by John Waters
The truth of this phenomenon, which has never been named, is that Brooks appealed to the pop kids of the 1960s, for whom ‘Country ’n’ Irish’ had had an attraction that they were loath to own up to. Now they were finding themselves experiencing a new appetite for sentimentality as they accompanied their own children to the airport. Brooks told a tale that few were willing to admit to: that just under the surface of the Irish psyche lay a melancholia that sought a particular form of expression. But, because of the 1970s backlash against country music, no Irish artist was at that time capable of meeting the needs of a generation caught between a fragile optimism and the renewed plausibility of despair.
People thought Big Tom was thick, perhaps because he looked thick. But he was a lot smarter than most of those who thought him unintentionally funny. There’s a story about Mick Jagger, who used to visit Castleblaney in the 1970s, asking Tom for his autograph after seeing him signing for a gaggle of young women who Jagger had first supposed would be more interested in himself. Jagger proffered a beermat and Big Tom, studying him carefully, enquired, ‘Who’ll I make it out to?’
‘Mick Jagger, man!’
Tom regarded him carefully. ‘Aye,’ said he, ‘an’ you look like him too.’
23 Ray MacSharry
Perhaps the most tragic circumstance of the modern era for Irish society was that Ray MacSharry declined to make himself available to become Taoiseach. Having, by general agreement, almost single-handedly rescued the Irish economy from perdition in the late 1980s, he disappeared off to Brussels, where he spent a term as Ireland’s EU Commissioner. Whenever speculation started up about the possibility of his returning to lead his party and his country, Ray slapped it down.
Back in 1987, following an election in which Fianna Fáil had issued mixed messages about its intentions, MacSharry became Minister for Finance in Charles Haughey’s minority government. Haughey himself clearly didn’t really know what to do about an economy with which several recent administrations, including two of his own, had achieved nothing but to make things worse. Haughey, in an attempt to differentiate Fianna Fáil from the outgoing lot with their talk of ‘fiscal rectitude’, had spoken vaguely during the campaign about ‘developmental policies’, giving the impression that there was a kinder, gentler way of snatching the country from the icy grip of death. But MacSharry was having none of it.
With his slightly stern air and what Olivia O’Leary called his ‘Transylvanian good looks’, MacSharry conveyed the right blend of reassurance and reserve. He didn’t mince his words and, though we whimpered a little in our hair shirts, Mac made us feel safe. Rolling up his sleeves as we looked on in apprehension, he gripped the economy by the scruff of the neck and, in a few short if painful years, shook it into a better shape than it had even been in before.
MacSharry came from a working stock family in Sligo town. In 1988, a year into the term as Minister for Finance in which his zero-tolerance of budgetary excess would pave the way for the Celtic Tiger, he gave an interview to Magill magazine in which he spoke eloquently of the values he’d grown up with. In one quote that reads like a Bruce Springsteen song, he recalled the MacSharry family’s first new car: ‘One of the most distinctive memories I have is the first new car bought by my father. I was ten or eleven at the time. It was a Ford Prefect, EI 5043, and we were trading in a Baby Ford, IZ 3534, at Gilbride’s Garage. The night before, I was with my father and my brother Louis when we counted out the money – three times – before going to bed. £230. And it was billions as far as we were concerned.’
When he took on the stewardship of the national finances in 1987, qualities of thrift, frugality and familiarity with life’s harsh realities, which had attached themselves to him in the tough years of his childhood in 1940s Sligo, stood also to the country. It was not easy, back then, to implement cuts in health, education and social welfare. But MacSharry pulled it off because he possessed a moral authority that exuded from personal connectedness to the reality of Irish life. He was not an ideologue seeking to impose an agenda. Nor, despite his ominous nickname – Mac the Knife – did he seek out easy targets. To the extent that human nature and reality will ever allow, the pain was evenly and fairly spread.
Even if you take the view that there has been a degree of exaggeration of MacSharry’s role in the rejuvenation of the Irish economy in the 1990s, it is inconceivable that the disaster that befell us in the Noughties could have happened had he been anywhere in the building.
MacSharry is still hale and hearty, a strong, handsome man, only twenty years or so older than the present generation of Irish leaders. In cultural and ideological terms, however, a millennium separates him from the pampered generation that inherited his efforts in the 1990s.
Back in ’88, the voiceless were the outrightly poor. But, although they suffered along with everyone else, they did not do so disproportionately – perhaps the greatest tribute that can be made to Ray MacSharry’s integrity as a leader and as a man. Today the truly poor have battalions of spokespersons, and the voiceless are those who have just a little to lose: those who own their own houses and perhaps an apartment in the centre of town in anticipation of their children going to college later on, the people who maybe bought their first brand-new car in the past decade. A generation ago, such people did not need spokespersons because the political leadership came from their ranks and therefore saw the world as they did. But now they are the truly voiceless people in a society responding largely to cant and humbug, in which it is no longer possible to observe without controversy the obvious fact that wealth should be generated by effort and creativity, rather than by stock-jobbery and sleight-of-hand.
It is well we may rant and rave and gnash our teeth on account of losing the greatest Taoiseach we never had.
24 Jack Charlton
During those halcyon days of the Charlton Era, the Manager seemed constantly to be repeating the refrain: ‘A nation of three-and-a-half million people cannot win the World Cup.’ His intention, obviously, was to dampen down the growing public expectation that was to leave the widest street in Europe completely empty during more than one unforgettable encounter with one of the great sides of world football. Jack, of course, could not have been expected to know that Ireland is not a nation of three-and-a-half million people, but a nation of 75 million people dispersed throughout the world. And because Jack was a Brit, we were much too polite, what with all the baggage attaching to this insight, to bring up the matter.
Charlton brought possibly unprecedented joy into the lives of Irish citizens, at home and abroad. Often it seemed as if he had been sent from on high to cancel out every evil deed his countrymen had perpetrated in Ireland, and he certainly left the balance sheet a lot healthier when he eventually departed.
But therein also lay the problem with Jack: his Englishness was both the greatest asset he offered Ireland and also his fatal limitation. He was accomplished in an art form that was not indigenous to Ireland, but which had come to be a key medium in which we sought to express our sense of having arrived in the world. He came to Ireland with modest expectations, and in the end seemed astonished by what he had managed to stir up. Far more effectively than any native son, he had awoken the Irish to the possibility of success. And yet, neither he nor almost anyone else seemed to look beyond the prospect of a modest achievement.
One man who seemed to sense that much more was possible was Roy Keane, who would end his international career in a distressing little drama at the 2002 World Cup in Japan. Perhaps there are those who remain convinced that what concerned Roy Keane in Saipan was the quality of the facilities. But, as he was to make clear as the years passed, what he was really seeking to express was the frustration of someone who had grown to see his own dream come true, wanted to make it available to the country he loved, and, though convinced that more was possible, found himself confronted and confounded at every turn by the ineluctable pathology of losing. ‘Win or lose,’ he would derisively remark on a radio programme a few
years later, ‘hit the booze.’
Perhaps the Roy Keane saga carried also signifiers of a frustration that goes deep into the Irish psyche – a feeling buried under the weight of centuries of self-loathing that we might actually be as good as anyone else, and yet are expected, and therefore expect ourselves, to be delighted about getting knocked out in the quarter-finals. Perhaps Keane’s response was some kind of existential roar of frustration at the idea that not only do our dreams always seem to get short-circuited, but the entire edifice we construct around our endeavours appears to make this inevitable.
The Irish attraction to soccer has long been more than an infatuation with the novelty of a global sport. Deep in the warped culture of late-twentieth-century Ireland, it was a form of subversion. There was a sense for us then that it provided a form of liberation from the weight of authority represented by GAA leaders, clergy, teachers and self-appointed cultural gurus who told us what being ‘Irish’ could mean and what it could not mean. It wasn’t that we were actively rebelling against the re-Gaelicization of our cultural horizons, but rather that this process, for all that we may have supported or engaged with it, could not touch some other part of us that still needed to be nurtured: the colonized part, the part that remained incapable of expression in any identifiably indigenous code.
It was perhaps inevitable that soccer would become a vehicle for the unashamed expression of our post-colonial imagination, a sort of surrendering to that which, in other contexts, the national project of de-Anglicization sought to eliminate. Once you’ve been colonized, invaded, violated, you ever after need two distinct forms of self-expression. One is indigenous, a way of telling yourself who you still are. It needs to be of yourself, for yourself, by yourself, yourself alone. The other needs to be Other, of the outside, a means of saying to the rest of the world: I/we are still human, still living, still here; I/we can do what you can do (almost just as well, at least not as badly as you would expect). We are not as shite as we have been led to believe! Usually this means of expressing ourselves to the external will have been received from the violator, and will provide a way for the violated to seek the approval of he who has tried to persuade him that he is nothing. The two forms, obviously, operate at cross purposes. The very act of participating in something indigenous, however necessary this may be in one sense, validates the violator’s poor opinion in another. And by succeeding at the other, I/we affirm a part of our own dread that we may no longer be fully ourselves. We cannot win, but please don’t say it aloud.
This paradox defines the relationship between Gaelic games and soccer in Irish life and society. Gaelic games are the means of affirming ourselves to ourselves, a way of expressing our relief at the departure of the invader and celebrating his banishment. Soccer is the expression of that part of us that remains colonized, however long the visitors have departed. Soccer is the means we have unconsciously chosen to say, ‘Look, there is no need to be disappointed in our progress! Look, we can be like you after all! Look, we have not fallen back into barbarism! We are something, in spite of ourselves!’
The difficulty is that the very urge to demonstrate our capability is matched by a defeatism implanted also by the invader, which tells us that, no, we cannot ever win. What we crave more than anything is possible through soccer, but that, because it belongs to our former abuser, is infected for us with a pathology of losing. The very means we had found to express our desire to be as good as anyone has an in-built mechanism preventing us from becoming that which we crave to be.
Before Charlton, whenever the Irish national team took the field, the best expectations of the nation resided with the prospect of another ‘moral victory’. This was when you got sixty-four kinds of DNA kicked out of you but you still did not lie down. You might be beaten fifteen-nil, but if you hit the side-netting in the closing minutes, that was ‘a moral victory’, a sign that there remained a glimmering spark at the core of the unbending spirit of the Irish, and a portent of greatness still to come.
The incredible success of the national football team under Jack Charlton in the late 1980s and early ’90s, revealed itself in retrospect as a rehearsal of the Celtic Tiger economic miracle of the decade that followed – a glittering success that for a cosmic moment promised to wipe out nearly a century of failure. Both phenomena were managed, supervised and controlled by foreigners; and, more pertinently, both were based on a product that might be termed non-indigenous.
There is, then, a remarkable similarity between our responses in the respective arenas of industry and sport, and soccer tells the story more clearly than other sports. In both soccer and industrial policy, we like to leave it to outsiders. It is not that we lack self-belief – indeed, when someone comes in and takes charge, we find self-belief in open-top busloads. But we are poor self-starters, and especially poor at seeing ourselves in an area of expression or activity we perceive as belonging to peoples who can exude self-confidence without a barrelful of ale.
These are the facts of what Jack Charlton stirred up in us. The tragedy was not that he failed, but that he succeeded beyond his own wildest dreams, and thereby made visible what was possible but at the same time unrealizable.
Not once during his years as manager of the Irish football team was Jack Charlton asked: ‘Could a nation of 75 million people win the World Cup?’ If we had only had the belief to put it like that, he might have said ‘yes’, and who knows what might have happened?
25 Gerry Adams
Everyone knows Gerry Adams was not just ‘in’ the IRA but in it at a pretty senior level. Innumerable times it has been written that for many years he was Commander of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA. He denies it, but has not sued anyone for what, if it is untrue, must surely strike him as a grave slur on his character. Books have been written linking him to some of the ugliest operations of the IRA – for example, the ‘disappearance’ of Jean McConville in 1972. Jean McConville was a young widow who came to the aid of a young British soldier dying in the street. For this she was abducted by the IRA, taken to a secluded place, shot once in the head and buried on the spot. It would be many years before her body was found, accidentally, by a man who came across a scrap of clothing while out playing with his child.
Gerry Adams told Jean McConville’s family that he had nothing to do with these events, that he was in prison at the time. This was untrue. Everyone knew that he was the senior commander in Belfast when this murder was carried out.
The great fiction of the ‘republican movement’ has been the idea of a separation between its political wing, Sinn Féin, and the ‘freedom fighters’ in the IRA. Everyone knows this was a necessary fiction to avoid imprisonment. When the conflict was brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, many republicans came forward to admit to their former freedom-fighting activities. Martin McGuinness, for example, admitted that he had been a senior figure in the IRA and took responsibility for the pain and grief he had inflicted on so many. He refused to go into details but still it was felt that he had gone some way towards atoning for any wrongs he had committed.
But not Gerry. Clinging to the fiction, Adams insisted that he had never been in the IRA. In fact, he told Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show that he had never so much as thrown a stone during a riot. He was a politician, not a freedom fighter. Mind you, he did not condemn freedom fighting – there had, after all, been a war on. It’s just that he hadn’t been a fighter himself.
In the immediate wake of the Good Friday settlement, this didn’t seem to matter. Adams had been a key figure in the delicate process by which peace was achieved. Indeed, as a senior republican who was prepared to risk his own safety by talking the republican movement around, he might well be deemed the most critical figure in that process. For a short time he was something of a hero. Commentators who had previously attacked Gerry Adams and all his works and pomp now acknowledged his statesmanlike qualities. Very few people in the Republic any longer believed that there had been any ‘war’, but
were glad that, however it was to be described, it was now over. The voters of the Republic had even agreed to dismantle their own constitutional aspiration to the eventual unity of their country by agreeing to amend Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, just to stop the Provos slaughtering people. More and more nationalists in the Republic were coming around to the view that the whole thing had been an unnecessary exercise in egotism and viciousness by a generation of Northern thugs who sought to appropriate the national flag and the history it signified so as to legitimize what was really no more than a squalid turf war pursued by ruthless criminals. After years of extending tacit support to the ‘armed struggle’, many people had become persuaded that, although the Brits and the unionists had much to answer for, the IRA’s response had been utterly disproportionate and deeply immoral. After thirty years of conflict and more than 3,000 deaths, the Provos had achieved nothing more than had been on the table at the beginning. Now they were prepared to exchange all the alleged principles on which they had fought their ‘war’ for a few seats in an assembly that could have been agreed nearly three decades previously if they had been prepared to be reasonable. They had fought for ‘freedom’ and settled for power.
Nevertheless, in the early days of the new-found peace, people were prepared to indulge Gerry Adams in his fictive endeavours. People understood that it was sometimes necessary to be less than totally truthful in the interests of peace and harmony. Because everyone had been so anxious to ensure that the peace was maintained, it was considered that a certain latitude should be accorded to Gerry’s pretences. If he had just kept his mouth shut, people might have been able to live with it.
