Days of Heaven

by Declan Lynch

  It wasn’t good enough any more to assume that a woman photographer would take it, because the women had also succumbed. Since so many of the ‘social’ struggles of the 1980s concerned them and what they were or were not entitled to do with their lives, it seems that women, too, were seeing Italia 90 as the perfect opportunity to wind down and to let themselves go. And as Nell McCafferty would point out, the women were indirectly paying for a lot of it, because the men were spending money in places like Sicily, or maybe just down at the Submarine Bar, that would otherwise be frittered away on household items such as food and clothing for the children.

  But perhaps the most unheralded contribution of the women at this time was the way they facilitated the drinking.

  Rightly or wrongly, Paddy has always felt that women are a controlling presence in this area, a barrier to his full enjoyment of the drinking life. He sees them essentially in a policing role. When he is watching football on television, for example, sipping a few cans of cool beer, and slipping into a state of deep, deep relaxation, the voice of woman seems to call him back from that happy place. And no matter what she is saying, this is all he can hear: ‘Stop relaxing ... stop relaxing ... stop relaxing ...’

  Paddy has always found it hard to relax. There is no stillness in him, no quietude in his restless soul. So the month-long festival of football and drinking that was Italia 90, seemed to offer to him the prospect of the deepest relaxation he would ever have, a spiritual journey.

  Of course, there would be moments of terrible tension and anxiety too, but even they would be experienced in the context of this broader peace that he was enjoying, this retreat from the world, into the World Cup.

  And yet he could not share this inner vision with his life’s partner. He could share it only with other men, who had an effortless understanding of it.

  So when women started to catch the Italia-90 virus in large numbers, there was an historical moment of reconciliation between two equal and opposite forces — and there was no need for women to know the off-side rule or to know anything about anything. All that was needed was their indulgence.

  The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989, and in Ireland a fair few monuments to repression had been coming down, too. But the collapse of this particular Wall, between the drinking football man and the women of Ireland, was a marvellous thing to behold. Some critical mass of irresponsibility had been reached, which allowed women to desert their posts and to join the party.

  In the build-up to one of the matches, on Philipsburgh Avenue, the poet and broadcaster Theo Dorgan remembers seeing a group of elderly Dublin women, attired in the national colours, lined up on a street in a state of high excitement, doing the can-can.

  Women realised at some point that all the normal laws of nature had been suspended, so they might as well go with it. They might as well get themselves a funny hat and a big inflatable hammer in the Ireland colours and go down to the pub and stand there shouting at the big screen like everyone else — it was too late to stop now. Maybe it was something about the men so openly displaying their emotions, men crying in public, that attracted them. Maybe they, too, just felt like getting drunk after all they’d been through, and decided that here was the perfect excuse.

  And it was a wise call, in that respect, because we have a perspective on this, which confirms that Italia 90 was indeed the greatest excuse ever to go drinking in the history of Ireland.

  We have the perspective of the Tiger years, during which Paddy developed a near-genius for thinking up new excuses to go drinking, from the regular corporate lunch to the stag-weekend in Vilnius, to the pheasant shooting and the feasting that would follow, but nothing compares and nothing will ever compare to Italia 90 as the ultimate cast-iron guilt-free all-singing all-dancing excuse to go drinking.

  Men knew this, and women knew this and children knew this. Indeed, men and women would have children as a result of this, with a World Cup baby boom materialising in 1991. But there would be a rough side to it, too, represented in Sebastian Barry’s play, The Pride of Parnell Street, which has at its core an episode of wife-beating during Italia 90. And during the madness, I remember witnessing a delightful scene one day in the People’s Park in Dun Laoghaire, whereby three generations of a family, a grandmother, a young couple and two small children, were partaking of some sort of a picnic. The grandmother was holding what can only be described as a large bottle of whiskey.

  A charming tableau.

  But it is impossible to look at any set of photographs of Irish people at that time, without seeing extraordinary quantities of drink and extraordinary levels of drunkenness. There are men lying on the floor face down, lost to the world. There are men sitting on toilet seats with their trousers pulled down, smiling at the camera, wearing a Viking helmet. There are men lying on a pavement on some foreign boulevard, comatose after the night before, almost naked, an empty bottle of cider and a few cans of beer still standing beside them. There are men lying on unmade beds in some foreign boarding house, sleeping during the day, with maybe a chair or a picture or even a television on the bed beside them, put there by their friends as a joke.

  There are men vomiting. There are men on their knees vomiting into the toilet bowl, or just vomiting anywhere they feel like it. There are men vomiting because they are extremely ill from alcoholic poisoning and men vomiting almost as a form of self-expression.

  Everywhere, there are men pissing, and laughing at the fact that they are pissing. There are men pissing into ashtrays. There are men with condoms filled with vodka, laughing hysterically at the camera as they drink the vodka. There are men drinking bottles of beer and bottles of spirits as they pose for a group photograph, fifteen of them on the bonnet of a car. There are men wearing vests and shorts leaving flowers with the porter at the front door of the maternity hospital, where their wives and newborns are resting, indicating that they are too drunk to go in there themselves.

  Somehow Paddy, in these scenes of utter abandon, can’t help drawing attention to the depths of the repression he must be feeling in the normal run of events.

  Who amongst us can exclude ourselves from this part of the story? Because it was more than just the greatest excuse to go drinking; it was an excuse to go drinking in ways that we had never gone drinking before.

  Other than tee-totallers, there is hardly a man alive in Ireland today who does not have some blissful memory of being terribly, terribly drunk during Italia 90 in the middle of the day, or some strange hour at which he had never been drunk before.

  It was suitably Mediterranean, except your Mediterraneans wouldn’t be throwing fourteen pints of stout into them as they lunched al fresco. We just couldn’t do it any other way. We are anxious enough to begin with and that is partly why we drink, so the arrival of this great flood of anxiety was always going to carry us way over the limit. Not that that is the only reason why we drink, which helps to explain how I had written most of the first chapter of this book before realising that virtually every man I had mentioned thus far was an alcoholic or a recovering alcoholic — and they were the guys who were doing pretty well for themselves.

  Norman Mailer had a theory about why the Irish drink so much. It came out in a story told by Frank McCourt to the Sunday Independent’s Barry Egan about his friend Joe Flaherty, who had run Mailer’s campaign for mayor of New York during the 1970s. Joe had testicular cancer and was in hospital. Frank went to see him and noted that he looked especially tired that day.

  ‘Jesus, yeah, Norman was just here,’ said Joe. ‘He had another one of his theories.’

  Mailer’s theory was that the Irish drink so much because they have an over-supply of semen and hormones and if they didn’t drink, they would go raving mad. It’s only a theory, but personally I wouldn’t rule it out. You couldn’t rule anything out, when you’re dealing with something on this scale.

  My own theory, or one of them, is that alcoholism is a form of immaturity. And that immaturity is an acute problem among the Irish, par
ticularly the Irish male. We tend either to be late developers, or not to develop at all. From the day a man starts drinking too much, to the day he stops, it is arguable that he stays the same age, emotionally and psychologically. He is just not able to grow up properly, because he reacts to most difficult situations by drinking, thus avoiding whatever lessons might be learned.

  There has been much useful work done on the reasons for the repeated failures of the Irish State and the various collapses of the Irish economy by journalists such as Kevin Myers, but my own intuition tells me to look at the immaturity of Paddy, because alcoholism is a form of immaturity, and we keep screwing everything up in a way that deeply resembles the behaviour patterns of the alcoholic.

  We can have periods of prosperity, when we are ‘on the dry’, as it were, but because we don’t address the fundamental issues, we keep relapsing into the old ways. We always secretly reserve the right to ‘hang one on’, to throw away what we have gained and to return to the darkness.

  Even those of us who are not alcoholics, are not exactly grown-ups either.

  And when you throw in all those who are alcoholics, and who are in positions of influence, you start to get a sense of where we might be going wrong.

  It has been observed that the way we collectively behaved during the boom years was a bit like Paddy winning a massive compo claim and spending the money exuberantly until it all runs out, at which point he expresses great surprise that such a strange thing should have happened, just when everything was going so well.

  Kevin Myers has mused much on our astonishing inability or refusal to plan things properly, or to plan them at all. Thus we can build hundreds of miles of motorways with no service areas, and we think that’s all right. We have this delinquent streak, tending repeatedly towards self-destruction.

  We seem to be uncomfortable with any strategy other than making it up as we go along, which may explain how so many of the Irish got around Italy in 1990, improvising, living on their wits, scraping together the means of survival and looking after the drunk ones, knowing that in a very short time, they would have to be looking after you. I guess you could keep that going, all right, for about three weeks.

  And we viewed it as normal that men would spend nine-tenths of their money on gargle on the first night on foreign soil, caring nothing for the morrow.

  We don’t seem to have any idea what to do with money apart from to waste it. And we have a genius for that. All of which are the classic traits of the teenager on the beer, the immature person.

  Or maybe I just favour this theory, because it seems to describe my own condition. In many ways I allowed my teenage years to continue all the way through my twenties and into my thirties. I had taken on vast responsibilities, quite casually, without realising that I might have to become a fully functioning adult, too, in order to make it all work. And in my case, that would mean making an agonising reappraisal of my drinking.

  Which would mean basically giving it up.

  But all this is much clearer now in hindsight.

  One of the reasons we don’t rightly grasp these things at the time is because the drink itself is stopping us from getting there — it is, as they say, cunning, baffling, powerful. We are still getting something out of it, still getting the message that everything is going to work out fine and that we are all right, it is everyone else who is wrong.

  As far as I could discern, I was mainly a social drinker, doing a job which demanded that I socialise, and drink. At the time of Italia 90 I was drinking no more than many people I knew, though I now realise that many people I knew were either alcoholics themselves or getting there.

  I was working all the time and apparently doing well and I could hardly stay sober for that long if I had some deep-seated problem, could I? It would take me a long time to understand that I was working mainly in order to create a space to drink, that that first pint in Mulligan’s after I dropped in my copy had become a holy thing, if not the entire point of the exercise.

  It is so hard to tell the points at which you are crossing into more dangerous territory, all you know is that when you find yourself there, you can’t get back. Well, there is one way of getting back, but that means not drinking again, and that can seem pretty unimaginable.

  I can’t tell for sure if I crossed into those badlands during Italia 90, I just know that by the end of the year Jane and I weren’t living together any more.

  And it most certainly didn’t feel like it back then, but maybe it was better that way. I was about 19 years old at the time, regardless of what it said on my birth certificate.

  I would still see a lot of Roseanne, because I was only around the corner, in Monkstown. I would have to start growing up somehow, although I didn’t start to understand that for about another five years.

  First, I would need to improve my typing skills.

  And I hope this is entirely coincidental, but it was only in writing this book that I realised that I stopped drinking for good at Christmas 1995 — which was just a few weeks after Jack resigned, having failed to qualify for Euro 96. At the time I didn’t see a direct connection. Or even an indirect connection. I don’t remember thinking that the Charlton years were now at an end, the good times were over, that it was time we all cleaned up our act, but I’m inclined to wonder if I was subconsciously responding to these deeper rhythms.

  It just seems like too much of coincidence, that I finally came of age at the end of this roistering saga of football and beer, this bubble in which we would stay forever young. Thankfully, that other bubble would be along soon, the money-bubble, in which we could divert ourselves. But it is tempting to see the Charlton years as the last big blow-out for Paddy in general, his wild years before the onset of maturity, or at least the trappings of maturity.

  Jack leaving us in 1995, his work here done, was supposed to signal the end of Paddy’s growing pains — or maybe it was just the beginning of the end.

  Or maybe we weren’t even ready for that yet.

  All of which was a long way from our minds as we waited, in a state of high anxiety, to see what Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard and Marco Van Basten would do to us below in Palermo.

  We were taking no chances this time.

  Arthur and I would be watching this in Liam’s place, sitting on exactly the same couches, arranged in exactly the same way as they had been against England. We wouldn’t be needing the cold cuts this time, or the cherry tomatoes, we were only fooling ourselves that food had any part to play in this episode. This would be a hard-drinking deal, from start to finish, though I should add that Arthur had a much healthier relationship with alcohol than I did, and it is a testament to the state we were in that he wanted it so much at this time.

  Dunphy had gone out to Italy, which was probably the safest place for him. His trip had been planned long before the pen-throwing outrage, but most of us preferred to think of it as a showdown, as Dunphy and Jack going mano-a-mano.

  There had been a press conference at which Dunphy would ask Jack a question: does Jack think that the team should play the same way in the finals of a major tournament as they did in qualifying? Jack refused to answer Dunphy’s question, because he was not a ‘proper journalist’. Which was about as good a result as Dunphy could get, in the circumstances.

  The English journos saw Dunphy as a martyr for free speech and even the resentful Irish ones, the ‘fans with typewriters’, had to acknowledge that he was where he needed to be: front and centre. And they, the ‘proper’ journalists, were in the front row taking notes.

  The Fear went on for a bit longer against Holland than against England, but again it was relatively short — after 17 minutes, Gullit scored, playing a one-two and finishing it into the bottom corner, like the superior being we knew him to be.

  Holland had only managed a scoreless draw against England, so we figured they might take it out on us. But we weren’t done yet. We could always rely on England to cheer us up, which they duly did by going ahead against Egypt
, with a goal by centre-half Mark Wright.

  We now had the additional stress of trying to work out the various permutations we needed to get ourselves out of this bloody Group F. With everyone on the same points and goal difference before the match, in one scenario all four teams could finish with an identical record, raising the appalling prospect of the drawing of lots to decide all four positions. Ah, it was a terrible strain on the brain.

  But there was a modicum of relief in the thought that losing to Holland had none of the catastrophic connotations of losing to England — we had no ‘history’ with Wor Dutch, apart from the fact that they beat us in Euro 88 and went on to win it. But we didn’t mind that. Mercifully they had been sated somewhat by that victory, because for the rest of the half and deep into the second half, they showed no desire to tear us apart, as was their natural right.

  And then Packie did it again.

  At around the same time in the match as he’d done against England, Packie gritted his teeth and sent up a high, lobbing, dropping ball.

  This time there was another mis-cue from a defender and the ball squirted away towards the goal, where it was chased down by Niall Quinn, sliding and poking it past the keeper, van Breukelen.

  Madness was now heaped upon madness, because the pandemonium which ensued was quickly followed by what looked like a gentleman’s agreement between both sides, to settle for a draw. This was so deeply surreal, no-one had any recollection of seeing such a thing happening before on an international playing pitch in a competitive context. But there they were, Ireland and Holland, apparently not trying any more. And to heighten the surrealism, this cosy little arrangement was founded on the premise that England would continue to beat Egypt in their match, happening simultaneously.

  Which doesn’t seem like a very strong premise, all things considered.

  And as for the moral dimension ... it seemed as if football had thrown everything at us during the last ten days and now it was asking us to take a trip into the moral maze, which we flatly refused to do, because in this situation, we had no morals.