by Declan Lynch
And it was actually more like nine minutes still to go, or, if you like, ‘Teenage Kicks’ played three times in a row. Except this time it seemed to be playing at 78 rpm.
——
That Dutch couple found it easy to empathise with George — after all, they had seen a couple of World Cup Finals slipping away, one of them in Germany itself, playing football of such mesmerising beauty even now the thought of it stirs the blood. But this was our first taste of losing at this level, of seeing some ludicrously large prize just out of reach, a place in the semi-final denied us by these aristocrats who would duly go on to win the tournament. And we wondered if indeed we had any right to be knocking the likes of them out of the tournament, as we would have done if we had held out for the draw.
They would play the Soviet Union in the Final. That would be the same Soviet Union that we had ‘beaten’ 1-1.
Holland would win Euro 88, by which stage we would be just enjoying the weather. I have no idea what the weather was actually like during those weeks. But in the mind’s eye, the sky was blue and the sun shone all the time.
The Homecoming gave us not just another day out but one of the enduring lines of the Charlton years. Somewhere in the centre of Dublin City, from the top of the bus, an elated Ray Houghton started up the chant: ‘Who put the ball in the England net?’
If there had been any question at all that Houghton was one of our own, this settled it. He was Paddy, to the core. And he also seemed instinctively to understand that while he was obviously having his fun at the expense of the country which had provided him with an exceptionally good living and all the opportunities he needed to become Paddy in the first place, it was also just that — it was just fun.
A few months previously, at Milltown cemetery in Belfast, the loyalist Michael Stone had materialised at the grave of three IRA members shot dead while on active service in Gibraltar by the SAS. In a scene which was filmed as it happened by the television cameras, Stone fired several shots and threw grenades, and could then be seen shooting at his pursuers as he ran from the cemetery. He had killed three people and injured 60, bringing a macabre new dimension to the North, where until that day, it was generally accepted that the one safe place was the graveyard.
And then at the funeral of one of Stone’s victims, two plain-clothes British army corporals, who were observing the proceedings in an unmarked car, were spotted by republican mourners. Their car was surrounded by a frenzied mob, some of whom would later claim that they feared another Stone-like attack. The two Brits were dragged from the car and beaten and shot to death. Pictures of their naked bodies lying on waste land were seen all over the world.
Now, at the height of summer, Ray Houghton could be heard singing ‘Who put the ball in the England net?’ to the tune of ‘The Camptown Races’, and it came across like a regular line of sporting banter. The sort of line you’d hear in the context of some ancient and intense sporting rivalry between, say, Kerry and Dublin. Ancient and intense, but perhaps not quite as violent as the rivalry between Kerry and Dublin.
So it seemed as if the football team had carved out a territory in which we might have a normal level of hostility with our neighbours, played out in a sporting manner, the way that normal countries do. It seemed as if the Englishness of Charlton and about half his team had helped to make that possible by demonstrating that there were just too many links between Ireland and England to sustain the idea that we were implacable enemies.
And that those links were tending to redound to our benefit, rather than theirs.
Maybe it’s just the potency of football, the deep importance of it, that helped to convey this impression that something unique was going on here in the context of Anglo-Irish relations and of our relationship with the rest of the world. But if we really take a look at ourselves, we can see that the emergence of the football team was just the most compelling example of a phenomenon which had been happening in an understated way for a very long time.
It’s not entirely true to say that Paddy just can’t make it on his own, but it is certainly true to say that Paddy generally does a lot better when he mixes it up a bit, when he fuses his own talents with the talents of others.
And it goes well beyond the ‘great-grandmother’ rule and the diaspora.
It even goes beyond the human, when you consider that the world’s greatest trainer of racehorses, Vincent O’Brien, sought the best of American bloodstock. And to get them across the line he had the greatest of all English jockeys, Lester Piggott.
In so many fields, for a very long time, we have been quietly availing of the services of those who do not belong to our gene-pool, who were not born in Ireland, but who have been an intrinsic part of almost every ‘Irish’ cultural project which has been internationally successful. Starting with the most bleeding obvious example, two of the members of U2 are not Irish in the straightforward sense of being born in Ireland or having Irish parents: the Edge’s people are from Wales, and he was born in England, as was Adam Clayton. And Bono’s mother came from the Protestant tradition, which is more a part of our English than our Irish heritage. Their mentor, Bill Graham, was from the North. Or, if you like, the United Kingdom. And their manager, Paul McGuinness, was born in Germany.
The film My Left Foot was universally regarded as an all-Irish international success, and of course director Jim Sheridan and producer Noel Pearson are Irish to all intents and purposes, yet one of the Oscars was won by Daniel Day-Lewis, who is in many ways, deeply English. Due to his complex bohemian background, he is also deeply Irish in many ways, but again, there’s a mixture here. Would a conventionally Irish actor, born and reared in this country, have delivered such an extraordinary performance? Maybe he would have done. We will never know.
But Neil Jordan surely, is Irish in every way? Yes, but much of his most successful work has been done in collaboration with the producer Stephen Woolley, who is English. They would appear to understand each other at a creative level. And Jordan would also acknowledge a debt to his mentor in film-making, John Boorman, who has lived in Ireland for many years but who is definitely English.
It is an interdependence and a source of mutual inspiration that was perhaps most powerfully seen in the relationship between Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, the Irishman and the Englishman who were in captivity in Beirut at this time. They would be released in 1990 and 1991 respectively, having completely missed Euro 88 and Italia 90 and their friendship would be viewed as a rare example of the Irish and the English coming together in a common cause.
But as we are seeing, it is not so rare after all.
We have already alluded to this potent fusion in the area of rock ’n’ roll, whereby the children of Irish emigrants would be regarded as Paddies by the English and as Brits by their relations back in Ireland, in Roscommon and Cork and Mayo where they would go for their summer holidays. They were mixed-race in a way that seemed to lead to enormous creativity. Enormous pain, no doubt, in many ways, too, but pain that produced Johnny Rotten and Morrissey and the Gallaghers and Shane MacGowan.
The Pogues were actually derided early doors by the traditional musician Noel Hill, for what they were doing to Irish music. But while the purists felt they were bringing us into disrepute with their noise and their drinking, the rest of the world could see that a beautiful thing was happening here with this London-Irish combo. They had created this sound of the Irish in England which you felt had somehow always existed, just waiting to be released — but not by the Irish acting alone. In this context the narrow nationalism of Sinn Féin, ‘ourselves alone’, can be seen to have brought us not just a thousand pointless murders, but was Paddy’s sure-fire recipe for failure.
Roddy Doyle may have fulfilled all the criteria for full-blown Irishness, but his commercial success was assisted by the brilliance of Alan Parker’s version of The Commitments, which was made with American money and which turned Roddy’s slim debut novel into a barnstorming modern musical — that would be the same Alan P
arker, who was so disappointed to hear us cheering the misfortunes of his England team as he scouted for locations in Dublin pubs. And then there were the film versions of The Snapper and The Van, superbly directed by Stephen Frears, an Englishman, of course. Roddy, indeed, would be an obvious collaborator with the English, because English football is his game, and the game of his male characters. They speak of doing things ‘the Liverpool way’, as naturally as their Gaelic literary forbears spoke of getting the pikes together at the rising of the moon.
I am thinking also of Arthur Mathews, Graham Linehan, Dermot Morgan, Ardal O’Hanlon and Pauline McLynn who were all football men and women — all, at least, apart from Graham. Whilst they could put together one of the most successful comedy series of all time, featuring situations and characters who were quintessentially Irish, again they could only do it with the generous support of the English, such as the late Geoffrey Perkins, a producer who believed in them. (You can still find people who think that Ireland’s indigenous TV service RTÉ turned down Father Ted, but the truth is actually worse than that — RTÉ never got the chance to turn it down, because it never occurred to the lads to offer it to them in the first place.)
In fairness to us, we have always openly acknowledged the Anglo-Irishness of some of our most celebrated writers, of Yeats and Synge and Beckett. We have never denied that Wilde and Shaw and Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan needed to join forces with all sorts of English types to make their genius known, or that Sean O’Casey — who, like Bono, is from the Protestant tradition — eventually preferred to live and work among the English. There was Joyce, who might appear like a rare exception to the rule, until you recall that he may have been all Irish himself, but he found it necessary to get out of here, in a hurry, in order to be discovered by the cognoscenti of Paris. And of course, the hero of Ulysses, the definitive Irish epic, was the Jewish Leopold Bloom. Not exactly your card-carrying, bona-fide, full-metal-jacket Paddy there.
Nor were Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, founders of the Gate theatre, who constructed this weird and marvellous façade of Irishness around themselves, perhaps to take our minds off the fact that they weren’t Irish at all, but English.
You might be thinking though, that Christy Moore is Irish, in every possible way and that is true. But then Christy is not universally known and internationally successful in the sense of having hit records in Britain and America and all around the world. Not like Chris de Burgh, for example, whose father was British and who lived in Argentina as a child.
Brendan Behan himself, whose image would appear on any tea-towel featuring the faces of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, is an interesting case. Behan’s sensibility was largely influenced by two things — his membership of the IRA, which involved him in the bombing campaign in England for which he was sent to borstal, and the borstal itself, which broadened his view of life and gave him the material for his best work, Borstal Boy.
You could compare this awakening to the way a raw young Irish footballer would go to England with a lot of ability but a lot of bad habits too, which would be knocked out of him in one of the great ball-playing institutions of Manchester or Liverpool. All of which, in the fullness of time, would leave him better prepared to serve his own country, in a more constructive fashion.
It is also universally acknowledged that Behan’s work in the theatre was championed and largely shaped by Joan Littlewood, who was born in Stockwell, a part of London not unknown to Paddy in the 1980s. The young Conor McPherson was similarly nurtured by the Bush Theatre in London and Martin McDonagh, lest we forget, is a Londoner by birth.
Behan himself, who kept a close watch on the Paddy in all of us, would have noted the ironies and paradoxes of his revolutionary roots, the fact that the men of 1916 included Pádraig Pearse, whose father was from Birmingham and would not have qualified to play football for Ireland, and James Connolly who was Scottish and who could only have played for the Republic that he envisioned under the parentage rule. When you add in exotics such as Roger Casement to the mixer, you can see that even in the defining narrative of Irish independence, Paddy couldn’t quite make it on his own.
Dana herself is from Northern Ireland, which is another country. Jesus H. Christ, even Foster & Allen, who gave us a few anxious moments with those kilts they were sporting on Top Of the Pops, were singing ‘A Bunch Of Thyme’, which is thought to be of English origin.
The search for the ‘true’ Irish goes on: Bob Geldof’s people are originally from Belgium; Sinead O’Connor’s great hit was written by a little guy from Minneapolis called Prince Rogers Nelson; Phil Lynott, being black, would not exactly be viewed as the stereotypical Irishman and rightly so, as he was born in Birmingham and his father was from Brazil, but his statue now stands in Harry Street, just off Grafton Street, where Glen Hansard of The Frames used to do his busking; Glen, who somehow won the Oscar for best song, when the no-budget Irish movie Once miraculously became an international hit. Which might seem like an extremely rare all-Irish success story until you remember that the song ‘Falling Slowly’ was co-written by Hansard’s co-star in the film, Markéta Irglová, who is from the Czech Republic — a new stop there on the traditional route.
No doubt I’m forgetting a few things here, but I don’t think I’m forgetting much — Seamus Heaney became very successful in the late 1980s but again we tend to forget that Seamus is from Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. He would have played his football not for the Republic, but for Norn Iron.
All of which leaves us with ... Enya. Yes, Enya is entirely Irish, every day, in every way. And so is her music. Except, now that I think of it, Enya’s recordings are essentially a collaboration with her producers, Nicky Ryan and his wife Roma, who writes the lyrics. And Roma is from Belfast, which is in Northern Ireland, which again we must remind ourselves, is part of the United Kingdom. So Enya doesn’t count either, in our quest to find something that is purely Irish and in no way English or American or Belgian or Brazilian but especially English — and that is internationally successful. To which the ‘wags’ might respond that the Boys In Green themselves have no place in this discussion, because they never won anything, or came close to winning anything.
But we will ignore that gibe, for the moment.
In terms of a victory on the international stage that was down to Paddy and nobody but Paddy in the purest sense, that we could truly say was ours and ours alone, to the best of my recollection there is ... the Eurovision Song Contest. In fact, there would eventually be seven Eurovisions. But wait ... There’s no way around this ...
Johnny Logan was born in Australia.
The breakthrough, I believe, was against Spain. As we look back on those years, we tend to see it all as one extended breakthrough. But there were breakthroughs within the greater breakthrough. And the greatest of these was at Lansdowne Road against Spain on 26 April 1989, in the qualifying campaign for Italia 90. It was a game against a great football nation that we absolutely had to win and that we actually won — it had never happened before in the Charlton era (we didn’t absolutely have to beat England in Stuttgart) and it would never happen again (Romania is not a great football nation and while we would beat them on penalties in the last 16 of Italia 90, the match itself was a scoreless draw).
After the fine madness of Euro 88 we had been re-connected to reality in the first match of the new campaign, receiving a right royal rogering from Johnny Spaniard in Seville the previous November. The result was 2-0, but it felt a lot worse than that. It felt just like old times, in fact, to be playing against these guys who were bred in the purple and to have our lack of class so clearly exposed.
Reduced to the simplest terms, such encounters tended to demonstrate that those guys were just much better at football than our guys. Anyone who has ever played football can relate to that at a visceral level. It brings you back to the schoolyard to an under-12 match, where it is plain to see that some lads are just better than others, they have
more talent. You might keep them out for a while, these lads who are just better at football, by dint of hard work and honesty of effort and the vague hope that they don’t really give a damn anyway. But they’ll get you in the end.
And though you’ve tried so hard, maybe in the end it’s not that hard to accept. Because it is, after all, the truth.
So the slaughter in Seville, at one level, felt a bit like nature taking its course. We could live with that, as we have always lived with it. And maybe we felt we needed to be reminded of the eternal verities, to submit ourselves to the tyranny of fact.
At Euro 88, we had played three, won one, drawn one and lost one.
We had not qualified from the group. It was a breakthrough just to be able to compete, but there was another breakthrough which had eluded us. Perhaps because, for all our undoubted charms, we just weren’t good enough at football.
Yes, we had beaten England, but they had battered us, and on another day they would have scored. Yes, we had played something that looked remarkably like football against the USSR, but high on the improbability of it all, we hadn’t got the result. And they, with their innate Soviet know-how and cunning, had qualified. Not us. And while that late goal in Gelsenkirschen had made us curse the baleful gods, it hadn’t fooled us into thinking that we were actually as good as Holland, either on that day, or on any other day.
So we were in a new place in the aftermath of Euro 88, an exciting place but a dangerous place nonetheless for Paddy.
Having established that everyone liked us, was it possible that they might also come to respect us?
——
It is one of our great character defects, this desperate desire to be liked.