Days of Heaven

by Declan Lynch

  Though he must have quiet moments of truth when he realises that he, in fact, is now the Establishment, he feels that he functions much better as the wild man, the headcase.

  It is another form of stage-Irishry, and it was played to the hilt during the Charlton years, just as it is played in the parade ring at Cheltenham when we see men who are worth a hundred million quid buck-lepping like labourers who have just won a lifetime’s supply of free porter.

  Jack’s success was particularly potent for these boys, because of the patriotic dimension. Flying in your private plane to your executive box at a regular sporting event is deeply attractive, but if you’re doing it for the love of your country, it is irresistible.

  So, whether they liked it or not, Jack’s lads were becoming part of the broader narrative of Irish success — in some versions, they were its founding fathers.

  Official Ireland is fond of these simple generalisations, urging us to ‘put on the green jersey’, and even to ‘give it a lash’. But as we have seen, a lot of other things were also happening in those years in Ireland, to change the way we were. It’s just that football was the best thing, and it probably mattered the most. It was the best thing, and it didn’t get any better than Italia 90.

  Like the Summer of Love and punk rock, there is a time when the best energies seem to come together to create magic. And it can’t last for very long, because it is too good, too intense. In fact, a lot of people are coming to it when it’s already winding down, when it’s over.

  Jack would be the manager of the Republic of Ireland until the end of 1995, but it would dishonour the memories of Euro 88 and Italia 90 to say that it was still the same after that. There were wild nights, like the one in Windsor Park when we got the result to take us to America, surviving what had been a festival of hate. There were wonderful nights, most notably against Italy at the Giants Stadium in 1994. And yet when we think of that World Cup, we also think of the lads melting in the heat of Orlando, going out tamely to Holland and being dragged back to the Phoenix Park for an embarrassing homecoming.

  We didn’t even qualify for Euro 92, or Euro 96.

  But the drinking didn’t stop. The journey of Paul McGrath through these years reflects the way it was for a lot of us. His drinking was hardly even noticed during the glory days because when everyone is drunk, in the best possible way, no-one is drunk. Or at least they are feeling no pain. But that’s not going to work forever. Alcoholism, they say, is a progressive illness, in the sense that it can only go one way — it can only get worse.

  In the language of psycho-babble, Paul was ‘enabled’ to drink because he was our best player and we were getting so much out of him. And unusually for us, we didn’t wait until he was dead for 20 years to realise how good he was, we knew it at the time. And we said it at the time.

  It is now better understood that a person can be performing at a very high level and receiving all the affirmation that comes with that and still be in the throes of full-blown alcoholism — Tony Adams was the captain of Arsenal and England at the height of his addiction. And perhaps these things were not generally accepted in Paul’s time, certainly not in football.

  Back then, it was felt that the most compassionate thing you could do for a player with a drink problem was to keep it quiet. People were well-meaning, they just didn’t know what they were doing. And there were times when it couldn’t be kept quiet, like the day when Paul sat on the team bus outside Lansdowne Road for a match against Turkey and kept sitting when everyone else had left the bus. And kept sitting, unable to get off that bus.

  Ah, the knees.

  Not that we gentlemen of the press were on the path of enlightenment here either. We were no better than Corporate Paddy with his bullshit. We just wanted to make the party last.

  But there comes a time when the party is over.

  A lot of people, quite understandably, couldn’t face life after it, and have been going around for the last fifteen years banging their bodhráns and playing the mad Paddy, the sort of people who’d be the first to shake the hand of Paul McGrath and buy him a drink.

  If I knew then what I know now, I, too, would have realised back in 1990 that the party was over. And I’d have known exactly what was troubling Paul, because it was the same thing that was troubling myself. And I’d probably have written that autobiography with him, years before Vincent Hogan did it so well.

  And Ireland would be free.

  Ireland, in fact, was doing fine. And by the mid-90s, it was clear that another party was about to begin. But there was still a bit of fun to be had, out of the Charlton years.

  In the last month of 1990, we elected our first woman President, Mary Robinson. Naturally, this turned into yet another battle in the ongoing civil war, which was now moving towards its decisive phase. Robinson was an iconic figure of the Left, one of the original feminists, a beautifully bred member of the liberal establishment and terrifyingly accomplished.

  For sure, we could let her out in any company. There would be no hiding behind the couch when this lady appeared on Newsnight.

  But when the campaign started, we were conditioned to assume that, as the Labour candidate, she was destined to finish third behind Austin Currie, representing Fine Gael, and Brian Lenihan, perhaps one of the few public figures in Ireland who could genuinely call himself a football man — he had played for UCD and Bohemians as a bustling centre-forward in the Noel Cantwell mould. But that would be no good to him when his campaign started unravelling, due to a few old porkies which were thrown back at him by the cold-blooded assassins of Dublin 4.

  Perhaps it was just complacency, perhaps the tide really was going out on old Ireland, but from an apparently unassailable position, Lenihan suddenly started to look weak.

  Though he had liberal credentials himself, due to his lifting of the censorship laws back in the day, in the mood of the time Robinson had all the momentum.

  If there was any doubt that this was a continuation of the moral civil war, it all went away during a radio debate in which the Fianna Fáil contributor Pee Flynn couldn’t stop himself making nasty remarks about Mrs Robinson suddenly discovering family values. There was probably nothing personal in it (or at least not much): it was just a bred-in-the-bone cultural response, a flashback to the days when Mary Robinson was one of the first people in Ireland to start openly using words like ‘contraceptive pill’, and perhaps even ‘intrauterine device’.

  Merely by saying such things she had made them a reality, in a place where, for all official purposes, they had not existed before.

  And in the traditional version of family values which obtained at that time, if you were advancing the cause of women in areas such as the right to control their fertility, you were automatically damaging the concept of the family as it had been understood in Ireland since the time of Christ.

  These were the family values that Pee Flynn pined for, and in his garbled way, he may have thought that reminding listeners of Robinson’s feminist record would damage her in the heartland. He didn’t quite realise that a lot of voters might actually be ready to vote for such a woman, up against good ol’ boys such as Lenihan and Currie, a woman whose brainy, lawyerly image had been softened by advisors such as Eoghan Harris.

  And yet we tend to forget that Lenihan, after all the embarrassment, and the shafting by Haughey, and the fact that he didn’t look a well man, still got the most votes. Again Paddy displayed the complex nature of his humanity here, voting for Lenihan in large numbers out of sympathy as much as anything else, and in appreciation of the fact that he had brought something to the party — but not voting for him in large enough numbers to stop Robinson winning the Presidency on Currie’s transfers.

  I voted for Robinson, predictably, because I knew which side I was on. Though over the years my view of her has darkened somewhat and not because she left for a really important role at the UN after her first term.

  It’s because I see her more clearly now as one of those patrician type
s who run everything, who just happens to be on the liberal wing, but who was born to rule regardless of her politics, the sort of people who don’t have a job, they have a ‘rôle’.

  My own father had to leave secondary school at fourteen when his father died. He worked as a telegram boy while he studied for the Inter at night. Given that he eventually ended up at Inspector grade in the civil service, I have calculated that if he had started out where the Mary Robinsons of this world start out, he would quite comfortably have become Secretary General of the United Nations. And worked his way up from there.

  Not that he ever displayed the slightest trace of bitterness about the cards that were dealt to him. Nor would it cross his mind that people like him kept football alive in this country, long before the Olé Olé’s found their voice. But it would cross my mind from time to time.

  And as for bringing me to see the then Boys In Green getting beaten in Dalymount Park, it didn’t occur to him that he would live to see them playing in two out of the three World Cups for which they have qualified. He was just doing the fatherly thing, at the time, bringing me on the train to big football matches in the big city, filling my head with overpowering images which have never left me, taking home the match programme which I would re-read endlessly in bed at night, with the names of the players arranged according to their position on the park — Alan Kelly, Tony Dunne, Charlie Hurley, the great Giles.

  Mary Robinson knew nothing of such things, I thought. Certainly I don’t recall seeing her with all the folks up for the match in the Forte café beside Amiens Street station, eating bacon, eggs, beans and chips, tea, bread and butter, to set us up for a beating by Poland. In the mind’s eye it is hard to see Mary Robinson watching us drawing with England on the big screen in the Submarine Bar in Crumlin, roaring obscenely at the referee to blow the whistle for fulltime. Or driving drunk through the streets of Dublin after the draw with Holland, blowing her horn.

  But she was still talking about the diaspora, about lighting a candle and putting it in the window of the Áras to show that we hadn’t forgotten the emigrants. And in her own Harvard-educated way she seemed to know what she was talking about. She was talking about these things, about the children of the lost generations, around the time that Big Jack had Maurice Setters out looking for them. I guess it was just another of those happy accidents.

  So whatever I think about her now, back then I was delighted to see her elected. At the end of this year of Italia 90 we were apparently still drunk enough on the fine wine of adventure to elect a liberal intellectual woman as head of state; in fact, we loved seeing her up there, a credit to us all. We had surprised ourselves again.

  I remember running into Theo Dorgan on Grafton Street around that time, the two of us high on the improbability of it all. Neither of us could recall ever voting for anyone who had won anything and we were having some difficulty getting used to this new sensation, this growing belief that we had actually got it right for a change. During those days I would keep running into people I knew who seemed dazed with happiness, rolling back the years and savouring the strangeness of Mary Robinson becoming President of Ireland.

  People were winning who had never won before.

  For Caroline

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to my friends Dion Fanning, Liam Mackey, Paul Howard, Arthur Mathews, John Waters, Philip Chevron and George Byrne for the excellence of their memories and the blinding clarity of their insights.

  Books by Paul Rowan (The Team That Jack Built), Derek O’Kelly and Shay Blair (What’s The Story?), Andy Townsend and Paul Kimmage (Andy’s Game) and Roddy Doyle (The Snapper and The Van) and Dermot Bolger’s play In High Germany also brought me back.

  Remembering Bill Graham and Dermot Morgan and Frank Lynch.

  Gill & Macmillan

  Hume Avenue

  Park West

  Dublin 12

  Ireland

  with associated companies throughout the world

  www.gillmacmillan.ie

  © Declan Lynch 2010, 2012

  First published by Gill & Macmillan in 2010

  This ebook first published by Gill & Macmillan in 2012

  978 07171 4637 6 (print)

  978 07171 5162 2 (epub)

  978 07171 5221 6 (mobi)

  Cover design by www.slickfish.ie

  Cover photography by Inpho

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission of the publishers.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  The website addresses referred to in this book were correct at the time of first publication.

  About the Author

  From Athlone, Co. Westmeath, Declan Lynch began his writing career at the age of seventeen with Ireland’s rock ’n roll magazine Hot Press. He now writes for the Sunday Independent. He is the author of several books including Ireland on Three Million Pounds a Day, Free Money: The Gambler’s Quest, and the acclaimed novel The Rooms.

  About Gill & Macmillan

  Gill & Macmillan’s story begins in 1856 when Michael Henry Gill, then printer for Dublin University, purchased the publishing and bookselling business of James McGlashan, forming McGlashan & Gill. Some years later, in 1875, the company name was changed to M.H. Gill & Son. Gill & Macmillan as we know it today was established in 1968 as a result of an association with Macmillan of London. There was also a bookshop, popularly known as Gills, located on Dublin’s O’Connell Street for 123 years until it eventually closed in 1979. Today our bookshop can be found online at www.gillmacmillan.ie.

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