Brilliantly titled new book is a 'love letter to Limerick'

CJ MacCarthy - a veteran scribbler, as comfortable writing in poison as in praise - has put pen to paper and written a "love letter to Limerick".

The much-anticipated and brilliantly titled The Devil Wears Farah is due to be launched in the Castletroy Park Hotel on Tuesday, June 20 at 7.30pm. Farah were the iconic Irish boys pants of the 70s. Every boy going into secondary school was put into a pair on his first day.

Liam Hayes, of Meath football fame, of Umbrella Publishing is expecting a large crowd to attend the event and celebrate the arrival of a book that is unambiguous – and unapologetic – about its “feelgood” ambitions.

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Mr MacCarthy grew up in Castletroy and attended local schools, including the famed CBS Sexton Street. After that “mixed” experience and several colourful but entirely useless years of, in his own words, “acting the flute”, he returned to education in Mary Immaculate College and began doing what he should have been doing all along: drinking tea and holding forth on whatever attracts his raptor eye. And that raptor eye has fallen on Limerick and its hinterland in the decade that time and taste forgot: the 1970s.

The Devil Wears Farah is a hilarious round-trip ticket back to that time and those attitudes, that place and people. Nestled within a typical family of the era, the young Mr MacCarthy, with his “child prodigy capacity for deceit” is a perfect witness to Ireland’s slow and blinking emergence from the stygian darkness of showbands, knitted swimming togs and “cold tays” into the bright shining world of Demis Roussos, Farah slacks and Angel’s Delight dessert.

Funny, frank and forgiving, the reader will only stop smiling to laugh out loud.