Writer with the quiet voice has a lot to say

‘EVERY writer has something in their childhood that nourishes them while seeming to be very damaging at the time,’ Wexford’s Colm Tóibín observed. The man from Enniscorthy overcame the silence induced by a childhood stammer, brought on by the death of his father when he was only 12, to become one of Ireland’s greatest living writers.

He turned his childhood silence into literature. His sexuality forced him into self-exile, yet from abroad he wrote about the quiet streets of his native Enniscorthy, the trauma of bereavement, the loneliness of exile, and the hidden lives of outsiders. His writing is among the most restrained and emotionally powerful fiction of modern times.

Is Tóibín an Irish writer? Undoubtedly. Is he also an international writer? Of course. Yet despite his long stays in Barcelona, America and elsewhere in Europe, these places never displaced Wexford as the emotional hearth of his writing. Wherever Tóibín chooses to live, it is with an Irish voice that he writes.

Rebellious Wexford

Colm Tóibín was born on May 30, 1955, in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, the fourth of five children. His father, Michael, was a schoolteacher, while his mother, Bríd, managed the household. The family lived on Parnell Avenue in a town where history was not safely confined to schoolbooks. Tóibín’s grandfather had fought in the Easter Rising and was imprisoned in Frongoch Internment Camp in Wales. The camp became the ‘University of the Revolution,’ where Michael Collins and approximately 1800 other Republicans seized the opportunity to network, organise, and teach guerrilla warfare tactics. To Tóibín and his family, the struggle for independence was part of their living legacy rather than a romantic memory from national legend. It is unsurprising that the complexity of Irish identity features throughout Tóibín’s literature and is central to his first novel, The South (1990).

Yet it was not only Dublin’s GPO that formed the political landscape of the Tóibín family. Enniscorthy itself carried the ghosts of its own rebellion. During the 1798 Rebellion, the Battle of Vinegar Hill took place overlooking the town. The initially successful—yet ultimately defeated—Wexford Rebels were led by Fr John Murphy. The priest, one of the earliest liberation theologians, carried Rosary beads in one hand and a rifle in the other as he commanded the Wexford Rebels against the British. Fr Murphy’s courage and execution are commemorated in the ballad Boolavogue.

It was within this Nationalist culture that Colm Tóibín was reared and shaped his identity. In his childhood world, the Irish past was visible in the landscape, present in family memory, and woven into an Irishness that was local before it was ideological. It came from voices, houses, streets, silences, and the knowledge of who had lived where and what they had done.

Fact becomes fiction

Tóibín’s childhood was shaped by loss. When Tóibín was eight, his father became seriously ill with a brain aneurysm. While his parents sought treatment in Dublin, Colm and his younger brother were sent to stay with an aunt in County Kildare. The separation created an anxiety that the young boy could not easily express. He was unable to read fluently until the age of nine and developed a severe stammer, which he later connected with the trauma surrounding his father's illness. At times, he could not even say his own name.

The Wexford writer incorporates these childhood experiences into Nora Webster, where one of the sons, Donal, develops a severe stammer as a reaction to his father’s death and his separation from his mother during her illness. Reading about the boy’s trauma becomes even more heart-rending when one realises that it was drawn from Tóibín’s own childhood experience.

Tóibín's stammer forced him to become an observer. When speech was unreliable, he listened. When words would not come easily from his mouth, he learned to weigh their rhythms and implications. Silence, embarrassment, and the gap between what people feel and what they can say would eventually become central to his fiction. The child who struggled to speak became a novelist renowned for understanding everything that remains unspoken. In Nora Webster, he deftly sums up small-town life in the reaction of Nora’s aunt: “Nora could sense what she felt all the more because she did nothing to show it.” Tóibín, more than most, understands that in small-town Ireland silence has its own powerful way of communicating meaning.

In 1967, when Tóibín was 12, his father died. The bereavement left the family emotionally and financially exposed. It also provided the deepest wound from which much of his later work would grow. Tóibín once observed: “A child who loses a parent never recovers.” His novels rarely treat grief as an event that ends neatly; instead, it enters the household, rearranges relationships, and alters the atmosphere of everyday life. By writing about loss, the Wexford writer was walking in the footsteps of a long Irish literary tradition, which James Joyce understood when he observed that in Erin: “The dead still live.”

Nora Webster

Published in 2014, Nora Webster is perhaps Tóibín’s most personal novel. Set in Enniscorthy during the late 1960s, it follows a widow struggling to raise four children after the death of her husband, Maurice. The political world of civil rights marches and the conflict in the North appears at the edges, but the novel’s true drama takes place inside the home. Nora must endure neighbours who arrive with advice, financial uncertainty, the expectations placed upon widows and the private difficulties of her children. Her younger son Donal develops a stammer, directly echoing Tóibín’s own childhood. Nora’s gradual rediscovery of music gives her a private space in which grief loosens its hold and a new identity begins to emerge. In one episode Nora, must endure town gossip because she had the audacity to get a new fashionable hairstyle a mere six months after she is widowed. Tóibín deftly captures late 1960s Ireland, when London was swinging, yet in small town Erin closeness and claustrophobia were different sides of the same shilling.

The novel draws upon Tóibín’s memories of his mother and of the household created by his father’s death. However, it is not simply disguised autobiography. Tóibín transforms family history into a broader portrait of Irish womanhood, domestic endurance and emotional survival. Nora is not a saintly Irish mother. She can be impatient, distant and determined to protect her privacy, which makes her strength all the more convincing. The author explained the creative value of such painful material when he said: “Every writer has something in their childhood that nourishes them while seeming to be very damaging at the time." In Nora Webster, childhood damage becomes artistic nourishment, but the original pain is never trivialised.

Education and escape

Tóibín attended St Peter’s College in Wexford, where reading opened a world beyond the restrictions of speech and small-town expectation. During his secondary education, he began writing poetry and became aware that he was gay. This was an Ireland in which homosexual acts between men remained criminalised, Catholic teaching influenced public morality and homosexuality wasn’t frequently discussed, except in tones of shame or secrecy. In de Valera’s Ireland, being gay did not only amount to moral and religious sanctions but also brought the full weight of the law down on homosexuals. The Tullow Case (1970) resulted in eight men being prosecuted for consensual same-sex relationships with one man receiving a six-month prison sentence under the 19th century gross indecency laws that were used against Oscar Wilde. The teenage Tóibín, the boy with the stammer, would also be forced to keep silent about his sexuality.

Barcelona

He later studied English and History at University College Dublin, graduating in 1975. Almost immediately, he left Ireland for Barcelona. Like James Joyce before him, he discovered that departure could clarify rather than weaken his connection to home. Spain was emerging from Franco's dictatorship, and the young Irishman encountered a society moving uncertainly towards political and sexual freedom. Even under Franco’s jackboot, the Catalan capital remained a defiant bastion of cultural liberalism and the city offered him space to live more openly as a gay man and to reconsider the country he had left behind. By reflecting on Ireland from a distance, Tóibín was following in the footsteps of Joyce and Beckett who wrote of Ireland from abroad.

Tóibín taught English in Spain before returning to Ireland in 1978. He began working as a journalist for publications including In Dublin, Hibernia and the Sunday Tribune. In 1982, he became editor of Magill, an influential current-affairs magazine, remaining there until 1985. Like his literary hero Ernest Hemmingway, journalism taught him discipline, political alertness and the importance of precise observation. It also allowed him to examine an Ireland whose official version of itself was beginning to fracture under the influence of EU membership and Church scandals.

After leaving Magill, he travelled through Africa and South America and reported on the trial of Argentina’s former military rulers. He also walked along the Irish border during the conflict, later publishing his observations as Walking Along the Border. Even at his most international, his writing returned to the question of Ireland—its borders, inherited divisions, Catholic assumptions and unstable understanding of nationhood. Yet he is also mindful not to stray into unknown literary territory about the conflict saying: “I’ve never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it’s not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North.”

The South

In Tóibín’s first novel, The South (1990), its heroine, Katherine Proctor, is an Irish Protestant who leaves an unhappy marriage, her young son and her home near Enniscorthy for Barcelona in 1950. There she attempts to become a painter and begins a relationship with Miguel, an artist marked by the Spanish Civil War. Both the main characters have been traumatised as consequences of civil war in their countries yet seek healing in their love for each other. Describing: “Her love for him, she thought, was another small pattern of grief and happiness. Her love for him was like breath on glass.”

The novel deals with art, love and political violence, but its deepest subject is exile. Katherine believes that freedom may be found elsewhere, yet departure does not erase memory or responsibility. Spain gives her another life, but Ireland retains its emotional claim upon her. When she eventually returns, she must confront the people and choices she abandoned. When she discovers that the son she left behind has married a Catholic: “She was surprised at how upset she was about him going to Mass: she did not know she had prejudices left like that.” Tóibín’s fiction, like his life, gives voice to peripheral people even if they make uncomfortable statements.

In many respects, The South established the pattern of Tóibín’s career—a quiet protagonist, a journey away from Ireland and the gradual discovery that home cannot be escaped merely by crossing borders. The Ireland of his imagination is not a sentimental homeland. It can be claustrophobic, judgemental and wounded, but it possesses an emotional force that distance only intensifies. In many respects Tóibín’s writing is part of a wider Irish exile literary tradition which includes Shaw, Joyce and Beckett.

Brooklyn

Tóibín’s best-known novel, Brooklyn, (2009). Tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman from Enniscorthy who can find little suitable employment in post-war Ireland. Ellis’s mother brilliantly describes the petty mindedness of small-town life, when she observes that: “Some of the shopkeepers in this town... have a few yards of counter and they have to sit there all day waiting for customers. I don’t know why they think so highly of themselves.” To escape rural claustrophobia and with the assistance of an Irish priest, she emigrates to New York and begins a new life in Brooklyn.

At first, Eilis is overwhelmed by homesickness. Gradually, however, work, education and her relationship with Tony, an Italian-American plumber, allow her to build an independent identity. A family death calls her back to Enniscorthy, where the familiar town begins to offer a possible alternative future. Eilis is torn between two countries, two versions of herself and promises made on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The genius of Brooklyn is that neither Ireland nor America is presented as a simple answer. Ireland provides belonging but also scrutiny and restricted opportunity. America offers freedom, but demands separation and reinvention. In Eilis, Tóibín captured the divided consciousness of generations of emigrants. As he said of the homesickness that helped shape the novel: “You don’t know it when you’re going through it, but homesickness can make you ill.”

Brooklyn won the Costa Novel Award and was adapted into the acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan. Yet its international success rested upon its intensely Irish understanding of emigration. Tóibín recognised that leaving Ireland does not end one’s relationship with the country. Instead, Ireland becomes an internal voice, capable of calling the emigrant home even after another emotional house has been built.

United Ireland

Tóibín’s Irishness is not that of maudlin blarney. He loves Erin sufficiently to challenge her. He has written about the Church's failures, the legacy of Nationalism, economic crisis, emigration, the border and the emotional cost of narrow social expectations. His attachment is rooted in sober scrutiny rather than drunken tricolour waving.

His views on a united Ireland have attracted argument. In 2021, he warned that the proposal was sometimes treated as an easy solution without sufficient thought for Unionist identity, taxation and constitutional arrangements. His critique of ‘Mystical Blather,’ he counselled against using abstract, Nationalist sentiment without detailed healthcare, schooling, and tax integration was potentially dangerous, destabilising and risked fuelling loyalist unrest. Whilst his views were seen as being controversial it did re-spark national public debate over whether emotional national sentiment can be a substitute for political detail. Tóibín commented that Irish ‘history is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources.’

Quiet voice

Despite his travels Tóibín’s imagination repeatedly returns to County Wexford—to the widow behind a closed door, the emigrant boarding a ship, the child listening whilst adults mutter as they attempt to survive what cannot be changed. His stammer taught him the cost of well-chosen words in speech. His father’s death taught him that grief does not follow a timetable. Being gay in Catholic Ireland taught him to recognise what was unsaid. Exile taught him that whilst he left Erin, she never left him. These experiences became the foundations of an art built not upon grand declarations but upon silence, hesitation and the small decisions through which ordinary yet important lives are changed. The young vulnerable boy who once struggled to say his own name found a voice of extraordinary authority—quiet, exact and unmistakably Irish. In Tóibín’s own words: “Every night, in his head, he returns home to Ireland.”

Dr David McKinstry is a teacher and poet whose poems are widely published and broadcast across Ireland and in the UK. If any readers wish to share their literary output with him, they can contact him at: davmick38h@yahoo.co.uk

PIC: JACE MERLYN