Days of Heaven

by Declan Lynch

  Poignantly, after the second or third time, one recalls a certain fear that took hold when it seemed certain that we would win another one and it was argued that RTÉ and the country in general just couldn’t afford to keep going like this. The figure which frightened us so much was something like £1.5 million, which these days is not much more than the take-home pay of a couple of top RTÉ executives, but which was considered so onerous back then, it seemed to involve making a straight choice between hosting the Eurovision or cancelling all other TV programmes planned for that year.

  We did it anyway, so anxious for recognition of any kind, we could not contemplate letting go of this weird knack that we had somehow mastered.

  Money and the rise of the new nations of Eastern Europe would eventually free us from this need, but until then, Eurovision would embroil Paddy in many of the old familiar contradictions — even in his moment of celebration there would be a lingering pall of shame; even the thing he was good at was inherently bad.

  But even this would have at least one unambiguously happy development, further on up the road — the director of the 1988 Eurovision, Declan Lowney, was a talented and ambitious chap and enough of a free spirit to complain openly to me in an interview for the Sunday Independent about some low-class act called Scott Fitzgerald that the Brits were sending over to represent them in the RDS. His outspokenness would have cost him a few extra moments of anxiety on the night, when the same Scott Fitzgerald was narrowly pipped for the top prize by the Swiss entry, sung by one Celine Dion.

  In the 1988 show, Lowney had tried to do something genuinely different, replacing the usual half-time bullshit with a video of Hot House Flowers busking ‘Don’t Go’ in cities all across Europe. The Flowers were supposed to become huge after this, as huge as Michael Flatley would become after a similar spectacular, but mysteriously, they didn’t — too Irish, maybe. But Lowney would do the best work of all, leaving RTÉ to move to London and eventually becoming the director of Ted.

  We were all trying to move beyond that Eurovision state of mind as we prepared ourselves for our debut on the vast, unforgiving stage that was Italia 90. And given the enthusiastic involvement of almost every element of Irish society, from the clowns of Official Ireland to the serious players of Killiney Hill, it seemed that we were looking at an unprecedented display of national unity.

  ——

  Which, in many ways, we were.

  Yet, after all these years I can still hear the voice of Father Michael Cleary coming through the wall.

  Yes, there was always something there to remind us that the country, as they say, was not half-settled.

  Needing a bit more space for child-rearing purposes, Jane and I and Roseanne had moved to an actual house on the other side of Dun Laoghaire, a very small terraced house, which of course we rented. And through the wall of that house every night, came the voice of Father Michael Cleary.

  The old lady next door was hard of hearing, so she used to listen to his programme on 98FM with the volume turned up loud, this rambling show which sounded like an extended parish bulletin, frequently featuring members of Youth Defence and the voices of various other ‘conservative’ Catholic organisations. They had been on a war footing for most of the 1980s and had won some and lost some, and had nothing else to be doing for the foreseeable future.

  So while we were presenting ourselves to the world as these wild and crazy guys who can go anywhere and enjoy the football and hold our drink, at home there was still a substantial minority who felt that a man such as Father Michael Cleary was a credible figure who still had something to contribute to the great debate.

  Now that it’s all over, it seems that the decline of the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland was some sort of an inevitable process, like the changing of the seasons, but in these pivotal years, the Church and its various storm-troopers were cocky after their victories in the abortion and divorce referenda and there was still a feeling that it could go either way.

  Jane and I would feel the need to send Roseanne to a non-denominational school, something that wouldn’t bother me greatly these days, but which at the time seemed like an issue that needed your full attention; Bishop Eamon Casey was still a prince of the church, much-loved and a gas character and most people were unaware that Father Michael Cleary was effectively a married man and a father in the biological sense.

  Or at least they were unaware, up to a point.

  Deep down, at some intuitive level, they must have known it. I don’t exclude myself from this complex system of denial: I ‘knew’ that Cleary had a child, or children. Or at least I ‘knew’ that in the course of a lifetime doing what he did, in the way that he did it, it would be inconceivable that The Singing Priest did not have a child or children. I had this running joke with a friend who worked in a tabloid paper at the time, whereby I would always greet him with the words, ‘Find Cleary’s children’, in the pompous tones of a Roman senator calling for Carthage to be destroyed. We ‘knew’ that there had to be at least one of them out there, but we also knew that it would be damnably hard to prove it. The aura of power still protected him, so that even a blackguard on the Father Michael Cleary scale seemed elusive, still free to roam.

  Yet he was a more fantastic creation than we had imagined at the time. Until Italia 90, perhaps the greatest single gathering of people on the island of Ireland in the latter part of the 20th century was for the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979, and Cleary had been the master of ceremonies.

  He was there on the stage in Galway with Bishop Eamon Casey, getting the crowd going in that vast arena as if he was working the room at the Old Shieling.

  We often hear commentators musing on the way that sport has replaced religion as the great communal activity of our time, except usually they are lamenting this, seeing it as an example of how we have lost our way. Perhaps they should reflect further on this in the case of Ireland, where the Pope’s visit would be followed by a decade of want, while the Charlton years would be followed by a decade of plenty. Perhaps they should reflect further on this, as they recall that the cheerleaders for the Pope would turn out to be deeply disturbed individuals while Charlton would never lose the respect and the gratitude of the people. And perhaps they should reflect even further on this, as they observe that we no longer felt the need to be supervised by priests and religious on our feast days. That we had surely grown up just a little, when we had Bill O’Herlihy up there as the chief moderator and John Giles and Eamon Dunphy getting us up for it, instead of Cleary and Casey — if that is not progress ...

  ——

  I have already alluded to the fact that I lived across the road from this Father Michael Cleary for a while. For about two years, indeed, I lived in a flat in Leinster Road in Rathmines (didn’t we all?) and Father Mick lived in a house on the other side of the road, maybe fifty yards away.

  Another Hot Press contributor, Michael O’Higgins, was also living in the neighbourhood, in a flat that was actually smaller than my own, from which he would emerge to join me for a late pint in the Leinster Inn, both of us entirely unaware of the true nature of Father Mick’s living arrangements — nor indeed would Father Mick have been aware that his daily movements were being observed by fellows from that well-known anti-God magazine.

  Mick O’Higgins, back then, was more exercised by various other blackguards in our midst, conducting interviews with the likes of Christy Dunne and Martin Cahill, all of which doubtless prepared him for his eventual career as one of the country’s best criminal lawyers and one of the few Senior Counsel who has spent any meaningful amount of time on the inside of a Rathmines bedsitter. Yet even O’Higgins’ forensic skills didn’t crack open the truth about the lifestyle of Father Michael Cleary.

  I would see him all the time, coming out of that house and getting into his car engulfed in smoke from the cigarettes that he smoked incessantly.

  I ‘knew’ that he was a man with normal urges which I ‘knew’ that he indulged the same as any ot
her man, yet it somehow never occurred to me for a moment that he might be indulging them behind the door of that house from which he emerged every day. That he would be out there performing his pastoral duties, whatever they might be, or broadcasting his rigidly orthodox Catholic opinions to the people of Dublin from the studios of 98FM, at the end of which he went home and went to bed. With his wife.

  Like all the best chancers, the true professionals, he had been hiding in plain sight. And he got away with it.

  He was dead by the time that his ‘wife’, Phyllis Hamilton, told the story of their relationship, which was not entirely unlike any other long-term relationship between a man and a woman, except for the fact that she was pretending to be his housekeeper and he was pretending to be a celibate Roman Catholic priest. Their son, Ross, was just trying to be himself against these almost insurmountable odds.

  But others must have ‘known’ about it, with or without the inverted commas. There were various characters that Cleary would bring home with him for late-night games of poker, with refreshments provided by his loyal housekeeper, which gave rise to one of the outstanding lines of the story, with Cleary telling the lads to throw ‘a few quid into the pot for poor oul Phyllis’.

  It would be nearly twenty years until the emergence of a sort of home movie of life behind the door of that house, a documentary called At Home With The Clearys, made by film-maker Alison Millar, who during her student days had shot a few apparently innocuous domestic scenes of Father Mick and his ‘housekeeper’ Phyllis and her son Ross. It is an amazing film, featuring this video diary of what we now realise was a secret family. It was made with the co-operation of Ross, and all the more powerful because it is not unkind to Cleary. It tries to show why the poor folks of Ballyfermot and Ballymun were so in thrall to him — basically, he was all they had, the only representative of Official Ireland who paid any attention to them. It showed that he had a certain generosity of spirit, a largeness of character, of that there is no doubt.

  Given his privileged background, it was clear that he could have had a perfectly normal life gambling and golfing and whoring without all the priestly bits thrown in. But he wanted it all. And I suspect that his background also partly explains why he thought he could get away with it: he was a member of that ruling class in Ireland, which had run the place since the foundation of the state, assiduously maintaining all the advantages for themselves and keeping everyone else in their place.

  For example, he would be ‘looking after’ unmarried mothers, quietly passing their children on to deserving middle-class couples, or just keeping tabs on them.

  In this role he saw abortion as the greatest of all evils — perhaps the only evil — to be conquered using all the skills at his disposal. These skills included his empathy for people who were in deep trouble, his ability to give them a bit of hope with a story or a song, and his almost unquantifiable reserves of complete and absolute bullshit.

  Ah, he was a disgraceful man, in so many ways. And yet, in saying that, I realise that he brings out things in me that I don’t like in myself. I don’t like to be judging people, and I don’t like people judging me.

  Which probably helps to explain the ferocity and the longevity of this battle between what you might call the old-fashioned values of ‘rural Ireland’ and what is termed the liberal agenda of ‘Dublin 4’.

  I don’t care for these terms any more as years of over-use by some of the more cynical characters in Irish life have rendered them virtually meaningless, but at this time of which we speak, there was a black-and-white split between these rival forces, made all the more horrible by this mutual ability to bring out the worst in each other.

  Charlie McCreevy, lionised by many a Questions and Answers panellist for his supposedly brilliant sense of humour, said something amusing once about his own constituency of Kildare, in which Allenwood was perhaps the quietest and the most nondescript of all the quiet and nondescript villages in the county — ‘And even in Allenwood, there is a Dublin 4 set’.

  Dublin 4 is a state of mind which most of us like to think is essentially un-Irish, this tendency to be ashamed of our own past and our own people, as unforgiving as the old ways which were under attack.

  And it is a state of mind, too, which lacks a genuine appreciation of the way things really worked, how it might actually be a good thing to cover up a little local scandal, how it could be a great kindness to hide the truth with a load of bullshit. Or, if you like, with ‘a sophisticated and responsive regulatory environment’.

  Yes, for generations before the establishment of the IFSC, Paddy had been running a sophisticated and responsive regulatory environment all over the place, in ways that the supposed sophisticates of the new Ireland of the 1980s didn’t entirely grasp. But somehow in the 1980s it started to shift from the usual nonsense about farmers paying tax, to something else altogether.

  At its most harmless, it manifested itself in the ‘moving statues’, which always gets a bit of an indulgent chuckle from the sages of Official Ireland, a form of localised voodoo which was also frowned upon by Official Catholic Ireland, including at least one bishop who was reprimanded by Eamonn McCann with these lines: ‘Here is a man, who, on a daily basis, purports to transform quantities of bread and wine into the body and blood of a person who allegedly lived about 2,000 years ago. I think he has a cheek’.

  I quoted this line in a piece for the Sunday Independent, leading to an odd little scene which demonstrated that Official Ireland might be pooh-poohing this as ‘silly season stuff’, yet it could have echoes of something deeper.

  I was stopped in the corridor of the Independent a few days after my piece was published by Sean Ryan, the football writer, who started to talk about my use of that quote of McCann’s. Sean is a nice man, so there was nothing menacing in his approach, but he was adamant that by quoting this paragraph of McCann’s, I had been appallingly offensive to many readers who were practising Catholics.

  At first I thought he was referring to McCann’s criticism of the bishop, but he insisted that that wasn’t a problem, that bishops are only human and can be criticised just like anyone else. No, his problem was that the Eucharist — which is essential to the Liturgy — was being disrespected here.

  I hardly knew Sean at all, so I had no idea about his religious beliefs, but this wasn’t the only reason why I found it hard to get my head around this encounter. Again, like the time I was accused of blasphemy by Bishop Comiskey, in a much more public fashion, it had never crossed my mind that such a reaction would be forthcoming — I wasn’t actually trying to be offensive, which sort of took the good out of it for me — but Sean and I stood there anyway, like creatures from a different solar system, meeting for the first time.

  And I suppose what made it bamboozling for me was the question that formed in my mind: would the people out there ever believe that in a corridor of Independent House, two men from the Sunday Independent were having a sincere and intense discussion about the role of transubstantiation in the context of the Liturgy? I don’t think so. Yet there was a civility about this encounter, which would not be apparent in the darker conflicts of that time.

  And Sean being a football man was a help.

  ——

  Looking back on the many accomplishments of Jack and the lads, I can think of no other force which came close to creating a sense that Irish people were generally embarked on a common purpose. In every other significant area of national life, you couldn’t go far without encountering this cultural split between the old Ireland and the emerging one. In fact, there can be no doubt that this fracture in the national psyche contributed greatly to all the other failures we were experiencing — if Ireland in the 1980s was a person, it would be described as ‘dysfunctional’, self-destructive, tormented by these incompatible ideas about how we should live.

  And the only thing which could apparently make it better was this sense of belonging to the alternative Republic of Ireland, a better place, ruled by the benign dic
tator, Jack. From Euro 88 onwards, as the big matches got bigger, it felt like everyone was on the same side for a change. I have this abiding image of a nun driving her little car a bit faster than usual down the Stillorgan dual carriageway to get home in time for a game of which she probably knew nothing except that it was very, very important for Ireland to win. Or maybe to draw. If he did nothing else, Jack Charlton could claim that he made the Irish feel like they all lived in the same country for a while.

  And, in time, we got the idea that it was better for us to be living like this than to be going back to the two-nations approach, where typically something terrible would happen in rural Ireland — the death in 1984 of 15-year-old Ann Lovett and the infant to which she gave birth in the grotto in Granard would be the most terrible example — and the Dublin media would arrive in large numbers to find out The Truth. The locals would suddenly be transformed into the cast of Bad Day At Black Rock, sullen and secretive and hostile, convinced that every reporter was Spencer Tracy, trying to find out their awful secret. And of course they were not entirely wrong.

  Deep down, the majority of journalists were convinced that they were dealing with a crowd of incorrigible rogues who were congenitally dishonest and mired in obscurantism. And of course they were not entirely wrong.

  And yet being right about so much does not necessarily mean that you will always be doing the right thing. I, for one, was not living a life markedly more righteous than Father Michael Cleary’s. I was drinking a lot, whereas Cleary didn’t drink at all. I was smoking nearly as much as he was; I was gambling nearly as much; for all I know, I was not even as good a ‘husband’ as he was, though I did acknowledge my own child. I was not offering succour to people in distress, as he was, and if I had a nightly radio show, I would not have been reading out requests from prisoners in Wheatfield, as he did all the time.