Bob Quinn I admire old people who live by their wits, like the ancient American, a real estate man, whom I met in Galway years. He wore a badge on his lapel with the slogan: OLD AGE AND CUNNING WILL ALWAYS DEFEAT YOUTH AND TALENT. He told me he was eighty. He looked sixty. We had some … Read more
In August of 1969 I was driving across Ireland with the late Bearnard Ó Riain, the older brother of a good friend of mine, the late Dinno Ryan. Most of my old friends are now ‘late’. We were going to join others in a mountain-walking weekend. Bearnard had participated in the nineteen-fifties IRA campaign in … Read more
In 1967, the fidgets struck again. That was the year my mother died, rapidly following my father. I confess now that I was not obviously upset by the deaths of my parents. In the culture of my generation and class, love, certainly any public expression of it, was an embarrassment. Such namby-pamby language was confined … Read more
In the mid-1990s Seosamh O Cuaig and I were filming a programme for TG4 in the State of Minnesota. It concerned an 1880 shipload of emigrants from Conamara. In the city of St. Paul we were told that the term ‘Connemara’ was a century-old Minnesota synonym for lazy. This was curious, because nobody in the … Read more
I was pretty sure I was going to die, sooner rather than later, one midsummer’s night in Libya’s desert. It was 1988. A cousin of Colonel Ghaddafi, a military man, was driving us to meet the Great Man himself. In the darkness, we had turned left off the tarmacadamed main road between Benghazi and Tripoli, … Read more
Back in Dublin again, I was one of thirty, all-male trainees destined to become the camera, lighting and sound operators with the new television service. I started late, in November 1961 and found the first work ambience I had ever enjoyed. We were based in the hall of a school near Ringsend and then in … Read more
I’ve just made my last film, a short called Bog Graffiti. Another last film. I always make that resolution when a film is put to bed. Never again, I say, will I go through the pain. In my childhood the cinema was already a fantasy, one which we could only occasionally afford. When as day … Read more
Back to love and sex. Liking is preferable to loving – and less conducive to heartache. Youth is oblivious to that boring truth. The unbiddable first love of my life lived in Terenure, Dublin, a half a mile away from me and I called her Thaura Mornton. We were equally devoted to amateur theatricals. She … Read more
PROLOGUE ‘The reverend Judge leaned over and addressed the defendant’ ‘I have taken your spotless record into account.’ ‘However…by the power vested in me I am obliged to sentence you to three score years and ten, maybe more, maybe less.’ ‘You will serve this time in an open facility.’ ‘Allowing for the normal remission for … Read more