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4.
AOTW: There are so many stereotypes attached to the Irish. Do you find yourself working to counter those in your writing?
Eoin Colfer: I did try to update the Irish image in Artemis Fowl. Even the fairies got a makeover --- it would have been a good show for afternoon TV. Ireland is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. Now, a lot of people know that.
Martin Roper: Every race has its stereotypes. There are even some rather absurd ones about Americans. Stereotypes are a shorthand I suppose and they can be used for good or ill, a way of finding humour. I don't consciously work to counter them but now that I think about it I do use them. When the narrator in Gone is frightened he falls back on racism as a form of protection, and becomes, for a moment, a rather hollow stereotype.
Morgan Llywelyn: I don't consciously attempt to counter stereotypes. I do consciously try to portray the Irish as I know and see them every day. Sometimes we do fall into stereotypical behaviour, but more often not. An honest depiction is always the best response to misunderstanding.
Niall Williams: Not really. I don't think of these things. I follow the characters, if some aspects of them are stereotypical, then so they are. To change a character once it has been created would be like changing your nose.
Malachy McCourt: At times I find myself bristling at some of the blatant taunts at the Irish but then I realize my own life at times has been the ultimate stereotypical example of the wild drinking, fighting, singing Mick or Paddy. So I need not be so thin-skinned when teased.
Liam Clancy: Brightening the image of stage-Irishmen has been the life's work project of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. In The Mountain of the Women, I describe as a highlight of my working life the production by Frank O'Connor and myself on St. Patrick's Day in 1961 in the Cuchullain cycle of Yeats plays at the "Poetry Center" of the YMHA in NY as an antidote to the dreadful image of green beer and plastic shamrocks.
Regina McBride: The only way to combat stereotypes is to write about fully dimensional human beings.
Jamie O'Neill: Much of writing fiction, for me at any rate, is creating characters that are believable and true. In this sense characters are the antithesis of stereotypes. So the countering of stereotypes would seem to be a natural product of good writing, and not something purposely entertained by the writer. It should be said that often it is the Irish themselves who delight most in these stereotypes: the drunken buffoon, the cunning shoneen, the good father who never beats his wife on a Sunday. In London, when asked was if I Irish, I would often reply, "No, I'm gay." Such is the force of the Irish stereotype that the two identities seemed incompatible, if not downright contradictory. In At Swim, Two Boys I wanted to ask that same question and answer, most affirmatively, "Yes." Two Dublin boys would fall in love, and in their friendship discover their country, a country whose freedom was worthy of their fight.
Marita Conlon-McKenna: Yes. I always hated those Irish stereo types! Growing up I was sick of reading about stupid little boys and girls who knew nothing and could be tricked and cheated and jeered at by all around them. Irish children seemed the most gullible eejits that ever appeared on the page unlike their English or US counterparts. When I came to write Under the Hawthorn Tree, my first children's book about the Great Irish Famine, I made sure that the three main characters Eily Michael and Peggy were clever and resourceful and brave and wise. Faced with hunger and disease and the workhouse, they had nothing or no one to fall back on except themselves. They were survivors and showed a strength and courage, which had rarely been seen in an Irish children's book before. Katie in The Blue Horse I guess was similar in breaking preconceptions about travellers. In my adult novel The Magdalen, I was determined to show Esther to be a good daughter, a kind sister, not just some pathetic nobody who fell pregnant. I wanted the reader not to reject or despise her, but care for this young Irish woman, who like thousands of others had made a mistake, and paid a huge price for it when she was rejected by her family and community and sent away to The Magdalen Laundry to have her child.
Emma Donoghue: Occasionally, but being Irish is so fashionable these days, I don't feel that the Irish are in any sense a beleaguered race who need to be defended. It's fun to explore and undermine the stereotyped reputations of all social groups. In one of my novels I had a minor character, a drunken surly man who happened to be Irish --- and the English editor made me change him into a Scot, which apparently was fine!
Mary E. Lyons: Yes, particularly while writing the opening sections of Feed the Children First. I wanted children to learn about the strength of the people and their culture --- the music, dance, stories, artistry. As Maureen Dezell points out in Irish Irish America: Coming Into Clover, American children know little about Irish history. They're vaguely aware that one wears green and a "Kiss Me I'm Irish!" button on Saint Patrick's Day. They laugh at stereotypical images of drunken leprechauns in films and on television. Otherwise, the ancestral homeland of over 45 million Americans has no real meaning for young people. And it's no wonder. As far as I know, the famine is required curriculum in only four states. World History and Cultures, a 5th grade social studies textbook from Houghton Mifflin, devotes one sentence to Irish immigrants. Harcourt Brace & Company's 3rd and 5th grade world history texts make no mention of Ireland at all. The Core Knowledge Foundation, which claims to be the definitive source of what American children need to know, excludes Irish history in its Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and related textbooks.
Andrew M. Greeley: I don't give a hoot about the stereotypes. The Irish can laugh all the way to their commodity brokers.
Maureen Dezell: A major premise of my book is the debunking of both cozy and derogatory stereotypes about the Irish.
Máire B. de Paor: In pioneering the rediscovering the medieval style of writing, common to both biblical and classical writers, in our Gaelic poetry, from our early Irish lyrics down to the end of the eighteenth century, and in some of our hagiography, I am countering the anachronism of applying modern expectations to those texts.
Randy Lee Eickhoff: Constantly. There is a tendency for the writer to unconsciously follow the steretypes such as the stage Irishman when writing dialogue. I always have to correct drafts in order to keep the rhythm and lyricism of the actual language without falling into the trap of mimicking the brogue. Another major problem is that most readers have this preconceived idea of an Irishman. You know, the drinker and brawler and the quiet man syndrome is definitely strong among some as well. Many do not realize the dignity of the Irishman, the well-read Irishman (more books are sold per capita in Ireland than any other country in the world --- I remember taking a stroll one Sunday through St. Stephen's Green and noticing that even the homeless were propped up against a tree with a tattered paperback in their hands), and even that there is a large organization that is anti-drinking --- the Pioneers. Yet, the writer has to, at times, fall back on those stereotypes in order to create a bond between the reader and his expectations and the story in front of him. It's an unfortunate circumstance, but nevertheless there and must be balanced by the writer.
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