Paul Howard: ‘When we moved here, we were English and we were reminded of it every day’

Paul Howard, who has done so much to break down the barriers of class with his Ross O’Carroll-Kelly books, plays and columns, is now uniting Ireland with his novel A Nation Once Again. Howard laughs at this idea and echoes Peter Cook’s ironic admiration for “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second World War”.He is not convinced his very funny writing makes any difference at all. We are in Dublin’s Brooks Hotel discussing the evolution of his career as one of Ireland’s best literary satirists. It probably has roots in his “confused” sense of identity, he says. His family moved back to Ireland when he was eight years old in 1979, in protest at Margaret Thatcher’s election. “I was hyper-conscious of the way I spoke, and I was hyper-conscious of the way other people spoke. I probably developed a listening ear because of that. I was heavily incentivised to lose my English accent. His accent was a “proper ‘wotcha mate’ Grange Hill accent” that was not popular in the Irish playgrounds during the 1970s and 1980s, he says.READ MORE“In England we would have just regarded ourselves as an Irish family who just happened to live in England. And when we moved here, we were English and we were reminded of it every day. I remember the playground kids dancing around us, singing ‘What Shall We Do with the English bastards? What should we do with the English bastards? Hang them by the balls in Stephen’s Green’.” He laughs. “I remember going into the headmaster’s office … and I’m looking at these pictures on his wall of Michael Collins in his battle fatigues and the ruins of the GPO after the Easter Rising and then the Proclamation in English and in Irish. And me just going ‘There’s a f**king war on? Nobody told me’. And then the next couple of years: ’80, ’81, the hunger strikes; those were the worst years for me and Mark, my older brother. We got really badly bullied.”A Nation Once Again started life as an unfilmed sitcom script that Howard couldn’t get out of his head. It’s the story of a secret department of civil servants and cross-community advisers trying to work out the shape of a united Ireland. He refers to it as a “reverse Puckoon”, Spike Milligan’s satirical novel about a village partitioned by the Border.“The united Ireland I’d always had in my head was that envisaged by Pádraig Pearse and Éamon de Valera, which is ridiculous,” he says. “[It was] the time of the Easter Rising, Nicholas II was on the throne of Russia. It’s a long, long time ago. We don’t have to cling to that.”The reality, he says, is that a united Ireland that had to reckon with hundreds of thousands of unionists would have to change. At the very least, basic questions would have to be considered. “How do you unify two police forces? One is armed and one isn’t armed. What do you do with the Constitution? What happens to compulsory Irish in schools? Are we going to tell the unionist people that Irish is compulsory? What will the flag be? Why does the capital have to be in Dublin?”‘Everybody around me had third-level education and I had a chip in my shoulder’— Paul Howard Howard thinks we need to think about these things now. “In Germany nobody saw unification coming. In 1988, 95 per cent of West Germans didn’t want it and never saw it coming. And then it kind of had to happen.”It’s his first non-Ross novel. He corrects me: “My second. I did Roy Keane’s dog’s autobiography. I baulk when I say that.” If his English childhood makes him the perfect person to write about Irish unity from an outsider perspective then growing up in Ballybrack, a working-class island in the middle of south Dublin privilege, influenced Ross O’Carroll Kelly. “I had a huge chip on my shoulder about class.” He used to listen to English indie rock group The Housemartins and write out their political lyrics. In the library at lunch he would read Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s foundational text. “I wrote a sonnet called Dear Aristocrat. The last couplet was ‘The fuse on the bomb of revolt is lit. We will rise. Yours sincerely, silage pit.’ I thought I was going to break down the class system, through the medium of a sonnet first and then later through the medium of a comic character.”From an early age he was obsessed with music. He inherited many of his favourite bands from his older brother Mark. “He looked like Paul Newman, blond hair, blue eyes. Paul Newman eyes. Any girl I fancied at school, they fancied Mark. Absolutely zero interest in me ... And he was big and he was strong and he fought all my fights for me.”Mark died of a brain haemorrhage in 2020 after a period of estrangement from the family. He had issues with addiction and depression. “I loved him so much. I think the last time I saw Mark was four or five years before he died and he was in hospital. And I said to him: ‘I’ll come in and see you tomorrow.’ And he said: ‘Oh yeah, do.’ And by the time I got in he had signed himself out. I think he left our lives because he didn’t want us seeing his struggles ... I just can’t believe he’s not in the world any more. I always kind of imagined he was out there somewhere in the hinterland.”Paul Howard: 'You talk to kids about the Troubles and you might as well be talking about the Boer War.' Photograph: Tom Honan Howard was not a big reader as a teenager, though he reads voraciously now. “When the mobile library came, we used to shake it, 30 on either side,” he says and laughs. His interest in writing was filtered through an interest in sport and then sports journalism. “I wanted to be a journalist from the time I was 11. It was the only thing I ever wanted to do as a child. When I was about 15, I started buying the Sunday Tribune and all I ever wanted to do was write about sport for the Sunday Tribune.”He recalls Mark passing him with a guitar as he wrangled with an article, saying: “You’re never going to get the ride doing that.”[ Paul Howard: You spend your life chasing the way the World Cup made you feel when you were 11Opens in new window ]Howard got a job in the Sunday Tribune after school. He loved the noise and the banter and hates that there’s now a gym where the paper used to be. “But I don’t think I wrote a piece I’d be proud of until I was about 25 or 6. I was too insecure because I didn’t go to college. Everybody around me had third-level education and I had a chip in my shoulder. Even though the Tribune was the best place in the world for someone like me, because [the editor] Vincent Browne didn’t care.”The chip on his shoulder also stopped him writing funny pieces even though he lived in a wisecracking household. “I thought to make it as a journalist, I had to be serious. I was recently looking at something I wrote when the US was awarded the 1994 World Cup. I was just cringing at how earnest and sanctimonious it was … At that time there wasn’t a great deal of humour in journalism.”A learning moment for him was when he was subbing Joseph O’Connor’s column in the Tribune magazine in the mid 1990s. “I remember reading that, feeling like I could hurt myself because it was that funny … I learned how to write a joke, how to deliver a punchline from reading Joe,” he says. [ Paul Howard: Ten things I’ve learned writing Ross O’Carroll-KellyOpens in new window ]He wrote his first Ross O’Carroll Kelly column after attending schools’ rugby matches and finding the combination of loudness, privilege and complete lack of self-awareness very funny. Was writing about Ross for 28 years cathartic? “It’s definitely cathartic for the 16-year-old person I was. It’s hard to explain to young people now but class was a much bigger deal in Ireland then than it is now. When we were kids, we would never write Ballybrack as our address when applying to jobs. We’d put Shankill because the thinking was that you’ll be discriminated against … I don’t know if we’re allowed to quote John Waters any more but he had that great line that there’s no class system in Ireland. Everybody just knows their place.”What does he think about academics who say the Ross O’Carroll Kelly books are an anthropological study of 21st-century Ireland? “I just cringe because I don’t take them that seriously. And that’s not false modesty or anything. I really don’t. I wasn’t writing them to be read in 50 years’ time, and I don’t think they will be read in 50 years’ time.”He has branched out significantly. As well as the new novel, he’s working on a biography of the late comedian Sean Hughes and he has written for several TV shows, including Bad Sisters, SisterS, and The Young Offenders. In midlife, he has really been enjoying having the opportunity to collaborate with other writers. He had begun talking to himself, he says. During Covid, he says, his wife, Mary McCarthy, noticed he talked all day while working. “I speak the accents as I’m writing, especially the dialogue.”He learned a lot while researching A Nation Once Again. He read about Irish history and the unification of Germany. He visited South Korea and learned they have a minister for unification. “Nobody thought the Border was going to last for 100 years,” he says. “Churchill was shocked it was still there in the ’40s. Attitudes on both sides of the Border have hardened over the course of a century. Our institutions are different. Our outlook on life is different.”What conclusion did he draw ultimately? “I thought it would be difficult to have a united Ireland. Now I think it’s nigh on impossible, given how bad we are in this country when it comes to big projects like the national children’s hospital, the rail link to the airport ... This is those things times 10.”There’s a running joke in the novel about how the best-case scenario when it comes to the North is an outcome where everyone is equally disappointed. He thinks widespread disappointment rather than idealistic rage might be something to aim for when it comes to uniting the island. “There’s so much fudge in the Good Friday Agreement, but the upshot of it is there’s no war any more … You talk to kids about the Troubles, and you might as well have been talking about the Boer War.” He does not expect his very funny book to change anything, but I suspect it might end up being the default guidebook for reunification. He thinks comedic writing is not particularly valued by the literati and he is fine with that. “Humour is a great way of puncturing pomposity. Which is why pompous people don’t like it and why they don’t trust it.”But he’ll always love a good joke. “When I see actors on TV saying lines that I wrote, I don’t think I’ll ever be cool about it. I’m like: ‘Mary! Mary! I wrote that line!’”A Nation Once Again by Paul Howard is published by Sandycove. He is doing events around the country. To book go to @AKA Paul Howard on Instagram