Eoin O'Ceallaigh, Dev supporter, fan of Hitler, lifelong celibate (though married), enthusiast for the League of Republican Paedophile Priests, and proud founder of the League of the Mother of God against Sin, has penned this admirable memoir with a spot of editorial help from Arthur Mathews, the co-writer of Father Ted and Irish Times columnist. We learn of his blissful childhood in a house in the Liberties so damp that the wallpaper needed replacing daily. His Mammy would kill the rats while simultaneously breast-feeding her three offspring, the children of neighbours, and one Mr O'Brien, a local schoolteacher who paid her a shilling for the experience. The family had an outside lavatory, though it was a good three miles away by train.
Eoin has some fond memories of Dublin comedians, not least one who had made his stage debut at the age of five during the Great Famine with some humorous impressions of the starving. School-days were no picnic, with boys spat at and kicked unconscious by Christian Brothers who would murmur "God, he's gorgeous!" on spotting a blonde-haired new pupil. There was, however, only one actual death. There is a passing allusion to those Irishmen who from 1914 to 1918 went off to the Front, a pub on the quays where they would discuss the latest news from the battlefields. We hear also of a brief encounter with Yeats, who made some remarks about swans before asking for the toilet, and about Father Tom Wenlick, a legendary figure in the fight against the gargle whose therapeutic technique was to shout "Stop Drinking!" in a stentorian roar at a cowed gathering of alcoholics.
Once celibately married to Noreen, a woman "with the sexual urges of a corpse", Eoin joins the Censorship Board, where his brief is to ban as many books as possible. Indeed we first encounter him dutifully watching a videotape entitled 1,001 Blow Jobs along with one of his clerical pals. Now a robust 80-year-old, his lifelong crusade has been against liberalism, the genital organs, the British, plays with titles like Big Jugs, Protestants, men who cook and boot-faced ethnic minorities who can't take the odd joke at their own expense. Well-Remembered Days is a side-splitting spoof, rich in surreal humour, wickedly inventive, and one of the funniest books to come out of Ireland since Flann O'Brien's. Mathews captures with mischievous precision Eoin's laboured humour, coy use of quotation marks and inept prose style, while using this unpromising medium as the vehicle of his own darkly anarchic wit. But if the newly modernising, Anglophilic Irish really have come of age, then they will be able to read the rest of this review without feeling odiously patronised by an Englishman. The now-widespread Irish debunkery of the past is too often the mere flipside of traditionalist nostalgia. A truly modern nation would be one which felt able to recall its history without either tearful sentimentalism or glib derision. Most Irish anti-Catholicism is as knee-jerk and tediously predictable as its target. One of the more insidious crimes of the Irish Catholic church has been to deprive the nation of the kind of intellectually challenging, politically relevant version of the Christian gospel which it would cost you something to reject. Instead, an autocratic Church has allowed its rebels to buy their atheism on the cheap, a feat which might be less easy in the jungles of Guatemala.
Modernisation, which the pious Eoin detests, means sweat shops and shattered communities as well as enlightened values, pollution and migration alongside Thai cuisine. If censorship and chauvinism hardly point the way forward, neither do designer stubble and the Groucho Club. But while the bonanza lasts, some of the Irish, understandably enough, don't want to hear it. Only when the bubble bursts and the Tiger sickens might it start to dawn on them that Temple Bar is no more a solution to the riddle of history than the Tubbercurry Legion of Mary.
Terry Eagleton is Warton Professor of English Literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford. A literary critic and author, one of his recent books is The Truth about the Irish