The Irish Male [antikvár]

Introduction Wanda and Me - A Brief History The Secret World of the Irish Male was published in 1994, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. (The book features a chapter about this funny new thing called 'the internet' and another on that cutting-edge item of modernity, the answering machine.) To my astonishment, it became an enormous bestseller in Ireland, largely because it contained a lengthy and light-hearted account, originally written over five weeks for the Sunday Tribune, of that year's World Cup finals in the USA. Vincent Browne was the editor of the Tribune at the time and it was his idea that I should go to America with Jack Charlton's Emerald Army. (I don't know if it was his idea that I should ever come back.) The other newspapers were sending their finest sportswriters, and the Tribune did too, but I think the notion of subjecting a total ignoramus on football matters to a baptism of beer at the World Cup appealed to the storyteller in Vincent. My brief was to write about the fans, not the matches per se, and it turned out to be the most enjoyable journalistic assignment I'd ever had. The book that resulted from the adventure was put together in roughly six weeks, with most of the editorial work, such as it was, carried out by my good friend Dermot Bolger, and I have to confess that its subsequent success unnerved me slightly. I felt I hadn't really written it. It had just arrived in some way. It reminded me of the children's story The Elves and the Shoemaker. I had awoken one morning to find The Secret World of the Irish Male on my workbench. Bolger, the elf, had created it. It rapidly outsold the literary novels on which I had worked for years. Before long, it outsold all my previous books put together. I would turn up somewhere to give a reading from one