Earlier this week Gerry Hannan met with Live 95FM personality Declan Copus. The reason of the meeting was to discuss the relaunch of Hannan's "Late And Live Show", the show ran for a number of years on the now defunct RLO pirate radio station.
Gerry Hannan gained local fame in the 90,s with the older population of Limerick, due to his radio show. When this blog contacted Hannan, he confirmed that he has had discussions with Radio Limerick "people" concerning bringing his show back on air.
Hannan is most famed for his on air spat with the late Author Frank McCourt, which took place on an episode of The Late Late show. In recent times Gerry Hannan hosted a temporary radio station called Pride Radio. He recently confirmed reports that he is gay.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Gerry Hannan "Radio Man"
Gerry Hannan " Radio Man"
The true story of the "real" Gerry Hannan.
Format: A4 Plastic Comb Binding.
Publisher: POD Press.
Release Date 30-11-2009
Pages: Approx 80 A4 Pages.
ISBN: Coming Soon.
The true story of the "real" Gerry Hannan.
Format: A4 Plastic Comb Binding.
Publisher: POD Press.
Release Date 30-11-2009
Pages: Approx 80 A4 Pages.
ISBN: Coming Soon.
Gerry Comes Out
CONTROVERSIAL broadcaster Gerry Hannan has for the first time publicly revealed that he is gay, as he gears up for his return to the Limerick airwaves after a two-year hiatus.
Gerry, who this week told the Leader that he is the happiest that he has ever been, will spearhead Pride FM — a temporary station for the local gay community — during Limerick's Pride Week September 13 to 20.
Speaking for the first time about his homosexuality, Mr Hannan told the Limerick Leader that he had been "living in fear" for over 25 years as a gay man in the city.
"I celebrated turning 50 this year, and it is only now that I'm publicly acknowledging that I am gay," he revealed. "
And he says that there are many more men in his situation who are simply afraid to come out.
"I know of several successful businessmen in Limerick who are afraid to come out, they are in fear of their own sexuality. I can completely understand that. I was there. But they shouldn't be afraid of who they are. There is a great gay community in Limerick and it is wonderful to see."
Gerry, who has lost five stone over the last year, was so grateful to his friends in Pride that he "jumped at the chance" to co-ordinate Pride FM. The radio station will broadcast 24 hours a day for seven days from midnight on Sunday September 13 on 105fm.
"I've been absent from the radio for two years and now I can't wait to get back in the studio and get loud and proud," said Gerry, who is single.
"And if all goes well, we have a fighting chance of applying for a community radio licence—as long as the people of Limerick support us," explained the former RLO talkshow host.
Gerry told the Leader that since he has come out he feels much freer, but added that his sexuality is just "a small part of my being".
"I am hoping that by coming out like this in such a public fashion that it will help some other gay people to do the same."
Gerry, who this week told the Leader that he is the happiest that he has ever been, will spearhead Pride FM — a temporary station for the local gay community — during Limerick's Pride Week September 13 to 20.
Speaking for the first time about his homosexuality, Mr Hannan told the Limerick Leader that he had been "living in fear" for over 25 years as a gay man in the city.
"I celebrated turning 50 this year, and it is only now that I'm publicly acknowledging that I am gay," he revealed. "
And he says that there are many more men in his situation who are simply afraid to come out.
"I know of several successful businessmen in Limerick who are afraid to come out, they are in fear of their own sexuality. I can completely understand that. I was there. But they shouldn't be afraid of who they are. There is a great gay community in Limerick and it is wonderful to see."
Gerry, who has lost five stone over the last year, was so grateful to his friends in Pride that he "jumped at the chance" to co-ordinate Pride FM. The radio station will broadcast 24 hours a day for seven days from midnight on Sunday September 13 on 105fm.
"I've been absent from the radio for two years and now I can't wait to get back in the studio and get loud and proud," said Gerry, who is single.
"And if all goes well, we have a fighting chance of applying for a community radio licence—as long as the people of Limerick support us," explained the former RLO talkshow host.
Gerry told the Leader that since he has come out he feels much freer, but added that his sexuality is just "a small part of my being".
"I am hoping that by coming out like this in such a public fashion that it will help some other gay people to do the same."
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Gerry Hannan did'nt do too well in past local and european elections, see results in this post
Photo of Gerry Hannan
PermaLink for this page: http://ElectionsIreland.org/?5606
Gerry Hannan
Gerard (Gerry) Hannan
Website: Personal
Date Election Party Status Constituency Seat Count Votes Share Quota
1999 Local Non party/Independent lozenge Not Elected Limerick No 2 (3) 65 1.58% 0.08
2004 European Non party/Independent lozenge Not Elected South (4) 6,394 1.32% 0.05
PermaLink for this page: http://ElectionsIreland.org/?5606
Gerry Hannan
Gerard (Gerry) Hannan
Website: Personal
Date Election Party Status Constituency Seat Count Votes Share Quota
1999 Local Non party/Independent lozenge Not Elected Limerick No 2 (3) 65 1.58% 0.08
2004 European Non party/Independent lozenge Not Elected South (4) 6,394 1.32% 0.05
Jan O Sullivan "backs Gerry Hannan's claim that Frank McCourt and Jim Kemmy were close friends"
O’Sullivan pays tribute to Frank McCourt
Issued : Monday 20 July, 2009
Jan O'Sullivan TD Statement by Jan O'Sullivan TD
Spokesperson on Health
I would like to extend by sympathies to Frank McCourt’s widow Ellen, to his family and to his friends on the occasion of his death yesterday.
Frank did no small service to Limerick and his portrayal of the city in Angela’s Ashes shone a light on the grinding poverty and hardship that existed during his childhood.
Despite the experiences of his upbringing, Frank always retained a deep affection for Limerick, and returned to the city on a frequent basis.
Jim Kemmy TD, my Labour Party predecessor in Limerick, was a close friend of Frank’s, and actually launched Angela’s Ashes in Limerick. I had the privilege myself of meeting Frank when he was presented with an honorary doctorate by University of Limerick in 1997.
The passing of Frank McCourt is an event of great sadness. Ni bheid a leithead aris ann.
Issued : Monday 20 July, 2009
Jan O'Sullivan TD Statement by Jan O'Sullivan TD
Spokesperson on Health
I would like to extend by sympathies to Frank McCourt’s widow Ellen, to his family and to his friends on the occasion of his death yesterday.
Frank did no small service to Limerick and his portrayal of the city in Angela’s Ashes shone a light on the grinding poverty and hardship that existed during his childhood.
Despite the experiences of his upbringing, Frank always retained a deep affection for Limerick, and returned to the city on a frequent basis.
Jim Kemmy TD, my Labour Party predecessor in Limerick, was a close friend of Frank’s, and actually launched Angela’s Ashes in Limerick. I had the privilege myself of meeting Frank when he was presented with an honorary doctorate by University of Limerick in 1997.
The passing of Frank McCourt is an event of great sadness. Ni bheid a leithead aris ann.
"Hannan supporter or another begrudger"
Sifting Through Frank's Ashes
By James Kirby
The death of Frank McCourt was greeted with mixed feelings in Limerick, the town that he recalled with little sentiment in his best-selling memoirs, writes James Kirby
Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, the blockbuster memoir of his "miserable Irish childhood" has died, and the people of Limerick bid him farewell with mixed feelings.
Limerick remains a small city — a population of perhaps 100,000 — but in McCourt's childhood it was smaller still, geographically isolated and economically fast asleep.
This was the city of my parents and grandparents. My grandmother's best friend was Mrs Coffey and her husband was the ogre McCourt describes insulting the wives of Limerick in the social welfare office while their husbands were off working in the English munitions factories during the war.
As a teenager, my father collected The Limerick Leader newspaper twice a week for the family shop. On that assignment, he had to deal with "The Abbot", an unforgettable character in McCourt's book, who stood for decades as a newspaper seller on the main street, O'Connell Street.
Reading Angela's Ashes for the first time back in 1996, when it was just "another book about the city" and not a Pulitzer Prize-winning runaway bestseller, I was bowled over by the beauty and restraint of McCourt's retelling of his extremely difficult childhood. The first time I saw someone reading the book on a suburban Melbourne train, I was compelled to ask them what they thought of it. Little did I know that Angela's Ashes would soon become as successful in Australia as it was in the USA where it sold over 10 million copies.
While my Limerick, that of the 1960s and 1970s, lacked the utter squalor and religious dominance of the 1930s, much of the old town remained. McCourt's old school, Leamy's, by then a clothing factory, was not far from mine in the Crescent, and the lanes of Limerick were still intact. By the time Alan Parker and his crew came to film the movie adaptation of the book in 1999, the lanes were gone (they had to film the lane scenes in Cork).
An abiding memory is a lane close to where McCourt spent his first years in the town. I can see it now, permanently wet and with tiny houses all around whose front doors opened directly into the living rooms. How did all those big families fit into those dainty damp cottages? Another nearby lane had a butcher's yard in the middle where the blood would regularly run out under big wooden gates and flow freely into the gutters.
Mostly, however, my bright new Limerick had turned its back on McCourt's world. We had cars, televisions and shiny new houses in estates that fringed the old town. McCourt's Dickensian tramps, crumbling tenements and sickness were fading away — and my parents' generation could not wait for them to disappear altogether.
When I returned to the city after Angela's Ashes was published, McCourt's Limerick seemed to lurk around every corner. The book was the talk of the town. I found locations from the memoir springing up everywhere. Behind my old childhood street was the "City Home" where McCourt nearly died of typhoid (or was it starvation?). Our old cinema — the Lyric — was where the McCourts could spend a few shillings and escape their desolation for a few hours.
Around the city I found the book well known but hardly well loved. Moreover, it attracted deep suspicions. Was McCourt's story even true? Were the people of Limerick ever that cruel? Nobody, it must be said, had any dispute with McCourt's recollections of the weather.
My father would say: "The problem with the McCourts is that their father was an alcoholic, in those days if the father was alcoholic, you were finished."
And my mother would add: "A friend of your father's knew those McCourts well. He says Frank McCourt always seemed to be alright, always had enough money for the scouts and all that."
McCourt himself, as graceful in person as in his own writings, never had any illusions about the town and what it thought of him for making it famous for all the wrong reasons. He loved to tell a story about going back for a book signing in O'Mahony's bookshop on O'Connell Street where there was a big crowd lining up for his autograph. A year or two later he returned again, this time as an international celebrity. On that occasion, the crowd of autograph hunters had shrunk.
"Where is everybody?" asked McCourt.
The bookshop manager replied, "The first time you were here they had heard about it, this time round they'd read it."
In recent years, as McCourt turned out lesser books and his brother Malachy turned out ever weaker volumes of reminiscence, many of the townspeople set out for revenge: After the publication of ’Tis, Frank McCourt's recollections of American adulthood, a Limerick local radio personality, Gerry Hannan, published a riposte titled Tis Me Ass. You don't have to read it to taste the sarcastic venom aimed at the man who talked down the town.
On O'Connell Street, the Coliseum café and the Jesuit church are gone but the local paper, the Limerick Leader, is going strong. And the Limerick Leader still knows its market. A few months before Frank McCourt died, it published yet another feature on the family. This time, someone had dug up a picture of Frank and Malachy as boys all dressed up in their scout uniforms — and not looking hungry at all. As anyone from Limerick could have told you.
By James Kirby
The death of Frank McCourt was greeted with mixed feelings in Limerick, the town that he recalled with little sentiment in his best-selling memoirs, writes James Kirby
Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, the blockbuster memoir of his "miserable Irish childhood" has died, and the people of Limerick bid him farewell with mixed feelings.
Limerick remains a small city — a population of perhaps 100,000 — but in McCourt's childhood it was smaller still, geographically isolated and economically fast asleep.
This was the city of my parents and grandparents. My grandmother's best friend was Mrs Coffey and her husband was the ogre McCourt describes insulting the wives of Limerick in the social welfare office while their husbands were off working in the English munitions factories during the war.
As a teenager, my father collected The Limerick Leader newspaper twice a week for the family shop. On that assignment, he had to deal with "The Abbot", an unforgettable character in McCourt's book, who stood for decades as a newspaper seller on the main street, O'Connell Street.
Reading Angela's Ashes for the first time back in 1996, when it was just "another book about the city" and not a Pulitzer Prize-winning runaway bestseller, I was bowled over by the beauty and restraint of McCourt's retelling of his extremely difficult childhood. The first time I saw someone reading the book on a suburban Melbourne train, I was compelled to ask them what they thought of it. Little did I know that Angela's Ashes would soon become as successful in Australia as it was in the USA where it sold over 10 million copies.
While my Limerick, that of the 1960s and 1970s, lacked the utter squalor and religious dominance of the 1930s, much of the old town remained. McCourt's old school, Leamy's, by then a clothing factory, was not far from mine in the Crescent, and the lanes of Limerick were still intact. By the time Alan Parker and his crew came to film the movie adaptation of the book in 1999, the lanes were gone (they had to film the lane scenes in Cork).
An abiding memory is a lane close to where McCourt spent his first years in the town. I can see it now, permanently wet and with tiny houses all around whose front doors opened directly into the living rooms. How did all those big families fit into those dainty damp cottages? Another nearby lane had a butcher's yard in the middle where the blood would regularly run out under big wooden gates and flow freely into the gutters.
Mostly, however, my bright new Limerick had turned its back on McCourt's world. We had cars, televisions and shiny new houses in estates that fringed the old town. McCourt's Dickensian tramps, crumbling tenements and sickness were fading away — and my parents' generation could not wait for them to disappear altogether.
When I returned to the city after Angela's Ashes was published, McCourt's Limerick seemed to lurk around every corner. The book was the talk of the town. I found locations from the memoir springing up everywhere. Behind my old childhood street was the "City Home" where McCourt nearly died of typhoid (or was it starvation?). Our old cinema — the Lyric — was where the McCourts could spend a few shillings and escape their desolation for a few hours.
Around the city I found the book well known but hardly well loved. Moreover, it attracted deep suspicions. Was McCourt's story even true? Were the people of Limerick ever that cruel? Nobody, it must be said, had any dispute with McCourt's recollections of the weather.
My father would say: "The problem with the McCourts is that their father was an alcoholic, in those days if the father was alcoholic, you were finished."
And my mother would add: "A friend of your father's knew those McCourts well. He says Frank McCourt always seemed to be alright, always had enough money for the scouts and all that."
McCourt himself, as graceful in person as in his own writings, never had any illusions about the town and what it thought of him for making it famous for all the wrong reasons. He loved to tell a story about going back for a book signing in O'Mahony's bookshop on O'Connell Street where there was a big crowd lining up for his autograph. A year or two later he returned again, this time as an international celebrity. On that occasion, the crowd of autograph hunters had shrunk.
"Where is everybody?" asked McCourt.
The bookshop manager replied, "The first time you were here they had heard about it, this time round they'd read it."
In recent years, as McCourt turned out lesser books and his brother Malachy turned out ever weaker volumes of reminiscence, many of the townspeople set out for revenge: After the publication of ’Tis, Frank McCourt's recollections of American adulthood, a Limerick local radio personality, Gerry Hannan, published a riposte titled Tis Me Ass. You don't have to read it to taste the sarcastic venom aimed at the man who talked down the town.
On O'Connell Street, the Coliseum café and the Jesuit church are gone but the local paper, the Limerick Leader, is going strong. And the Limerick Leader still knows its market. A few months before Frank McCourt died, it published yet another feature on the family. This time, someone had dug up a picture of Frank and Malachy as boys all dressed up in their scout uniforms — and not looking hungry at all. As anyone from Limerick could have told you.
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."
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."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)