Days of Heaven (2 page)

That’s Donal, who joins Christy, Bestie, McGrath, Chevron and arguably Charles Haughey as the sixth alcoholic, not including the author, to appear so far in this narrative.

And Shane MacGowan is in a category of his own.

Though of course, these men had many other strings to their bows.

Christy was generous with his time the next day, his driver taking us to various New York settings like Washington Square Park, so that Doherty could take his pictures. Looking
ten years younger than he had looked ten years previously, Christy talked about how he had given up the drink and taken up a macrobiotic diet. He had loved butter almost as fiercely as he had loved
porter. Now he had become just as fond of carrot juice. Which perhaps accounted for his calmness on this day when he would be playing Carnegie Hall.

He would also speak of his ultimate disillusion with the republican movement after Enniskillen. Which was about time for him, though he got there in the end.

Christy was interested in a book I was reading about Henry Ford, the supreme achiever of the Irish diaspora. We were all interested in the photographer’s epic endeavour to buy one of those
new car-phone things at the right price from a shop run by a bunch of Latinos, a car-phone thing in New York being fantastically cheaper than a car-phone thing in Ireland.

‘My girlfriend comes from Ireland,’ the shop owner lied, thinking this might tip the balance his way at a crucial stage of the negotiations, which would ultimately prove fruitless.
‘She is from County Bray.’

Christy’s was a tight operation, essentially himself, his deeply intelligent manager, former showband singer Mattie Fox, and a sound man. It seemed only right that
Time
magazine
carried a small feature about him on the occasion of his visit to America, placing Christy in an international context of timeless roots music. We had come to expect nothing less from an Irish
artist of this stature — by now
U
2 had already sold about ten million copies of
The Joshua Tree,
the Pogues had produced ‘Fairytale of New York’,
the film
My Left Foot
was about to win two Oscars, and Sinead O’Connor was at that stage when, as they say, she could be anything.

But still we could hardly face Ireland v England in Stuttgart without a recurring sense of dread throbbing away in our guts. Ah, there is a deep restlessness in the soul of Paddy, and sure
enough it could be seen and heard in snatches in the vicinity of Carnegie Hall that evening.

And let me clarify at the outset that when I refer to Paddy, I am not necessarily excluding myself. Like Afro-Americans with the n-word, I feel it is all right for Paddy to speak of Paddy,
because he is himself Paddy, so he is speaking with love and understanding.

There were some Americans in the hall that night — the serious musicologist types who had been reading
Time
magazine — but this was a night for Paddy to be among his own kind
and to let himself go. So many of the voices were clearly and ostentatiously from the counties of Ireland that it made a visit to the Gents sound weirdly like some flashback to the dancehall days
when the lads would be supping from naggins of whiskey before heading back to the hall to take on the women. Rowdy lads would be reminded by more sensible lads that they needed to behave
themselves, to remember that they weren’t at home any more.

This form of peer pressure was one which we were starting to see being enforced across the continent of Europe, too, Paddy on Paddy. In the era of football hooliganism, reporters covering Euro
88 would marvel at the way that the Irish would police themselves, how an errant fan with maybe a few beers on him, trying to steal a chocolate muffin from a display counter, would be chastised by
his buddies, all quipping good-naturedly.

Back in the grand environs of Carnegie Hall, you could sense there would be no trouble either from Paddy, even from the most vulnerable of us, the alcoholics who would be out in force tonight,
hailing Christy the lost leader.

This new wave of self-policing, even of personal responsibility, might have been partly due to the ever-present danger of attracting too much attention to yourself, as an undocumented alien. But
there seemed to be a co-ordinated effort on the part of all Paddies everywhere to behave ourselves, now that we were going places. And more importantly, to be seen to be behaving ourselves. And
even more importantly, for Paddy to be seen to be behaving himself better than John Bull.

Yes, we were going places — tonight we would celebrate our national bard at the most storied Hall in the most cultured city on earth, tomorrow we would also celebrate, win, lose or
draw.

Except we knew that we wouldn’t win.

And we knew that we wouldn’t draw.

And we would have to deal with that, in the only way we knew how.

Did I feel any guilt, that I would not be witnessing this defining event in our island story? Not even a twinge, to tell you the truth. In the matter of the Republic of Ireland and of football
in Ireland in general, I had paid my dues. My father Frank, who had been involved in football in Athlone all his life, was taking me to see the Republic playing in Dalymount when it would not be
unusual to see Eamon Dunphy out there on the park.

But I don’t propose to list my full football credentials here — suffice to say that on this day, I felt a bit like the wise peasant who plants the seed, unconcerned that he may not
see the harvest. ‘My work is done’, I thought, as I dropped into Mulligan’s on the Sunday for a few more beers for the road.

I even felt some vague disdain for the hordes beyond in Ireland and in Germany, wondering where they had been on a night a long time ago, in 1981, when a few of us from the
Hot Press
magazine had to persuade the barman in a Mount Street pub to get the telly going in a quiet corner of the lounge so that we could watch Belgium beating us 1-0 in the pouring rain, the thunder and
lightning in Brussels, denying us qualification for the 1982 World Cup with a late, horribly illegal goal.

It was such nights which had convinced Paddy that success was not for him. That there was nothing inappropriate or unreasonable in his mounting dread of what might be happening in Stuttgart ...
what might already have happened in Stuttgart.

Yes, it would be over now, I thought, as I had another one for the road. In a world which had yet to discover the need for everyone to be constantly informed about everything as soon as it
happens, in a country which regarded soccer as a girl’s game, in a time before texting, you just resigned yourself to finding out about things as best you could — especially if part of
you didn’t want to find out.

So it was that I went to the toilet in Mulligan’s bar, where I encountered the actor Joe Savino — Johnny Boyle in
Juno
. It felt surreal then, and it still has
shades of the
Twilight Zone
, because normally I would be running into Joe in Larry Tobin’s of Duke Street. Suddenly, it seemed that the world was no longer such a big place, for
Paddy.

— The score?

— England won.

— Oh fuck.

— They won 7-2.

I believed him, of course.

No Irishman would have disbelieved him, at that time.

— They won 7-2.

— Of course they did.

At some stage Joe took pity on me. As a football man, with a natural inclination towards the truth, he could not let such a lie stand. Ireland had won 1-0.

Ireland had not lost to England, or drawn with England.

Ireland had scored one goal and England had scored no goals, and the match was over now, so Ireland had won.

There was no other way of looking at it.

And they couldn’t take it away from us now.

Ireland ... had ... won.

In the hotel lobby that morning, a bunch of Scandinavian pilots and air hostesses had arrived, and I had observed them as Paddy had always observed such people, as a kind of a
different species, one to which he could never belong, into whose company he could never be admitted as an equal, his best hope being to entertain them with his antics. I now knew that I was as
good as any of them, that Paddy could even win football matches now.

I would be going back to a land transformed. I would be bringing home this tiny T-shirt, with the Manhattan skyline on it.

My daughter, Roseanne, was a month old.

Y
ou should never trust a man who supports the Republic of Ireland. By this I mean a man who supports the Republic to the exclusion of all other
football teams. It is perfectly normal and good to support the Republic along with the club you support for most of the year, be it a League of Ireland club or a Premiership club, or ideally both
— genuine football men have always found it natural to maintain such a portfolio, and deeply unnatural to pursue a more narrow, nationalistic line.

At one level, it is simply a matter of putting in the hours. The genuine football man does it every day of the week, most weeks of the year, and weekends too. It is a full-time occupation, which
gives him certain rights — the right to comment, for example, on the game with a certain degree of credibility.

The man who comes across like a football man but who only supports the Republic is essentially a bullshitter. He may vouch for his commitment by pointing out that he follows the lads to foreign
countries, but that can also be classed as a drinking holiday, an extension of adolescence into infinity, not the job of work that it should be. And in a good year, he can get away with about eight
matches, which would hardly represent a month’s endeavour for the real people. He is, in every sense, only here for the beer.

Yet it is his voice, and the voices of many more like him, which have tended to prevail in our official version of the Charlton years — the Olé Olé voice, as we know it. It
behoves us to question all the received wisdom on this, even the parts that seem most persuasive, such as the assertion that the unprecedented achievements of Charlton’s teams in qualifying
for major tournaments gave the Irish a new sort of positive attitude which contributed to the subsequent economic boom.

Personally I would have subscribed to that one, up to a point, and in a lazy-minded way, until I heard it said for about the fourteenth time on
RTÉ
’s
Questions and Answers
, which renders it automatically suspect.

Indeed to gauge the mentality of the Olé Olé crowd, you might recall the way that assembled members of the Irish establishment on
Q&A
would respond to any question about
sport, usually the last question, the ‘funny’ one. They would immediately lapse into a fit of girlish giggling at the ‘light relief’ provided by the mention of sport, after
all their grave reflections on supposedly more serious matters such as, say, the new Fine Gael policy document on neutrality.

These people know nothing. But worse, they do not even know that they know nothing.

So when I hear the consensus forming that the Celtic Tiger can be traced back to the Boys In Green, as they call them, something bothers me. Perhaps they are just reaching for the familiar
embrace of a cliché, in this case the one that ‘success breeds success’. But if that is the case, what bred the success that Jack had? Is it not also true to say that failure
breeds success, inspiring us to do better, to rise above the morass in which we find ourselves? In fact, given the economic and social context in which
U
2 and the Gate
Theatre and Christy Moore were formed, and considering how well they were doing back in the late 1980s, can it not be argued that failure actually breeds success better than success does? It is
such a fine line and we need to remind ourselves that the first phase of the Charlton years had ended in failure, or so everyone thought at the time.

It had been universally accepted that Ireland would not qualify for Euro 88, that they would finish second in the Group. Jack’s first campaign had had its uplifting moments — the
best research suggests that Olé Olé was first heard in Lansdowne Road around this time — but with the last match about to be played, in which we needed Bulgaria to get beaten at
home by Scotland, it was clear that ultimately Jack had failed.

Not that we were too disappointed, this time. We had not actually been overtly cheated on this occasion and we had not disgraced ourselves. We did not have to look at Eoin Hand and the other
lads on the bench in the pouring rain with their heads in their hands, mourning another night of appalling misery. We had had our low moments, in particular a scoreless draw against Scotland at
Lansdowne which would be regarded as one of the most boring football matches ever played by trained professionals — then again, there was a night in Hampden Park when we beat the Scots 1-0,
which gave us a brief foretaste of the fine madness which was to come.

Though we had again resigned ourselves to not qualifying, we would live off these advances, until the next time.

Even the two draws with Belgium had not been without honour — and in particular the 2-2 result in the Heysel Stadium was viewed as a moral victory. Which might not seem like progress, for
a country such as ours, where we had so many moral victories, we had become connoisseurs of the things, noting their unique characteristics and subtleties the way that a master sommelier would
analyse a mouthful of Château Lafite. Though to extend the analogy, most of us couldn’t bring ourselves to spit it out when we were finished. No, we would swallow it and hold our
glasses out for more, because we knew that more would inevitably be coming.