‘No, it was the hair. Did you see the hair on her?’
‘Hair or no hair, it’s touch and go with her now. It could go either way. She’s not expected to make it. The prognosis is very poor. We should prepare ourselves for the worst.’
1.00 p.m.: A vizzer rushed to tell me that Pablo, who was heading the poll, had arrived outside because they were about to announce the vote. We gathered outside in a highly luminous circle around the taxi to carry Pablo inside. The first count had ended so they were ready to announce the winner, Pablo. Our campaign manager started crying.
3.20 p.m.: TV3 ordered pizza to form the centrepiece of a photo shoot with Pablo and his family sitting together eating. The assistant spread five boxes of pizza on the table and went away to find the camera crew. She returned two minutes later to find the camp followers of Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and the Greens finishing off the last few slices of Pablo’s domestic prop. She retrieved one half-eaten slice for Pablo, who had his photo op in front of a table of empty boxes. Later, we had photos of Pablo on the phone looking business-like, Pablo stirring tea wisely, and Pablo walking without assistance and even talking at the same time.
4.10 p.m.: Bring your knitting with you to a count. Nothing happened for an hour. We clung to the railings and tried to sleep. A woman hanging beside me told me why she voted for a particular candidate. The story took fifty minutes. It involved a car crash, a fight, two trips to the hospital, a psychiatrist, an accountant, someone who worked in a hotel and a life-changing experience at Lourdes.
6.00 p.m.: Bring a sleeping bag with you to a count. A shout woke us as we were hanging on the rails like bats.
‘The mammy of the Dáil is gone,’ someone listening intently on their earpiece told us.
‘Why did she run? Sure she must be a hundred.’
‘Well, whatever age she is, she’s gone now.’
The news of someone’s misery causes happiness all round.
6.30 p.m.: If you are a candidate, don’t turn up at a count unless you got at least fifty votes. Those who ‘were gone’ had quietly gone home; the very unpopular hadn’t even turned up; those who were expected to be popular but weren’t had gone home in shock. Those who were left were either the winners or the middle-ranking, nail-bitingly close competitors in the dog fight predicted to break out at around 1.00 a.m. By now we were waiting for transfers.
‘We won’t get anything off those independent lunatics. We’ll have to go again. We’ll be here all night,’ someone said.
Almost immediately the word went round from the tallypeople that Pablo had thirty votes from ‘your man with the eyes’.
8.50 p.m.: You should work out if you are campaigning with a candidate who might win.
‘Okay lads, we are ready to go. Get Pablo and bring him up front with the family. The TV cameras are ready for us. Who is going to hoist him up? The four of ye look the strongest. Get in beside him. When I give the signal, throw him up in the air.’
The four who were nominated the most muscular had a tight hold on Pablo’s arms and legs, ready to recklessly fling him into the air in traditional fashion.
One candidate got twenty-five votes. A security man standing beside me asked no one in particular whether or not that fecking eejit had any family.
‘Wouldn’t you think they would have voted for him. Must be some dangerous fecking loony if he can’t get more than twenty-five votes out of his family and neighbours. Sure if he had hired a bus he would have done better than that. What kind of a person can’t get more than twenty-five votes? Was he in jail or what during the campaign?’
9.00 p.m.: Don’t drop your victorious candidate on national television. We threw Pablo into the air. The campaign manager cried more than everyone else put together.
‘Right lads,’ someone says, ‘across the road en masse to the pub and don’t put him down.’
They carried Pablo out of the building. My tally guru told me that Pablo’s result wasn’t too bad.
‘It only took twelve hours. If those fecking eejits hadn’t lost those twenty-five votes he would have been out of here ages ago.’
Ah, sweet victory! My candidate had been elected. In a good mood I returned to a nail-biting M still hanging on the railings. I told her that it was a scientific fact of tallying that she was going to win, despite my tally guru – who is never wrong – telling me she was going to lose. Why spread misery, I asked myself.
‘Any hang sandwiches left?’ I asked. She did lose just before 2.00 a.m.
1.55 a.m.: You should try to get some sleep. I was awoken hanging on the barrier to the shouts of the final candidate being carried around the end of the hall and out the door. My tally guru had got it right at 10.15 a.m. the previous day.
Some party high-ups thought that my going undercover with Fine Gael as a campaigner was so successful that they asked me to join the party. This was while I was at a victory celebration with free booze. As a general principle, it is not a good idea to ask me anything serious at a free bar. I am sure that a public apology may be required on my part if I could remember what I said while declining the offer. I vaguely recall mentioning my preferences for nailing my feet to the floor, etc., which was very ungracious behaviour towards some of the most gratuitously helpful people I have come across. My claims to be utterly unsuitable for membership of a political party, which I believe I demonstrated in the most unambiguous way at the party piss-up, were tolerantly ignored. I am not really a joiner. I don’t even have a Tesco Clubcard. I prefer to watch us making fools of ourselves, though I frequently do participate at that level myself.
Once elected, you will be called upon to do favours for all of the people who participated in your campaign. This number will usually exceed the number of those who actually campaigned for you by a factor of ten. Now I have to work out what Pablo can do for me. Just yesterday I saw a dog pissing against a newly planted tree at the end of our street. Intolerable behaviour really. I will have to get on to Pablo about it.
* * *
While campaigning, I came across an old lady who lives alone in Glasnevin in the middle of a bustling neighbourhood. She invited me in and insisted I sit on her antique sofa in her tiny sitting room. She told me that she was eighty-nine years old and didn’t have long to live because she had been diagnosed with cancer, for which she was receiving chemotherapy. She sat regally on the sofa, balancing a very unconvincing wig on her head that she must have last worn in the sixties when platinum beehives were the rage. I assumed it had been rightly banished to a shoebox in the back of her wardrobe sometime in the early seventies. She told me that she saw no one from one end of the day to the other. She insisted on my staying for tea, which I made in the enormous tea pot in the kitchen, and we talked about life and shite in general for half an hour.
10
Being Cool: Bono Who?
1-5 to 0-8…well, from Lapland to the Antarctic, that’s level scores in any man’s language.
(Mícheál O’Muircheartaigh)
It is time to introduce some anthropological theory. One of my favourite theorists, Claude Lévi-Strauss, developed structural anthropology which, in part, compares binary opposites such as culture/nature; raw/cooked; man/woman; savage/civilised; sacred/profane. Structuralism supposes that these kinds of oppositions are fundamental to all language and thought, and that they are a basic tool for organising culture and language. Fortunately, Irish culture has many binary opposites worth examining. For example, Dublin City provides us with a popular opposition between Northsiders, who are all treated as savages, and Southsiders, who are all viewed as civilised. The River Liffey defines the border between these two distinct cultures. But all Dublin City dwellers come together to share the cultural burden of having to be cool when they are set opposite to all country folk, who have to be sporty. This is probably why there are really only two GAA football teams in Ireland: Dublin and Anywhere But Dublin. For the sake of structuralists everywhere, I am happy to keep these tensions going by setting the city agai
nst the country, the cool against the uncool and the sedentary against the sporty. Structuralists don’t judge one side of these oppositions as being better than the other; they believe that each gets its meaning and energy from the rivalry.
Every contemporary culture has its ways of being cool, just like everyone in Ireland has a Bono26 story. There are definite things you can do to become an icon of hip urbanity. There are rules you can follow on how to become cool. These are the rules Bono didn’t follow (what’s with those glasses?). I have discovered during my research on cool people that no one wants to be Bono. In the words my coolest informant – ‘Who is Bono?’
Classic structuralist anthropology uses comparative analysis to help illustrate behaviour. Anthropology is cool because you can hang out with cool people. It’s also uncool when you have to hang out with uncool people. I just have to be myself. By looking at aspects of both, I will compare the cool with the uncool. The frenetic life of the urbane hipster is distinct from the fusty existence of the rural GAA fan.
An anthropology of Irish behaviour is not complete without including some sporting activities. Sport is hugely important in Ireland. It takes very many forms, from GAA hurling and football to tennis, golf, soccer, rugby, drifting, swimming, athletics, horse racing, dog racing and racing anything, including bikes, hamsters, cars and trucks. On any Monday our newspapers are filled with reports of the weekend sporting events. Sports are important to anthropology because they have very many social effects. For example, ‘avoiding the match on the telly’ provides Irish women with an excuse to go shopping; anything racing on wheels or legs provides an opportunity to go to the bookmakers to bet on ‘two flies crawling up a wall’; and participating in GAA sports allows us to express our inner uncool selves.
Being uncool is important because it helps us to define its opposite, being cool, which in Ireland can often be measured by how far removed from the GAA you are. These states have to be studied together as complementary behaviours. To follow sports, you need to be part of a mob. But to be cool is to be individual and shun the crowd. Anthropology studies popular culture, even where that popular culture involves the effort to be as unpopular as possible.
* * *
There is an intrinsic difficulty in researching cutting-edge habits. The shelf-life of the behaviours in question is so necessarily short that, by the time they get into print, they should be passé. Therefore, my writing about what is happening now in Ireland is more a nostalgia piece because the venues, clothes and behaviours that support what is so now should be so over by the time you are reading this. In contrast, the wonderful thing about the GAA is that it changes, if at all, very, very slowly. It prides itself on its conservatism, which is what makes it, by definition, so uncool.
Avant-garde trends constantly replace themselves. Being up-to-the-minute is a phase that we should all try to go through at least once, because being cool is an essential stage of our individual cultural engagement. Every contemporary society has a sub-group whose function it is to set that society’s standards in what counts as fashionable in clothes, music and art, and what ideas to espouse as being so now and what ones to abandon as being so over. That job is practically a full-time career for those who take on the responsibility. To do it well, it is necessary to have just enough money to support your signature lifestyle. But you shouldn’t get your money from employment, which can be a distraction from your responsibility to trends. You need to be just poor enough to be earnest about making a difference in the world and rich enough to be able to acquire the trappings of being socially cool. When you are too rich, you move out to uncool suburban havens for the uncooly successful or even into castles, like some of our stars. Being cool in Ireland is a fine balancing act between the gauche extremes of poverty and wealth.
If you are urban based and unemployed after spending seven years – finger quotation signs in the air – ‘studying’ Music Technology, and you are just too self-aware to scream your head off and drench your fellow fans with spittle at a GAA match, you will need to find comfort in the company of other like-minded people.
Where to Stay Cool
An initial search for cool people took me to Trinity College, or Trinners, because an informant told me that he once saw some cool people there. They may have been tourists; he wasn’t certain. But we agreed it was a starting place for my research. Some students are cool, but, for the sake of demographic rigour, I am not including students who actually attend lectures, even in a sporadic way, under the category of hip people. However, there is a grey area between, on the one hand, students who are on campus every day attending class, going to the library and actually studying, and those who are technically registered as students. No one amongst the former group can qualify as cool. Some among the latter may. The first step in becoming cool is to register as a student. But you are not yet cool. The second step is to register in the right college. How cool you can potentially be is directly related to where you are registered. Trinity is very cool, but only if you are studying Literature, Music, Media and Sound Engineering. History can be cool but it depends on what area you are pretending to study. Military history is cool. You might get away with Psychology but you’d probably be pushing it. It is also cool to be registered in the National College of Art and Design and some schools in Dublin Institute of Technology, but it is not cool to be registered in University College Dublin. Maynooth is totally uncool. In general, undergraduates are not cool. Some are definitely uncool because they live at home in Naas and commute to a course in Applied Technology in UCD. They also play Gaelic in the evenings with Grangenolvin Football Club. After graduating somehow, following the third step to coolness, register on a postgraduate course. By following these three steps you will achieve the minimum qualifications for consideration as being possibly hip.
And for God’s sake, don’t turn up to lectures. How uncool! Do turn up for the first lecture to pick up the syllabus and reading list, in order to be aware of what you are missing and the books you should be reading. The Greek philosopher Socrates was the first person to point out the vital epistemological difference, well understood today by hip people, between knowing what you don’t know – which you will know by attending not more than three lectures – and not knowing what you don’t know – which you will not know if you don’t turn up at all. The former state of being is cool. The latter is not. You might also attend all the lectures only if you are thick. That might be cool in certain circumstances because it is not always cool to exclude thick people. You will need to offer both yourself and your friends convincing excuses for not attending class, because you should pretend to everyone, including yourself, that you care. One of the best excuses would be that your band rehearsals are clashing with lecture times. Another satisfactory excuse is that you were up all night puking from the sushi you had the evening before to celebrate completing your new one-minute-fifteen-second short film. Or how about you fell asleep on the train to Santiago Airport and didn’t wake up until you got to Lisbon. If you want to take it to the limit of coolness, register for a postgraduate course in Sound Engineering in Trinners, turn up for one class, which will be enough to get a job for two hours per annum as a first-year tutor in jazz banjo in the National College of Art and Design, and then don’t turn up for work.
If you want to be cool, you have to be able to at least recognise the difference between being an undergraduate student, which is not cool; being a graduate student who attends lectures in a prosaic topic such as Accounting or Law, which is also not cool; and being in the seventh year of your MA in Experimental Music and Development Studies at Trinners, where you have completed two field trips exploring the therapeutic value of bongo rhythms amongst HIV populations in Laos, but have not actually attended any lectures, which is very cool. If you are an undergraduate student, you may live in student accommodation, which is extremely uncool, but not as uncool as living at home with your parents, which is actually even less cool than becoming a hurler on a GAA team. If you have
any potential for hipness, by the time you have gotten into third year, you should have moved into an apartment in Rathmines with three other students. If you are studying something uncool, use the opportunity to move in with students who are studying cool subjects such as Philosophy, Theology or even Classics. When you graduate to be officially unemployed and your parents refuse to pay for the apartment you saw in Ranelagh, you should move into a tiny cottage down a back alley in Dublin 8 with your new cool partner who you’ve met at a non-competitive film festival at the Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar. If you are both rich and cool, you may be able to afford an alley in Dublin 6W.
No matter how bad things get, you should never exchange your Southside alley for one on the Northside. No one living on the Northside is cool. You may visit Stoneybatter to eat sparingly, drink moderately, or even attend an underground art show, but you should get back over the river before dawn. There is a hard-core enclave of people living in Great Western Square in Phibsborough who think they are cool, and a few sprinkled around Drumcondra and Stoneybatter. But otherwise the Northside is a hip-free zone. Remember, there are no cool people living outside Dublin. Cork? Let’s not go there, unless you can get to the English Market without passing through the city.
The Rules of Looking Cool
There are a few simple things you can do to look cool. You can carry cool stuff. In anthropology, the effect of taking on the nature of something through contact is called contagious magic. Carrying a violin case is cool. Carrying a cello or banjo case is cooler. Carrying a double base case is the coolest. You will get away with a saxophone case but leave the guitar case at home.
When not practising the magic of carrying cool stuff, try looking cool. To look cool in Dublin you have to be thin. This is true if you are either male or female. Dieting is helped if you have no money for food. Being unemployed in something cool in media helps with having no money. In any case, you shouldn’t be seen dead in McDonald’s scoffing burgers even when coked out of your head. No matter how stoned you are, remember no cool person would be so stoned as to wander into McDonald’s. In fact, you wouldn’t even protest outside McDonald’s against the carbon footprint of their large fries.
How to Be Irish Page 20