Tuesday 23 November 2010

Dublin’s Toddlers Already Signing Book Deals

Meet Dublin's new literary elite
Publishers are forming orderly queues along the banks of the Liffey today to sign up the Irish capital’s toddlers for lucrative book deals, in which Dublin’s under-threes will write bestselling feel-bad paperbacks about growing up in unimaginable poverty.

“Sure and we all thought them English were all set to corner the market,” smiled Mrs. O’Leary, who has already sold her washing machine and replaced it with a washboard and fearsome iron mangle, with which her children Niamh, 3, and Conal, 2, will be expected to injure themselves repeatedly. “But thank the Lord for granting us a crippling economic collapse.”

“Conal want Niamh to die of something really really bad,” shouted her cherubic son excitedly. “The Penguin man told me I can get a great big guilt trip out of that. What’s a sub text? He said I have to have one. I want lots and lots of them!”

“If I don’t die of measles or whooping cough ‘cos mummy can’t pay the doctor man,” explained bright-eyed Niamh, as her father flung her pink TV and her Disney DVDs into a skip, “My nice agent says I’ve got to have a baby when I’m 12, so mummy and daddy can call me the whore of Babylon and throw me into the gutter, which is in front of our house where the car doesn’t live any more.”

The advances received from major publishing houses are expected to cover the costs for Ireland’s few remaining schools to beat basic literacy skills into the nation’s aspiring authors, whereupon their schooling will be brought to an abrupt end and they will be handed over into Father Donnelly’s wandering hands for the obligatory heart-rending chapter on being touched up during preparations for their first communion.

“To be sure, I thought I’d be the last Irishmen ever to weave a jaw-droppingly grim page-turner about childhood deprivation,” grinned Mr. O’Leary – whose recently-issued memoirs, Me Mam’s Coughing Blood Again, are providing for the all-important years of brutal, Guinness-fuelled alcoholism necessary to complete his offspring’s nightmarish suffering – as he ripped out the bathroom fixtures to make room for a manky, wheezing horse. “Thank you, sweet baby Jesus, for raising up such a glorious bunch of bumbling wastrels to govern us.”

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