mongrel

I’d like to thank the (Royal Irish) Academy…

I was flattered to be included in Penguin’s collection of Great Irish Reportage, published last week. Not that you’d guess so from the above picture.

I had been trying to appear casual at the launch. As though my writing gets included in anthologies alongside Flann O’Brien, Fintan O’Toole and Conor Cruise O’Brien all the time, and I wasn’t particularly phased.

So one of my sisters taking flash photographs kinda risked botching that whole operation.

The piece selected, For God & St. Patrick, originally appeared in Mongrel magazine in September 2007. It’s about religious observance in Co. Mayo. If you have a minute, I’d like to relate a little (EDIT: actually a long bit) about how that article came about. Read the rest of this entry »

The Imelda May story: Irish media still seeking that elusive second angle

I Wasn’t The Devil’s Double. I Made the Whole Thing Up. [UPDATED]

There’s an interesting story by Ed Caesar in tomorrow’s Sunday Times. It concerns a man named Latif Yahia, who is the subject of a new $20m film called The Devil’s Double, starring Dominic Cooper (Mamma Mia!, The History Boys.) Yahia first came to my attention four years ago, when I was on the staff of an independent magazine called Mongrel.

I had come across the story of an Iraqi exile living in Ireland. The guy seemed to have been through hell. He had been taken out of the Iraqi army, in which he served as a captain during the Iran-Iraq war, and forced to work as a body-double for Uday Hussein. He had been tortured and even forced to undergo cosmetic surgery that he might more closely resemble Saddam’s psychotic son. Read the rest of this entry »

“Folks say ‘Ohh, they look like dead babies’. I say ‘No, these babies are very much alive’.”

She catches my eye and makes a startling admission. “Dead babies look like they’re made of candle wax,” she says. She takes a drag on her rollie cigarette and, almost as an afterthought, adds “I should know. I’ve buried three of mine.” Read the rest of this article here.

So my birthday party went pretty well…

Are You Lonesome Tonight? (1969)

Yeah, it’s the laughing version… The back story, from Wikipedia: Read the rest of this entry »

Student hack bites back!

If there’s one thing this blog is fond of doing, it’s recycling old material. And the hardiest of hardy perennials in that respect is this wildly inaccurate perhaps-not-entirely-definitive profile of me written, in 2005, by a young student journalist from DCU. No matter how many times I post it, it never fails to raise a chuckle. But now the hapless anonymous author has stepped forward to answer his critics. Read the rest of this entry »

“The most likely explanation, I correctly surmised, was that the bank had simply made a mistake…”

I’d like to say that I agonised about what to do next. But that would be an utter lie. When a friend, over breakfast, suggested contacting my branch, I laughed so violently that a Rice Krispie and a trickle of milk exited my left nostril rather abruptly. Read the rest of this article here.

“Meanwhile, government ministers and members of the Health Service Executive were locked in crisis talks, and had to be rescued by the fire brigade…”

HUMAN TRAFFICK

Remember Latif Yahia? Iraqi army captain, worked as Uday Hussein’s body double, escaped into exile, took a policeman hostage, punched a judge, torched a refugee camp, married an Irish woman, got into a beef with Michael McDowell and posted some fucking scary messages on this blog… Yeah, that Latif Yahia.

A $20m biopic based on his book I Was Saddam’s Son is about to go into production, starring Dominic Cooper (Mama Mia, An Education.) And the film’s director has a pretty colourful back story all of his own… Read the rest of this entry »