Colin Walsh's new story for RTÉ Radio 1's Spoken Stories is voiced by Naoise Dunbar - listen to Night on Earth above.
It is Leaving Cert night in a small Irish town. School is done. Eoin is all buoyed up thinking how the whole world lies ahead of him. Then he is set to thinking about a long-ago summer when off-guard he recognises Saoirse, a friend from that time whose life is on a different path to his own.
The 12 writers of this Spoken Stories collection took as their starting point the theme Creatures of the Earth, the title of a short story and of a short story collection by Irish writer John McGahern.
On the theme of Creatures of the Earth, Colin Walsh says ‘I'd been thinking about our creaturely innocence, and the point where, as we mature, that can evolve into naivete or willful ignorance. I'd been thinking about this alongside McGahern (and the post-independence disillusionment of his father), in terms of how Ireland has often turned from the ideals that underpinned the war of independence by turning a blind eye to the creaturely suffering of its most fragile citizens. Both these strands wove around one another in the writing of my story Night on Earth.
Spoken Stories 2: Creatures of the Earth, Sundays at 7.30pm on RTÉ Radio 1, and also available as a podcast - listen to more from Spoken Stories here.
