The Great Irish Novel of David Hanly
Addressed to the author’s country, the title, placed in its proper context, animates the book in a way that is both clarifying as to the author’s perhaps subliminal motives, and also profoundly sad.
Literary Time-Capsule that sketches and illuminates the Road to Ireland’s Undoing
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In a charity shop around last Christmastime, I stumbled upon a book I had heard a great deal about over many years but never seen a copy of. It is one of those quasi-mythical Irish books that almost no one has read but many feel they ought to have, and perhaps will read one day when they retire. The author was once extremely famous in Ireland, though not for writing books, not even this book. He was famous as a journalist, though not even a writing journalist — a broadcaster, current affairs anchorman on radio, and sometime television interviewer, immensely respected but quietly rumoured to in reality be a literary genius who, for some obscure reason, had never written a second book. Many of the people who had not read his sole book spoke of it in rapturous terms, as did a goodly number of the few who had read it. To have read his book put other would-be novelists at an enormous moral advantage in pubs like Doheny and Nesbitt’s on Baggot Street in Dublin, for they would themselves invariably have written more than one book, albeit secreted away in their bottom drawers, and yet the existence of this one book and the fact of its author’s more recent day-job seemed to give them some kind of solace, to bespeak something concerning the country’s inability to support its great writers, for all the talk there was about writers past. It was said that, had he stuck with it, the author of this one book might have emerged as an equal for Joyce or Beckett, or at least unequivocally above the second-string brigade with their forgettable names and remaindered volumes.
And yet this writer’s one book, too, had long gone out of print and had not been reissued, a fact that only added to its legend. It could not be purchased in any high street bookshop, nor seen very often on the shelves of secondhand booksellers. It was one of those odd books that people who had a copy wished fervently to hold on to it, lest one day their constant whispered insistence that this was one of the great undiscovered gems of Irish literature be vindicated in glory.
The book in question is a novel, and is titled, as it happens, In Guilt and in Glory. It is by David Hanly, long known as the longtime co-presenter of the main Irish morning radio news-analysis programme, Morning Ireland, (from 1984, at its inception, for about 20 years) on the national broadcaster (no scare quotes required when referencing that institution as it was back then), RTÉ, an acronym, which stands for Raidio Telefís Éireann — ‘Radio/Television of Ireland’.
David Hanly was the one with the booming voice and imperious tone, who — when he appeared before the public, which he rarely did — looked exactly like you imagined him to look: stout, balding and with a structure ideally adapted to delivering belly-laughs. He also had an engaging habit, whenever he was at a loss to know what the next item might be about, to take a deep breath and shout at the guest before him: ‘Tell us what you KNOW!!’ He was also known for the TV interview series, Hanly’s People, and two literary series — The 1990s Writer in Profile series, and the Naughties poetry discussion radio programme, The Enchanted Way.
David Hanly died n Friday, November 21st, 2025. He was 82 and had been resident in a Dublin nursing home for some years. When I finally read his legendary novel, I made inquiries about him and was told that he had been ‘living with dementia’ for some time and was unlikely to respond to a visitation for the purposes of relating my response to his book, even if he was not scared by the prospect of being visited by a ‘far right writer’. I do not believe we had ever formally met, though I had spoken with him on air by telephone a couple of times in his long career as a broadcaster. Anxious to tell him how much I had liked his book, I briefly considered writing him a letter but, on further inquiry, learned that this would be more or less pointless.
Such was the legend of In Guilt and in Glory that when I came upon it I thought I was dreaming. The book was a hardback, a first edition and was in what secondhand booksellers often describe as ‘used, acceptable’ condition, without specifying acceptable to whom. Some long-dead bookseller had scribbled on the flyleaf in pencil: ‘First edition, £15’. I bought it for €2.50. When I reported my treasure to my wife, she immediately went online and came back up to tell me that I could have bought a paperback copy for £1.70, although a hardback would have set me back £81.42, plus £8 delivery. The book’s global rating on Amazon was 5 out of 5 — 100 per cent approval, and its description read as follows:
Novel Hardcover – January 1, 1979 by David Hanly (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars 1 rating:
Brilliant, ribald, sophisticated, startling and at hear [sic — ‘heart’?] deeply serious, this is an unforgettable novel of Irish destinies A.D. 1977-78 not focused narrowly upon the Troubles, but taking the overview of the Irish temper.
On the inside-back leaf of the dust jacket, the American writer, Richard Condon, provides this endorsement, clearly directed at his fellow-countrymen:
David Hanly’s In Guilt and in Glory will change the shape of the Irish novel. It will also change all the old saws which taught us what Ireland is supposed to be like. The narrative races, the characters are so many different kinds of Irish that many, like me, will read this magnificent novel twice or more times. Hanly joins the masters of Irish literature with this, and surpasses most of them.
This might be thought to flirt with typical American hyperbole but, having read the book, I do not think so. It is indeed an extraordinary book, though its solitariness as the Hanly literary ouvre creates a sense of mystery that casts a shadow over its impact, provoking an involuntary searching in the reader for flaws or limitations that might explain its singularity.
In Guilt and in Glory is immensely readable, though somewhat under-realised on account of having no spinal-column plotline. In many respects the rumours of its greatness are borne out, or at least revealed as not-disproportionate, in the reading. The author is clearly an immensely literate and erudite writer, with a vast and impressive vocabulary and a talent for penning characters that jump off the page. The storyline relates to a variegated group of characters — a mixture of Irish natives and American television people in Ireland to make a documentary for an NBS series called ‘The Whole Story’, who are touring around Ireland with a team from the Board of Welcomes, the fictional equivalent and direct English translation of An Bord Failte, the tourist board. The team includes a black female presenter and an American egomaniac columnist, and the Irish ‘guides’ for the trip comprise several Board of Welcomes handlers, with an archaeologist and an Irish egomaniac novelist thrown in to answer questions from the visitors. From the Board of Welcomes’ perspective, the point of funding and facilitating the project is to whip up some American publicity for an Ireland still struggling to survive after sixty-odd years of ‘independence’, which has lost any significant restraint of conscience about how it might go about selling itself.
I remember well the time in question, when Ireland was still Ireland, a struggling backwater that outsiders found cute and charming, but in which the phones didn’t work and the buses never ran on time, and we thought of these matters as serious problems. This soon gave way to an Ireland in which sociologists began to ponder the conundrum of Bord Failte’s bizarre strategy of simultaneously selling Ireland as a postmodern industrial paradise and an ancient island of fairy forts, stone circles, passage tombs and thatched cottages, in which, as the cultural commentator Luke Gibbons, observed back around then, ‘. . . the dominant images of Ireland, for the most part, emanate from outside the country, or have been produced at home with an eye on the foreign (i.e. tourist) market.’ On the one hand, Bord Fáilte promoted Ireland as a country essentially rural, traditional and undeveloped; on the other, as a place where transnational corporations could come and (sotto voce) not be bothered with pernickety environmental legislation like they had fled from their homelands to avoid.
Hanly had himself worked as a press officer for Bord Failte, before becoming a scriptwriter for various RTÉ dramas and soap operas, including The Kennedys of Castleross (radio), and The Riordans (television). I suspect that, in his Bord Failte years, he kept a bulging notebook somewhere about his person at all times, and rarely in the history of Irish literature has the literary payoff for such resourcefulness been so abundant.
Hanly paints a colourful picture of an Ireland struggling to pull itself up by its bootstraps, to shake off the past except for the parts that suit its official thinking on any particular day, and to join the Great Outdoors beyond the cliffs and beaches of its island borders as an equal.
The book was published (it is unclear due to different tellings) either on February 15th, 1978 (US only, I suspect) or January 1st 1979 (general release, probably), as a result of which timing it has become a kind of document of the way Ireland was at the very moment it was starting to go awry, a by no means trivial quality in these times of imposed cultural amnesia and memory-holing. I remember the late 1970s with great clarity as a time of growing expectations, new excitements and opportunities, and possibilities of dreaming that exploded as never before. In retrospect, some of this takes on an aura of ambiguity, having led us in the interim to much darker places than we might remotely have dreamed of. Those years, looking back, left several seemingly indelible indentations on our country and its culture: the unleashing of budget-deficit economics by the giveaway manifesto of Fianna Fáil in the 1977 general election; the onset of an indigenous base of creative popular music, born in the hybrid forms of Planxty, Thin Lizzy and Horslips, and opening out into in what would become the dazzling global appeal of U2’s excavated witnessing from the cultural wastelands of suburban north Dublin, the crescendo of an Irish rock ‘n’ roll insurrection. By way perhaps of balance, in the near future there awaited the imminent visit of the newly crowned Pope John Paul II, whose visit to Ireland in September, 1979, far from serving as planned to provide a reboot of Irish Catholicism, seemed paradoxically to draw a line under 1,500 years of Irish Christianity with one final blowout party.
Hanly, though he alludes to none of these events or sagas, seems to have written his book in a mood defined by them and related phenomena. He seems deliberately to have chosen more nondescript hooks on which to hang his odyssey, the book being built essentially around a series of set pieces of the real-life Irish tourist calendar, though thinly disguised: the Rose of Tralee beauty and personality contest; the Merriman Summer School, which drew the intellectual life of Ireland yearly to County Clare; the Dublin Horse Show, and so forth. Other chapters are built around visits to the Catholic seminary in Maynooth, the tragic-melodrama of a West of Ireland Anglo-Irish landlord family whose status and ancestral pile are crumbling due to lack of funds, and the as yet uncontroversial grave of the poet W.B. Yeats in Drumcliff churchyard in County Sligo, which would later emerge as probably containing the remains of an anonymous Frenchman.
In Guilt and in Glory is in many respects a prophetic book, although it makes no such claim for itself. It is really a set of verbal polaroids taken at a pivotal moment in the advancing life of Ireland, a moment that could hardly have been identified as such at the time of its writing, when the present still appeared to have a seamless relationship with the past.
In one almost incredible respect, the book is immediately and literally prescient. Unless Amazon is mistaken about the publication date of the novel, (January 1st 1979, as above) one of the chapters, about an oil spill in Bantry Bay, County Cork, anticipated by at least one week a similar but far more serious event that occurred on January 8th. In real-life Ireland, on January 8th 1979, a French-owned oil tanker, ‘Betelgeuse’, caught fire and exploded at the Gulf Oil-operated terminal jetty at Whiddy Island in the same Bantry Bay, with the explosion and resulting fireball killing 50 people, on the ship and on the jetty. According to Mr Google, ‘[t]he similarity between the fictional event and the real tragedy was a notable and widely discussed coincidence at the time of the book’s release.’
The relevant chapter of In Guilt and in Glory, referring to the curmudgeonly Irish novelist, J.J. Haslan, begins:
Haslan it was now who saw the destruction first, and his ‘Merciful God!’ rang out in the minibus.
They were on the road overlooking Bantry Bay, vast under a blue sky that should have been reflected in the sea. But the face that the sea presented as far as the horizon was a thick impenetrable black. Gradually it dawned on all that the whole of Bantry Bay was carpeted with still, black crude oil.
Subsequently known as The Whiddy Island Disaster, the real-life event was one of the worst such calamities in Irish history, compounded in time by suggestions of cover-up and interference, when the inquests into the deaths were completed before the public inquiry into the episode had reached its conclusions. To this day, relatives of some of the deceased continue to fight for truth and justice for their loved ones, insisting that failure to observe safety regulations was a key cause of the disaster.
In Hanly’s book, the Bantry Bay disaster is emphasised purely on account of its environmental characteristics, and yet is almost Biblical in its prescience and attunedness, not merely literally but also, in a sense, in anticipating and visualising the materialist shift, trading every value for ready coin or advantage, the country was shortly to take. In one vignette, he describes how the American TV crew, seeking the rental of a boat to take them out into the bay, is told by a boatman, in justification of his rip-off price quotation: ‘All my life, I never thought I’d land a windfall like this. There may be a fortnight’s work out there, or more. A few more spillages and I could retire for life. Send my children to the university. Well, we can only hope for the best.’
Hanly describes his imagined scene:
On the island, squat and grey, stood the vast storage tanks. The huge tankers filled their bellies in the Middle East, ploughed across the ocean and emptied themselves into the tanks, whence other, smaller tankers took the oil for further distribution in Europe.
Only Bantry Bay, of all the bays in Europe, was deep enough for the big ones, and the promise of employment had persuaded the Irish government that the risks were worthwhile. Leaks were impossible and even if one did occur — and of course it could not occur — it was automatically monitored and cut off before it could do any serious damage. The Irish people were told that there would be employment for five hundred people, and were given a cast-iron guarantee that the environmentalists’ fears were unfounded, their screams mere hysterics. The tanks were built, giving the promised employment. At their completion, it was found that a dozen men, more or less, could adequately service them. But the tankers stayed for three or four days at a time, and their hungry, thirsty, randy crews spent their money with hungry, great intensity, the benefits of their presence permeating the whole areas so munificently that environmentalists, still waging their futile little war, could find no toehold of understanding. ‘Doomsayers’, ‘alarmists’, they folded their tents and left weeping.
Hanly’s cast of characters, though ostensibly a random mixture, is chosen with great care to expose the fault lines that were already appearing across the face of Ireland under the attrition of modernity and a certain new kind of freedom. He delves into all the major questions then facing Ireland: the reopened wound of the ‘Troubles’ over the border in ‘the North’, her already disintegrating literary reputation, her struggle to find ways of feeding and clothing herself, her dwindling faith in something beyond, her capacity to self-understand, never mind self-realise. Characters illuminate these events with their vying personalities and deeply antithetical views. They drink and ‘sleep’ their way across and around the island, laying bare the truths that lie just under the surface. The TV crew is looking for thrills and sensations; the Board of Welcomes team is there to make sure that nothing of the kind makes it on to film.
The ’debates’ that vivify the book are between a crude, inchoate form of nationalism and the imperatives of necessity or pragmatism. This was a time when Irish ‘intellectuals’ were beginning to rehearse what would become their perennial diatribes through the dying decades of the century — against Ireland’s alleged demographic homogeneity and its residual irredentism, which persisted in spite of their best efforts. By the end of the twentieth century, just a score of years after Hanly’s book was published, the Irish had become an almost entirely deracinated people, ashamed of their flag and silent about their now ambiguous historical heroes. What was once an embarrassment of riches has become a wealth of embarrassment. Today, our capital city is populated and staffed by a majority of foreigners and besieged on virtually a nightly basis by gangs of feral, sometimes knife-wielding African youths, intent upon new and aimless forms of destruction or bloodshed.
The arguments of Hanly’s colourful cast of characters veer from violent nationalism to environmentalism, to industrialisation, to the loss of the native language, to the viability or credibility of religion, to literature, and back again. The persistent sense, as the reader advances through the pages, is of a nation not so much at the crossroads, but somewhat down a road it is unsure of, yet reluctant to turn back for fear of something worse. Some of the argumentative speeches verge on declamation rather than conversation — ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’ — but there is a degree of licence for such drifts which the author does not exceed.
It is impossible to tell which of the voices, if any, might be expressing the author’s own view, or indeed whether the author holds to any view on any particular subject he draws into his narrative. There is little in the way of explicit and unambiguous commentary that might be parsed for express clues to David Hanly’s own perspective. All I will say is that the very fact of having undertaken such an odyssey of exploration suggests a jaundiced eye, and it cannot be said that what emerges is a rosy picture, or that it is less than an unapologetic depiction of ambivalences to be located in the society even now when it is too late to do what might yet have been done back then. He renders faithfully the complexity of Irish popular thought in such a way as to capture the ferment of the moment, and yet leaves everything open to possibility. At the end, it is impossible to pick out something in the book that amounts to a bum steer or a false trail.
In Maynooth, we encounter Fr Keegan, an apostate priest and Joycean scholar, challenged by Stephen Crossan, one of the Board of Welcomes officials, with the gauntlet that ‘for one who has lost the faith’, he remains ‘mightily moved’ by the Church.
‘Ach’, replies Keegan. ‘Lost the faith. I hate the phrase. What does it mean! I have no patience anymore with Catholic rituals, the choking bureaucracy. And the young Dedalus answered forever any questions about alternatives, and more succinctly than I ever could. But the simple fact is, Stephen, that we Irish Catholics are spancelled for ever by our upbringing. And Mr Joyce, for all his vaunted free-thinking and nonserviams, was the pluperfect example of it. Wouldn’t allow his own son to bring his girlfriend home because they were sleeping together! Now where did he get that from? Your friendly neighbourhood Marxist will tell you that it’s bourgeois convention. But we know better, don’t we? That man was an Irish Catholic first, last and always, and a lucky man he was, too, for he would never have written a single word without those two things he professed to despise most. Ireland and Catholicism.’
In another sequence, the two principal official supervisors of the expeditions, Stephen Crossan, head of the Board of Welcomes delegation, and the state departmental representative, Oliver Mulligan, a retired school principal seeking new vistas of experience, get involved in an argument with the US columnist, name of Frank Dineen, a central-casting Irish-American who would prefer an Ireland still immersed in myth and poverty, after a trip to the Japanese-owned Fujikawa plant in Killala.
I have written many times in the past four decades about the latitude extended in real-life Ireland to chemical, pharmaceutical and fertilizer manufacturers who were invited in and given free licence to take advantage of the ‘absorption capacity’ of the Irish landscape, which is to say pollute and sabotage it to their hearts’ content. Fujikawa is the pseudonym of Asahi, a Japanese-owned operation that operated out of Killala, Country Mayo, throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, making engineered plastics. Official Ireland had turned itself inside out and danced on its head to persuade Asahi to set up shop in Mayo. I worked on the railways at the time, where it was well known that the train that moved across the central plain of Ireland in the small hours several nights a week was a special train containing a dangerous substance, acrylonitrile, which is reactive and toxic at low doses. The protocols in place included a massive evacuation plan in the event of a derailment or other misfortune, whereby areas within several miles of such an eventuality would have to be cleared of their human quotient.
In Hanly’s book, the talk arising from the visit to Fujikawa turns to these very dangers, but Oliver Mulligan, representing the government of the day, must adopt the official narrative:
‘It’s very presence is pollution, and each day it pollutes the waters around it. But which is worse? A polluted bay or two, or three hundred men on the dole?’
The American columnist, Dineen, ripostes: ‘That’s too goddamn simplistic.’
Mulligan replies: ‘Try deploring pollution to a man who has lost his whole family to emigration. Try telling him that a new factory would be a bad thing because it would spoil the beauty of the locality or ruin the river for foreign anglers.’
Dineen asks the question any sentient Irishman or Irishwoman of the time was asking, though in a whisper: ‘Listen, why do you have to have monstrosities, for God’s sake. They’re all right for America and Germany: let them do what they like, they’re ruined already anyway. But why do you let them in here?’
[Stephen] Crossan came in to relieve a very agitated Mulligan. ‘Maybe we take them because nobody else will, and damn glad to get them. Maybe we are so grateful for a factory, any factory, that we push our environmental conceits to one side. Anyway, if the truth be told, the worst polluters of all are the farmers. Pig farming has done for dozens of lakes and rivers. Creameries the same. Fertilizers the same.’
End of official narrative, directed at media and voter, and perfectly condensed in a few broad strokes. This, and little more, amounted to the core of what passed for the Irish national discussion about the country’s at the time relatively new policy of Foreign Direct Investment, whereby the State invited outside corporations in to provide the jobs it couldn’t provide, and then turned a blind eye when the industries destroyed the landscape and waterways, and imported their workforces from abroad. Truth be told, there is more of a discussion on this subject in David Hanly’s book than ever occurred in reality, the matter being generally dismissed by a quip or a putdown, such as ‘you can’t eat scenery’, which tended to abort all such discussions instanter. Now we deal with the fallout: a saturation polluted landscape, massive dependence on external enterprise and a workforce overwhelmingly comprising foreigners, while the young Irish head for the ports and airports to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
J.J. Haslan, the Irish novelist, reads as a character like he ought to be a recognisable figure, yet he rebuffed all my attempts to pin him down to a single real-life prototype and re-Christen him ‘Brian’ or ‘Brendan’ or Benedict’ (I also ruled out ‘Jennifer’ and ‘Molly’!), and so I have to admit defeat and declare him a composite. He is a writer with ‘West-Brit” intonations, who has been blessed by modest commercial success, and who, late in his career, finds himself outstripped and marooned by the times and changing tastes. There is a sense, never spelt out, that he is slumming it in acting as a kind of literary guide for a busload of Yanks, and his proclivity to argumentation seems to suggest that he is not unaware of this state of shame. He lectures, cajoles, bites people’s noses off, casts insults around with a disowning laugh, but then exposes himself as a decent and lovable man behind it all.
‘Oh, what a bore it is to be Irish,’ he says, out of the blue one day. ‘I mean, does any nation have to carry the burdens that we have to bear? All that history, all that tradition, all those writers, all those emigrants, all that endless talk?’
Later, he admits: ‘I don’t know my country any more. I try to pretend that my writing is still catching the essence. But the essence has changed and I haven’t the heart to go searching for it, to start all over again. I cannot write about Ireland now. It has passed mẹ by.’
He leaned back and stared into the distance. ‘I haven’t the vocabulary.’
The text continues:
Sympathy and sadness welled in Crossan [of the Board of Welcomes]. He was looking at an artist who had had the tools of his trade stolen from him, not by a sly nocturnal thief, but by an inexorable historical impulse which had swept over his country and changed those immutables which were the cornerstones of his writing life, changed them casually and carelessly and arbitrarily and brutally, and with such speed that he could never hope to catch up. He was right. He did not have the vocabulary for the new Ireland. His tales were now written in aspic, and he would continue to his death to write them in the pretence that there was no Fujikawa factory spread over the Bay of Killala, that Annie Furlong and her kind were still sipping and swapping tales in the inns of Ireland, that the breadth of his own experience incorporated the experience of his nation. The pretence gnawed at him, as was evident in his confession, but he would be saved by the power of his memory, his hidden compassion and the habits of a lifetime.
Without a change in style or technique, his role had been metamorphosed from that of a gifted and astute reporter to that of historian, subtle repository of the soul and features of old Ireland.
Hanly also captures the spirit of mutism, the fear of speaking out on contentious matters which now amounts to a form of national cultural lockjaw, even then rearing its ugly head, as in this passage:
In truth, it was something that everyone on the journey was sensitive to: some of the best conversations went perforce unrecorded; the Irish would not let themselves go in front of camera and microphone, and often enough they were hesitant in front of the Americans. It was not merely that an unspoken tribal loyalty inhibited any comment which might be construed as critical of the home country: there were times when this broke down, and Haslan, particularly — since he was not snaffled by a government salary — said what he wished to say and without fear. There was another impediment: the ironic tone into which the Irish persistently lapsed was a continual baffle to the Americans, who were brought up in and lived in a society where even the intellectuals always said what they meant, often having their chronic honesty mistaken by foreigners for gullibility. Irony had little currency in the New World, and the constant inversions and louche remarks of the Irish caused moments of shock and horror which lasted for but a second, but which kept the Americans on a perpetual teeter. As the days passed, each of the visitors learned to look carefully at the speaker’s face when he delivered himself of some typically shocking apothegm, finding reassurance only in the lightly lifted lip or the unmistakable smile in the eyes.
Near the end of the book, Victoria, the black American anchorwoman, who has been toying with Stephen for the duration, listening to his dissembling and evasions, asks him if he would like to come to America and live with her. He gives her a typically evasive answer and she squares up to him and declares herself in terms that might well have been addressed to his country, or at least half his country, in the same moment, albeit likely to be heard by that portion in a manner different to the intention of its delivery:
‘Don’t even think of moving to America. Because it would burn you up in a week. America is the future, boy. Califuckingfornia is the future. All those people you have been talking about are the future. All those people around you in this bar are the future. I am the future, Stephen! And you hate the future, the thought of the future, don’t you?’ Her huge eyes drove every sentence into his brain. ‘You hate it. You’re scared of it. Well, I’m not. I’m part of it. I love it. I am it. You and J.J. [Haslan, the washed-up novelist] are the Ireland of the past. The only difference between you is that he’s not ashamed to admit it. He hates the future and doesn’t mind saying so. But you try to keep one foot in the past and the other dipping into the future when it suits you. And you’ll fall on your ass. And you deserve to. And I won’t be around to pick you up. I’lI be out in Califuckingfornia smoking dope and listening to a stereo and being what I am and always will be — a good lay. You stay here, honeychile, and mourn for the past, and end up an alcoholic when you’re forty. You’ll have a great story to tell.’
In Guilt and in Glory makes no claims to augury, and yet in its invocation of observation, thoughts and feelings succeeds in anticipating the kind of deranged country —world — we have now. At one point Hanly has J.J. Haslan declare: ‘Mark it well, young man. The Western world is finished. No backbone. No strength. It’s led by America, and America is too young to lead anyone.’
I have no recollection of the kind of perspectives or awarenesses enunciated in the book being widespread in the Ireland of 1979, certainly not in the media at the time. The general mood was a kind of inferiority complex camouflaged by bravado. Sure, there was an ongoing hammer-and-tongs battle between revisionists and irredentists, and an emerging wave of Catholic reaction as the scent of the future wafted in, but there was no sense that something like the simultaneous inertia and capitulation of Ireland’s population to the shapes and sneers of the future might serve to calcify Ireland’s cultural capacity so as to spark the levels of devastation and deracination about to unfold.
In the end, In Guilt and in Glory suggests itself as the precursor of a great literary trajectory that was never to manifest, for reasons that are unclear in the case of David Hanly, but obvious as to the wider culture. Under the former heading, it may well be as simple as this: that David Hanly’s settling for a big-money job in RTÉ, eschewed the starving garret for the RTÉ canteen — as had occurred, too, with the ambiguous ‘showband’ curse whereby potentially great Irish musicians settled for handy money in the dancehalls, killing off their ambitions in return for ready money. As for the wider culture, it succumbed to the material hurricane and either emigrated or stayed clinging to the nearest citrus spruce.
Putting on my abandoned critic’s hat, I would place the merits of In Guilt and in Glory at about halfway between John McGahern and John Broderick (at his best) — pretty high praise, though with the caveat that none of the other two delivered on their implicit potential as the authors of Great Irish Novels — defined as works that speak of, and to, the soul of its nation-of-origin at a moment in history — with McGahern steering to the European mainstream, and Broderick deteriorating as he aged. Hanly may have burned out in a premature but luminous supernova, but with In Guilt and in Glory he created a blaze that either of the others would be more than proud of.
The book is not without its faults: there’s no continuous plot or interest narrative, aside from the general melee of argumentation and bed-hopping; sometimes it settles for ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’; and the sex scenes read now as almost intolerably cringe, though in fairness I can see that a failure to include them might at the time have been seen as cowardly in a climate already in revolt against Catholic ‘prudishness’.
Did — or does — David Hanly, as Richard Condon in 1979 predicted, ‘join the masters of Irish literature’, surpassing most of them? You would have to say not. The book is a straw in the wind which blew in splendid isolation into the ditch and was left behind to, in future times, intrigue and tease but never really answer most of its implicit questions: was David Hanly the great lost genius of modern Irish literature? Was his subsequent silence an admission of failure or simply a function of excess comfort or the demands of an indispensable day job?
But the book exhibits certain qualities that make it unique, and probably essential reading for anyone interested in the trajectory of Ireland to its present state of dependency, degeneracy, dysfunction and dis-grace. In my own 2025-centred view, In Guilt and in Glory is a book which offers a time-capsule of a moment which, perhaps to a unique extent, enables it to capture Ireland at one of the most critical moments in its trajectory from slave nation to deracinated island, and from blank slate on to which many possibilities might have been sketched, to a cracked tablet covered in street toilet expletives and Woke platitudes.
The way we were
From a socio-cultural viewpoint, the novel’s most arresting aspect — read around now, almost half a century after its writing — is that it clearly and repeatedly manifests and examines a plausible arrangement of roots for the conditions prevailing in Ireland now. It is as though, without stating as much, David Hanly sought to anticipate the future not by predicting it, but by constructing a context in which the character or deep nature of that future would in retrospect seem to have been inevitable. He paints a people at a loss to understand itself; its cultural totems all askew; its priorities confused and contradicting one another; its desperate need to prosper without a clear sense of how this might be done harmoniously with its own spirit and resources.
This is a profound book masquerading as a slightly more modest one — by which I mean that, although hailed as a significant work in its own time, it is only in retrospect that it reveals its depths of insight, wisdom and perception. Yet, now, it is spoken of in the same terms as in the beginning — a great piece of prose, a promising debut, a worthy addition to the literary pantheon — without reference to what it tells us, reminds us of, excavates and elucidates of a past that, had we back then the tools and the insight to observe and read it correctly, might have served as a warning, or a whole volume of warnings, about the ominous direction we were headed in. It is a book that was, in a certain fanciful sense, written for the moment of its author’s death, perhaps in the unconscious hope that the occasion might provoke a discussion as to its contrasts, resonances, collisions, and ironic disharmonies with what would by then — which is to say now — be an entirely new present, whose nature and structure were already implicit at the end of the 1970s, the decade when the Sixties arrived in Ireland at last. The author’s knowingness of all this is visible now in the deliberation of his choices of episodic contexts; the selection of his characters; the subtlety of tone that clarifies as to his motives; and his own almost inaudible interventions — for example in his choice of title, a phrase from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: ‘Youre only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. Youre but a puny.’ Addressed to the author’s country, that title, placed in its proper context, animates the entire book in a way that is both clarifying as to the author’s perhaps subliminal mindset and motives, and also profoundly sad, revealing as it does that the nature of the future was knowable and actionable at a time when the emerging culture of mutism remained relatively challengeable, and there was still time to sound alarms and thereby avert catastrophe.
Hanly paints both the Ireland being undone and the broad shapes of the Ireland being unleashed. Moreover, he captures in his descriptions a mood of foreboding that does ‘justice’ to where we have fetched up in the twenty-first century present, as well as hinting at pretty much all the probable reasons and causes of our emerging national disintegration.
I am moved to say, on the basis of this book, that David Hanly exhibited such promise as to turn into a kind of national tragedy his failure to deliver a second novel. In Guilt and in Glory was a tremendous first effort, but its sole literary virtue resides chiefly in a promise that was never afterwards realised as its author settled into the relatively comfortable life of broadcast journalist and public figure.
Yet, in the end, had I any remaining influence in Irish society, I would urge that this illuminating snapshot on the trajectory of Irish life and being, set nearly half a century ago, be reissued as the starting point of a discussion as to where we started to go wrong and in precisely what ways.
As to what its author might make of where we have ended up, I cannot imagine. If you were to essay a timeline diagram to measure the correlations between 1979 and the present, I think that, by almost any calculation not marred by delusional inputs, the verdict would be that we have arrived to the logical culmination of what was implicit in Hanly’s realisation of those half-century past times. My sense is that in any sequel he might have written in the present epoch, he would most likely maintain his position of ironic authorial detachment, and yet, by putting words into the mouths of sundry characters, suggest a country that, having long ago lost the run of itself, had now arrived under multiple headings, at its own antithesis.
At the time of its publication, this book would not have been read for anything in it with the potential to become prophetic, but simply as a piece of literature to be measured by its writing, characters, plot, et cetera. From the other end of the telescope, it provides a view of the past that makes a lot more sense of the present, by at least giving us a starting point from which to measure the extent of the degeneration that has occurred. For a novel to capture what Hanly captured in this, his first and only novel, was a remarkable achievement for the time, conveying as it did (and does) the sense of a moment in which, while almost anything remained possible, only a condition of unravelled national guilt would be sufficient to satisfy the disordered dreams and pathological longings of a nation convulsed by an intractable mixture of egomania and half-buried hatred of itself.
David Hanly at his day job
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