It Held its Flight

'There is that campaigning edge that I can't seem to quieten down in myself, even though I've shifted from campaigning as a career to writing,' she admits.

Set in 1980s Ireland, A Swift Pure Cry tells the story of 15-year-old Shell, who struggles to keep her brother and sister clothed and fed after her mother dies and her father turns to alcohol for comfort. The Church and community turn a blind eye to the family's difficulties, and the only adult inclined to intervene, the new curate, is himself treated as an outsider. When Shell becomes pregnant, she has no one to turn to for help.

The events of the novel were inspired by two true incidents which made headlines throughout Ireland in 1984. In one of them, a 15-year-old girl died in childbirth, alone, with her community claiming ignorance of her situation. In the other case, police charged a young woman with the murder of two babies found dead 50 miles apart, claiming that they were twins despite DNA tests proving there were different fathers.'

'Instead of there just being one voice in Ireland around morality there began to be many voices, a plurality of views.'

'The stories brought the previously taboo subject of unwanted pregnancies into the spotlight and marked a turning point in the way Irish society viewed itself. 'I think it lost its innocence at that time,' says Dowd. 'Instead of there just being one voice in Ireland around morality there began to be many voices, a plurality of views.'

'In 1991 Mary Robinson became president of Ireland, and it was a huge event for women in Ireland. I think that she encouraged more debate around these issues. It's really since then that these stories have emerged of things that had been going on that had been kept hidden for many years.'

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Dowd's novel is the abandonment of the children, even by the Church. Yet she is quick to point out that she is not critical of religion, but of the way the Catholic Church is used by some of its adherents.

'I was a very devout Catholic myself until round about the age of 14. I suddenly stopped believing and had to tell my poor mother I didn't believe in transubstantiation any longer. But I think people's spirituality is their own affair and it should be respected.'

'What is sent up in the book is not the beliefs in themselves, but rather the ways in which the society around Shell is using these beliefs as a screen behind which they can hide and say that they're one up and she's down there somewhere. It's that that I'm criticising, not the Church, per se. But then readers can have their own views and find in it what they want. Some people read it and think it's a very religious book.'

Although the subject matter is undoubtedly bleak, the novel itself is not, for Dowd writes lyrically and with irreverent humour. A Londoner of Irish parentage, she visited the family cottage in County Waterford frequently throughout her childhood, and the happy times she spent there influenced her depiction of people and place. 'I adored my first cousins; they had such freedom to play. I think it's their voices, their way of describing things, that really inspired a lot of the book.'

Dowd's style is individual and assured, particularly for a first time author, but, she says, finding her own voice was a challenge. 'I wrote the whole of the first third of A Swift Pure Cry in first person and I realised I wasn't comfortable with it.'

'So I had to translate it all into the third, which was in itself a very interesting exercise. But the moment I did that I realised it was the right decision, it had to be third person. I needed that distance, and to be able to use language that Shell herself may not have used in this particular story.'

Unsurprisingly, Dowd is influenced by Irish writers. She names Bernard MacLaverty and James Joyce as favourites – the title of her novel comes from Ulysses – but it was the years she spent in America that had the greatest impact on her work.

'What really inspired me about living in New York is the writing – the economy of language in great American writing, the poetry of language. I learned to pare away all the redundancies through living in America. I have an intense admiration for American literature, so it was great to be immersed in it for seven years.'

'What really inspired me about living in New York is the writing – the economy of language in great American writing, the poetry of language.'

She had already begun to work on what would become A Swift Pure Cry in New York, and found that living among Irish-Americans gave her a different perspective on her heritage. 'Ireland is perceived differently there to the way I perceive it. In America you were getting this total romanticisation of the roots - where JFK had come from, where Reagan had come from - but in Ireland you had this total fascination and pride with where their sons had got to. There were romanticisations on both sides.'

The skewed perception of Ireland eventually caused her to lose sight of the real place, a problem that she found she could only resolve by moving back home. 'There was this feeling that I was writing out of a sense of nostalgia. And I realised at a certain point that writing out of nostalgia is just no good. When I was in New York I found that my homesickness was equal – Ireland and England. Once I wasn't homesick, the nostalgia got edited out of my writing quite easily and briskly.'

Two decades after the events that led to much soul-searching in Ireland, A Swift Pure Cry has been warmly received in the Irish press – although its author is viewed as an outsider. '[A] reviewer was saying it would have taken someone outside of Ireland to write this particular story because of how difficult the feelings were around these cases. I'm kind of like the bull in the china shop! But I hope not – I hope I've picked my way quite carefully through all the shards.'

Sadly, Siobhan Dowd passed away on Tuesday 21 August 2007. Her books both published and unpublished constitute an impressive legacy.