Days of Heaven (12 page)

The kid had made his point. But the result stood, and we would not be going to Spain in ’82.

It is tempting to see that episode as the defining narrative of Ireland’s misfortune throughout the 1980s, when it seemed that we had been excluded from life’s feast. Perhaps we are
also drawn to it because it has a terrible injustice at its core, giving us the feeling that it wasn’t our fault, that we were done down by the badness of others. Which we know was not the
truth in the case of all things that went wrong for us at that time, but which somehow consoles us.

And astonishingly, nearly thirty years later, we were still getting done out of the World Cup. Indeed Frank Stapleton, scorer of goals-that-were-disallowed-for-no-reason-at-all, would testify
that the 2009 Thierry Henry episode was not even the first time we had been done out of it in Paris. You could say it was actually the third time in Paris alone, if you counted a 1-0 defeat to
Spain in a play-off for the 1966 World Cup which was held in Paris because the
FAI
apparently took the Spanish shilling and gave them what was effectively ‘home’
advantage.

But let us be rigorously honest: when France cheated us out of that place in the 2010 World Cup, many of us were privately fearing that they would have second thoughts and agree to play us
again, in which case they would most certainly beat us out the door and take away our only consolation, the ecstasy of victimhood.

So this is an endlessly recurring theme, one that isn’t exclusive to the 1980s. And there was further consolation back then, because it wasn’t all bad anyway. I went
to the Bruce Springsteen concert in Slane in the back of a van with a
Hot Press
crew that included lay-out man Leo Regan, who would later compile a stunningly courageous book of
photo-journalism about white nazis in England and make award-winning
TV
documentaries, but whose main cultural contribution on the day was to introduce me to the music of
The Pogues.

Yes, it was in the back of a van on the way to Slane, on a dazzlingly sunny Saturday morning in the summer of 1985, with about three beers already on board, that I first heard ‘Streams of
Whiskey’. It was a piercingly beautiful moment and almost everyone who went to see Springsteen that day remembers such moments of their own.

But not entirely unpredictably, many of those memories are polluted by something that Springsteen himself noted, something of which he spoke privately: the amazing amount of drinking he
witnessed among the Irish.

Ah, even on that long, long day of almost supernatural lightness, the darkness was never too far away from us.

Dermot Morgan, more than any other figure of that time, seems to me to personify this constant drifting between the darkness and the light and the darkness again.

Dermot always seemed to be living in the moment, and living well. He always behaved in a way a successful entertainer was supposed to behave. You would not see Dermot driving an old banger or
keeping his hand in his pocket in the pub just because he had no income, as such. It was impossible to be in his company, and not to be greatly entertained.

Yet I got to know him at a time when there wasn’t much going on in his career apart from recriminations with
RTÉ
over an infamous
TV
special which was supposed to have been a full series, but which had been chopped down to a one-hour special for reasons which Dermot found outrageous: essentially
RTÉ
types were saying that they knew what was funny better than he. We have no way of knowing how wrong they were, or if indeed they were wrong at all.

Dermot loved football so much, in the League of Ireland he supported
UCD
— ‘I don’t like crowds’, he would explain. And we might even suspect that
his affinity with the garrison game had gone against him or at least made it easier to dismiss him — his portrayal of a mad hurler jumping out of the studio audience to remonstrate with Pat
Kenny would have made traditionalists feel uneasy. But it was certainly worth talking about, on the record, to the injured party. Apart from this dark episode with
RTÉ
, there was a sense that Morgan’s predicament said a lot about the country in general, how Ireland had a way of dumping on anyone who was any good.

I would look at the likes of Paul Hogan, the Australian comic who was then becoming an international star, who was clearly not as talented as Dermot but who had got himself to a place where the
talent he had could be released. Why the hell couldn’t Dermot Morgan do that, too, instead of wasting his time and his energy arguing with
RTÉ
, with bloody
civil servants?

Dermot picked me up outside Blackrock
DART
station in whatever fine motor he was driving at that time and drove up the hills to the Blue Light pub in Barnacullia, which
would later become internationally known as the place in which Adam Clayton was busted in the car-park for possession of dope — Adam would later acknowledge his addiction to alcohol and other
substances, but at the time, like so many of us, he was just working on it.

Dermot, who oddly enough was free of all the usual addictions, drove up there entirely in the character of Eamon Dunphy. He was a deeply, deeply funny Dunphy, and given his obsession with
football, he was particularly exercised at the time with an interview I had done in which Dunphy had monstered some of his sports-writing colleagues, calling them ‘scabrous wretches’.
He would later characterise them as ‘the fans with typewriters’, but ‘scabrous wretches’ was better, and Morgan loved it. ‘Scabrous wretch! Scabrous wretch!’ he
would holler at every possible opportunity.

Yet while he was riffing anarchically, Dermot would also ask you not to smoke in the car. Probably for health reasons, possibly because he was ahead of his time — back then in Ireland even
if the driver was on the point of death due to emphysema, he would be reluctant to ask you not to smoke. He wouldn’t want to upset you. He would prefer to die than to interfere with your
enjoyment.

Dermot didn’t subscribe to that particular sort of moral cowardice. And he was also quite proper in other ways, which are usually described as middle-class. For example, he was one of the
few men in the history of Ireland to send thank-you notes. Then again he might ring you up and frighten you by pretending to be some dreaded individual such as a bank manager, intoning something
about your expenditure getting out of control and concerns at head office — you got the impression he had been on the receiving end of a few such calls himself, so convincing was the
style.

Like Dunphy, he was full of contradictions, but the contradiction that most concerns us here is that Dermot was a public performer who, in his youth, had allegedly suffered from agoraphobia.
Usually agoraphobia is described as a fear of open spaces (again one thinks of the terraces at
UCD
) but as Dermot described it in the Blue Light that day, it was essentially
a fear of leaving the house.

But when I raised the topic, Dermot asked me to pause the tape-recorder and to talk about it off the record. He was afraid of how it might look and maybe he was afraid that it would vindicate
those in
RTÉ
whom he felt had damaged him — they could claim that the man was now admitting that maybe he had a few screws loose, that he was
‘difficult’.

Maybe it was just a general fear of people knowing things about him that were really none of their business. Whatever the source of the fear, it was strong enough to keep the old agoraphobia off
the record, for the time being at least — when he felt the time was right to talk about it, I would be the first to know. Maybe when he was a massive star, and they couldn’t get him any
more. Or maybe when Ireland was free.

It is truly extraordinary that in Ireland at that time a bright and sophisticated man would be afraid of such things, especially when you consider that we now live in a time in which men would
be boasting loudly of such an ailment. Indeed they would be prepared to invent a spot of teenage agoraphobia to demonstrate how far they have travelled and the terrible obstacles that were in their
way, how they had once been afraid to leave the house and now they were standing in front of 3,000 strangers telling funny stories.

They might build an entire career on the back of it.

But Dermot, who had the moral courage to ask passengers not to smoke in his car, was still spooked about the prevailing attitudes towards issues of mental illness. You could sense that deep fear
in him, of the creepy forces that could destroy his fragile existence on a whim, that army of the Irish night, and the more mundane tormentors he would describe as ‘the suits’,
permanent and pensionable.

That dead hand had touched so many in this country. It could even reach out and touch those who had escaped and made it to the other side, like John Giles. Back in the 1970s, when Giles was the
most influential player in the most successful club side of the time, Leeds Utd, he would be routinely traduced as a man who regarded playing for his country not as a signal honour, but as a
tiresome duty. And on the rare occasions when he deigned to play for us, his heart allegedly wasn’t in it.

This was terrible bullshit, but it seemed to come naturally to the suits of football — the blazers to be exact — who found it reasonable for the players to arrive over from England
on the boat the night before an important international match, having played a full match for their club the previous day, and to be grateful for the opportunity. Representing his country,
supposedly the highest honour known to football man, a player would encounter conditions in which no serious professional should have been expected to work, and having created that morass, when the
results were somehow poor, the suits and blazers would do what suits and blazers and other such respectably dressed men have always done — they would blame the talent.

Mercifully they were powerless to do serious damage to Giles, who had already made it. But if you were Dermot Morgan, in the late 1980s, the dead hand could destroy you, and he knew it.

Ah, if only he could have a bit of what they had, if only he had — a job. It was said by Anthony Cronin of Patrick Kavanagh and it can be said of Dermot Morgan, too, that all he really
needed was a job.

Perhaps he was too scatter-brained to work with in the 1980s, too undisciplined for the fantastic levels of precision needed in
TV
comedy. Perhaps he was
‘difficult’ or perhaps his hammering of the Provos made him a tricky proposition for the light-entertainment department. But even if they had given him all the professional help they
could, in the most empathetic creative environment, they didn’t give him the one thing that would have liberated him from so much grief — they didn’t give him any sense of
security. By this I don’t mean the six-figure salary for life and the pension that they themselves would be on — I mean, let’s not be silly here — I just mean some assurance
that he could pay his bills for the vaguely foreseeable future, that he would be employed to produce comedy until such time as he got it right. By which time he wouldn’t need them any more.
Along with Gerard Stembridge, Pauline McLynn and Eoin Roe he would present them with a radio hit,
Scrap Saturday
, but in the end they didn’t really want that either.

Dermot was not to know, in the depths of his own struggles, that the emigration of a generation would yield a massive result for him: it was Graham Linehan leaving for London and persuading
Arthur Mathews to join him from which all else followed. I wish I could have told him that day in the Blue Light that I had these friends, who would one day write him an international hit, that it
would all turn out great.

But Arthur and Graham themselves were still in the dark about that one.

A character called Father Ted Crilly was starting to form in Arthur’s head and was being developed by himself and Graham and Paul Woodfull, the other lay-out man in the
Hot Press
at that time, in the context of a group called the Joshua Trio. It was being formed late at night during production weekends at the magazine, these insane work-marathons which as
late as the late 1980s, would go something like this: you would get a few galleys containing an article and you would proof-read them, using a blue marker to highlight any wrong spellings. You
would write these corrections on a sheet of paper and then you would walk down three flights of stairs to the typesetter, usually Jack Broder, a lady with a superb Mullingar accent, a typesetting
wizard who was greatly in demand for her speed and her vast capacity for toil. Which may explain why she was starting to get other work, including a job typing up a first novel called
The
South
by a journalist called Colm Tóibín.

Having given the corrections to Jack, you would walk back up the stairs to do some more proof-reading, maybe a few headlines and captions, before walking down the stairs again to collect the
corrections, and walking back up the stairs to commence the task of cutting them out individually with a scalpel, applying cow-gum to the back of the sliver of paper and sticking the correction
down on the page which Arthur or Paul had laid out. And you would do this, every second weekend, for most of the day and most of the night, the sessions broken up when a certain number of pages had
been finished, enough for our leader Niall Stokes to lash together a package and run like the wind to his car in the hope of catching a van bound for the printers in Kerry.

Sometimes one of us would go with him, to keep him awake if the chase started stretching beyond Dublin, perhaps on into Munster. Hence the story of how Liam Mackey ended up running through
Newbridge at three in the morning with his shoes in a biscuit tin.

It was all terribly simple really.

In hot pursuit of the van, Niall’s car had run out of petrol in Newbridge and Liam had this idea of going to the garda station to ask for a container into which he might put petrol when he
got to the petrol station further up the road. The gardaí gave him a biscuit tin.