Author interview: Sizzling story on the border of life and death during Troubles

Eoin McNamee’s life had always been touched by the Troubles; as a small boy, he remembers seeing people injured by the British army around the house

Author Eoin McNamee decided to write 'The Bureau' when a producer friend compared his stories to ‘The Sopranos’. Picture: James Fraser

• The Bureau 
• Eoin McNamee 
• Riverrun, €18.99

I meet Eoin McNamee at the Oscar Wilde Centre in Trinity College, where he is director of the creative writing programmes.

We’re discussing The Bureau, McNamee’s latest book, and his most powerful yet. It’s also his most personal.

Born in the North in 1961, Eoin focuses much of his fiction on the Northern Irish troubles. 

His first novel, Resurrection Man, later filmed, was based on the Shankill butchers; he’s also written about Robert Nairac and others involved in real-life crimes. But The Bureau is closer to home.

The Bureau of the title — a money-changing outfit in Newry — was owned by Eoin’s father Brendan, a former human rights solicitor who had been struck off. Eoin, who was often in the Bureau, took it over after his father’s death.

Although in many ways this is an affectionate portrait — Brendan comes across as incredibly charismatic — he was an alcoholic bankrupt and often had tussles with the police. He also had a lot of secrets.

“The first time he became bankrupt, we found out that he had a racehorse we didn’t know about,” says Eoin. 

There was a house we didn’t know about and a mistress we didn’t know about.

“Well,” he qualifies, “there was more than one woman.”

Why, though, did he decide to use his late father as material? Isn’t it something of a betrayal? 

Batting my question aside, Eoin says he thinks his dad would have been proud of the book and believes it is his best yet. One of his brothers has read it and approved.

“I don’t know what reaction there will be, or what offence might be taken.”

The book has been on his mind for a long time.

“But I never thought of it as writing material. I realised if you are writing about Robert Nairac or Diana Spencer, there is always somebody else’s blood on the floor, not yours.

“You can’t get too close, but with this one my family’s blood is on the floor. And for me there always has to be an edge, a risk. You have to push that bit too far.” He laughs. 

“That’s a thing I inherited from my father.”

McNamee's stories compared to 'The Sopranos'

He decided to write The Bureau when a producer friend, Liz Gill, compared his stories to The Sopranos.

“I thought, ‘No, it’s not 'The Sopranos',’ but that gave me a way into it.

“I’d thought that there was no thread to pick up on; that it was just a morass of trauma and hurt and broken lives, but I realised I’d been focusing on the wrong point; and that the way in was through character.”

His starting point was the murder-suicide of Paddy Farrell and his mistress Lorraine. And it was Lorraine who had procured the gun, ordered a grave, and fired the shots.

“It’s a very sad love story. A love that ended in the most brutal and distressing fashion, but the woman had agency. She was the lover who believed in love.”

Eoin knew Paddy Farrell through the Bureau, along with some of the other featured characters who worked the border. 

He even appears in the book; but tells me that ‘Owen’ is a composite of himself and his brother.

“And it was him who was abducted, not me,” he says, telling of the time his brother had been taken by men who were owed vast sums of money.

He was put in the back of a car and taken to south Armagh.

“I was in Spain at the time, sitting on the top of a mountain with no phone and no electricity trying to write poetry.

“Myself and my girlfriend (now wife) Marie came back from Spain and the special branch were waiting for me at the airport.

“I had no idea what had happened. Eventually I got hold of an aunt, but she wouldn’t tell me. She just said, ‘Nobody’s dead,’ with a ‘yet’ in her voice.

“The rumour was that I was in Spain, stashing money, but my father was gambling very heavily, losing money, and leaving massive debts.

“I hadn’t known what he was doing. A tremendous amount of money was coming through the place, and I thought it was all under control.

“As long as money was coming in, he could pay the next guy, but then the whole thing collapsed.

“Marie and I moved in together a month later, and my mum moved in with us.”

There were special branch sitting at the gate, watching us. Those were scary times.

Meanwhile, Brendan was on the run. At one stage, needing to disappear, he signed himself into a secure unit at St John of God’s psychiatric hospital.

When Eoin visited, Brendan told him to go into an attic space to retrieve some files he had hidden there.

“He’d had to open a door in a locked ward,” says Eoin. 

“He slipped me through, and I remember standing in this long corridor with the wind howling around the place. It was like absolute bedlam.”

Eoin’s life had always been touched by the Troubles. As a small boy, he remembers seeing people injured by the British army around the house. He also read the files of people who had been tortured.

“There was terror coming off the pages,” he says. “These people thought they were going to be killed.

“Once the Troubles started, the law was used as a weapon against the minority population, and lawyers like my father became clever at using it back — using every last inch of the law.”

Despite the Troubles, Eoin was happy, growing up in Kilkeel.

“I loved the house and its garden,” he says. “I still walk through it in my memory.”

That changed when Brendan and two of his cousins bought a hotel in Rostrevor for £20,000 and received £370,000 in compensation after it had been blown up.

“The taxman came looking for a cut and we had to sell up very quickly. And from aged 15 or 16, I had to walk across the border to school. Armed men stopping you on the way to school is violence.”

Of all the real-life characters to appear in this book, from Dominic and Mary McGlinchy to Paddy Farrell and Lorraine, the border itself is central to everything.

‘This was the time of unexplained shootings of clandestine alliances, zones of subterfuge, zones of dread,’ writes Eoin. ‘This was the border. There were set-ups, double crosses, betrayal. Subterfuge was the currency.’

Comparing the Irish border to Trump’s wall and to the consequences of European borders in Africa, Eoin points out that The Bureau, a political book, is relevant today.

“The story could have happened anywhere,” he says. Above all, he says, The Bureau is concerned with masculinity.

If you look at the current American cabinet, the phrase a ‘legion of horribles’ is what comes to mind.

“In many ways, this book is the legion of horribles, and at the very end that is juxtaposed with Lorraine, who believed in love.

“They could have told her, in this country they kill for politics and for money. Nobody kills for love.”

Eoin is keen to stress how much he loved his father — a man who read Dostoevsky, who wanted to fight in the Hungarian Uprising in 1958 against the Russians, and who was so proud of his son that when Eoin’s first poem was published in The Irish Press, he went out and bought 70 copies.

“I found the pile of them when I was clearing out the Bureau,” says Eoin.

“He was always the brightest person in the room.

“But he was probably never the shrewdest.”