{"id":558019,"date":"2026-06-28T07:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T07:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/558019\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T07:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T07:22:12","slug":"ive-become-aware-of-how-irishness-is-considered-abroad-how-much-it-can-be-weaponised-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/558019\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019ve become aware of how Irishness is considered abroad, how much it can be weaponised\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018I was on a residency in Denmark<\/a>,\u201d Sheila Armstrong tells me, \u201cand one day I came down to the breakfast table and there was a Danish newspaper with a big picture of Seamus Heaney<\/a>\u2019s head.\u201d<\/p>\n

Armstrong is talking to me via Zoom from her home in Berlin<\/a>, where she has lived for the last couple of years, about her new novel<\/a> The Red Mouth. The book is built around discoveries in Irish peatland bog, including the 2,000-year-old body of a woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cI already knew I wanted to write about the bog,\u201d she continues. \u201cAnd I didn\u2019t understand what the [Heaney] article was about, but someone explained it to me.\u201d Heaney had written a series of poems, in his collections Wintering Out and North, about the bodies of bog people discovered in the Jutland peninsula in Denmark. The poems include The Tollund Man (\u201cSome day I will go to Aarhus \/ to see his peat-brown head\u201d) and The Grauballe Man (\u201cAs if he had been poured \/ in tar, he lies \/ on a pillow of turf\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in the middle of nowhere,\u201d adds Armstrong, \u201cand it was a nice excuse to get out for a bit. So I went straight to visit [the bodies]. When I visited Grauballe Man, I had this real sense of peace and serenity. But when I visited Tollund Man, it was the opposite: I just reacted really anxiously and felt unsettled and almost angry.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I was fascinated by these two different emotions that were completely my own, and I became interested in what people project on to these bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the core of The Red Mouth, where characters circle around the discoveries in an Irish peatland bog: the body of a female is discovered by an archaeologist, who secretly keeps her thumb as a memento; decades later, the antler of a great Irish elk is slowly uncovered by a man and his dog. Over time, connections emerge and expectations are unravelled, so what seemed clear at the start is overturned by the end of the story. <\/p>\n

What is the importance of the bog to Armstrong? \u201cI didn\u2019t grow up on the bog,\u201d she says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t one of those kids who was out cutting turf with their families. I grew up in a fishing village in Sligo. But my grand-uncle was a peat worker, and he was a poet as well. He worked for Bord na M\u00f3na since the 1950s, when he was a teenager.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Sarah Moss: Brexit and Heaney\u2019s bog bodiesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd he died last week,\u201d she continues. \u201cHe was 96 and he was really hanging on for publication [of my book], but he didn\u2019t quite make it.\u201d Her grand-uncle, Thomas Murtagh, wrote a poem for Armstrong when she was a child, which she has pinned to the wall behind her as we speak. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo I started listening to some of the interviews he had done down through the years and I became really interested in our changing relationship [to the bog], and how someone who was so involved in stripping back the bog has to watch our attitudes changing toward the idea of conservation, and what boglands and peatlands can offer us in terms of climate [change].\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\u2018Himmler believed that [nearly] every bog body was a gay man and he used that as justification for some of the horrors of the Holocaust\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Sheila Armstrong<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Armstrong has always written about the natural world, including in her debut novel Falling Animals and in her collection of stories How to Gut a Fish. In The Red Mouth there\u2019s a real sense of love for the poetry of the natural world, whether rhythmically intoning the names of things \u2013 \u201cliverworts and herb Robert, fox-tail feather-moss\u201d \u2013 or inspired visual images, such as one moment where a dog is described as \u201ccrossing her front paws as elegantly as a secretary\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong: admirably ambitious for a debut novelOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so glad you said that!\u201d she cries. \u201cBecause this has been an argument with my family, because my family dog does this. And I asked my entire family, what would you describe this as? And other people said ballerina or different things, and I said, no, it\u2019s a secretary!\u201d<\/p>\n

Does writing like this come fast or slow to Armstrong? \u201cI spent many years as an editor, so I did my 10,000 hours there in some way,\u201d she says, referencing the rule popularised by Malcolm Gladwell that 10,000 hours of practice in a subject is enough to gain expertise. \u201c[So] a lot of what I write ends up in the final draft. I\u2019m a slow writer, it could be a paragraph a day, but it\u2019s generally a decent paragraph.\u201d<\/p>\n

The format of The Red Mouth is to follow different characters in alternating chapters. Armstrong\u2019s previous novel also takes this particular approach \u2013 what is it that attracts her to this type of storytelling?<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a very short attention span. I find it hard to stick with one character for too long a time. But it\u2019s also because of the point of view I take. I don\u2019t ever write in the first person. I like to look down on everything and hop around through time.\u201d<\/p>\n

This piecemeal approach enables the reader to pick up connections across characters through the timeline of the book, but also shows how time can change our perceptions of things. The bog body in the novel, known as Belroe Woman, is inspired by the story of the Windeby bog body, which was recovered in Germany in the 1950s and which held more secrets than its discoverers realised.<\/p>\n

\"AdolfAdolf Hitler and his chief of police Heinrich Himmler inspecting the SS Guard. Photograph: Getty Images <\/p>\n

The Red Mouth illustrates how we apply the traditions and prejudices of our time to these figures that are thousands of years old and come from a culture entirely alien to us. For example, Armstrong says, \u201cHeinrich Himmler was actually obsessed with bog bodies.\u201d I did not know that. \u201cYeah, and he believed that [nearly] every bog body was a gay man and he used that as justification for some of the horrors of the Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Armstrong later sends me a link to one of Himmler\u2019s speeches<\/a> from 1937, where he argued that 90 per cent of bog bodies were homosexuals and that this was evidence that in previous cultures gay men were \u2013 in Himmler\u2019s words \u2013 \u201cdrowned in a swamp, clothes and all. That wasn\u2019t a punishment, but simply the extinguishment of abnormal life. It had to be got rid of, just as we pull out weeds, throw them on a heap, and burn them.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this comes up explicitly in the book, when it\u2019s observed that authoritarian governments \u201crefer to an imagined past as justification for present crimes\u201d, which, if it wasn\u2019t a timeless point, would seem particularly relevant to the current US administration, among others.<\/p>\n

Even outside governments, I observe, it\u2019s happening here and now. A couple of days before we speak, a mile down the road from me in Belfast there were riots taking place and people being burned out of their homes literally because of the colour of their skin, because the rioters want to return to an imagined past that never existed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m travelling a lot for work at the minute,\u201d says Armstrong, \u201cand I\u2019ve become aware of how Irishness is considered abroad, and how much that can be weaponised. It\u2019s implied that being white Irish is something worth preserving and needs to be protected from all these terrible foreigners.\u201d <\/p>\n

In the novel, one character\u2019s father becomes radicalised with conspiracy theories, following an injury at work that leaves him looking for someone to blame for his suffering. \u201cPeople who are vulnerable in some way are so susceptible to these rabbit holes,\u201d Armstrong says. Is she writing from things she\u2019s seen in her own family?<\/p>\n

\n

\u2018I think I had this idea that either you were a writer or you weren\u2019t, you didn\u2019t have to work at it\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Sheila Armstrong<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No, she says, but \u201cevery time I\u2019m at home, I\u2019ll look over my father\u2019s shoulder at what he\u2019s looking at on Facebook. Thankfully he seems to be [limited] to the world of woodworking forums. But he would be the target audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, she adds, \u201cI have people in my life who I\u2019ve known for many years and I will see them posting the most horrible, racist, bigoted stuff online. And then I\u2019ll meet them and they\u2019ll be, oh, hi, how are you? As if it\u2019s normal to have this vitriol coming out of your mouth in one sphere and to be acting like a normal caring member of society in another.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was she a reader as a child? \u201cI was a massive reader. I would have books taken off me as punishment. But I wasn\u2019t a writer from a young age, which I think is unusual. I came to writing in my teenage years and always found it difficult. I think I had this idea that either you were a writer or you weren\u2019t, you didn\u2019t have to work at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Learning how to write \u2013 those 10,000 hours as an editor, which Armstrong says improved her own writing \u201c100 per cent\u201d \u2013 makes her value the process and work involved more. \u201cAnd it makes me so angry when people talk about [using AI], like when [Nobel winner] Olga Tokarczuk would talk about how she would use it<\/a> to develop [ideas] \u2026 and I just don\u2019t understand it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNot everybody gets to be a writer,\u201d she continues. \u201cIt\u2019s not a birthright. It\u2019s OK for some things to be hard and difficult. When someone says they have great stories but they just need a bit of help with the language or the writing, well, that is the writing; that\u2019s the job. I think more people should quit writing,\u201d she adds, laughing.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0From the archive: Sheila Armstrong on RSL Ondaatje Prize shortlistOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The rewards for the reader from the work Armstrong has put into The Red Mouth are obvious, and it has attracted praise from a galaxy of superstar writers, including Annie Proulx. \u201cShe wrote a book about bogs called Fen, Bog and Swamp, that I used for research,\u201d Armstrong says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd she gave me this incredible quote, and we had a bit of back and forth about bogs. And [Proulx] said to me: \u2018The time of the bog is imminent\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n

Well, with Armstrong\u2019s remarkable novel, you could say it\u2019s already here. <\/p>\n

The Red Mouth will be published by Bloomsbury Circus on July 2nd<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018I was on a residency in Denmark,\u201d Sheila Armstrong tells me, \u201cand one day I came down to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558020,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[25123,9,10,382,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,64689,30114,7011,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-558019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-berlin","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-denmark","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-seamus-heaney","tag-second-world-war","tag-sligo","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116826535109148390","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}