Mick Clifford: Gene Kerrigan engineered a new view of Ireland

Usually when somebody dies, the tributes pour in. Now and again it’s no bad thing to do so when the subject is alive and well and just moving off the professional stage rather than this mortal coil.

I first came across his work as a student in UCC. In the mid-1980s, the college opened a chill-out space at a time when we’d never heard of chilling out and space was where astronauts went in search of Bowie’s ‘Major Tom’. They called it a common room and it consisted of a few tables and chairs in the basement of the Boole Library. 

As you entered the room there was a hatch, behind which sat the man in charge. He oversaw the entertainment facilities, consisting of a battered game of backgammon. During my college years I got really good at backgammon. He also had control of a stack of frequently-replenished magazines. The most coveted of these was Magill.

I was studying civil engineering, en route to becoming the second-worst engineer to emerge from UCC during that period (don’t ask). The common room was a refuge from thermodynamics and Civil and Structural Design, Parts One and Two. Pretty soon, the man in charge knew my reading habits and when a new edition of Magill arrived I didn’t have to ask him, he just passed it through the hatch with a rueful shake of his head, as if I had gone wrong.

The magazine, created by Vincent Browne, was top-heavy with serious writers. Colm Tóibín, Fintan O’Toole, Olivia O’Leary, Nell McCafferty. And then there was Kerrigan. He wrote in short, snappy sentences, weighted with a promise of more to come if you just kept reading. It was as if the short story writer Raymond Carver had gone to sleep at home in Washington state, woke up in Cabra, and ambled in to ask Browne for what we used to call “the shtart”.

Frequently, Kerrigan’s prose was coated in a light sheen of comic possibility, not unlike that of his colleague McCafferty, in which the reader was nudged to observe the pompous nature of those who wielded power.

He was at his best writing about power, in government, in the courts, in the police. He and his late colleague Derek Dunne wrote the seminal book about police abuses overseen by the government in the 1970s, Round Up The Usual Suspects. Their work shone a light from which eventually the State could no longer look away.

Being from Caherciveen, I was transfixed by the Kerry Babies case in the mid-1980s. Kerrigan covered the tribunal and afterwards produced an analysis of a deeply-flawed report that had been more concerned with maintaining the gloss of respectability rather than inquiring into a shocking misuse of power that targeted an innocent family. 

He tore it apart in patient, forensic, and tidy prose. The tribunal chair, Judge Kevin Lynch, was so put out by the journalism that he penned a rebuke. Kerrigan then rebuked his rebuke and there was no more. 

Decades later the State accepted that the report was deeply flawed, as if the journalist hadn’t shown them back when it was hot off the presses. 

Down in the Boole basement, the man in charge was getting seriously concerned about the amount of time I was spending reading and re-reading one magazine.

I finished college and set sail for Glasgow to burst into the world of civil engineering. Nine months later I moved south to London under cover of darkness and managed to bluff my way as an engineer there for a while longer. None of the buildings I worked on actually collapsed, but there was no point in tempting fate. So I left while the going was good, and spent a few years wandering, working exclusively from the neck down.

Eventually, one rainy day in Sydney, lost in the maw of a ferocious hangover, I happened across a few editions of the Sunday Tribune in a strange apartment. People today might find it hard to believe, but the posting of Irish newspapers around the world to displaced exiles was a way of life in years gone by. 

At that stage, Kerrigan was writing for the paper. Reading through his copy reignited in me the old feelings from the common room. Now that I was without any direction at all, the germ of an idea floated into my head. Imagine a world in which you could actually get paid for writing.  Imagine having your words appearing week after week on a printed page. Imagine doing something you enjoy. A road opened up.

Kerrigan hit another peak during the tribunal years, when Dublin Castle housed Moriarty. A great uncovering was afoot. The golden circle were being exposed as con artists and tax dodgers. His generation had lived through the times when there wasn’t a bob in the national coffers, yet a whole class of people had organised elaborate tax scams to steal the State’s money. He wrote cogently, always doing the difficult job of making it look easy just to ensure that reading it would be easy.

Week on week he dissected complicated financial dealings and accounts and frequently presented them in the context of the times through which he had grown up and lived, like a reporter firing dispatches back from the frontline.

Then a decade ago he was to the fore once again, his work this time illuminating the expedient and thoughtless attempts by the government of the day to introduce water charges. As a public policy, charging for water makes perfect sense. But the context of the attempted introduction of the measure, the last straw in at least five years of crippling cutbacks which were disproportionately imposed on those least able to bear the burden, changed everything.

In other countries when the economic crash battered society, there were riots or defaulting on debt. Here, the rage and sense of injustice was poured into opposition to water charges. Kerrigan was the journalist who saw that first and held tight with what was going on.

At various points over the years in this business, I have run into the man that lit some kind of fuse in my head back in the basement of the Boole. Turns out he’s a thorough gentleman, devoid of affectation or ego. That’s nice to discover but really irrelevant to the work. So here’s to you, Mr Kerrigan, enjoy kicking back, but give consideration to penning another book or two to keep us nourished and maybe a little amused.

And while you’re at it, think of your contribution to the built environment, making it safe from the second-worst engineer to emerge from UCC.