Escape to Eden

Memoir:  I must declare an interest. I know Bernard Loughlin

Memoir:  I must declare an interest. I know Bernard Loughlin. I wrote a novel at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in Co Monaghan when he ran the place.

One evening at dinner, another guest inquired why I lived in the North, implying that this choice made me a closet fascist. Before I could reply Bernard said to the questioner, "No politics" and shut the man up. I was impressed. Bernard clearly had no qualms about imposing his will on others..

Now he has written a memoir, In the High Pyrenees. Like the man I saw at the dining table in Annaghmakerrig, this is robust, direct and steely.

The author starts his story in Barcelona in the mid-1970s. He was a QUB graduate teaching English.

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One weekend he discovered the village of Farrera de Pallars in the Catalan Pyrenees - a jumbled settlement of stone houses, many empty because their peasant owners had left.

The author was so entranced he brought Mary, the woman he loved, to live there. Their first child - Maeve - was born in Farrera and the couple married there too. Sadly, there was no way of earning a living in Eden.

The Loughlins returned to Ireland. A second child - Eoin - was born in Dublin in 1979.

A year later, the author spotted an advertisement in The Irish Times for the first resident director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. Sir Tyrone, the great English theatre director, had inherited the Annaghmakerrig estate but had no children to leave it to. In his will he left the lands, gardens and yards to his steward James McStravick (the name is changed in the book), while the big house he left to the Irish State for the benefit of artists. To Bernard, who got the director's post, went the job of transforming Annaghmakerrig into an artists' retreat.

The Loughlins moved in. They set to work in the house while the McStravicks worked the grounds. The house, however, couldn't function when separated from the lands to which it had always been attached. It quickly became clear to the author that he would have to buy back what Sir Tyrone had gifted to the McStravicks and he set about doing just this.

According to the author McStravick senior was obstructive and unhelpful.

Nonetheless, by the end of the 1980s the farmyard and 12 acres of gardens were finally purchased. The long haul towards restoring the estate to its former 19th-century glory had begun.

This should have been the start for the Loughlins of a golden time at Annaghmakerrig but it wasn't. A year later, while the negotiations to buy back the rest of the estate were still ongoing and the McStravicks were still living beside the big house, the Loughlins discovered that their son, Eoin Loughlin, had been sexually abused by the McStravicks' son, Fintan, for a number of years. He was asked to leave the estate (and he did) but his mother and father remained. Five horrible years later, McStravick senior sold the balance of the estate and moved away with his wife. That should have been the end of the nightmare. It wasn't. A year later, the Loughlins discovered their daughter, Maeve, had also been abused by Fintan McStravick.

Maeve, by now a third level student, opted for prosecution - a brave and commendable decision. The tortuous and very public legal process began.

Simultaneously, the relationship between the board of Annaghmakerrig and its resident director began to go awry. In December 1998, after a closed session, the board determined to ask the Loughlins to leave. In January 1999, Fintan McStravick pleaded guilty to indecent assault on a minor and a number of other charges, for which he subsequently got four years on the first charge and three on the others, the sentences to run consecutively.

At around the same time the Loughlins left Annaghmakerrig.

After so many catastrophes (although at least the legal process had had a positive outcome) it seemed to the Loughlins there was only one place to go.

They would return to Farrera where their family life had started so happily.

They have lived there since, immersing themselves in rural peasant life and village politics. They have partially re-built a house, set up an arts centre and tried - as the phrase goes - to re-build their lives. Their involvement in the tightly knit non-Irish world of Farrera, at least judging by the closely observed accounts of village life that fill the book's second half, have had a benign effect.

This is a powerful work, shot through with anger and melancholy and not a few grim jokes. The author tells his story well and he confesses to his own failings with disarming honesty. Finally, he does a very brave thing at the end when he insists life is not a matter of either triumph or defeat but of Sisyphean endurance.

Carlo Gébler is writer-in-residence at HMP Maghaberry. Last year, his play 10 rounds was shortlisted for the Ewart-Biggs Prize. His novel August '44 was published last September

  • In the High Pyrenees: A New Life in a Mountain Village By Bernard Loughlin, Penguin Ireland, 299pp. €20