The Trib

by David Kenny

  With the infinite patience he could muster under pressure, he asked me what precisely I was recommending.

  ‘No speech,’ I said. ‘No statement. You’re going to arrive at the Burlo in high good humour. You’re not going to rush past them. You’re going to get out of the car as if it was a surprise birthday party. You’re going to pick off individual journalists you know in the crowd and tease them unmercifully, by name. You’re going to make the whole lot of them laugh and while they’re laughing, you’re going to wave and disappear into the hotel.’

  ‘I would never do that.’

  ‘Mr Haughey, you’ll do whatever you decide. I’m just telling you what you should do.’

  The conversation ended with a growl and a banged-down phone. A few hours later, my assistant slid an evening paper in front of me.

  Big picture of the man, surrounded by microphone-holding journalists, with the caption ‘An ebullient Charlie Haughey outside the Burlington Hotel earlier today’. The impact of Molloy’s move could never be glossed over, but Haughey had at least stiffened his own party by appearing to be unbothered by this, the latest episode in a brilliantly planned wave.

  Now, the process is happening in reverse.

  The latest negative is the letter from one of the four founders of the PDs, Paul Mackay, urging members of the party to tell HQ that they had to get out of government in order to revive their fortunes. Mackay will have infuriated a good portion of the PDs and interested another portion of them. It doesn’t matter. He’s not only barking up the wrong tree, he’s barking up the wrong shrub.

  The PDs were a necessary, indeed vital catalyst in Irish politics. Mary Harney gave us smog-free cities, the party deregulated some areas in serious need of deregulation, and tax was reformed. A lot done.

  The reality behind the electoral meltdown and the rumours that one of their two TDs is now negotiating with Fianna Fáil with a view to conversion, is that Fianna Fáil subsumes small parties and gains a new sense of direction in the process.

  Or put it another way: the PDs may no longer be necessary, because Fianna Fáil has learned how to be them.

  DAVID KENNY

  Sometimes the growing pains never go away

  16 May 2010

  A story in the news last week reminded me of an old friend. Before I get to that story, I’d like to tell you about him. Forgive me for being nostalgic, the pay-off is important. Brian and I were thirteen the first time we met. I wasn’t impressed. He looked a bit of a shaper as he marched around the schoolyard, clicking the studded heels of his George Webbs, with his hands in the pockets of an oversized Eskimo anorak.

  We fought – I can’t remember why. It was one of those ‘hold-me-back’ affairs, with a flurry of missed groin-kicks and the loser ending up in a headlock. Brian, as it turned out, was no hard-man: he was rubbish at fighting. It was something we had in common.

  The scrap was a sort of pathetic, pubescent, bonding ritual. We became best friends, constantly messing about to disguise our terror at being weedy First Years, surrounded by giant, moody Older Lads. We slagged everything off – as all insecure thirteen-year-olds do to deflect attention from themselves. Clothes, hairstyles, even bikes were fair game.

  Brian had a twenty-gear Asahi racer, while I had a crock of crap masquerading as a Chopper. He never let me forget it was crap – especially as it didn’t have a crossbar.

  ‘It’s a girl’s bike.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s just ... streamlined. It’s a streamlined Chopper.’

  ‘But it folds in half.’

  ‘It’s a Chopper.’

  ‘It’s a girl’s bike and you’re a girl.’

  The bike was eventually ‘stolen’.

  Our afternoons were spent listening to records or cycling around ‘scoping out the talent’. At night we’d slip through back gardens, avoiding fathers filling coal scuttles, to steal apples that we never ate. We whispered instructions to each other on a shared set of walkie-talkies. Their range was about twenty feet. There was no need for them: we could have spoken normally and still have heard each other.

  Brian and I learned how to smoke together. We could only afford cheap tipped cigars. They were disgusting and tasted like burning doc leaves (I once smoked a doc leaf). I accidentally stubbed one out on my arm while swinging from a tree, making monkey noises to annoy the lawn bowlers at Moran Park. The scar lasted for a year. I told my mother that it was a result of two wasps stinging me on the same spot, one after the other. She didn’t buy it.

  Brian and I rode around Dún Laoghaire with our cigars clamped between our teeth, thinking we looked like Clint Eastwood. We didn’t see ourselves as two short-arses playing at being adults from the safety of childhood.

  We went to our first disco together, herky-jerk dancing like mad to Bad Manners to impress the girls. The more we ran on the spot, the more they liked it – so local stud, Macker, told us. What he didn’t tell us was that he had spread the word among the girls that we were ‘special needs boys’ from a care home.

  ‘We’re ‘in’ there,’ I said, as one waved sympathetically at us. We ran faster on the spot to impress her even more.

  Brian went on my first date with me. Not as my date, obviously – he came along to act as witness in the event that I ‘scored’. When you’re fourteen, ‘scoring’ is everything.

  He cycled behind me to the venue, Sandycove train station.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ he shouted at the back of my head. ‘It’s like oil and cat piss.’

  ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I cycled faster, knowing full-well what the smell was. It was the contents of a bottle of my dad’s Eclipsol hair tonic. We skidded into the lane overlooking the tracks.

  ‘What’s up with your hair?’ Brian was examining my forehead. A mixture of sweat and hair restorer was trickling down my nose.

  ‘I haven’t washed it for a week,’ I said, ‘and I used Ted’s hair stuff. It helps to keep the bounce down.’ Bouncy hair was for girls. My mother always said my freshly-washed hair reminded her of her own.

  ‘You’ve got my hair.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Yes you do.’ My father ran the palm of his hand over his bald head. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be like me some day. Then you won’t have to worry about having bouncy hair and looking like ... Barry Manilow.’ Bullseye.

  Brian leaned his bike against the wall. ‘Go on, then.’ I could hear him chuckling as I nervously approached my ‘girlfriend’.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ asked one of her friends. ‘It’s like pee.’

  ‘Why’s your hair greased up like that? Are you trying to look like Elvis?’ I had hoped I looked like Elvis.

  ‘Did Elvis ever work as a toilet cleaner in a Pet Shop?’

  ‘Or an old folk’s home?’ Brian fell over his bike laughing.

  I didn’t score. The love affair ended soon afterwards.

  The day Brian moved down the country was the bleakest of my young life. I couldn’t tell him I was going to miss him. You didn’t say that to your mates. We played ‘Baggy Trousers’ on my Lloytron tape recorder over and over again as he unsuccessfully attempted to blow up his tree house with bangers. ‘I’m not leaving it for the next family,’ he said, despite my protests. Looking back, he was scorching the earth of his childhood.

  Before he left, he handed me his half of our walkie-talkie set. I traded it for some now-forgotten item. I couldn’t share it with anyone else.

  Years passed and we lost touch. We picked up our friendship again when he eventually moved back. Then we both got night jobs and lost touch again. We orbited the same crowds, but never seemed to meet up.

  In November 1992, Brian walked into his local and settled a few small debts. He was in good form. He was twenty-five. Later that night, Brian turned the exhaust pipe in on his car. He killed himself. No one had seen it coming.

  I try not to think of his final moments. How alone he must have felt. How his family felt when they heard the news.
How whoever found him felt. How I felt.

  The fourteen-year-old who shared my growing pains was gone. The reason why is not important now. I have other questions. What would his children have been like? Would he have enjoyed my wedding? Would we still be friends, tilting at the bar in Finnegan’s?

  Brian – that’s not his real name – came back to me last Wednesday when I read that the Marks & Spencer model Noémie Lenoir had tried to kill herself. I was surprised at how hard that story struck me. Lenoir is young and beautiful: people like her don’t kill themselves. People like Brian don’t kill themselves.

  Newspapers generally don’t carry suicide stories because of the ‘Werther effect’, where reporting might encourage copycats. Sadly, Lenoir’s attempt will have sown the seed in some minds.

  The suicide rate here has risen by 35 per cent since last year (CSO) as more people succumb to depression. Two years before Brian’s death, I suffered a prolonged period of desperate sadness. I was luckier than him: I learned from it. I think of what I could have said to him had I known what he was going through. I could have told him we all crash emotionally, but it’s possible to walk away from the wreckage. I would have told him that he didn’t really want to leave, he just wanted the pain to stop. I would have told him that the darkness passes.

  I would have told him that he will always be my friend.

  I would have told him that he was never really alone.

  ‘Manity’ and the day I dyed for Ireland

  23 January 2010

  ‘Tell them what an idiot you are.’ That was the curt instruction from the woman who edits this column. No political rants this week. Just explain to those who don’t already know it that I’m an idiot. Here goes:

  Men are idiots. Fact. Scientists proved this last week when they discovered that Man ’Flu actually exists. We exaggerate the symptoms of the common cold to idiotic proportions. We think we’re the stronger sex, but we’re not. We’re also idiots who can’t accept that ageing is inevitable. The Harley Medical Group has reported a 17 per cent rise in calls from men seeking Botox treatment since Louis Walsh admitted getting work done. Presumably hair weave enquiries also rose after Gordon Ramsay had his hairline restored. Men are idiots. Vain idiots.

  The worst thing a man can do, next to wearing a wig or getting Botox, is to dye his hair. He is a preening knob if he does. He’s cheating. Besides, grey is manly, grey is wise. Grey is the colour of silver-back gorillas.

  Grey is also bloody boring. I’ve an admission to make: I’m a preening knob. I dyed my hair last weekend. No, please don’t turn the page; let me explain.

  I’ve been letting my grey hair grow for the past year. I love taunting my baldy mates by draping it over their shiny heads. Over the past few months, however, it’s been turning a horrible shade of green. This is something the Baldies love reminding me about. (‘Look, it’s the Not-So-Incredible Hulk!’)

  Sick of hearing me moan about it, my sister bought me a bottle of Super Silver Sensations. She promised it would sort the greenness out. I lathered half the bottle in, ignoring the instructions to rinse after five minutes. ‘I’ll give it forty,’ I thought. To get it REALLY silvery. An hour later, my hair was purple. Silver Sensations turns out to be blue-rinse shampoo. My head looked like Barney The Dinosaur’s crotch.

  ‘No, you don’t look like Barney,’ my wife reassured me. ‘You look like old Mrs Slocum. You idiot.’

  Shortly afterwards, someone told me ketchup can rectify yellowness. It took fifteen minutes to apply because, being a man, I had to mess around, teasing my hair into various shapes. I let it dry into a two-horned, devil ‘do’. Idiot.

  The whang was appalling but I soon forgot about my saucy bonce as I caught up on household chores. Two hours later I went into the study to play with the cat. She shied away from me. ‘That’s odd,’ I thought, reaching out to pet her. She licked my face and hissed again. I looked up to see the postman staring in the window. I waved. He slowly backed out the gate.

  My ketchup ‘horns’ were melting down the side of my face. It looked like I was engaging in some perverted Satanic ritual with the cat. ‘Come back, I can explain,’ I called, which only made him run away faster.

  Ketchup doesn’t work, by the way. It turns your hair ginger. My pub-mates started calling me ‘Rusty’. So I bought some Grecian 2000, but that turned my pillow brown, which was hard to explain to our disgusted (former) cleaning lady.

  I bought a bottle of Just for Men hair dye, but I couldn’t use it. I’m not that vain. I threw it in the bin. It came out again last Saturday in advance of an appearance on RTÉ’s Daily Show. ‘Don’t put that in your hair. You’ll make a mess of it,’ my wife warned, forgetting that men are idiots. We’ll always press the button marked ‘Do Not Press This Button’. We’ll always stick a knife in the toaster when it’s plugged in.

  I emptied the bottle onto my head. ‘Two minutes is all it takes!’ the label said. I left it in for ten.

  My wife says the screams were up to The Exorcist level. My hair was black with red roots. I was a cross between Elvis and Bono. ‘It’s all YOUR fault,’ I shrieked, as she locked herself in the bedroom with the cat.

  I lathered Fairy liquid into it. I steeped it in lemon juice. It turned grapefruit pink. I shrieked some more.

  It took my wife’s hairdresser, Matt Malone, two days to rectify things. It still looks dyed though and I’m paranoid about it. The worst thing is when you catch someone staring at it and quickly looking away.

  There’s a lesson in this for all you fellow idiots who may be thinking of dyeing: don’t do it. I really miss my grey hair.

  The last straw came when I went for my first post-dye pint. A wag shouted: ‘You can’t come in here – it’s Just For Men.’

  I’m staying in until I go grey again. If anybody asks my wife where I am she’s instructed to say I’m at home, under the weather.

  Knowing me, they’ll probably think it’s Man ’Flu.

  Was it for all this the men of 1916 fought and died?

  28 March 2010

  My great-grandfather delivered Pearse’s farewell letter to his mother. As the fires crackled around the GPO, the rebel leader wrote: ‘Whatever happens to us, the name of Dublin will be splendid in history for ever. Willie and I hope you are not fretting for us ...’ He sealed the envelope and great-granddad kept it safe. By the time he delivered it, Pearse was dead.

  History sees Pearse’s sacrifice in terms of bloodshed. My great-granddad, Matthew Walker, saw it in the face of a mother who had lost two sons.

  You won’t have heard of Matthew. He was one of those remarkable figures who prefer to work behind history’s stage. You may remember from school that Parnell had lime thrown at his eyes during a rally. Matthew was the friend who shielded his face with his hat. Anonymous, forgotten.

  On Easter Monday 1916, Matthew – who was sixty-nine – walked eight miles from Glasthule to the GPO. He was dressed in full Edwardian fig of topcoat and top hat. He also had corns on his feet, but his generation ‘didn’t grumble’. He was determined to play his part.

  As he entered Sackville Street, Matthew would have seen the first casualties – two dead horses belonging to the lancers. He would have felt the giddiness of the slum bystanders waiting to see blood.

  He would also have seen a tricolour flying over the GPO.

  For Matthew – IRB man and publisher – Easter Monday was the culmination of his life’s work. He was given the task of printing Pearse’s Irish War News, as bullets ricocheted around the city. Each night, he bravely walked home through the cordons.

  His Abbey actress daughters, Maire and Gypsy, were ‘out’ in 1916 too. Gypsy, my grandmother, lost her pacifist lover to a looter’s bullet. A priest refused to marry the couple on his deathbed.

  Despite the pain, their generation valued sacrifice. Their selflessness seems very remote as you survey today’s Ireland.

  Last week, the tricolour Matthew may have seen over the GPO failed to sell at auction. It
had been valued at $500,000. I wonder how he would have felt about this. After the week we’ve just had with Brian Cowen’s reshuffle and more turmoil with the banks, I wonder what he would make of the Republic he risked his life for.

  If he was publishing a newspaper today, Matthew’s editorial would probably compare our Taoiseach’s power-at-all-costs philosophy to Pearse’s. It would condemn the cynicism of hoarding power at the expense of the democracy people died for.

  Coming from an age when people risked their lives for principles, what would he think of Beverley Flynn? Unprincipled Bev’s belief that democracy should serve her was in evidence again last week. She said she deserved a place in cabinet. She would ‘flower’. She couldn’t understand why the media picked on her. Drop around Bev, I’ll tell you why.

  What would he make of the people who keep electing her? Or Michael Lowry for that matter? Or Mary Hanafin, who along with seven other deputies still refuses to give up her teacher’s pension? Or smug Mary Harney, with no party behind her?

  Let’s be fair to politicians, though. They’re not the only self-servers living in this great Republic.

  Matthew would have led his newspaper with the Civil, Public and Services Union’s go-slow and how they are denying people their passports. He would have been livid. A passport isn’t a bargaining chip. It’s proof of the citizenship fought for by people like him and Countess Markievicz.

  Not that we care about the Countess any more. She would appear on Matthew’s ‘page 3’ (with her clothes on). He would report that she isn’t included in an MRBI poll of the greatest Irish people of all time. Neither is President McAleese. Louis Walsh is, though. What does that say about us?

  Matthew would look at what the vacuous Tiger generation allowed happen to Tara and run a story warning about the same happening to under-threat Newgrange. How many would read it?

  He would look at Seanie Fitz and wonder why we allowed a new landlord class of bankers and developers to be created.