Grattan Fletcher and Suck Ryle are on the road, risking their dignity and occasionally their lives to renew the civic spirit of Ireland. Grattan is an idealistic, ageing civil servant who has enlisted Ryle, a skeptic prone to violent temper, in a quixotic quest to make a better Irish future for Grattan’s granddaughter...
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Grattan Fletcher and Suck Ryle are on the road, risking their dignity and occasionally their lives to renew the civic spirit of Ireland. Grattan is an idealistic, ageing civil servant who has enlisted Ryle, a skeptic prone to violent temper, in a quixotic quest to make a better Irish future for Grattan’s granddaughter. Along the way, they encounter politicians, protesters, and power brokers, some of whom are fascinated and others only flummoxed by Grattan’s wide sympathies and wild philosophical musings. In sprawling comic fashion, Grattan and Me addresses countless contemporary political, economic and ecological problems, allowing no person or institution to remain safe from ridicule.
Tom O’Neill has written since he was given a pencil back in Carlow in the early 60s. His creative efforts have rarely impacted anyone as much as they do himself. Writing educational materials is what has kept the pot boiling. Then he met a man from Dalkey Archive Press who told him to write what he knows about. He doesn’t know a lot about anything. But he cares quite a bit about family, fiction, development education, pisrógs, bio-sciences, farming, heritage architecture, new technologies, old wisdoms and being of Ireland. So now he has migrated to Kilkenny (via Galway, Cork, Munich, Kimberley, Durban, Dublin, and Cape Town) and writes mostly about what he cares about.