General Fiction
The Forced Redundancy Film Club, Brian Finnegan
I must be the only person in Ireland who’s been selfishly praying for the past two years that the recession wouldn’t end, just yet. For it was around March 2009 that the idea for The Forced Redundancy Film Club came to me and I figured if things got better on the financial front before I finished the book, the concept would become redundant.
I was walking down Dublin’s George’s Street that cold March day with my partner, Miguel, when we bumped into his friend Lisa. She had just been let go from her job and in an effort to stay in contact with some of her other suddenly jobless colleagues had decided to form a book club. ‘That’s a great idea for a book,’ I said.
Later, when I started really thinking about it, I figured there were enough ‘book club’ books on the market already. What would be different would be a film club, and so, with the help of my 19 year-old son to get the title right, The Forced Redundancy Film Club was conceived.
I suggested the title and concept to Ciara Considine, now Editiorial Director at Hachette Ireland who has worked with me on a couple of ghostwriting titles over the past three years. She said, ‘Write that book’.
Writing a novel is hard work and coupled with the insecurity that comes from not knowing if you’ll ever be published, it’s a bit like wading through muck with no horizon in sight.
Paul Howard - Ross O'Carroll-Kelly
Few names are as synonymous with the Celtic Tiger as Ireland’s greatest uncapped rugby player, Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. Paul Howard has created an era defining character; nobody embodies the excesses of the Celtic Tiger quite like Ross. With the upcoming release of ‘Nama Mia’ we have been following Ross from his days as a teenage dirtbag to the dawn of his thirties, with countless tales of scandal and intemperance along the way. Kevin Massey spoke to Paul about the origins of Ross, what the future holds and a writing process that found him pretending to be Jim McDonald.
Ross owes his origins to culture shock. As a young sports-writer, Paul Howard was given the job of covering the schools rugby matches for The Sunday Tribune. Paul did not attend a rugby playing school and so was not expecting the coliseumesque spectacle that unfolded before him; ‘players held up as demi-gods with proud dads in the crowd and the mums standing around in the mud of Belfield or Skerries in all their finery and a full face of make-up’. He equated the setting to that of an English Public school or an American High school event, with crowds of up to 4,000 at some games.
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