Irish writing is so strong that it can feel like the country has all been covered, but in fact, there are so many gaps. The small west of Ireland cities and the working classes there have almost never appeared in Irish literature, simply because those communities were never in the way of producing books.

I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, 'See this kid? He'll kill.'

What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.

Every day we let this Brexit mess go on means less money being invested in the UK, fewer jobs being created and less tax revenue to pay for our public services.

If any of us were faced with a huge bag of free money and very little accountability, it would be human nature that you would make the most of it.

I always wanted to be a main eventer in pro wrestling. I lived my dream, but the excess of the '80s and the huge money of the '90s became a great temptation for many of us.

My experiment in money exchange was the temptation to set up a bank. The absence of any Islamic banking was also another factor in establishing Al-Rajhi Bank, which is now the world's biggest Islamic lender by market value.