by Tim Bradford
And so I had that in mind when I got to the wide streets of Limerick City. For years, whenever I mentioned Limerick,2 people would suck in their breath – Psssewwwweh! – as though they were taking in the last remnants of a runty little spliff at a party, desperate for a last-minute hit before they head off home in a smelly late-night minicab. Evidently this attitude is something to do with the city being famous for fighting; fisticuffs and, of course, knife-related violence. People made Limerick seem like some Godforsaken gang-warring mixture of the worst of Los Angeles, New York and the Marseilles docks area. Wander round the streets at night and you’ll wake up in hospital, if you wake up at all.
Limerick was founded by the Vikings in the tenth century. Perhaps the city’s violent reputation goes back this far, though to be fair to the Vikings they weren’t really into stabbing so much as slashing, burning, beheading, chopping into little bits, pillaging and, of course, raping.3
A powerful family called the Robin-Cook-Lookalike-Fitzgeralds, Earls of Desmond, ruled the area in the 16th century. Others called them after a girl’s name – the Geraldines. They had come over with the Normans (good boy’s name) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and in time, like most of the families that settled in Ireland, became completely Gaelicised and ruled like independent princes. Back in England that greatest of all centralising monarchs and all-round philandering fatlad, Henry VIII, decided to cut down on their power and thus set about attempting to make Englishmen of them. The Geraldines, stung by the suggestion that having a girl’s name meant they’d be no good at fighting and with a gung-ho leader in James Fitzmaurice Robincook Fitzgerald, revolted against English rule. A vicious war started up in Munster which ended with the defeat of the Fitzgeralds and the confiscation of their estates and their goatee beards.
They’re still obviously a bit mardy. Richard Harris is from Limerick – and used to get into fights after his all-day-and-night benders. That girl from the Cranberries is too and she’s dead stroppy; you wouldn’t want to get in a scrap with her. So is Peter Clohessy, a talented nutcase hardman rugby prop forward who played for Young Munster and who had a terrible disciplinary record.
Walking through Limerick you certainly get a bit of a buzz, particularly if you’ve just spent a few days in the peaceful tourist areas of Cork and Kerry. For a start the people look very different. Big families walk the streets, the men with button-down shirts, short hair, weather-beaten, pinched, scarred faces, mad eyes; fat women, dirty-faced kids. They’re probably in their twenties but look ten or more years older. There are people selling cheap rubbish – toys, teacloths, batteries – at the side of the small streets running off the main road. Traffic, fumes, a rush of energy. Less tourists than anywhere I’ve been so far in Ireland. Near the station big old buildings, hotels, pubs, sad old fellahs shuffling about from pub to pub, battered-looking Chinese takeaways (Ireland has the lowest number of Chinese people working in Chinese takeaways in the whole world). Recent improvements in the city have seen those evil symptoms of economic success, fun theme pubs, appear where once would have been honest, dirty, seedy old men’s boozers with piss on the carpet where you might get stabbed for breathing too quickly (but where men were men and not consumers in a brand-marketing concept).
I’d been told about the Munster Hurling Final between Waterford and Clare a week before, but only decided to go on the morning of the game, leaving the hotel and heading off to the station around lunchtime (I’d checked in my timetable that a train would be leaving for Thurles at 1.30 pm). For some reason I expected the station to be full of bouncy and enthusiastic hurling fans waving flags and shouting raaaay raaay raaaay raaaay as all sports fans do when they are herded together in one place, but it was virtually empty. In front of me in the queue was a short speccy guy with big teeth and spiky hair,4 who was arguing with the man in the ticket office (a dead ringer for an ex-U-Boat captain: steely-eyed middle aged with close-cropped blond hair) about when the trains were supposed to be coming in. I imagined he must be a local trainspotter and was prepared to embark on a citizen’s arrest procedure (it’s the only way, readers, to get these people off the streets). The ticket man was shaking his head vigorously, as though one of his crew had asked for extended shore leave, then he went away for a while (to check the periscope, or something) and Speccy turned to me and said something very quickly, like, ‘theeoo na dra torless befaa ga’. By this stage I had already learned how to filter a sentence – place it in my mind, then rake over it, searching for words or phrases that I understood – all the while putting on a sort of grimaced smile. (This process only took a couple of seconds.) However, I had to ask him to say it again.
‘It appears, old chap, that there are no trains to Thurles that will get us there before the hurling match begins,’ he said, my in-built translation mechanism now functioning properly.
That can’t be right, I thought. Behind me a couple of young Clare girls with long wild curly hair and little excited smiles fingered their scarves and cursed under their breath. Well, they said to each other out loud, oh fucking shit. I took a timetable found the relevant page.
‘That can’t be right,’ I said in that way that only Englishmen do when they are indignant about some kind of public transport foul-up, ‘it says here in the timetable that there is a train at half-past one.’ I jabbed my finger at the page in question, to emphasise how clever and organised I was. The two girls laughed in that tinkly Sharon Shannon squeezebox sort of way.
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ one of them said. ‘No-one reads those.’ She had a point. Why the hell was I taking the timetable as gospel? I already knew not to trust anything written down – better to ask locals, usually an old man or young street urchin hanging around a bus stop or station platform, who would tell me that on this particular day the transport in question always came fifteen minutes early for reasons which no-one seemed to understand and which probably went back to the Megalithic era. I brandished my timetable for a few more seconds, then relaxed my frown. Then rolled it up and did that trick where you can see a hole in your hand,5 as if to distract attention away from the fact that I was so obviously a thick tourist. Meanwhile Speccy and the Captain continued their debate about trains. An older man joined us, hoping to get to Thurles.
Old Man: Have they run out of tickets?
Dark-haired Girl: Ah no, they haven’t run out of tickets, holy God!
Speccy was getting impatient. His line of argument was that he had spoken to a station master at Ennis in Clare and had been told that there would be a train. And then he said something along the lines of ‘and anyway, you know who I am, sure enough’. What did he mean? But no-one would sell us a ticket. We stood around, the five of us, as Toothy chatted away in a singsong accent about the semi-final and how the Waterford defence might stand up to Clare. And then he disappeared. I didn’t even see him go. Perhaps he was never there. Like a faery.
Red-haired Girl: They say it happens. Faeries come disguised as sports fans and ingratiate themselves with us. Then they just disappear, after offering to sell you a cheap ticket or merchandise item.
Suddenly the barrel-chested stationmaster (a big-smiled Mr Nice compared to the Nazi U-Boat captain in the ticket office) told us that a train from Ennis was coming to the station especially to pick us up. We all went back to the ticket window, where the guy begrudgingly sold us tickets before barking some orders in German to the pretty little colleen next to him and the ticket office disappeared beneath the waves of an imaginary North Sea (‘Schnell schnell! Man ze torpedo tubes!’), to the sound of a siren going off, with just its Iarnród-Eireann-emblazoned periscope showing above the platform. Then it headed off in the direction of the newsagents.
The train was crowded with families, groups of young men, pockets of late-teenage girls, all with wristbands, scarves and shirts in the Clare colours. Speccy suddenly reappeared in front of me. I bought him a beer and he told me about the girl who was usually on this train, who he really liked and who he thought quite
liked him actually. Are you sure? I said. Oh yeah, he replied. You wait and see. Is Finoola around? he said to the barman, looking back at me and winking. Ah now, said the middle-aged guy behind the bar. She recently got engaged and she’s gone away on holiday with her fiancé. Speccy’s face drooped sadly and I suggested we go to find a seat. Obviously this part of his day was not going exactly to plan.
And so the train clattered along. You don’t get old trains like this in England any more. They’re either 125s, Network South East (modern or old) or the little two carriage ones. It was all wood inside the carriage, with a nice little cubbyhole type of room that was the bar and which must have got very snug on Saturday nights. We sat down at a tiny table near the bar and Michael – Speccy – started to tell me a bit about himself and hurling. I had never been entirely sure about the rules but the way he explained it all seemed quite simple.6 One point if you knock the ball over the posts. Three points if you can get it in the goal. Different teams have different styles, he said, and the fortunes of a team will ebb and flow over the years. Take for example his team, Clare – they had not won an All-Ireland final for eighty years until 1995 and now they had won two in three years and were undoubtedly favourites this year. Wow, I said, just like my old home team in football, Lincoln City – they’re really shit and never win anything either. No, he said, Clare aren’t shit. They play a fast vigorous game. Some teams would make shorter passes and lots of hand passing. Others would just whack it upfield in big shots and get it up as quickly as possible. This was, in his mind, he said, the true spirit of hurling. Though many people, old fellahs particularly, didn’t think the players were as skilful as in the old days, there were still some great guys out there. Jamesie O’Connor of Clare and Tony Brown of Waterford. This guy should be on television, I thought as he rattled away, like the train. Then I looked at him again and decided radio might be more his thing.
I have a ticket to pick up from some friends he said. You can come with me if you like and I’m sure you will get a ticket. I thanked him for the offer but said I wanted to just wander around and get a flavour of the event. Ah, fair enough, sure, he said. They shouldn’t have messed with me, they know who I am, he said. Who are you? I asked. My uncle is a well-known politician, so they know they shouldn’t mess with me. He didn’t look like the sort of bloke you wouldn’t mess with. But then I’d always thought that Martin McGuinness looked like a cuddly old English teacher, the sort who would take you for a pint after school and tease you about girls you fancied and your lack of knowledge of Ovid, so I’m no great judge.
As Michael started to tell me about the intricacies of the Clare political scene I drifted in and out of consciousness, staring out of the window at the farmland colours, the faint wash of hills daubed into the background. A mass of crows took off from a ploughed field as the train went past, reminding me of the scene in Out of Africa where Robert Redford and Meryl Streep are in a plane buzzing the wildlife out in some national park. I suppose I was Robert Redford and Michael was Meryl Streep.7 Two round hills loomed up in the distance and I thought of Maria Guevara’s Breasts, a mountain range in South America with two prominent peaks, apparently reminiscent of a celebrated sixteenth-century Spanish beauty – perhaps a modern equivalent would be Salma Hayek’s baps. As the train rocked from side to side – I could hear the blah blah of loud voices at the bar kids asking their Dad who Manchester United were playing that day – Michael telling me that ‘the people at Limerick realised they had to pull that train in when they knew who they were dealing with, even though it wasn’t supposed to stop there’. I felt as though I was travelling back in time. I played the ‘what olden days costumes would they wear?’ game – the bar lads would be eighteenth century, the kids Victorian era, Michael I saw as a mad druid type.
As soon as I got off the train I could tell by the smell and the way the wind blew that Thurles was a small market town. I just know these things, having been brought up in a small market town myself. It’s a mixture of wood polish, sausages and two-stroke engine oil. The difference being that this is Ireland so the smell is sweetened by the aroma of burning peat (typical for late July), breaking the dryness like an old man on a busy city street with a well-stuffed pipe. It all seemed very suburban and I looked for signs for a town centre, then we turned a corner over the railway bridge and the whole scene opened up before us. Plump crowds spilled out onto the street from every available pub orifice, attracted by elemental forces to chip vans and hot dog stalls. Michael said he was off to find his friends and asked me for one last time if I’d like to accompany him. I suppose if I had I’d have been able to write a whole book about hurling, but my natural inclination to drift in and out of things got the better of me so I said thanks, but I’m off exploring. Good luck, he said, and remember you’d better be supporting Clare after my sporting lesson. I laughed and he disappeared into the crowd, in the instantaneous way he had done back at Limerick Station. I thought of going for a quick one at The Hayes Hotel, where the Gaelic Athletic Association was formed in 1898, but the gridlock of red-faced suppers crammed into the doorways, exalting in their Mecca, tempted me to try a less fundamentalist establishment. I found a small pub nearby. It had different levels of noise, quiet talkers, whisperers, loudies, shouters, singers. In or outside? – I weighed it up. I was getting sticky on such a moist, close day but I hate Guinness in a plastic glass and would rather stand amongst the bodies and sweat. Someone shouts something in my ear and I just say ‘yeah’ because I haven’t understood a word he’s said. All around the classic sports fans high-decibel ‘murmur murmur’ was drowning out everything.
I supped up then headed back out onto the street. Moving into town from the station were Clare fans, having got the train from Ennis and Limerick, and I became caught up in the blue and gold tide, while the Waterford contingent walked in from the opposite direction, most having come by bus or car on the main road and parked at the other side of town. It was like a dance, opposing forces coming together and touching but only slightly then merging or going off into separate directions, the different colours – the blue and yellow of Clare and the white of Waterford – making patterns in the grey light. They all merged in the town square and headed off in different directions, into alleyways and pub lobbies. I walked into a long bar and reached the back, where they had only two pumps. Harp and Guinness. Old men stood around and it felt like a good place to be. I got a proper glass too. I stood out in a little courtyard where it was drizzling slightly. A huddle of middle-aged men watched a swallow diving above an old medieval tower. I’d never seen that before, but I’d watched Elvis swallow-diving in the movie Acapulco. I positioned myself next to a family group. The oldest, a man with noble, battered face and flat cap, was holding court, talking about past finals and great players, and techniques. Next to him, two middle-aged guys in their fifties. Then a thirtysomething and a late teen. The two youngest didn’t say anything, just clutched their pints and took it in. Even the old guy’s two sons waited for a suitable opening before speaking. The old guy was the channel, the playmaker. In the parlance of sports tactics, he pushed the play.
I didn’t see much sign of sponsorship. The hurling championships are sponsored by Guinness but there didn’t seem to be the plethora of branded merchandise you get at, say, a British sporting occasion, never mind an American one. Who knows how long this will last? There must already be forces pushing the players and counties in the direction of at least semi-professionalism. I don’t mean to sound like an old uncle with a pipe.8 The players are all amateurs. Noble men. Train hard. Don’t drink.
Apart from warfare and group dating, hurling must be the oldest team sport in the world. It’s there in the Celtic myths9 – it’s what the legendary warriors did in their spare time between stealing bulls and each other’s wives. Setanta, on his way to meet his father and the fated meeting with Cullan’s hound, whiled away the journey over mountains by hitting a sliotar around with a hurley. You can see elements of the game in more modern con
coctions such as football and rugby (as well as the slightly more effete pastimes of hockey and lacrosse10). The first hurling I’d ever seen was the All-Ireland clash between Clare and Offaly in 1995, from a pub in Waterford. I had been impressed by the frenetic pace and skill of the game, but TV never gives you the real picture of any team sport11 – plus in hurling the ball is too small to see when you’re watching a smallish TV from the back of a crowded bar. They should make it bigger.12
There’s a stillness at the start of the Munster hurling final, an emptiness which the fans try to fill by bellowing the names of their heroes and sounding off air klaxons so that the noise level brings to mind a huge medieval battle, though without the blood (that will surely come soon enough). There’s the odd drum, too, which adds to the ancient aura. Old faces and wild eyes all around me, red cheeks and long-nosed profiles wait eagerly for the start. I imagine that the start of battles in the old times was like this – the pageant before the blood. Then the referee’s whistle blows and there’s an explosion of energy on the pitch, like the psychic spark that flamed in the nothingness before creation and an inquisitive ball of fire and light rushed outwards into everything, as the two sides smack each other’s hurlies into the ground and the legs of their opponents as they rush for the sliotar. I’m enthralled by the energy, as a Waterford forward gets strealed across the back of the legs by his Clare counterpart. I’d always imagined the game as a load of big-legged farmers chasing around hitting each other with sticks. Now I know for certain that’s exactly what it is. Then a few seconds later it’s mayhem, barely controlled violence as everyone chases the ball like a swarm of small boys do a football in a playground kickabout, hurleys clashing as if in an elaborate and dangerous dance.13 The crowd are now suddenly so excited that the back of my neck begins to tingle. I’ve never experienced an atmosphere like this before. I’m at the Clare end, but a few Waterford lads are in front of me, screaming at the referee. A middle-aged Clare man with a red face and small, blue, watery eyes makes some comment about them ‘fecking off to the other end’. They laugh at him when a Clare defender makes a mistake. Then pandemonium as two players are sent off. Klaxons are off again, banners swirl in the wind. Then it starts to piss it down and the crowd huddles closer together, becoming even more a single organism. I’m in sporting heaven.
