Tony Guerin tells Adrienne Murphy his brushes with ill-health has given him zeal for life
The most striking thing about Tony Guerin - apart from the broad Kerry accent despite living for decades in Dublin - is how extraordinarily contented this garda-turned-playwright seems with his lot.
Born in 1938 in Listowel, Guerin's plan was to emigrate to America in 1957, until the X-ray insisted upon by US authorities at the time revealed that he had TB.
"I had to go to the sanatorium in Glanmire," recalls Guerin, "where I was horizontal for 12 months. After that America was out, so I joined the guards in the early 1960s.
"The one thing that kept me going when I was in hospital was I said that I would come back and play Gaelic football for Kerry. And I did come back, and I did play for Kerry - I played with the seniors and I'd a junior All-Ireland medal, and a Cork County Championship medal, which I treasure.
"There was a pile of people buried from TB at the time. It was was way more infectious than Aids is today because it's carried on the air, so when you came out of hospital you were ostracised," he says.
Fortunately, Guerin, was a friend of Kerry writer, John B. Keane.
"When I came out of the sanatorium, John B gave me the keys of his house. Himself and his wife Mary welcomed me, and I sat at the table with them and had meals with them. They were absolutely wonderful to me. From that time onwards, myself and John B were great pals, and very loyal to each other."
From the 1960s onwards, Guerin worked his way up through the ranks of the Garda in Dublin, living with his wife Eileen and their four children in a house off the South Circular Road. He was eventually promoted to detective sergeant in crime, based at Harcourt Terrace Garda station.
"I found the job most interesting," says Guerin. "It was all serious crime - murder and rape and burglaries. And you'd be at the paper big time, doing briefs for the courts and compiling books of evidence."
Furnished with wonderful story material directly through his job, Guerin started writing fiction, and had two novels under his belt when another close shave with mortality - manifesting itself in excruciating headaches and other alarming symptoms - threatened to nip his young writing career in the bud in the early 1990s.
"I was going to every specialist in the land and no one could identify what was wrong," he says. "Then I went down to a match in Tralee with a pal. There we met a guy my friend knew who was about seven foot in height. He pointed the finger at me and said 'I've good news and bad news for you. The good news is 'tisn't terminal, but the bad news is you've a growth in your brain.'
"This man actually had giantism - which is caused by a tumour above the pituitary gland, and he recognised it in me."
At last diagnosed, Guerin had the tumour removed in 1993, just one year before retiring from the Garda aged 55. He was told that he wouldn't be able to write for at least 12 months after surgery, yet in that time he finished his third novel, overcoming post-operative visual impairment through the use of huge print, brown paper to avoid glare, and 6B pencils that were "soft as lipstick".
"It was around that time John B was dying of prostate cancer," recalls Guerin. "He asked me to come down, and I drove him 33 days in a row into University Hospital in Cork for his treatment. He told me then I'd a great turn of phrase, have a cut at the plays instead of the novels."
Since the switch, Guerin has seen three of his plays - all based on hard fact - produced to great acclaim, with a fourth due in 2007. His first, Cuckoo Blue - which he has since turned into a screenplay and sold to actor, Patrick Bergin - concerned corruption in the guards.
"That was first put on back in 1998, pre all the Donegal revelations," says Guerin. "It's a strong play, and not many theatre companies were willing to handle it - they were afraid the guards would get at them."
Were you afraid of that yourself?
"Not at all," snorts Guerin. "I couldn't care less. You're bound to get a few phone calls, but never a name - you know, the usual. My pals in the guards loved the play. Some of the hierarchy wouldn't have liked it, but they're not supposed to have liked it."
Guerin's other plays, Hummin' and Solo Run, are also hard-hitting true stories centred around the plight of two women known to Guerin, one an unmarried mother who worked in Dublin as a prostitute, and the other a woman who died in childbirth in Kerry in the 1940s, when she was refused admission to hospital because she was unmarried. The Laird of Doom, Guerin's play due out next year, is also topical, taking as its theme the violent brutality that was inflicted on Irish schoolchildren, from which Guerin himself suffered.
Meanwhile, in terms of health, Guerin had some melanoma removed last year.
"Just for good measure," he laughs, "for fear I'd be getting away with it. I'll tell you what all the health stuff has given me, ever since the TB: I don't see myself as in any way important. I'm going back to zero. I'm just an ephemeral something that's here today and gone tomorrow.
"All that illness thing that I've had, now I'd never look over my shoulder. I never regret anything, just keep ploughing away, keep looking forward. It's optimism, really. Get things done as best you can, look after everyone and hurt no one, that's my discipline."