Book review: Creedon’s childhood set him up well to become Ireland’s most charming man

If there was a TV reality show, a Strictly Be Charming, to annually ennoble a Mr Avuncular Ireland it is hard to imagine that John Creedon would not be the serial, almost unassailable champion. 

One of our warmest and best-loved public figures he has worked in public service broadcasting for the bones of four decades almost exclusively celebrating our better angels. 

He does not do angst; a Liveline moan fest would be totally alien to him. 

His stock in trade, one he has mastered almost like no other, is nudging his audience toward the right side of the border wall dividing optimism and the grim realities of our Trumpian world.

If Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes — incredibly, almost 30 years old — was the very apex of Irish misery memoirs then This Boy’s Heart is the perfect foil. 

Set some decades after McCourt’s Dickensian evisceration it is very much more a celebration than an accusation. 

It remembers the joy of innocence; it recognises the empowerment inculcated by the kind parental trust that allowed a 12-year-old to ramble city streets alone and frequent Cork city’s bars and listen to whatever wisdom was offered in those utterly changed refuges. 

It honours the calm, the support and emotional sheet anchors that shaped a positive character and a generally upbeat world view. 

It underlines the power and security offered by a real, engaged community. 

It is so filled with joy, happiness, and almost relentless wonder that a reader will inevitably wonder if Creedon wore rose-tinted glasses as he wrote. 

It is also a very powerful argument in the unending debate about which is more influential — nature or nurture.

However, Creedon is far too good a communicator and writer to fall into that saccharine-lined trap. 

At every moment when you begin to suspect that This Boy’s Heart is yet another weren’t-we-great romance indulging that toxic drug — nostalgia — Creedon winnows the penny apples from the sharper reality. 

Despite his commitment to celebrating the joy that ran through his Cork city centre home that he shared with a small regiment of siblings — 11 — the dark presences of poverty and routine school violence occasionally cloud his very engaging narrative. 

It is not that he is unaware of classroom thugs, the lost souls soaked in Cork’s bars, or the crushing loneliness eating at many of those struggling to find a footing in a quickly changing society but rather he chooses, like all natural optimists, to try to reach beyond a warts-and-all judgement.

He succeeds most dramatically in this when he describes his visits to Johnny Creedon’s — no relation — farm in Cork city’s hinterlands. 

An entirely empathetic figure Farmer Creedon indulges a child’s fantasy built around competing in a donkey derby in a way that that seems almost casual but allows, in a quietly profound way, innocence fuel an ambitious journey towards something wonderful and yet unexperienced. 

Farmer Creedon indulged Jockey Creedon with more heft than Coolmore might invest in one of their many champions and the prize was as wonderful and as transformative as any brought home to Aidan O’Brien’s Tipperary citadel.

Creedon’s descriptions of the anarchic and hilarious heckling in Cork’s 1960s cinemas are so well told, so vividly described that they are belly-laugh wonderful. 

Even if it seems just possible that these stories came from a time slightly later in Creedon’s childhood covered in this instalment of his memoirs they alone are worth the price of this soul-lifting, heart-warming book. Far better than any Prozac. 

The book ends as the author is exiled to Kerry to continue his education but it leaves a glow, a richness and a convincing reassurance that humanity is essentially good and well intentioned. 

It can only whet the appetite for the next instalment of Mr Avuncular’s steel-in-the-velvet memoirs.