Bringing A Greystones Childhood To Book

Taḋg Paul with his new book…

ver the years, Greystones has inspired many a book, and that includes tomes that would fit snugly in Halfway Up The Stairs.

From Marita Conlon-McKenna’s bestselling Safe Harbour to the likes of Pip Carr’s Sea Rabbits Of Greystones, the town certainly makes a fine backdrop for childhood adventures.

Which is why local scribe Tadg Paul has put together Remy Had A Little Lamb, combining his poetry chops with his illustration skills in a book inspired not only by his native home but by a real-life Remy and the author’s border collie, Toby.

Just how the book came together, hey, we decided to let the lad himself explain…

I grew up in Greystones, spent seventeen years in London, and moved back just before Covid. The route from there to here – writing and illustrating a children’s picture book – was not a straight line.

Poetry was my first language. I started at ten and wrote prolifically until my Leaving Cert, when I had to choose: English and some notion of writing for a living, or computer science and a career in tech. Being a gay teenager in 1990s Ireland, I fled to London at the tender age of seventeen. I came back for the computer science degree and told myself I’d keep writing on the side. For a while I did – GCN, the student paper, even a piece for The Irish Times. Then the tech career took hold and the poetry went quiet for the best part of two decades.

It came back in a hospital bed. A serious injury left me paralysed below the neck, and the three years of rehab that followed involved learning to walk again, and to use my hands. My left hand, which had been my dominant, refused to emerge from being a claw for a long time and I had to adapt to becoming right handed, a fact I still weirdly resent. Something about the conformity of it probably. It was a time of difficult physical rehab for three years, and during that time the stuff I was writing was deeply emotional and intense. Cathartic, something that I had to get out of my system. Out of that came my contribution to Cargo Of The Soul, the SeaScribes anthology we published last summer.

I owe my visual art to the same period. Before the injury I couldn’t draw more than a stick figure, and it was Susan Farrelly and the art project at Spinal Injuries Ireland that showed me I could learn do it regardless of disability. You adapt and learn in new ways.

As luck would have it, Cargo turned out to be a threshold. A County Wicklow Arts award let me work with a creative coach, and I came to a point where, after the intensity of Cargo, it was time to pivot to something more fun. Around the same time I’d started mentoring at Fighting Words, where children write with a fearlessness most adults have trained out of themselves. Being in the room with that energy with young people is actually very inspiring. I began to write a series of poems for children, and at some point started pairing it with my illustrations, then the penny dropped about what the next project should be. And from that came Remy Had A Little Lamb.

Remy is a real boy, more or less. The poem was written for him, but he is a little bit older now and is probably mortified that I am publishing this now. Sorry, Remy!

Was it a challenge or a joy to write? Both, honestly. Mostly joy. Writing can be cerebral, you need to be sharp. Whereas illustrating, sketching, is more of a meditative experience. You can sit there and crosshatch and shade, and perfect the colours and hues for hours, and it’s not work. It’s a letting go of sorts.

I live with Toby, my border collie, who supervised throughout. He’s a good friend of Remy, and by the end of the book, he’s best friends with our little black sheep too.

You can grab your copy of Remy Had a Little Lamb right here, and find out more about Tadg Paul here, plus follow on Instagram here, Facebook here, Github here and Bluesky here.