Author Garrett Carr was a guest at this year’s Cúirt literature festival, reading from The Boy from the Sea, a book about family, community and fishing in the years after Ireland joined the EEC. He tells JUDY MURPHY about his first novel for adults, which has been getting rave reviews, including in his home place.

“It’s a character assassination of Galway,” says Garrett Carr with a laugh, referring to a line in his novel, The Boy from the Sea.

The book is set in the fishing port of Killybegs, which is the only place to live and work as far as Donegal-born fisherman, Ambrose, a central character, is concerned.

Based on his experience of working on trawlers elsewhere in Ireland, Ambrose is dismissive of fishermen from all other places, including Conamara.

The Galwaymen had particular failings: ‘They were crippled by superstition. A big, strong fisherman might arrive at the pier before set-off and he’d be fretting like a child because he had met a red-haired woman on the road, or he had accidentally packed an odd number of socks, or a blackbird had chirped at him, or some other nonsense.’

Garrett, who was in Galway for  Cúirt,  jokingly defends himself, saying he provided similar character assassinations for several other Irish counties.

Opening in 1973, The Boy from the Sea follows the adventures of a fictitious Killybegs community over two decades. That’s the year that a baby is found abandoned on a beach there, in a barrel lined with tinfoil.

The town is captivated – initially at least – and nobody more so than Ambrose Bonner, who is originally from Arranmore and has settled in Killybegs, where he’s married to local woman, Christine Lyons. They have a two-year-old son, Declan, but Ambrose is determined they should also adopt this boy, whom they name Brendan.

The book centres on a fictitious version of Garrett’s home town and the industry that dominated it.

That era in fishing has long fascinated him and hasn’t been well represented in fiction.

“I felt it was unique; a culture and people who weren’t served in literature,” he says. “And the book had to be about Killybegs, not just about Donegal.”

In those decades, Killybegs was unique among Ireland’s fishing ports in “being a particularly intense, rapidly expanding place. During the 1980s and 1990s, there was an extraordinary growth in the town”, in a way that wasn’t the norm elsewhere.

Garrett’s father had been a fisherman, although ill health forced him to quit at a young age. That meant the author had never gone to sea with the hardy type of men who are central to this book.

“My father had a boat with a crew of about four, similar to the Christine Dawn,” says Garrett, referring to Ambrose’s boat in the novel.

“I never fished on it, as my father had lost the boat by the time I was big enough to go out,” he adds. Garrett’s father died when the teenager was 16.  That was also the year Garrett sat his Leaving Cert, going on  to study art in Dublin.

“My mother moved away around the same time I did my Leaving,” says the author, who now lives in Belfast, where he teaches creative writing at The Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University.

Garrett and his own family still visit Killybegs regularly, but they’ve no immediate family there now –  his cousins live in nearby Kilcar.

Pictured: Garrett Carr. Galway isn’t the only county that  comes in for a ‘character assassination’ in his novel.