at the age of sixteen, he had won a five-mile currach race along this very coastline, beating older and hardier oarsmen by a distance which passed into local myth in a race that proved him to be not just a better oarsman but also a better seaman, with wisdom and courage enough at sixteen to set aside the conventional wisdom of taking a wide sweep around the shoreline so as to avoid the onshore currents which would pull across the boat and push it onto the rocks, choosing instead a line tighter to the land which was more dangerous but sheltered from the offshore winds which he rowed under, sitting on the middle beam and pulling from his shoulders as his father had advised till, fifty minutes after leaving Roonagh he came into sight from Old Head Pier rounding the Priest’s Lep with his two hands on fire at the oars and blood seeping up between his fingers when he ran his boat up on the slipway and near tore the bottom out of her, far gone now in a delirium of pain and fatigue, but so far ahead of the following boats that he had time to drink a jug of milk and rinse his shirt out in the tide before the second boat had come ashore and
if, at ten years of age, I had no real sense of how difficult that race had been, alone out there with nothing but your two arms and blank determination to keep pointing the bow of the currach in the right direction, it was easy to imagine the flooding relief of a brutally extended effort finally coming to a close as he rounded the point a full five minutes before anyone else would come into view and it says something about my relationship with him that it was the way he wore it so absently that impressed me rather than the achievement itself, because he never once mentioned it to me in all the time we spent together, so that even after I did hear about it from men who, in old age still remembered it with wonderment, I never asked him about it, as it seemed to me his silence on the subject only added to its grandeur and I did not want to take from it in any way with questions so that
years later, when his days as an oarsman were behind him but there was as yet no sign of the madness that would overtake him at the end, we took that Sunday trip in the trawler up towards Clare Island and he stood in the wheelhouse with Joe Needham who showed him all the instruments and the navigating equipment and it was no surprise that he took a special interest in the plotter and how it mapped out the rise and fall of the seabed beneath the keel and I could tell, just by the way he examined it that he could not let this go
could he fuck
because he saw in this new instrument a challenge to the triangulating system he had used to navigate by, the old method by which three landmarks were aligned from sea so as to position the boat over those raised parts of the sea floor where crabs and lobster fed and I wondered why, at this age of his life, when he was now an old man and his work as a fisherman was behind him, he could not ignore this challenge and let it pass, because we both knew there was a lot more at stake than the accuracy of a piece of folk wisdom or an antiquated system of navigation but I knew by looking at him that he could not let it go
he just couldn’t fucking do it so that
twenty minutes out from land, on a heading straight for Clare Island, he calculated that we would soon be over ‘The Maids’, a sudden rock shelf visible only at very low tide, a feeding ground on which crabs and lobsters thrived, and he stood at the stern of the boat looking back towards land because the old way of finding this particular marker was to head straight out from the bottom of Kerrigan’s land and bring the spire of the Protestant church in the north out with you till Matthew Ryan’s hayshed in the south came into view around the end of the headland and with these three markers drawn into alignment you should be over ‘The Maids’ as I knew them myself and still know them, having heard of them since childhood but not till now, when they were being put to the test, had I ever wondered how much faith should be put in this old way of finding them because while part of me had a real appreciation of such inherited wisdom another part of me was never sure just how wise it was to invest so much in it but now
my anxiety in all this was only a small wager – this old technique was not something I ever had to live by, unlike my father who now, at a time in his life when he could have passed up the challenge with honour, still found it necessary to test what he knew and had lived his own life by so that now, with him standing at the back of the boat and scanning the coast, my heart was in my mouth because there was no knowing how he’d react if his old system was at variance with the sonar and my sense of what was at issue was so clear to me it reached down into my very soul because, what really hung in the balance was the possibility that a good man, through no fault of his own, but by way of received wisdom and immemorial faith, may have lived an important part of
his life warped in error and foolishness, misguided over the seas and if that was now shown to be the case then might not that same foolishness have been handed down to me some way or other – what’s bred in the dog coming out in the pup – and been responsible for some of the misdirections of my own life so
now
he shouted from the stern
we should be over them now
and sure enough, standing in the wheel house, I saw the graph rising across the screen, the ocean floor coming up to meet the keel in a crest of shallow peaks, my soul rising with it, a gladness which must have been contagious because Joe Needham was chuckling and slapping me on the back as if I were responsible for the happy outcome, both of us relieved – thank fuck for that – and I went out to the old man and confirmed that yes, we had hit the marker and he contented himself with a nod, pointing out to me the relative positions of the church and the hayshed, markers which were ten miles apart in a straight line which traversed the parish west to east, a meridian known only to a handful of fishermen along this coastline and
that summer Sunday, with its blue sky arched down to the horizon beyond Clare Island my father showed me how he had so precisely fixed and located himself within the world’s widest shores, an incident I would recall often not because of what he had shown me but because I, with all my schooling and instruments, could never lay claim to such an accurate sense of myself in anything whatsoever, not even as
an engineer, whose life and works
concerned itself with scale and accuracy, mapping and surveying so that the grid of reason and progress could be laid across the earth, gathering its wildness into towns and villages by way of bridges and roads and water schemes and power lines – all the horizontal utilities that drew the world into settlements and community – this was my life, an engineer’s life, which, even if governed by calculations, was never one in which I was so accurately placed as my father, not then and not now either as I had thought that by now I would be carrying myself with more certainty – some part of me believing that with wife, work and family a wisdom of sorts would surely have come also and brought certain assurances or clarities but instead it seemed that all my circumstances had gathered to a point where they were unwilling to present themselves as a clear account, but settled instead into a giddy series of doubts, an unstable lattice of questions so far withholding any promise I might inherit
my father’s ability to comprehend the whole picture across all those contours and cycles in which our lives were grounded – family, farming and fishing and most memorable of all, politics, as he would show me in the run-up to the 1977 general election, that counter historical upheaval which was not only a watershed in the nation’s fortunes but which marked also my own political blooding as well over
thirty years ago now, hard to believe, and certainly not anything so predictable that morning I went out to start milking shortly after seven o’clock, a beautiful May morning with a cold mist rising off the land to meet a low sun as I came around the side of the barn with a galvanised bucket in my hand to see all the telegraph poles along the roadside hung with election posters that had gone up overnight, the face of a new candidate staring down at me from within a green and gold border, high up on every pole, this face echoing away into the mist back as far as the crossroads and
I, standing there
in the door of the cowshed with the bucket in my hand, was not to know that the way this candidate’s face paled off into the dawn was this moment’s way of telling me that at some time in the future I could look back and mark this morning as the moment in my life when I came to political consciousness, having turned eighteen earlier that year and my father having made sure he’d contacted the local Peace Commissioner to enter my name on the electoral register putting me among that large swathe of young people who would be voting for the first time in this election and who were judged by commentators to be an unpredictable element in its outcome so that
I, with a keen sense of my involvement in this historic moment and an anxious interest to measure my political wit in these charged circumstances persuaded my father to sit down with a constituency map of the country and, holding as many variables in mind as possible – all the likely swings and divisions of the electoral system – we would separately try to prophesy the result, going through the constituencies one by one and marking them as we thought they would fall when the votes were counted, all the gains and losses of an electoral campaign, and when the forty-two constituencies were complete I found that my prediction differed little from the current political wisdom, which foresaw the coalition government being returned with a loss of two or three seats at most across the whole country, a solid outcome that would see the nation returned to the sullen rule of the law and order party, an outcome which gratified me in one sense as I was happy to find my own result chiming with the majority of the media’s political analysis but which also had a disappointing lack of drama about it as well, a quality squarely in keeping with the personality of the outgoing government – steady and dogged and fixated on questions of security – but an outcome totally at odds with my father’s analysis which
when he pushed his paper across the table towards me, showed that he had weighed the opposition with a tidal majority of twenty-two seats, such an outlandish result and margin that, for a moment, I thought he had not taken the exercise seriously but had merely struck through the constituencies carelessly to have done with it and come up with this result which I was careful to recheck no fewer than three times but which, how ever way I did it, still refused to yield little of its ridiculous margin except one or two seats either way, no serious adjustment no matter how it was looked at it, twenty seats or thereabouts, an epic margin which, in the unlikely event of its fulfilment, would reconfigure the whole political horizon into the long-term future, but so utterly fantastical and beyond all likelihood that it was not made any more probable by my father getting up from the table without a word of explanation except to tap his finger in the centre of the map and say
big changes, mark my words
something of which he might have been referring to a few days later when a car pulled up at the gate and three men in suits and with party rosettes in their lapels came across the gravel towards us, two local men whose party affiliations we knew well and who were now leading the new party hopeful – the same candidate whose face I had seen in the morning mist and who now, in the flesh, presented himself as a tall man, well over six feet in a pinstripe suit, a man with an imperious air and an unusually long neck, a man who, even if he had not yet acquired the famous habit of speaking of himself in the third person had already about him an air of providential certainty, such was his bearing and his innate ability to look down on the world from a height as
the two men introduced him and he shook both our hands and asked me my name, correctly guessing that this would be my first time voting as he handed me a leaflet, this man with the side parting in his hair, listening while his canvassers gave a brief resume of his stellar career as a county councillor, ticking off all those local achievements which could be credited to his name – road surfacing, the new health dispensary, the extension to the local national school and the water filtering plant – some of the facilities he had agitated for and been present at the opening of – a broad swathe of achievement in local government which was all well and good they conceded, but it was now time for him to step up to national level where the power and influence resided, something which of course could only be of benefit to this western part of the constituency because, as was well known, it was ten years, more even, twelve, since this part of the county had a Dáil representative and it was past time there was a strong voice from this area to vent local concerns so that any stroke at all after his name on the ballot paper would be welcome and
I stood with my father at the gable of the house, sifting these weighty issues and savouring a fine sense of importance that the nation’s political process had come courting me and my vote, that it had taken the time to cross the country and shake my hand and make its case before me as it would any other man whose name was on the electoral register and who wielded the single transferrable vote and the idea that I was a citizen with consequential stake in these matters had such lasting effect upon me that, from that day to this, I have never failed to vote in any election and that while I may not hold to the one-true-political-faith anymore and I have, through the years, voted left, right and centre, each time doing so with some shade of that solemn meeting at the gable of the house renewing itself and prompting me, time and again that sense of consequence which attends putting a stroke on a ballot paper coming to me in the privacy of the voting booth as it did when
polling day came around on June 16th and our local national school was made over as a polling station with all its gates and the concrete wall surrounding the playground covered with the banners and posters of both parties, blue and green, jostling and overlapping each other on poles and pillars where men I knew since childhood stood with rosettes in their lapels handing out leaflets, pressing them into my hand on the off-chance that my decision might still be in the balance and could be swayed one way or the other by a leaflet at this last moment as I went into the middle room of the school and stood over the election officer, watching as he turned the pages of the register to find my name recorded there in blue ink before using a pen and ruler to strike through it with a single line as if obliterating it for all eternity before he handed me the stamped ballot paper with its list of candidates, which I took to the curtained cubicle at the other end of the classroom and ticked off my preferences, one, two and three in the boxes opposite the candidates’ names before folding it once across the centre and dropping it through the slot in the black ballot box
the single transferrable vote
amen
the electoral instrument so ingrained in the political psyche that it must surely be possible now to isolate its neural correlate, a twitching cluster of synapses to which we could point as proof that democracy in all its shades and hues inheres in our very souls, landslides and single-party rule, minority governments and coalitions, hung Dáils and all part of the very fabric of our being, after which
I stepped outside, my vote cast, my first say in the fate or destiny of my country and even if I did try to wear that responsibility lightly there was some urgency in the air which went beyond the result of a general election, something which later that night was not soothed by the nine o’clock news bulletin which confirmed that polling booths around the country were reporting an unusually high turnout, well over seventy per-cent which was impressive even for a country whose electorate were always keen to exercise their franchise as
the whole thing became clear the following morning when, within a few hours of the first ballot boxes being opened, tallymen in counting centres throughout the country began reporting a massive swing to the opposition, a double-digit surge which looked likely to sweep them to single-party government with an unprecedented majority of nearly twenty seats, a majority near-as-dammit to my father’s prophecy, which had me listening open-mouthed to the coverage throughout the day, when so many sitting TDs of the National Coalition began the inexorable process of losing their seats across the country, north, south, east and west, swept aside in both urban and rural constituencies by a tidal wave of electoral rejection
which was now taking its full revenge on the government for four years of rising unemployment figures, inflation and a whole ream of other grievances so that
by midday a steady marching pace was set for the cull which swept through the country, dropping a slew of sitting deputies in marginal constituencies who went down to small percentage swings, back benchers and cabinet ministers toppling also in a steady rhythm, the government’s officer class totally decimated by the time the leader of the National Coalition came on television later that night to concede defeat with his face fixed in an interminably long and silent opening shot before he finally spoke, his voice ragged with shock, telling the nation what it already knew, that the people had spoken so unequivocally it had left him with no option but to resign and hand over the reins of government to the opposition with all best wishes for the future, a resignation stiff with grace but that did not fully plumb the depths of the electoral disaster his coalition had undergone, so that we had to wait till early the next morning
before we got the full figures, the results of those late counts that had continued on after the close of broadcasting, the definitive nature of the victory clear and impressive now as commentators picked through the bones of the carnage, none of their reports quite catching the proper sense of epochal change which hung over the country that morning, something greater than a change of dispensation, something with a hidden force biding its time within those astonishing figures, reluctant to disclose itself just yet so that for a while commentators confined themselves to speaking in terms of a sweeping tidal movement that had carried the opposition party to power and while the image was clear, its broad application rolled over that grain of unease which grated at the heart of what had happened and around which some coherent anxieties would make themselves clear in the coming days as the drama of the opposition party being swept so triumphantly to power gave way
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