INTERNATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL

There aren’t many book festival events where you’re still wiping tears of laughter from your eyes as you stumble out into Charlotte Square at the same time as feeling that you’ve just had a masterclass in modern Irish history, as well as a whole heap of added insights into the middle-aged Irish male psyche. But yesterday’s event with Roddy Doyle had all of that and more.

Masked Irish podcaster Blindboy cancelled as interviewer, but Chris Brookmyre was a more than adequate replacement, not least because of the way he highlighted Doyle’s influence on Scottish writing, as well as reflecting social changes in Ireland itself. In Doyle’s latest book, Charlie Savage, Brookmyre pointed out, the big difference between Ireland and Britain seemed to be that middle-aged Ireland was looking forwards, not back. Why was that, when if anything Ireland had changed even faster in the last 20 years than we had?

Doyle’s answers touched on appreciative Irish attitudes to Europe, the ending of the colonial chip on the shoulder in the 1990s when Irish GDP overhauled Britain’s, the bravery of the victims of abuse in tackling the Church (“when those stones were lifted, it was the people under the stones who were doing the lifting”), and at the way in which middle-aged Irish people, moved by the passion of the younger generation in the referenda on same-sex marriage and abortion, collectively thought “No, it’s their turn now” and voted alongside them.

Charlie Savage, the fictionalised