David Marcus was the lapsed Jew from Cork who did so much to encourage Irish writers

David Marcus would eat an evening meal as unexciting as a tin of salmon while reading the stories and poems, writes Terry Prone

SOME people have an irrational fear of lifts. In my teens, I had an irrational fear of stairs. Not stairs in general. Just one particular flight of stairs; the ones that led to several upper storeys in the old Irish Press Building on the Liffey.

At the time, I was working as a colour writer for woman’s editor Mary Kenny, whose office was pretty far up. Despite an aversion to any form of speedy physical activity I always took those steps at a run, out of fear of meeting one of two people on them.