Days of Heaven (17 page)

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 other 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 98
FM
, 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 dictator, 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.

In my defence, I would say that I was not presenting myself to the world as a celibate Catholic priest, as he was.

Ah, he wanted it all. He wanted it every way, but he could not have kept that schtick going for so long if he hadn’t been striking a few resonant chords with the people of Ireland —
the major chords always followed by the minor chords; the little moments of apparent joy always followed by the shafts of remorse.

I say ‘apparent’ joy, because in Cleary we can see something of what Evelyn Waugh meant when he described the Irish as a joyless people — this might seem like a strange
observation on the face of it, given the way that we present ourselves to the world, yet while Waugh was no friend of the Irish, that doesn’t mean he was wrong. Cleary would tend to give that
line of Waugh’s some credibility. There was no real joy in him — he was too much of a control freak for that.

In fact, it was not until the arrival of Bono that we found ourselves a real singing priest, who could do joy, who could be standing on stage in Croke Park singing about pride in the name of
love with nothing to be ashamed about and God on his side.

We have always done sadness superbly, but Bono is the first Irish artist of renown who has made it his business to generate these sensations of joy and he has spoken of how hard it is to convey
this thing called joy — it must be harder still, given the bit of Paddy in him.

It is another of our little contradictions, this impression we give to the world that we are bursting with merriment when in fact we are wasting away with melancholia. Which makes our journey
with Jack all the more meaningful — because it is arguable that Italia 90 and everything surrounding it was the most sustained period of joy in the entire history of the people of Ireland.
And some day we might even manage to do it again, only sober this time.

Now that the war is long over — and his side lost the decisive battle by a terrifyingly thin margin in the Divorce Referendum of 1995 — I suspect that we would feel most comfortable
with the story of Father Michael Cleary rendered as a musical comedy. We would prefer the broad strokes, the holy man warming up the crowd at Knock for the Pope along with Bishop Eamon Casey and
the hilarious twist, whereby he would later tell Casey about his son Ross, but he would have to find out about Casey’s son from the hated media.

The Singing Priest!
it would of course be called, a madcap romp through the playing fields of the
GAA
where he first got the thirst for glory, to the austere manly
world of the seminary and on to stardom as the peoples’ priest who could sing a song and tell a joke about God, and who was loved by the ladies ... and the rest of it kinda writes itself, as
they say.

We would prefer to experience the life and times of Father Mick again as musical theatre, because human beings can’t take too much reality, and Paddy can probably take less of it than
most.

We were preparing to abandon it altogether in this glorious time called Italia 90.