If the divided loyalties and complex identities of his forebears gave Sebastian Barry the key subject and the essential structure for his career as a writer, witnessing while a student at Trinity College Dublin part of the loyalist triple car bombing of Dublin in May 1974, which killed 27 people, was the catalyst.
The description of the aftermath of the attack on South Leinster Street in his novel Old God’s Time, from 2024, is so vivid that it feels like lived experience. The shrapnel scars are still visible on Trinity’s perimeter wall and the images are still vivid more than 50 years on in the writer’s mind.
One of the Ulster Volunteer Force bombs that detonated on the other side of the Liffey minutes earlier is also at the heart of his play The Pride of Parnell Street, from 2011.
“I was a very ignorant, sheltered, middle-class Irish student,” Barry says. “My first instinct was to leave the country and be done with it completely, because I couldn’t understand why anyone on the island would want to incinerate shoppers going home.
“It was also an enormous, high-speed education in what people were suffering in the North of Ireland, that mysterious country that we could never really get our heads around.
“If you’re a sensitive or even vulnerable person coming out of Lincoln Gate [at Trinity] and there is this enormous noise … My first innocent thought was that a butcher’s shop had been blown up, because there were literally steaming cuts of meat; then I saw people kneeling to these and whispering – a moment of humanity and inhumanity.”
As soon as Barry graduated he left for Paris, Greece and Switzerland, but then he set up home for seven years on North Great George’s Street, just off Parnell Street, with Alison Deegan, who is now his wife; it gave him a deep identification with the people of the inner city and an understanding of the history that had befallen them.
“It created an ineradicable sense of home. Living there made it important to me that I was born between the canals. That’s where the little fire was lit for feeling I could possibly, truthfully, be from here. That inexplicable murderousness in Dublin that day cancelled my passport but was the beginning of a truer sort of documentation, all written with blood and in the heart.”
We are talking in the old Church of Ireland rectory in Co Wicklow that he and Deegan have restored and where they raised their family. It’s an obvious metaphor for his writing, which has sought to make Ireland a warmer house for those who do not conform to the Catholic, nationalist tradition that created a narrow notion of Irishness.
He recalls reading Netherland, Joseph O’Neill’s great 9/11 novel, whose enormous explosion triggered memories of the Dublin bombing, “everything blackened and ruined. The book is like a forensic reconstruction after a plane crash, and he somehow makes it again that you could fly it. That’s what I feel I was doing for decades: trying to find all the bits and put them back together.”
Barry has also built a towering reputation, twice winning both the Costa book-of-the-year award and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. His novel The Secret Scripture has been called an alternative history of Ireland – a description that could sum up his life’s work – and he has been praised as an unrivalled chronicler of lost lives.
“So much Irish history is about othering people – ‘we belong; you don’t’ – that to create a sense of communion for someone who has no gift for it, it’s compensatory in a way.”
Adam Begley in the Atlantic wrote that Barry should “be widely read and revered … He ought to be a laureate for fiction everywhere”, a reference to his former role as laureate for Irish fiction. He also recognised Barry’s early tendency to poetic excess, prose that “occasionally goes all purple” and “an unabashed delight in metaphor” but traces his evolution from the poet and dramatist he began as.
Robert Gottlieb, reviewing all of Barry’s novels to date in a stellar New York Review of Books essay in 2018, wrote that “Barry’s novels give us lives, not plots – that is their power … His family’s past is his material, not his subject.”
Barry sent Gottlieb Old God’s Time and he replied, referencing Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which he had edited.
“I’m that passportless, tentative individual that I’ve always been, yet he is bringing to my efforts this graceful majesty. When he died recently I felt as if I had lost a brother, father, angel,” Barry says.
He had a similar friendship with Harold Pinter, who wrote him a letter praising The Secret Scripture and A Long, Long Way. “I thought it was from my father, as they used the same black ink. I opened it with concern, as he only ever wanted to put a razor slash inside me.”
Barry didn’t in fact read Gottlieb’s article, but Colm Tóibín had briefed him of its content and import. “Colm’s two months older than me, so he’s my big brother.”
But telling tales has come at a high price for Barry. Like Tóibín, Barry was a friend and long-term patient of the psychiatrist Ivor Browne. Whereas Tóibín’s father had died young, Barry’s father, Francis, an architect, poet and womaniser, was very much alive, but they were hopelessly estranged, as he was from his mother, the actor Joan O’Hara, and maternal grandfather, Jack.
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His childhood, and that of his siblings, was troubled. His parents were “selfish, not very nurturing, narcissistic”, he says. Their home in Monkstown, in south Co Dublin, sold for €1.75 million in 2017, but material privilege was accompanied by emotional poverty.
When I suggest that Barry’s family is the structure around which he has built his work, he corrects me that Deegan and his children and dogs are his family. His books and plays deal with his previous family.
Is his happy home a riposte to how he was raised?
“It’s a miracle,” he says. “You might be surprised to hear this, but I was awful good-looking once. I think Ali noticed I was in need of the sort of rescue she could supply. She had the skills from her own childhood. She is a very good doctoring presence to me.
“I’m probably one of those GPs who should be struck off; nevertheless, I try to reciprocate. I think in a more primitive psychiatric atmosphere I would have been sectioned, descended into a depression so deep I wouldn’t have got out.
“At a certain point you have to dispense with the oral history and write The Odyssey. That’s really all I’ve been doing for 50 years.”
Barry once expressed surprise that John McGahern had written a memoir, effectively decoding his fiction. Might he follow suit?
“I was trying manfully” – “not my strong point,” he adds wryly – “to think about, with these books, the Dunnes and the McNultys. What unites them is the marriage of my parents, which I did manfully try to touch on in Old God’s Time.”
But when he attempted in 2024 to write a memoir, “the whole idea of traipsing through the whole thing again, which one has done endlessly in therapy, there was absolutely no engine for it.
“Maybe I’m just not at the right door. Essentially every book is truthfully a found object; it’s already there. The joy of it is having the patience and absence and discipline and freedom and time to recover it from whatever silence it sits in.”
When Barry hit on the opening line for Days Without End – “The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake” – “somehow I could tilt that sentence and see the rest of the book, like a range of sentences stretching out for 300 pages”.
I can’t help noticing a pile of books with a Native American theme on the table beside us. Having already written a sequel, A Thousand Moons, somewhat to his surprise, he has written a third novel with that setting. The Newer World is the story of Tennyson Bouguereau, the freed man in the first two books, who leaves his farm to join first a black choir and then the army.
The Newer World’s birth was not so much difficult as delayed. In 2020, having developed Tennyson’s character in A Thousand Moons, “I thought I would go straight on as Tennyson was beckoning, but instead I wrote Old God’s Time. That happened before: I was working on The Secret Scripture and then wrote A Long, Long Way instead.”
Barry’s novels are like a family tree or solar system, with related characters and a gravitational pull between their orbits.
“This book speaks back to the first book, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, since Eneas and Tennyson have both been cancelled as people in their home places.
“Tennyson, Willie, Lilly, Roseanne: what my characters all have in common is courage.
“Lilly Dunne in On Canaan’s Side is the sister of Willie in A Long, Long Way. It’s all intertwined, intensely familial. Minnie [in The Newer World] marries a man called Kinderman. The man that Lilly Dunne marries is Joe Kinderman, so he must be their son.
“The moment I put that name down was a moment of intense happiness to me, because it is our connectedness that matters to me. As long as you can prioritise the wonderful things we have in common, then we are doing our jobs better as humans, recognising that we are all the same family. That’s a fact we’d like to drill into some of the more blinkered politicians.”
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This partly perhaps answers the vexed question of cultural appropriation surrounding a white Irish writer telling the story of a freed black slave in 19th-century Tennessee.
“I think that’s definitely what gave me pause in 2020,” he says. “I’ve been working full time as a writer for 49 years. Other generations must decide for themselves, but we have conducted ourselves in a certain way.
“I would call a book like this cultural reverence, a desire to reach out to a member of the human family who turned up in Days Without End and plays a large role in A Thousand Moons. I think of it as people meeting across the so-called barriers of time, which of course Einstein tells us don’t exist.
“If I was to characterise Tennyson and me, I’d say I was the only eejit he could find to write his book. I’m very proud and strengthened by having been in his company.”
Tennyson, the now unfashionable poet whom Barry fell for at Trinity College, also inspired the title, “a newer world” being a line from his poem Ulysses. Littlefair, the slaveowner who raped Tennyson’s mother, also admired the poet.
“I was looking for an aspect of him that wasn’t disgusting. Even our tyrants have other qualities.” Barry recalls Ian Paisley once charming a Late Late Show audience.
“All my books are about someone trying to make a world when it is so difficult to be alive. Tennyson engenders in me an immense respect. He also has this great singing gift. That also rings an enormous chiming bell with me. My rescuing aspect as a child was the fact that I could sing as a boy soprano. You can only give your characters what you’ve read or lived yourself. That’s what kinship is, actually.”
Barry’s aunt Mary O’Hara was the finest singer of her age. Now 91, she is in a nursing home in Galway, and he mentions the burden of taking on the enduring power of attorney, taking over someone else’s decision-making, which makes me think of an author’s responsibility to their characters. “Beautifully put,” he says.
A puzzling aspect of The Newer World is Tennyson leaving his lover, Minnie, to soldier with his friend George. Barry wanted to shine a light on the importance of male friendships but also hint at how the world’s darkness discourages people from bringing new life into it, a choice a Belfast friend made during the Troubles.
Is the past Barry’s natural element? His early books, no longer in print, had used his immediate experience, like Henry Miller did, in a way he found troublesome.
“There is an incomprehension towards your own present moment. That isn’t helpful to a writer. I don’t understand it enough.”
He also cites the hostile reaction to Hinterland, his Charles Haughey play – “such an emotional catastrophe”. “I was running scared, but I found a new home in the past, where I could write in a primal way, not safer but more peaceful.”
Einstein’s theory of relativity, the idea that past, present and future are contained in the same universal moment, “leads me to believe that if you sit still enough and absent yourself enough then somehow you can make a connection; you can be in cahoots with Tennyson”.
Tennyson travels to England with a choir of black singers, an art born of torment, which blossomed after emancipation, their field songs piercing the hearts of listeners in a way light opera did not. “It is important to notice these things. That way lies salvation.”
Barry calls his books “stepping stones across this isthmus of chaos. I have tried to make my response, the books and plays, equal to the gravity of the anguish of my younger life. I rise up to meet it.”
The book ends with John Cole and Thomas McNulty leaving for the Alaska gold rush. Barry might well follow them but possibly after a different book.
Many books fed his imagination, but the most inspirational for Barry, “a soldier manqué” from a military family, was Army Life in a Black Regiment by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an officer who was also a friend and correspondent of Emily Dickinson, whose unique take on language is equally present in her letters, to Barry’s delight.
“People sometimes praise me or accuse me for a sort of lyricism, but it’s the way my mind works. That’s my own birdsong, my whistle tune.”
Barry has a gift for gripping plots and sentences that shine. But editing – revising what a different part of his brain has created – is a big part of his process.
For him, editing is weeding, or finding and removing the dead wood. As with theatre, every second has to function. “I am the happiest man in the world to cut anything that doesn’t work.”
My mother was an interesting, extravagant person, probably bipolar. It was difficult to be a child of such a person
Like Tóibín, Barry could not read or write until he was seven or eight, and is still a slow reader, so research is laborious. It must be buried deeply, “so that anything that rises up in your manuscript, it’s as if it’s from your own experience”.
Barry reviewed Brian Moore’s 1985 novel, Black Robe, positively in The Irish Times. Did his fellow author’s Native American novel somehow plant a seed for his own novels in that field?
“That stayed with me. I can sit here with you seeing that book as if it were in some ways my own. What really affected me is the way the native characters were translated, all cursing roundly. In a different generation all emphasis would have been on the Jesuit priest, but he had gone further.”
Barry was inspired to write about gay friendship in Days Without End after his son, Toby, came out. With Toby’s blessing, he also wrote a letter to The Irish Times to back a Yes vote in the marriage-equality referendum of 2015.
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As a bohemian Irish boy who felt he didn’t belong, Barry had identified with Jewishness. He aspired to be the next Bob Dylan and grew his hair to his waist, which may have got him the part of Tonto in a Trinity play, “with no lines, interestingly enough. I had a huge desire to give lines to Tonto.”
He was staying in another old rectory, in Kerry in 1974, when visiting a neolithic fort inspired the line “They huddle in the walls where the creepways end”. That one good line told him he could be Sebastian, not Bob. “In that moment I had identified as a writer.”
The Barrys had moved to London for work, and Sebastian had returned with a London accent, which he had to shed swiftly lest his Dalkey schoolmates murder him.
“This is why I felt a strong identification with Ali, who is a Dublin Presbyterian. I presented as odd to other children. I never felt that anything I was could be included in a sense of Irishness.
“A lot of people felt they didn’t have enough of the adjectives describing Irishness to qualify. Certainly, Dublin Protestants were told they didn’t really belong. I have spent 50 years trying to include some adjectives into the mix. I now feel profoundly Irish, but I fought for it.”
It is not enough for Ireland to accommodate outliers or newcomers, he says. We must appreciate and welcome them.
Barry wrote a laureate lecture called The Fog of Family about his parents, but it was too honest, so he rewrote it to be more palatable, if less true.
“A lot of people loved my mother professionally. I got a lot of letters when she died. It felt churlish to say, ‘Yes, but …’ She was an interesting, extravagant person, probably bipolar. It was difficult to be a child of such a person.
“If she were here, she could manage this conversation, she was so fearless. My father much less so. For the last 40 years of his life I was the enemy, because I had spoken certain truths, and that was unforgivable.
“He followed his appetites to an extreme degree. Womanising was the least of it. It was destroying my mother. She needed to live with certain myths intact. Any truth-telling was as unwelcome for her as it was for him. They were difficult people. And we are sundered people.”
Even in death there was pain. Barry did not attend his father’s funeral and was away for his mother’s. Scattering her ashes on Knocknarea, in Co Sligo, he fell and cracked two ribs. He loves his siblings, but his sister Siuban lives in France, and he hasn’t seen Guy since 2007, and doesn’t know where he is.
“His memories are too painful to be near fellow survivors. In the classic Abbey play we would reach a scene where people apologise to each other, but no.”
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In a creative sense, Barry very much followed in his parents’ footsteps; in terms of character, he rejected them.
His mother and grandfather brought him up on a well of family stories, but “wells get spoiled”. He shared a bedroom in Monkstown with his grandfather Jack, who inspired The Temporary Gentleman, his 2014 novel. Wasn’t that odd?
“No, it was a great benefit, because it was freezing. He told me stories about his war years. He needed to think of himself as pretty magnificent.”
He was a recovering alcoholic, and his wife had died of alcoholism. She inspired Barry’s play Our Lady of Sligo.
“He was as near as I could get to a person I was close to. He introduced me to his parents. I never saw it as material; I was just a little boy, grateful for companionship. He wasn’t loving or demonstrative, but he spent time with me.
“We did have a falling-out over me writing stories. He hated that, because I described his parents’ house as poverty-stricken – not a truth he wanted propagated. I never had the wisdom to make peace with him. I was too young and stubborn and stupid.
“Conflict and mutual hurt are a given in human affairs. Our job is to find common ground. There was no reconciliation possible with my parents, as they weren’t looking for reconciliation. For them I was utterly in the wrong.”
Barry has been a lifelong full-time writer, a rare breed, “not so much an occupation as a preoccupation”. In his early years he “was probably depressed, certainly hypochondriacal, neurotic, but I did notice if you got up in the morning and had a story by the evening it was an extreme form of compensatory happiness, the feeling of making something”.
Donal McCann’s performance in The Steward of Christendom, Barry’s theatrical masterpiece, made it the finest production I have ever seen. Its success first in London, then in Dublin and off Broadway, enabled the Barrys to buy their first home.
A fine self-portrait by McCann hangs on Barry’s wall, with a map of Australia on his forehead, like a cross-section of his brain, drawn while touring the play there. They had a unique bond.
The play’s phenomenal success was “a bit defining”. It led some to mistake Barry for the new Friel or even think of him primarily as a playwright.
“As Thomas Kinsella said, there is no mantle and it does not fall.”
He was writing The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, his first mature novel, at the same time.
“I didn’t give up on the theatre, but something happened, which was that Donal died. One of the reasons I came to the earth was to meet Donal. It was a perfect conjunction: an actor in two years of sobriety; a play he thought somehow I had thieved out of his brain.
“He made a total identification with it; I made a total identification with him. He was the great actor of my childhood. He could be absolutely terrifying – but never to me. He showed me the greatest level of mercy. He treated me like a god.
“He was so pleased when it made a lot of money; we were able to buy the house in Greystones. Before, when we were rehearsing, he was giving me a pound or two for McDonald’s. He was so proud, because he knew he had caused it.
“Ali made him smoked mackerel. I can still see him sitting there – he was not given to happiness – looking like the most contented man in Ireland … When Donal died part of me died, and I had to resurrect myself as a novelist.”
McCann’s death, in 1999, together with a crisis in Guy’s life, triggered a breakdown. Barry had suffered one after the Dublin bombing, and again in Paris in 1981.
“The cure was running. I’m so glad people talk about these things now, because in 1999, when I was utterly unable to function and so anxious, my agent told me not to say it to anyone, because you might be considered disabled. But all the excitement of the novels was yet to come. It wasn’t disabling in any way. So that’s my message to people when they are suffering.
“Ivor Browne, who was my friend but also substitute father, after my breakdown after [The Steward of Christendom], said, ‘Your trouble is, having climbed the mountain, you have to go back to supply camp and start again.’”
There is a carpenter’s pencil on his writing desk, a sturdy tool whose lead looks unbreakable. Two poodles come bounding in, not the fluffy toy variety but muscular standard poodles, as big as Labradors. Originally they were hunting dogs, duck hounds. Similarly, you sense body armour beneath Barry’s velvet jacket.
His work is adorned with saving graces, life’s small joys and mercies. His friend Viv Roche made a seaweed sculpture of a line from The Secret Scripture: “The world is indeed beautiful.” Barry spontaneously finishes the sentence: “And if we were another creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.”
He doesn’t see his family saga as a national project. “You’d have to be some mighty healer to heal history, wouldn’t you?”
Tom Kettle, the “old policeman with a buckled heart” in Old God’s Time, reminded me of Thomas Dunne. “I didn’t think of that until very recently,” he says. “It is almost a carbon copy.”
Kettle is named after the poet whose line gave The Secret Scripture its title. The real-life Kettle, an Irish patriot who died a British soldier in the first World War, with his conflicted allegiances and tragic fate, could be a Barry character.
A Long, Long Way was almost titled The Secret Scripture, but Barry felt it a bit grandiose for Willie Dunne, so he saved it. “Then it just seemed quite natural for a novel about a lady putting stuff under floorboards.”
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“The quote for Whereabouts is, ‘He who is not written into the book of life shall be cast into the lake of fire.’ I have had that anxiety. Roseanne says, if you don’t have anecdotes associated with your name then you are destined to be just a cipher in a family Bible.
“It’s a reluctance on my part to allow Aunt Annie to pass away with nothing. I’ve thought about them every day. There is something in them of almost infinite value, the person no one will give credit to. I’m interested in writing them into the book of life. That is not high-art ambition, more an anxiety that they not be lost.
“Once you get to the point of waiting for Roseanne or Annie or Winona, then you’ve got to get yourself out of the picture. It’s not a conversation; they are going to talk. I have to be their amanuensis.
“My grandfather would put a hubcap in the garden for the birds, to draw them. You have to sit as still as you can or they will fly out of the garden.”
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“The unprompted things that arise naturally in the mind are not the same as things prompted by questions. It’s the private mind, not the prompted mind.
“To reach into the private mind of someone who never technically existed is so outrageous it’s worth doing. You’re going back to the 1850s to find a private mind. What could be more elusive?
“I fished for salmon in the Moy for 50 years. Don’t for a minute think I am not immensely proud that I was granted time to know how to stand under dripping leaves.”
Barry told me before that he had visited Joseph Conrad’s grave and that Axel Heyst, from Conrad’s novel Victory, was his favourite character.
“I thought it was in me to write with a recognisable signature like Conrad, whereas the tradition at the time was a different sort of absence, language unadorned, impersonal, neutral.
“I was never interested in that. I loved archaic language. The reason I can exult in the broken language of Days Without End is I can see it as archaic language worth retrieving.
“It is an undertaking towards music. If writing hadn’t been invented I’d have to put it out on the air, memorise it. I don’t feel like a writer. I feel like a rememberer of things that never happened.”
Barry is not afraid to visit dark places in his work and with his work. On Blueberry Hill is set in Mountjoy Prison, and he staged it there. “Talk about going home. I had a great curiosity about the people in Mountjoy. Why have we put these people in there as a society? Is that the best answer when people are living on the clippings of tin?
“Next day they said to their teacher, ‘It’s obvious Sebastian was in here.’ That is such an accolade to your instincts, to the very unlikely outcome of your ignorance.”
Again as laureate, he visited the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum.
“I can never forget the feeling of discomfort and foreboding walking up that avenue. If you wanted to find a room of ostensibly lost people who were living with the radiance of an Aquinas, that was the place. It was the grateful realisation that these cancelled people were of greater value as citizens than myself.
“In the tectonic pressure of their lives, seemingly discounted people are the greatest poets who ever lived.”
“It would be hard to overestimate the incoherence of my life. When I wake up I have to talk to myself for half an hour to put myself in a place that doesn’t feel uncomfortable, panicky. If I am anything, I am that: the dispeller of the enemy, the black dog. Although, of course, I own and love three black poodles.”
The Newer World is published by Faber on Thursday, September 10th
This is an updated version of an interview from A Hosting: Interviews with Irish Writers 1991-2026 (Lilliput Press)