IRISH MY ERSE!

In February 1987 the Irish Democrat published my  very long  review of Bob Geldof's book "IS THAT IT?".

As I'm a one finger keyboard operator I'm only including the first two paragraphs.

KICKS, HALFPENCE AND BAND-AID

Bob Geldof's story takes us from an unhappy childhood in Dun Laoghaire and a miserable adolescence in Blackrock College on an itinerary that includes a squalid squat and a drug-induced suicide attempt in London, a jail in Helsinki, a bugridden flophouse in Canada, an unappetising brothel in Bangkok, the famine-parched lands of Africa, and the insides of Buckingham Palace, the White House, the Elysee Palace and Arus an Uachtarain. The biggest surprise is, not that he hasn't lost the common touch,but that he is such a powerful and accomplished storyteller.True, he had the help of a prizewinning journalist, but he leaves on each line the imprint of his own character, a character as often exasperating as exasperated.

Geldof was aways an omniverous reader, and he consciously echoes Joyce in the description of his Catholic education. There are pieces too which reacall Patrick MacGill's Children of the Dead End, but I'm most reminded of Myles na Gopaleen's Beal Bocht, satirically set in "Corca Dorcha" - a region of perpetual darkness. For example, he recalls the fog horns, whose mournful calls are familiar to those of us raised on the Dublin coast. You'd never think, to read Geldof, that the sun also shines there, making Dublin and Killiney Bays the match for anything on the Riviera. His father used to take him sailing, an opportunity millions would envy, but Bob was scared of water and didn't enjoy it.

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