Days of Heaven

by Declan Lynch

  Generally at that time if McQuaid expressed disapproval of anything, it would be studiously avoided by all members of the ruling class and anyone else who knew what was good for them, but a crowd of 22,000 turned out that day, giving out a great roar of Dublin working-class defiance of the ogre McQuaid, or anyone else who would deny them the great joy of their lives that was association football. And turning a predictable 4-1 defeat into a great day for Ireland.

  Dermot loved that story, but he couldn’t drum up enough interest in making a movie out of it, or a TV drama or whatever. So he continued on, constantly trying to get something started, rounding up anyone in Dublin with any sense of humour at all, meeting in hotels and making big plans.

  Though it would be whispered that he was ‘unprofessional’, in a larger sense he was perhaps the only true professional in a place full of amateurs.

  Like the Republic he kept getting the bad breaks, but there was something different about Dermot, something that the football team probably doesn’t have to this day — he would never be content with the moral victories. He really felt that there was a million bucks out there with his name on it, and that he was going to get there eventually. Unlike the Republic, the lads who would turn back so many times at the gates of the promised land, when the time came, he would be able to take that extra step. He wasn’t afraid of it.

  They say that politics and football don’t mix, but of course that is twaddle. In fact, if we know nothing else about this world, we know that politics and football mix, all the time.

  Yet at the time of Jack’s appointment, so sad was the state of Irish football and of Ireland in general, that politics and football genuinely weren’t mixing. In fact, far from mixing with it, few politicians would care to recognise the existence of the game, because there was really nothing in it for them.

  This hadn’t always been the case. We have already alluded to the roaring 1950s’ controversy over the visit by communist Yugoslavia — which may seem like a religious matter, though of course at the time religion was politics: religion was just about everything. But traditionally the Church favoured Gaelic games, with the Archbishop of Cashel and Emly throwing in the ball for the All-Ireland hurling final and the minor football final, and the Artane Boys Band entertaining the crowd at Croke Park with their march medleys, with no mention of the fact that Artane was one of the institutions run by the Church and the State in which poor children were routinely abused physically and sexually. At Dalymount Park we preferred the music of the free men of the St James Brass and Reed band.

  Admittedly, there has been a suggestion of bad politics in the legend that the Republic was the first country to offer to play Germany after the Second World War, which is allegedly the reason that the ‘away’ strip of the Germans is green — a sort of tribute to Paddy for reaching out to the fallen Fatherland. It is a lovely story but, as far as we can ascertain, it is not true. Switzerland was actually the first country to play Germany after World War 2. Though it has to be said that a reasonable percentage of people in Ireland at that time would have been proud to have the Germans wearing the green, both home and away.

  In the ‘modern’ era, until Jack started getting a few big results, for a long time, one of the few Irish politicians who would openly be associated with the Republic’s football team was David Andrews. As you waited for the kick-off in Dalymount, reading the official match programme, you would see Andrews’ name as Patron of the FAI. It would look quite impressive — Andrews, after all, was the scion of a leading Fianna Fáil family, a distinguished-looking cove.

  But if you looked a little bit closer, you would realise that Andrews’ association with the FAI did not necessarily mean much in the greater Fianna Fáil scheme of things. He was, after all, marginalised on the ‘liberal’ wing of the party, opposed to the leadership of Charles Haughey for all sorts of reasons, not all of them good, and to complete the stereotype, he represented the borough of Dun Laoghaire, which, in the eyes of many of his colleagues, would make him a West Brit and thus the right man to be endorsing the garrison game.

  For a long time, Official Ireland, as it was christened by Eamon Dunphy, had stayed away from the garrison game, but with Italia 90 coming down the track, that time was about to end.

  ——

  It would be wrong to think that Haughey preferred Gaelic games to football, as such. He had played Gaelic football in his youth and he would feel it was in his interest to be seen in Croke Park rather than in Lansdowne Road, but I don’t think Haughey had much interest in sport anyway. At least, not in the ball-games of the masses. He had refused invitations to Lansdowne Road, fearing it might upset his followers, with all its associations with ‘foreign games’. In his mature years he favoured the pastimes of the gentry, the hunting and the shooting and the sailing, partly due to his exalted image of himself and the lifestyle he felt appropriate for a man of his stature, and partly for more deep-rooted psychological reasons. You could never imagine Haughey playing golf, for example. It is too humbling. It exposes human weakness too horribly and its image is too middle class — Haughey didn’t see himself as middle class, but as an aristocrat. So instead of thrashing around in a bunker and wheeling his trolley around the links with other men who might well include a taxi-driver, Haughey preferred to equip himself for his sporting endeavours with a horse, or a boat, or a gun.

  He had materialised on the podium to hail Stephen Roche’s win in the Tour de France, but there was a hint of cosmopolitan glamour to this — it was Paris, after all — and he had done this for the usual venal motives which compel politicians to associate themselves with sporting success, or just to have their picture taken, yet there was something almost inspiring about the lengths to which he was prepared to go in this case. Only a country that is completely desperate for something good to happen to it, could imagine their Prime Minister travelling to another country in this way, to seize his moment.

  We really needed it, and he was able to recognise that need.

  We had lived in a world of bullshit for so long, that when something of this magnitude happened, and it wasn’t bullshit, it was almost too much for us, and for our leader, to take in. Especially when the leader in question had been instrumental in perpetuating so much of that bullshit.

  He was a man of almost unlimited appetites in relation to food, drink and sex, yet his governments would hold the line against the ‘liberal agenda’ which he himself had been following to the full extent of his capabilities for most of his adult life, along with a few agendas of his own which the most far-seeing liberals wouldn’t even have contemplated.

  Not that a leader should necessarily be a virtuous man, or a consistent man, but the gap between the public and the private Haughey was remarkable. And yet he kept us darkly entertained with the grandeur of the deception — the sophisticated statesman who was paralysed with fear of doing anything that might upset the most backward of his followers; the lord in his mansion telling us we were living above our means. And this was before we were fully aware that Haughey was ‘rich’ only to the extent that he could get people who were actually rich to bung him bucketfuls of money.

  Yes, it was probably the size of the lies that entertained so many of us, that made us recognise in Haughey some essential characteristic of our tribe, some inexhaustible and ineradicable strain of bullshit.

  ——

  My one encounter with The Boss was actually quite pleasant. It was back in 1986, not long after the arrival of Jack, and the actual purpose of my visit to Leinster House was to interview the Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, Father Miguel d’Escoto. He was over here with a delegation from the Sandinista government, the Sandinistas being so hot at the time, The Clash had named an album after them. It was not unknown for young Irish people to go over there to join in the spirit of the revolution which had deposed the evil old American-backed Somoza regime. Which probably wasn’t as leisurely as a summer spent in Puerto Banus, but perhaps a tad more character-forming. The writer Joseph O’
Connor went there, and it became the setting for his novel Desperadoes.

  O’Connor would eventually write powerful stuff about the Irish at the World Cup in America, but in 1986, that was an unimaginable journey.

  Our new football supremo, Jack, would not have realised it, but he was coming to a country in which people were so desperate to find something to support that was even half-decent, the best of them would take themselves off to the badlands of Central America to seek it.

  In fact, few of us realised the true potential of a successful Ireland football team because Haughey’s Ireland, and indeed Garret FitzGerald’s Ireland, had dissipated our energies in so many other ways, we could no longer imagine the nation coming together for any purpose. In our hearts there was a hole the size of Nicaragua, and as far as we could tell, Jack Charlton wouldn’t be doing much to fill it.

  We were wrong about that. But it seemed pretty unpromising at the time, with most of our good players getting older and Jack only getting the job after a deeply twisted voting procedure, an FAI cock-up in the grand style which was best described by Liam ‘Rashers’ Tuohy, one of the unsuccessful candidates. ‘It was a two-horse race’, he said. ‘And I finished fourth.’

  There was no sane reason in 1986 to hope that a soaring new vision of our country might emerge from the general direction of Merrion Square, or indeed from Leinster House, which was just a few yards away from the powerhouse of Irish football, so some of us would be looking instead to the Sandinistas for a vision of a risen people. They had defied the United States of America, a superpower which lived just up the road from them, while we were arguing about the Kerry Babies. They had replaced the disgraceful Somoza with the impressive Ortega, while we were thinking of replacing the illustrious Liam Brady with some busy little geezer from Oxford Utd called Houghton.

  And their Foreign Minister was a priest, but no Father Michael Cleary he.

  The interview had been arranged with Hot Press by Michael D. Higgins, and I was told it would be done ‘over lunch’. So I was expecting a few minutes with the distinguished cleric while we ate egg and chips in the cafeteria and railed against the evils of the Reagan administration, only to discover on my arrival at Leinster House that contrary to all my expectations this would be quite an elegant affair, a full dinner for about ten people with several courses and waiters pouring drops of wine into your glass for you to taste and to offer your approval, before they filled it.

  Introduced to the Foreign Minister by Michael D., I did the interview at the side of the room while they were having the aperitifs. He talked up a storm, did Father D’Escoto, about Reagan’s dirty war, while I sipped a Campari.

  Then I found myself sitting down to the first course with the distinguished visitors and our own representatives, including Gerard Collins of Fianna Fáil, then out of government, leaving Gerard free to be eating big dinners with the revolutionary intellectuals of Central America. I seem to recall some humorous discussion taking place about Irish sausages and their significance in our culture, with Collins asking the waiter if some sausages could be produced for our guests — ‘pig-meat’ he added for the benefit of the Nicaraguans — perhaps momentarily forgetting that Father D’Escoto was a highly-educated Catholic priest who had probably figured out somewhere along the line that sausages are made of pig-meat. But at least Collins was there: to his eternal discredit, Garret FitzGerald who was then Taoiseach, was a no-show.

  Haughey came in, about halfway through, for all the world as if he was still the man in charge, which in his mind he probably was. First, he had some bad news. ‘There has been an explosion at a nuclear reactor in the Soviet Union,’ he intoned, standing at the top of the table.

  Thus I heard the news about Chernobyl, from Charles Haughey. It was not looking good. Then he turned to Michael D.: ‘You were right about that nuclear thing all the time, Michael D.,’ he said, and then he quipped good-naturedly: ‘Now why don’t you do the right thing and leave that bloody party . . ?’

  Haughey had apparently always felt that a man of Michael D.’s calibre was wasted in the Labour Party, and perhaps he longed to have him on his side if only as a companion, someone he could regard as an equal. A man unlike the gobshites in his own party, a man to whom he could talk about the finer things in life.

  Which might or might not include Michael D.’s long association with Galway Utd football club. It is not widely known that Michael D. has any association with Galway Utd though he is actually the President of the grand old club. And the fact that it is not widely known says much about the man himself and the restraint he would show in the years to come, when colleagues who knew nothing and cared less about football would be disporting themselves in executive boxes, claiming ownership of the Boys In Green in the company of Corporate Paddy. Their good buddy.

  Michael D. would be not be along for that ride.

  As he introduced me to Haughey and we shook hands, I thought I felt a weakness come over him at the mention of the words Hot Press, perhaps a flashback to his infamous John Waters interview in which Haughey had said ‘fuck’ a lot, and which had done him no harm — though the memory of all those unguarded remarks appearing across several pages of the magazine may have haunted him still. In truth, it was actually quite a statesmanlike little appearance, especially given the gracelessness of the Fine Gael absence — maybe Garret was out there formulating the Fine Gael response to Chernobyl.

  Haughey was back in the saddle in 1987, with Fine Gael, now under Alan Dukes, having formulated the Tallaght Strategy, a fancy name given to the policy of allowing Haughey to run the country without Fine Gael indulging in asinine opposition just for the sake of it, as long as Haughey did the right things. The responsible things.

  Then in 1989, after a bad election call, Haughey found himself, incredibly, in coalition with Des O’Malley, the man to whom he was thought to be referring in that Hot Press interview when he said that there were some fuckers whose throats he’d like to cut, fuckers he would like to throw over the edge of a fucking cliff.

  Now this fucker was his partner in government.

  According to Official Ireland, everything started to change around this time. According to received wisdom, in the late 1980s Haughey, with the greatest reluctance, finally put aside all the bullshit and started to face the truth about the state of economy, to accept that it was completely and utterly fucked and actually to do something about it.

  And according to Official Ireland, this, allied to the improved sense of national well-being which was being created by various Irish successes, most notably those of U2 and the football team under the Gruff Yorkshireman, would set the country on the right road.

  And that road would eventually lead to this thing called the Celtic Tiger.

  ——

  Neat.

  Maybe too neat.

  Maybe, in fact, more bullshit.

  Here’s an alternative reading of the situation, by Gene Kerrigan, in a Sunday Independent column in 2009 in which he reflects on the calibre of Ireland’s elite and their version of history:

  The first generation of leaders having achieved independence, weren’t sure what to do with it. Thus, the country stagnated for several decades, dependent on emigration for survival.

  In those days the elite included the Catholic Church. The priority for the bishops was to safeguard their power — to the point of protecting the abusers of children. In business it was the era of cute hoors, building small local dynasties. In politics, it was a time of placeholders.

  Then came Haughey — a bright man, who hadn’t a new idea since the 1960s. He was a taker, and he took incessantly, lost in self-aggrandisement.

  To today’s media cheerleaders, the late 1980s was the time when political leaders took ‘tough decisions’ and restored balance to public finances. To some of us, that era looks somewhat different. It was a period of massive, complex criminal tax frauds, organised by bankers and engaged in by thousands of ‘respectable’ people from the comfortable classes,
at a cost to the State of hundreds of millions of pounds. The roll-call of criminality is studded with household names, in politics and business.

  At the time, many within the elite — in the professions, in politics, even in the Central Bank — knew about the frauds.

  There was no ‘tough decision’ to confront this criminal assault on the republic. Instead the health and education of the punters, the skulls, the eejits, bore the brunt. In a traumatised health service, people died prematurely, unnecessarily, cruelly.

  Our leaders stood not with us, but with the criminals. In some cases they were the criminals.

  The police, as always when the elite are involved, found something else to do. (Jailing street traders was a biggie.)

  If allegations can’t be ignored, tribunals are set up — to last years, costing millions, too often leading absolutely nowhere.

  The professions service and benefit from this state of affairs. The academics too. The media picks a hero from the ranks of the powerful and cheerleads.

  The past 20 years have been dominated ideologically by the PDS and Charlie McCreevy, who mimicked the idea of the then-fashionable Thatcher and Reagan ‘revolution’. This involved wrecking the tax base and unwinding the regulatory reforms that followed the Great Depression and stabilised capitalism for 40 years.

  It could be summarised as, ‘let’s free the imagination of the entrepreneur from the dead hand of bureaucratic regulation’.

  Oh, I see.