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.
