Yet another article relating to Gerry Hannan and Frank McCourt

See you in court, McCourt

Next week's film début of Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt's stirring memoir of his Limerick childhood, is eagerly awaited. But for local radio host Gerry Hannan it is a vicious slur on his city

Tuesday, 4 January 2000

Frank McCourt must have done scores of interviews to plug 'Tis, the sequel to Angela's Ashes, his global bestseller about growing up dirt poor in the priest-ridden, rain-sodden slums of Limerick. But all these encounters put together could not have been anywhere near as painful as the prime-time television appearance he made back in his native Ireland recently.

Frank McCourt must have done scores of interviews to plug 'Tis, the sequel to Angela's Ashes, his global bestseller about growing up dirt poor in the priest-ridden, rain-sodden slums of Limerick. But all these encounters put together could not have been anywhere near as painful as the prime-time television appearance he made back in his native Ireland recently.

It wasn't Pat Kenny, host of The Late Late Show, who gave him a hard time. The trouble came from a member of the Dublin studio audience. "You have been peddling lies about Limerick," the man bellowed into the microphone. "You are a liar, a self-confessed liar." McCourt could only raise his arms to the heavens and appeal to his accuser in his strange but weirdly soothing mid-Atlantic accent: "I don't know why you're so obsessed with me. Why don't you get a life and go and do something?"

His plea fell on deaf ears, for a large part of Gerry Hannan's life is now devoted to stirring up controversy around McCourt. His personal crusade to "set the record straight" will crank up a gear next week when the movie version of Angela's Ashes rolls on to cinema screens. Hannan, who combines local broadcasting with running a second-hand bookshop in Limerick, has even penned two books as direct ripostes to McCourt's memoirs. The first was called simply Ashes. The second, due for release next week, is even more opportunistically entitled 'Tis In Me Ass, an expression straight from the language of the Lanes, the now notorious backstreets on the north side of Limerick where McCourt endured his miserable childhood.

The main outlet for Hannan's literary vendetta isn't his books - which will never rival their targets in the bestseller lists - but the late-night phone-in programme he presents on Limerick 95. The radio station provides a regular platform for critics of McCourt, who seem to be both numerous and vocal in the author's native city.

No one is getting terribly worked up about 'Tis, which tells of young Frank's escape from Limerick to America and what he found there. Hannan's tribute to "the people who didn't run off to America but instead stayed at home to help build a city" doesn't pack anywhere near the same animus as Ashes, which was a far more pointed attack on Angela's Ashes.

According to his arch critic, McCourt's upbringing wasn't anywhere near as brutal as he makes out. "When you read Angela's Ashes, it's misery, misery, misery all the way," says Hannan. "That's not how it is remembered by anyone else who lived there. Of course there was a lot of poverty and suffering, but there was also a great spirit to the place. People helped each other through the hard times." For him, the situation was best summed up by an elderly listener who called in to say: "Ger, everyone loves Frank McCourt except the people who knew him. And everyone loves Angela's Ashes except the people who know the truth."

Angela's Ashes is a particularly searing account of the author's childhood in the Lanes of Limerick, depicted as a living hell where he and his brothers (those who didn't die in the cot) begged for food while neighbours looked on with cruel indifference and the local Catholic clergy humiliated the most wretched members of its flock.

The book, which won the 1997 Pulitzer prize for biography, begins with this now famous opening passage: "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived it at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

Ger, as his fans affectionately address him, seems a bit of a local hero in Limerick. When we met up in the city's Bewley's café (Dublin's famous coffee house has become a fast-growing chain), several people came up to tell him what a grand job he was doing or to alert him to some local injustice he should sort out on the airwaves. Hannan claims to have received a hero's welcome after his showdown with McCourt on The Late Late Show. "I think they wanted his head brought back to Limerick on a plate," he recalled, beaming.

He admits to having got a frostier reception at the University of Limerick, which conferred an honorary degree on McCourt two years ago. "I know it annoys the intelligentsia to see some little gobshite stand up to the great author, but I'm only concerned about the common people and they're on my side."

Being only 40 himself, Hannan cannot draw upon his own experiences to contradict McCourt's recollections of the 1940s, far less the 1930s. But several of his relatives are contemporaries of McCourt, and it was they who first raised his suspicions about the book. His late uncle Martin, who went to school with Frank McCourt, fed him a lot of the background information for Ashes, which was billed as "The real memoirs of two boys from the Limerick Lanes". Paddy Hannan, his 74-year-old father, was particularly affronted by McCourt's portrayal of his mother, Angela, whom he remembers as the angel of the Lanes. "He makes her out to be good-for-nothing. Anyone who cuts their own mammy down like that deserves nothing."

McCourt is also accused of scandalising the family of Teresa Carmody by telling the world that he had sex with her just days before she died of tuberculosis. McCourt maintains that she never existed and that the name was made up.

Such explanations have failed to silence his detractors, including those on the local newspaper The Limerick Leader. At one point it published a half-page of photographs showing McCourt as a member of St Joseph's Boy Scouts. Pointing out that this particular scout troop was regarded as the élite of Limerick, the headline asked: "Is this the picture of misery?"

McCourt, a handsome, snow-haired figure who penned his memoirs after teaching for many years in New York high schools, tried to laugh off such assaults. "Begrudgers," he told the Boston Globe. "Where would Ireland be without them?" He dismissed the complaints as "peripheral", describing Angela's Ashes as "a memoir, not an exact history". He has owned up to one falsehood. In the book, schoolmate Willie Harold is depicted walking to his first confession "whispering about his big sin, that he looked at his sister's naked body". Willie Harold never had a sister, a point he brought to McCourt's attention when, in the advanced stages of cancer, he queued at a book-signing to set the record straight. McCourt claims to have settled the matter amicably by granting his old chum a free copy. It is impossible to verify this, as Harold has since died.

He'll have to do a lot more than sign a free copy to silence Gerry Hannan, who is plainly basking in the limelight of hisvendetta. In the back office of his bookstore he has a fat file containing all the stories his claims have generated on both sides of the Atlantic. He also got to vent his spleen on The South Bank Show when it profiled Frank McCourt recently. Is he obsessive? Gerry Hannan doesn't think so. "I've got a lot of other things in my life, but I do have a tremendous sense of loyalty to my listeners, who inundated me for weeks and weeks with their heartfelt complaints about Frank McCourt."

Whatever, the feud will enter a new chapter as Alan Parker's film of Angela's Ashes hits the screens. The producers of The Late Late Show would doubtless be keen to stage a second bout. Whether McCourt will allow himself to be ambushed again is highly doubtful. Hannan, who was carefully primed by an RTE researcher for his first ever appearance on prime time television, is certainly up for a rematch. "I don't just want to eyeball him in a television studio," Hannan told The Independent. "I want Frank McCourt to take me to court, where the truth about his book will come out for the whole world to see."