly couples or bachelor farmers with modest requirements.

The second thing that influenced my thinking here was wireless broadband. If – shall we say – “sources close to” this writer can download the entire new series of the Sopranos out of thin air, before it even appears on television (Vito and Morgan Spurlock – who knew?), then surely Micheal in Partry can boil his kettle without needing hundreds of miles of glorified tin can telephone. Everyone who knows anything about science agrees that wireless electricity is an absolute impossibility. And if the history of good ideas is anything to go by, that’s on its own practically guarantees that this will happen.

Reserve price: €10,000,000 (or 10% of profits in perpetuity)

haircut intervention

This one is pretty self explanatory. After a normal day at the office, you arrive home as usual at half five humming “I’m Walking On Sunshine”. To your surprise, you find that your entire family, your friends and the local parish priest are all gathered in the kitchen. “What’s going on?” you stammer. Your closest friend steps forward and says solemnly: “It’s your haircut, Sandra. We all feel that it’s really, really stupid.” Variations could include ironic moustache intervention, dance routine intervention and roller hockey intervention.

Reserve price: €25

unfinished christy moore song

Legend and all that he is, Christy hasn’t really done the business in the charts in a while. I think the rot started when he did that song about life being like a voyage and love being like a boat. Suffering Jesus, what was he thinking? Anyway, I got this notion a while back that if I wrote a comeback single for him – something with a bit more fuck-it than he seems to be capable of producing himself these days – then I might be able to get his career back on the right track. This is how far I got:

(rousing acoustic intro)

“Well, the politicians in the Dail are smokin’ crystal meth
And Charlie Haughey’s on the lawn, playin’ chess with death*
Paddy’s in a Beamer and Joxer’s in a Jag
And every second window flies the Polish national flag

Singin’ ooohhhh…”

The chorus isn’t set in stone yet, so what you’re seeing here is just provisional. No more than Christy’s politics back in the day, says you. (Yiiiioooooooooooow!) Fierce rowdy crowd we have in tonight altogether. Anyway, here’s the chorus:

“Singin’ ooooooooooooooooooooooooh Ballyhaunis
Bally-, Bally-, Bally-, Ballyhaunis
OoooooooOOOOOooooooooooooooooh Ballyhaunis
Bally-, Bally-, Bally-, Ballyhaunis…”

It needs work, I’ll be the first to admit.

Reserve price: 50c

* This was written in the early summer of 2006, when Haughey was seriously ill.

excuse hotline

A few weeks ago, one of my friends arrived in Dublin from Galway on a Friday night. It was to be a flying visit. The next day (Saturday) he rang his girlfriend to explain that he’d been unavoidably detained and would be back Sunday. On Sunday he said his car had been clamped and he’d be down Monday. On Monday he said there’d been a small fire in the clampers office and, long-story-short, he’d be down Tuesday. On the Tuesday I called his girlfriend saying my name was Dr Patel and I was calling from Athlone General Hospital… You get the picture.

We got to thinking: Shouldn’t there be a service out there that duplicitous persons, such as my friend, can turn to in these situations? Competent professionals who’ll listen, ask pertinent questions and – drawing on a database of original, plausible excuses – come up with something that, at the very least, doesn’t insult the girl’s intelligence? For a few extra euros, couldn’t they also provide corroborating evidence to back up this story? Medical discharge papers, fake newspaper headlines, thank you notes from Pope Benedict XVI on Vatican headed paper – that sort of thing. Think about it. No more christenings, no more funerals and all the sick days you could ever want – this is an idea with boundless potential.

Reserve price: €50

potato peel challenge

Potato Peel Challenge is a Reality TV show that I’ve had in development for a couple of months now. The concept is ingeniously simple. We take ten contestants, each handpicked to represent areas in Britain with particularly irritating accents – Liverpool, Birmingham, Wales etc. (If it’s produced in Ireland, I’d probably have to insist on an all-Cork cast.) We lock these contestants into a bunker with the legendary Jean Pierre Juppe, who will instruct them in how to peel potatoes to the highest professional standards. The Frenchman has peeled potatoes in some of the world’s finest restaurants and is passionately committed to his art. But he is incapable of accepting mediocrity from those who study under him. So expect waterworks aplenty as Juppe tears apart his pupils’ inept peeling techniques on live television.

Incidentally, yes, the asking price here is rather high. But keep in mind that I’ve already had firm expressions of interest from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, RTE and TV3 ,and that the rights to Celebrity Potato Peel Challenge are also included.

Reserve price: €3.1 million

nazi punk infiltration scheme

It was the summer of 2004. The sun was shining. Life was good. But beneath that rosy façade there lurked a menace which threatened the survival of this island nation and our way of life. That menace was Irish neo-Nazi black metal. More specifically, that menace was anonymous persons posting on Irish heavy metal forums claiming to be neo-Nazi black metallers. (More often than not they got laughed at by other posters and went away in a sulk.) This shit obviously ran deep. In the crusading spirit for which it is renowned, Mongrel immediately dispatched two of its most dedicated reporters, Larry Ryan and myself, to investigate.

After a few minutes of intensive research, some tea, and a selection of digestive biscuits, we decided on a strategy. We could identify only one act on the Irish NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal) scene with even vaguely convincing claims to being a real band. Ketzer had their own website (now gone, sadly), creepy cod-mythological aliases, hilarious costumes and an unlistenable MP3 called ‘The Blessing of Racial Holy War’. We emailed them to see if they’d like to do an interview with us. They didn’t reply.

Undeterred – well, very nearly deterred, but not quite deterred – we emailed them again. This time I mentioned that if they wanted to drop by our office there might be a few cans of beer floating about the place. Call it a hunch, but I really thought that that might be the clincher. (In retrospect, it was not my finest hour as either a journalist or a responsible adult.) Whether it was because they knew we were really a bunch of race traitors, or because they couldn’t get out on a school night, we would never discover. But Ketzer never got back to us about that interview.

This was how Declan Regan came into the picture. Regan was originally just a Hotmail address, an alias we concocted so that we could post on irish-nationalism.com – a (now defunct) website, frequented by members of Ketzer. But he became to me an almost romantic figure – a vulnerable and politically naïve young man who slipped through the cracks of an uncaring society and, embittered, became seduced by the easy answers of the far right. Soon he was lashing out against the system the only way he knew how – through the brutal white power stylings of his band Erin’s Sword.

To our disappointment though, the Irish NSBM fraternity did not accept Erin’s Sword straight off. They made it clear that if we were ever going to make it past just posting on their website we would need to produce some solid evidence that we were for real, and not just some more idiot investigative journalists looking for a story. So, with Michael McDowell’s citizenship referendum of June 2004 still fresh in the memory, Larry penned the utterly brilliant Blood Referendum (chorus: “Blood referendum / Blood referendum / What we need is a blood referendum”). And for a short time we seriously considered trying to record it. We never did though and the Declan Regan project was abandoned.

People have often assumed that the reason for this was because we were too lazy or scared to really infiltrate the Nationalist Socialist Black Metal scene. Truthfully, it was because, knowing Larry as I do, I knew that if he successfully infiltrated the National Socialist Black Metal scene he wouldn’t stop until it was over. He would go Deep Cover, with fucked up consequences for all concerned. For your money here you’ll get all of Declan Regan’s logins, the publishing rights to the song Blood Referendum and, of course, creative control of Erin’s Sword.

Reserve price: €25

iNap

Have you ever been handed the opportunity to have a much needed nap and not been able to take advantage of it? On a transatlantic flight last summer I sat grimfaced through Be Cool, Guess Who, Hitch and Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous without managing a yawn, knowing there had to be a better way. Then it hit me! What if I could upload the 10,000 most refreshing naps I’ve ever had onto the harddrive of my computer? Not only that, what if I could then copy them onto a portable device and access them whenever I wanted? Like that Christmas Day when I dozed off during Trivial Pursuit, dreamed I was footing turf with Bibi Baskin, and then woke up just as Die Hard was starting. Imagine if I could have that nap again any time I wanted. What a glorious day that would be for mankind.

Reserve price: €20

unfinished screenplay

Another project that promised much but, ultimately, failed to deliver. The Stoneybatter Trilogy was to be the epic story of an ambitious young man from the west of Ireland who comes up against a series of obstacles and challenges. Unfortunately, due to competing commitments and a packed schedule, I never actually worked out what the young man’s ambitions were, let alone what the obstacles and challenges that stood in their way might be. Consequently, The Stoneybatter Trilogy is a bit light on story.

THE STONEYBATTER TRILOGY

Part 1 – The Batter

[1. INT. STONEYBATTER. DAY]

A man bursts into the room. He is OWEN BURKE, twentysomething, with rugged good looks… Well, with rugged looks… Well, let’s just say he has looks. Does it matter what kind of looks they are? He is dynamic, driven, decisive.

BURKE
[decisively]
That’s it. I’m gonna do it. I’m finally gonna do it. As God is my witness!

His flatmate, ED SCULLY is watching some moronic documentary about how Nostradamus invented the pyramids. He is a dour character, with dogmatic opinions concerning the refrigeration of milk.

SCULLY
Huh?

BURKE
That thing I was just talking about that needs doing… I’m going to do it.

Pause.

BURKE
[contd., less decisive]
You know, the thing I was talking about before… that I’ve always wanted to… D’you remember me sayin’?

SCULLY
[non-committal]
Right, yeah.

BURKE sits down at the computer. Gazes at the screen for a moment. Stands up again. Raps his fingers on the table. There is a long pause.

Finally, SCULLY looks up.

SCULLY
Here, that Fulham v West Brom game would be just starting if you wanted to…

BURKE
[instantly]
Christ, I’d almost forgotten. To the pub-mobile!

Both exit hastily.

[2. EXT. STONEYBATTER. DAY.]

BURKE and SCULLY hurry down the street, away from the camera.

SCULLY
By the way, you still owe me fifty bucks from last night.

BURKE
Fuck off. I explained Switzerland’s refined proportional representation system, didn’t I?

SCULLY
No, you didn’t. You said something about cantons, then you started roaring about the Black and Tans.

BURKE
Ah, you got the gist of it.

SCULLY
Well, I’m just sayin’. I wasn’t one bit happy with it. And neither was the taxi driver.

BURKE
Ah, shut up…

They disappear into The Belfry.

THE END

Bids start: €25,000

the da vinci code: the musical

Close your eyes for a moment, and let me share with you my unique vision for how The Da Vinci Code: The Musical might unfold… On second thoughts, open your eyes again. This is a magazine article. What was I thinking? Anyway, the theatre is in darkness. A dramatic overture swells to a dramatic crescendo. The lights come up and a massive chorus of dancers emerge, twirling and kicking to beat the band. The stage is set: Over the next four-and-a-half hours Tom Hanks will battle it out with an albino Dolph Lundgren lookalike in the race to solve this baffling two thousand year old riddle: Was Jesus Christ’s real Dad? Was it God the everloving father? Or Amos the singing leper?

Okay, I admit it. I’ve never actually read the The Da Vinci Code or seen the film. But I’ve sure as shit bluffed my way through conversations about it. I’ve argued the toss with friends, co-workers, taxi drivers and radio phone-in hosts. But staging a lavish Broadway musical is where I would draw the line, because I just know I’d trip up somewhere. The sad truth though is that, of all ideas I’ve come up with here, the Da Vinci Code: The Musical is the only one that’s likely to see the light of day. Baring that in mind, I wish to point out that following URLs are all currently unregistered:

http://www.thedavincicode-themusical.com/
http://www.thedavincicodemusical.com/
http://www.thedavincimusical.com/

Reserve price: This one’s on me. Go for it!

[Postscript: When this article first appeared, Newstalk invited me on to discuss my wireless electricity idea with some Oxford Professor of Thermonuclear Physics (or something). He basically said that my idea could not, and would not, ever work. Ever. I lamely countered that all major scientific advances were at one time considered impossible. He in turn countered that I didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I conceded the point.

So you can imagine I was rather tickled to read this in the Guardian in January 2009. Yo, Powerbeam Inc... Where's my fucking cheque?]

[Post-postscript: Re-reading this now, I'm not entirely sure why I was auctioning these ideas off for money. If I'm an ideas man, shouldn't I have been swapping them for other ideas?