Books are my business: Founder of Colmcille Press Garbhán Downey
Garbhán Downey: 'We focus on local history and memoir and we’ve also done some fiction and poetry.'
I had always been interested in the process, I was involved in students’ unions when I was younger, and we would put together manuals and student handbooks and I really enjoyed that. When I left college, my first proper job was as a freelance reporter with the . I also worked with the , and with the BBC for a good stretch. I published my first book in 1994, ; I had reported on the World Cup in the US for the and I was asked to put together a book featuring my articles. When I was at the , we did a series of articles about the history of Creggan to mark its 50th. We put those together in a book, and it was very successful. At that point, I started working with Guildhall Press in Derry. I published nine or ten books with them and edited other books, and really enjoyed it. It became a passion and I later set up a company called Hive Studio Books. We did a number of titles and then five years ago this month, I set up Colmcille Press. The first book I did was my mother’s memoir. She had been writing letters to her sister for years about their childhood and we put them together as a book. Growing up, they were the only Irish-speaking family in East Belfast; their mother was originally from the Donegal Gaeltacht.
We focus on local history and memoir and we’ve also done some fiction and poetry. We now have two books which are on the Irish Studies syllabus at Yale university. One is a book of poetry called by Frankie Quinn, a former Republican prisoner. The other is a book we did last year — , a memoir by Pat McArt. He was editor of the from 1981 until 2010 and was very influential — the would have been the voice for prominent nationalists such as John Hume, Martin McGuinness and Bishop Edward Daly. In 2021, we also did a glossary of Seamus Heaney's ‘hearth language’, the language that he would have learned at home — Irish, a little Ulster Scots, some old English, and Latin. It is called and it has done very well. All together, we’ve probably done about 30 book titles and about 10 e-books as well.
Contributing to the fabric and history of Derry, and the north-west of Ireland in general. Colmcille was a Donegal man who set up the first monastery in Derry. The border doesn’t really apply here in the way it does elsewhere — it is more porous as the years go by. I also get a kick out of working with good people.
There's very little I don’t like about it. Sometimes the tight margins of the business are difficult to grapple with and in an ideal world, I would love to be doing the creative bit and nothing else. But I do enjoy the business side and it is a great skill to learn. I really can’t complain, it’s a very fulfilling way to spend your time.
The first is by Risteard MacGabhann, which is one of ours. It’s a collection of 121 Irish songs with beautiful translations, explanatory notes and footnotes in English and Irish for the songs. Risteard worked on it for years and years. Unfortunately, he passed away three weeks after we launched the book; his funeral mass was the most beautiful musical occasion. Number two is , the memoir by my late mother Áine Downey. I love to read it because I get to hear my mother's voice, it’s so calming and so wise. She was a really quirky, lovely writer, and I love that. My final book would be by Seamus Deane, which is probably the best book ever written about Derry. It’s a ghost story, it’s history, it’s a memoir — it’s everything and it’s absolutely beautiful. I am lucky to have a copy that he signed for my father Gerry, who was a contemporary of his at St Columb’s College in Derry.
