Carlo Gébler: ‘I want Irish unification and Northern Ireland in Europe. We do not belong in a UK that is not in Europe’

The book consists of one entry from each year of the “record” I write every day. Diaries, I’m told, are heavy on the calendrical and the factual, while journals lean towards introspection and self-scrutiny. My daily scribbles are both. Perhaps I should call what I write “diurnals”, ie dailies.
The first entry The Fall of Communism, the End of History (Not) (Friday 10 November 10th, 1989) and the last, The Strike (Thursday 24 January 2024). The 1989 entry is about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the last is about Northern Ireland’s recent general strike. In 1989 we thought we were headed for sunlit uplands but the experience of 2024 suggests that we have turned around and have returned to where we were.
I owe Gerry Dawe so much. He was both an astute reader and critic, and a generous enabler. That I now work in the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, is all down to him.
Indeed. That’s what I said in 1991. Then the South changed and became much more diverse. Meanwhile, the Troubles having ended more or less with the Good Friday Agreement, which was predicated on EU membership, Northern Ireland has been dragged out of the EU, courtesy of the 2016 referendum. Now, in 2024, my thinking has altered in line with the new circumstances; I want Irish unification and Northern Ireland in Europe. I believe that’s where we belong. We do not belong in a UK that is not in Europe.
Yes, I believe that, and even if we don’t manage it, we should never stop trying.
The world (and these islands) are in trouble. Rectification won’t be possible until first the truth is told.
Irish-European.
If the Stasi had asked me to spy, I’d have capitulated I’m sure. Knowing this of myself, I’m naturally disinclined to rebuke Wolf.
The burden isn’t connected to recognition in print. The burden arises from how, as a writer’s child, you are obliged to endure the projections and fantasies of readers who are devoted to your parent.
[ Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien: Coming to the endOpens in new window ]
I cannot summon her voice by will but sometimes, as I wait for sleep, her voice returns unsummoned.
Yes, I did, because it is.
The UK’s foremost documentary film cameraman. (Google him. He’s made amazing films.)
Indisputably. And asthma has done the same for numerous others.
Yes.
A memoir about my maternal grandparents with a side-bar on the aforementioned great-uncle.
Yes, to Algiers to visit Albert Camus’s birthplace.
Show up at the desk every morning bright and early and just do it.
Catherine Corless.
I would change the UK election system from FPTP [first past the post] to PR [proportional representation].
Kneecap.
Labour’s 2024 election victory.
Transylvania.
The Mont Blanc pen the family gave me.
My 1st edition of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day with Joan Hassall cover.
Elizabeth Bowen, Vera Brittain, Edward Bunker, MR James, Samuel Johnson, Gita Sereny, Jean Rhys.
Summer evenings (best); rain (worst).
“Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” Konstantin Stanislavski
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Madame Bovary.
The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith
New Grub Street, George Gissing.
A Cold Eye: Notes from a Shared Island 1989-2024 is published by New Island