Victoria Mary Clarke

Mannix Flynn interview

Mannix Flynn interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2002

Gerard Mannix Flynn, actor and writer, has been an outsider, a rebel, for most of his life. At the age of ten, following a history of truancy and petty crimes, he stole a bicycle and was sent to St Joseph’s Industrial College, in Letterfrack, a correctional institute for children. By the time he started work in the theatre, he had spent time in Marlborough House Detention Centre and St Patrick’s Institution, Mountjoy. Upon his release, he quickly established a reputation as an actor, working with Jim and Peter Sheridan at Dublin’s Project Theatre and as one of Ireland’s most promising writers. But he also established a reputation as an angry, self-destructive hell-raising drinker, which he now says was deserved. Having been abandoned into the care of a non-caring, abusive, neglectful guardian,- which was the State- he abandoned, neglected and abused himself.
And now, at the age of forty five, he is taking the State to court, on stage at Dublin’s Temple Bar Music Centre. The Dublin Theatre Festival is currently taking place, but “James X” the new play which Mannix is performing and producing is not part of the festival. It is something of a struggle for Mannix to work entirely outside of the system, without the benefit of financial support from the Arts Council or, as he puts it “the other agents of the State”. But this is how he prefers it. He doesn’t trust the State or any of it’s agents. He is presenting this play, -which took fifteen years to write- as a labour of love, as his contribution to all of our wellbeing, for an Ireland who has been abandoned to the abuse and neglect of the State and of the Church, which is, he says is an agent of the State. The play itself is about a man, James X, who is the same age as Mannix and who also comes from an inner city Council flat. He first enters the State System at the age of three when he is deemed by State psychiatrists to be a danger to those around him. Mannix admits that he has based the play on his own experiences, because his experiences are something that he has learned from and this learning, he would like to share.
            In return for such dedication, for such courage in being willing to re-create his own pain and suffering as art, what does he hope to achieve?
“A certain measure of truth. Presented entertainingly,” he tells me. “It’s a funny show. In the same way that the Jews have a terrific sense of humour about the holocaust, it’s a way of dealing with awful things that happened to you. I’m dramatising events and turning them into creativity, so they become a currency that I can use. But I don’t want anybody walking out of my venue feeling down. My task was to redeem James X and present him to the public when they need him most.”

It’s a difficult thing, interviewing somebody about such serious matters as child abuse and abandonment, particularly when you are not sure how much of what they are telling you is their own story and how much is fiction. I am aware of Mannix’s fragility, as he talks about James X and I am aware of how important this is to him. He is quite unrecognisable from the Mannix Flynn that I last met at a party somewhere, five or six years ago. That Mannix Flynn was full of drunken banter and was entertaining a room full of people with his performance. This one is quiet, serious, controlled and seems smaller and much older than the last one. Kinder, too and more human. “Mannix is one of the kindest and most loving people I have ever met,” an ex-girlfriend commented, when I told her that I was meeting him. ‘With the most amazing soul, underneath all the bravado.”
Alcoholics, Mannix says, either die slowly and tortuously, or they save themselves. Having been abandoned to the State himself, he says, he in turn abandoned himself to toxic substances, namely alcohol, but he has saved himself by giving up drinking and he has been a teetotaller for over three years now, living quietly in the countryside, in Kerry and getting healthy. Drinking is something that he doesn’t want to talk about, apart from saying that while he was doing it, he was often capable of turning into a different person, somebody that he didn’t recognise. And once he touched a drink, he says, he wasn’t able to stop drinking until he collapsed. The drink controlled him. And he is glad that he no longer drinks, but he is taking it one day at a time.
We talk about the play. James X is taking a civil action against the State, at the beginning of the play.
“And it’s not a case about compensation, it’s a case about justice. There is a file on James X, which he has obtained, the file is written by the state, by psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, governors etc, detailing assessments of this person from the age of three. The file is a shameless document, a damning indigtment of the State and it’s agents. As he reads the file, he begins to doubt the whole process, because he realises that throughout his life all the State and it’s agents have done is abandon him. Like you abandon an old pair of shoes. They are not willing to help him, so they send him off to the industrial school system, which in turn abandons him to the hospital system.”
What about his family? I say. Wondering about Mannix’s own family. The same ex-girlfriend has told me that both of his parents were alcoholics and that he was one of twelve children, himself, all of whom were continually in and out of the Children’s court for petty theft and truancy and the like.
“His family are no match for the State, ”he says, simply.
But what did they do wrong? How did he end up in this situation? Coming from a middle class background myself, I am perhaps deluded in thinking that you would have to do something terrible to have your child end up in a State institution.
“The authorities decide to put him in this situation. He’s taken from his parents for minor incidents like non attendance at school and theft. He comes from a working class family, but I don’t want to emphasise that he comes from a particular class.”
Could that happen to a middle class child?
‘In this case I don’t want to enter into class politics because I believe a child is a child. What they have is different support systems. I believe that if a child from Foxrock and a child from a halting site went into the Letterfrack system, they would get the same abuse. Because in order to get there, they would have been condemned, they would have had the necessary reports to say these children are of no consequence to anybody.”
            The file states that James, at three, is a troublemaker, a truant. A danger to Society. Is this possible, for a three year old to actually be dangerous?
“In this instance, the State deems so. I think it’s ridiculous to say that a three year old could be a danger to society. We are always going to be pulling each other’s hair and stamping on each others toes, that’s nature. But that child could have gone on to be fine at four. Depending on how he was treated. What was happening to James X by the time he was eight was perpetrated on him by adults and it was savage.”
So if you treat a child well, he will go on to be well balanced? Again I am wondering what Mannix Flynn would be like, if he had been raised in a small, affluent, Dublin four family, with no alcohol in sight. But Mannix insists that there was
“fuck all wrong” with James X’s family, and with his home life. I sense that I am treading on dangerous ground.
They weren’t violent, or alcoholics?
‘They were just a normal working class poverty stricken family. An ordinary hard working troubled family. But the State decided on moral grounds to remove the child from that environment and place him into the hands of people who knew fuck all about children. People who because of their vocation had turned their backs on family life.”
Because they were priests?
“Because they were fucking assholes. And the State abandoned him into that situation. As a three year old child, James X was not subject to abuse in his family home, he was subject to poverty. His crimes-stealing a bar of chocolate and non attendance at school meant that he was recommended for psychiatric care, but because the hospital didn’t have such a facility for children, he was sent to Letterfrack for two years. Where there are no psychiatric facilities. And he reads this file and he begins to realise that the very people he is seeking justice from are going to turn him over, just like they did at the Lindsay tribunal. So he has to go back and rescue his own life and he goes back on a journey into his childhood and re-enacts it and reclaims his childhood years. In order that he can liberate himself from it, in order that he doesn’t abandon himself.”
How does he do that?
“It’s a process. There comes a point in your life when you have to let go of things. Let go of the injustices that happened to you. If James X walks into the courthouse and expects the system to deliver him justice, he is abandoning himself into a structure that according to his file has never given him any reason to trust them. Here he is, about to trust his greatest abuser. Why would he do that? So he has to go back and resolve the issues, before he can decide whether he is going to risk himself, as an adult who has empowered himself. He has to decide whether he is going to place his life in the hands of the Irish judicial system. If he doesn’t resolve the issue, he’s going to repeat the issue, we are all repeating ourselves. Like the alcoholic who lifts up the glass, he is repeating himself. We can’t blame anyone else.”
But how do you resolve this stuff?
“You’ve got to come and see the play, that’s how!”
I ask him if he still feels anger, at the State or if he feels that it is possible to work within the system as it stands.
“The State is always going to protect itself first and foremost as opposed to any one of us individuals. The biggest employer in this country is the state. The Church is an agent of the state, so the state protects the church. Like two gangsters, one gangster pleads guilty for the other fellow and takes the rap, that’s what the state has done, pleaded guilty for the church, in the case of the sex abuse scandals, it has indemnified the Church.
But if you have a revolution and overthrow the State it will be replaced by another State, whether it’s the Communist party, Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, whatever.”
So he doesn’t think that if one was to get elected one could make a difference?
“No, you wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. We as human beings always think that we have a great effect on people places and things. But we can hardly tie our shoelaces. Most of our lives are unmanageable. There you are running across a busy road and risking your life. Here you are smoking a cigarette. You wake up and hit the floor running, mostly just trying to get through the day. That’s the general situation, organised chaos.”
What part does God play in all of this? Or is there a God?
‘I would say that God looks on with amusement, waiting for the phone to ring. Most people use God as a 999 apparatus. They don’t make a big connection on a daily basis. I would make a connection on a daily basis, I would have a conscious contact, which makes living in the present a nice experience. Most people are living in the past, or in the future. It makes being Gerard Mannix Flynn a nice experience, because I like myself and I like what I’m doing.”
What he’s doing, he says, inspires him with a passion that he has never known before. And he is convinced that he can make a difference to the rest of us, who have each in our own way all been affected by the abuses and neglect that he is speaking about.
“If people come and see the play, I guarantee them that they will have resolved issues, by the time they hit the street. That’s a promise. This is not just a theatrical experience, this is a genuine experience, which is going to affect an audience. The issues that James X has to face are historical, political, social, economic, sexual, they are all the big issues that we have to face as a society. James X is merely one unit of a bigger whole. And he has to resolve these issues in a way that is spiritually progressive. He is enabling and empowering himself for the first time in his life, it’s wrapped up in enlightenment and in wellbeing. The audience are coming on this journey emotionally, mentally and spiritually.”
Is he also redeeming you, by doing that? I ask.
“Yes,”he says, without hesitation.