THERE ARE TWISTS and turns in all of our lives, small little meanders that turn into something bigger.

For songwriter Declan O’Rourke, his trade has always been in music – wringing beauty and meaning out of chords and melodies, finding slices of life in collections of words. The song Galileo (Someone Like You), is his calling card, with its lyrics that look at love through the eyes of the astronomer Galileo, a dramatic leap that shows that feelings are the same for all of us, whether we live now or in the 16th century.

That song showed that O’Rourke had a rare gift for songwriting that had much in common with fiction. So it wasn’t a surprise when a book written by him landed on my desk a few months ago, called The Pawnbroker’s Reward, and set during the Famine. Declan O’Rourke writing a book? Makes sense. And yet this latest career twist was a big surprise to the man himself. 

“I never foresaw it coming,” says the Galway-based songwriter (he’s originally from Dublin, but lives in the west with his family) when The Journal talks to him over Zoom. “I was never interested in writing prose, per se. And I never thought I would find myself in this place. And then, when I got here, it was like, ‘Oh, my God, I love this so much’.”

As we talk, I can see that the room he’s in – which looks more like a large tent you might go glamping in – has scatterings of musical instruments around, art on the walls and all signs that a creative person spends time there. 

It turned out that over the years O’Rourke had been nudged towards writing prose by a few people, like the late songwriter and broadcaster Shay Healy, but he’d never seriously considered it.

“I was like, ‘really’? I didn’t see the attraction, you know,” he says. “But anyway, it felt really natural [to write the book]. I think years of writing songs, it feels like 200 mini books or whatever – you know, they all have a start, a middle and an end.”

Beneath the surface of history

The book has its roots in O’Rourke’s own family. Around 2000, his mother and her sisters were looking into their family history when they discovered that O’Rourke’s grandfather had been born in a workhouse.

“He’d kind of always had a bit of a mysterious past,” says O’Rourke of the man. “But we didn’t know what a workhouse really was. And I just told myself I wanted to find out more about that.” Since then, they have discovered that two other relations died in workhouses.

Another factor in his fascination was reading The Workhouses of Ireland by John O’Connor. Reading it was “like being hit by a train”. One particular vignette, about a man who carried his wife home from a workhouse, only for the pair of them to be found dead the next day, got stuck in O’Rourke’s heart. When they were found, the man had his wife’s feet “held to his chest, as if trying to warm them”.

“I just thought that was the most powerful thing I’ve ever read. The most powerful image, you know, it was like something of Greek tragedy proportions, and here it was right on our own doorstep,” says O’Rourke. “I thought anybody in the world could read that, and you couldn’t be not moved by it.”

This all led to O’Rourke writing the album Chronicles of the Great Irish Famine, in 2017, a song cycle that told tales of people who lived during this period of hunger and loss. In turn, that led to the opportunity to expand the stories of the people he wrote about into The Pawnbroker’s Reward. 

The book tells the stories of two men and a woman, local pawnbroker Cornelius Creed, and local farmer Pádraig ua Buachalla and his wife Cáit, real people who lived in Macroom, Co Cork. While Creed is witness to both the bureaucratic wranglings and the human toll of the Famine, the ua Buachalla family feel the direct impact of potato blight and political decisions that leave them starving.

The Famine is “beneath the surface of a lot of our histories”, says O’Rourke. “You know, anybody who’s alive today [whose family lived in Ireland then] is alive because their ancestors survived it. So it is ultimately a kind of a success story – despite how strange that sounds. But I think we all have these ghosts and figures lurking in the past, you know?”

Reading The Pawnbroker’s Reward, among the scenes of sadness and devastation I found a quiet hope, I tell him. “You know, I think I like to see the hope in things, but at the same time I didn’t try to have any agenda or push anybody in any direction,” he says. “I tried to follow what it looked like they were doing. And, you know, I think history and our views of the famine in particular may have become very black and white. I thought it was interesting to just present them as they were and let people make up their own minds.”

In telling the stories, he wanted to show the humanity of it all, to collapse time and make the reader feel that the Famine wasn’t something far off in the national imagination.

“I could see them as real people. I think that period of our history suffers from being just that little bit far back that we don’t have, you know, colour images of it. We have these lithographs and etchings, the diagrams that make it seem like a cartoonish time where we’re not connected to it,” he says. “I wanted to do that as much as possible: just to show people how little has changed… they are just people, you know, other people like us, just in a horrific time.”

[For example], the world is endlessly fascinated with World War Two. Nobody ever asks questions about ‘what’s your fascination with World War Two’? Nobody ever asks that. Yet, they do about something like the Famine. And I think, you know there are a million stories within that story. Like these people, like the family, it’s those human stories that we are drawn to.

There is power in the individual stories, he believes,  because one story is a microcosm of the greater event. “One tiny story like that is almost, ironically, bigger than the story of the Famine. You can relate to it. And it makes you feel empathy, it makes you feel… you imagine, God, what if that was my parents or my children? It really rips you apart.”

He sees finding that story in the workhouse book as a gift, which in turn “gave me the gift of something to share. But a challenge also, to bring that to people.”

The book is historical fiction, but is based heavily on archive research done by O’Rourke. People’s real names are kept, and primary sources – like the minutes of meetings – are included. It’s very much the work of someone who wants to lean on reality, but it reads like fiction. “Generally the funny thing is, over the years I think I’d much prefer [reading] nonfiction,” says O’Rourke. ”That probably very much fed into the fact that this was me trying to stick with reality as much as possible.” 

What the book shows, too, is that there is nothing more emotionally devastating than reality – there was no need for him to spend time crafting paragraphs that imagined the impact of the Famine when the stark details were written down by survivors in the 19th century. What he was able to do was craft it into a narrative that makes the past feel like the present. 

‘I was songwriting in secret’

But over to songwriting for a moment. What did it feel like when he realised people were touched, really emotionally affected by, the words that he wrote? “It was very liberating. Actually, I can pinpoint a single moment where… I’d been writing away in the shadows for years – I call it doing my apprenticeship – in secret, you know, kind of chipping away trying to write songs. I’d probably been writing for 7, 8, 9 years before I ever stepped on stage and sang a song.

“I remember going from being very nervous about standing up on stage, and basically, doing this – pulling your skin open and showing somebody what was inside you, what I’m feeling this is, this is what I felt about that person, my heart was broken, and really, really kind of nervous about that.

“This lovely thing happened, where I was at an open mic night, this guy came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You know, God, you absolutely described my life or exactly what I was feeling about something’. And I was like, huh… actually, you didn’t see me at all, you only saw yourself. And I was free. At that moment. I was like, ‘God, I can do anything I want up here’.”

The song Galileo, which was on his debut album Since Kyabram (2004), is loved by fans but also by fellow songwriters, with Paul Weller and Eddi Reader speaking of their admiration for O’Rourke’s work. Did he realise it was so special when he and co-writer Seamus Cotter wrote it?

“Certain songs you write you do get, in a certain moment you get lucky, a Eureka moment,” he says. “I remember I had that song started and you know, I had a chunk of it but I was searching for weeks about the entry point, the angle… who could be thinking this, who could be so in love with people or with the person to be thinking about rainbows and everything?”

He found his answer in the past, and with a fascination he had with Galileo Galilei, the astronomer from Pisa whose fascination with the universe led him to invent the telescope. 

“Those two things [came] together and I realised it could be him and he could be searching through his telescope for who who invented this thing, you know, this feeling [of love].”

Since that song and album he’s gone on to make eight more, with his most recent, Arrivals, coming out this year. Whereas he would have thought in early 2020 that the next few years would have involved an album release and touring, Covid-19 got in the way. And yet the pandemic also gave O’Rourke the opportunity to really immerse himself in the writing and research required for The Pawnbroker’s Reward.

“It was probably the most enjoyable thing I’ve ever done,” he says of that time. “I’ve never been so immersed in anything. Because lockdown was an absolute gift.”

But now he’s preparing to go back on the road. And it turns out that he’s learned a lot about who he is as a creative person over the past 18 months. 

For starters, he didn’t actually miss touring. “I haven’t missed it for a number of reasons. One, because we have a young family here. And [lockdown] was just a gift in that respect, you know. And then, because I was writing the book, it was a kind of a period of reevaluation in many ways for for everyone.”

“I had a kind of a realisation that, because I didn’t miss music, I hardly touched an instrument for quite a while. I wasn’t worried about it, because I was constantly occupied with this other thing.”

And this ‘other thing’, connected to his music and yet also to another world entirely, gave Declan O’Rourke a new perspective on his abilities. 

“I realised that after so many years considering myself and calling myself a songwriter, that I’m just a creative person, and I don’t think it would matter quite what I was doing, you know what I mean?

“It kind of kicked the doors open a little bit as well. I’m kinda like, God, I can do anything now, maybe. There’s a freedom with it. A feeling of new freedom and getting rid of the borders that you have on yourself.”

The Pawnbroker’s Reward, published by Gill, is out now.