Feckers (13 page)

Like it or not, Big Tom was a central element in the cultural formation of a majority of Irish people born between the Emergency and the Mary Robinson presidency. Some of those affected or afflicted were volunteers, but most were conscripts. Some people went to his gigs to ‘square’ a member of the opposite sex. Some, although claiming to hate the music, went because they liked to jive. Many truly loathed the music, while others regarded it with an arched eyebrow. But, no matter how you heard it, the music seeped into your soul.

It was difficult to tell if Big Tom was for real or not. He was a strange phenomenon to look at – a mountain of a man with blond hair, dressed in incongruously colourful clothes, who sang a succession of odd songs without saying much besides, rarely communicating at all other than by means of the occasional theatrical wink. Apart from the clothes and the guitar, he looked as if he would have much happier behind the wheel of a Massey Ferguson.

But there was, too, a sense of mystery about it all, a suggestion of a ritualistic celebration of something felt at a very slightly deeper level. The mood was always carefree, even raucous, but the songs were all about pain and loss – so much so that it became funny. He called himself once ‘a singer of sad songs’. He said: ‘We’re a sentimental race of people . . . We’ve had a lot of trouble down the years, so maybe we have reason for it.’

Big Tom had been born plain Tom McBride, in Castleblaney, County Monaghan, probably early in the 1930s. He left school at 14, got his first job working on a neighbouring farm for five shillings a week. He spent a decade or so going between Monaghan, Scotland and London, eventually settling down to a mix of farming, steel-erecting and music. In the early 1960s, Tom began playing with a local group called the Fincairn Ceili Band, performing mostly at dinner dances and weddings. He was the rhythm guitarist, singing the odd song, but eventually became the lead singer, singing a range of songs about love and exile that he’d picked up on his travels. His first hit was ‘Gentle Mother’, a country dirge about a dead mother. Tom had first heard it sung in London a decade before.

Country music Irish-style was to acquire a specific context as the folk music of a generation traumatized by involuntary emigration, and without any other means of expressing itself. Through the 1960s and 1970s, pop co-existed alongside this odd Irish hybrid, seeming to articulate the dichotomy of fear and hope that characterized the Lemass era and its messy aftermath. Pop became the voice of optimism and forgetting; ‘Country ’n’ Irish’ that of apprehension and remembering.

The problem with Big Tom was not so much that he was shite, although he was in a way. The problem was that, underneath what he did there was the shadow of something else, something that might have been great if he had had the vision to excavate it and his audience had the intuition to demand it. The ironic response the music engendered was not without basis: there was the makings of something good rattling just below the surface. Had there been a Shane MacGowan happening along, capable of giving the music a root in the arse, who knows what might have come of it?

It would be a mistake to overlook the fact that it was in the 1980s, when emigration started up once again, that Daniel O’Donnell emerged to become an international star. His oeuvre owed something to ‘Country ’n’ Irish’, but it lacked roughage and Daniel thought irony was a pill you took with your breakfast.

A few years after the ballroom boom died down, an American country singer called Garth Brooks started coming to Ireland for occasional performances. Brooks sang of a pain that was manageable and shallow. His voice did not penetrate like Bono’s or Sinéad’s. He allowed a little of the pain to show itself, but also enabled it to be covered over in a coat of sugary syrup. Within no time at all he had sold 500,000 albums in Ireland alone, a level of sales unequalled in any other market.

The truth of this phenomenon, which has never been named, is that Brooks appealed to the pop kids of the 1960s, for whom ‘Country ’n’ Irish’ had had an attraction that they were loath to own up to. Now they were finding themselves experiencing a new appetite for sentimentality as they accompanied their own children to the airport. Brooks told a tale that few were willing to admit to: that just under the surface of the Irish psyche lay a melancholia that sought a particular form of expression. But, because of the 1970s backlash against country music, no Irish artist was at that time capable of meeting the needs of a generation caught between a fragile optimism and the renewed plausibility of despair.

People thought Big Tom was thick, perhaps because he looked thick. But he was a lot smarter than most of those who thought him unintentionally funny. There’s a story about Mick Jagger, who used to visit Castleblaney in the 1970s, asking Tom for his autograph after seeing him signing for a gaggle of young women who Jagger had first supposed would be more interested in himself. Jagger proffered a beermat and Big Tom, studying him carefully, enquired, ‘Who’ll I make it out to?’

‘Mick Jagger, man!’

Tom regarded him carefully. ‘Aye,’ said he, ‘an’ you look like him too.’

23
Ray MacSharry

P
erhaps the most tragic circumstance of the modern era for Irish society was that Ray MacSharry declined to make himself available to become Taoiseach. Having, by general agreement, almost single-handedly rescued the Irish economy from perdition in the late 1980s, he disappeared off to Brussels, where he spent a term as Ireland’s EU Commissioner. Whenever speculation started up about the possibility of his returning to lead his party and his country, Ray slapped it down.

Back in 1987, following an election in which Fianna Fáil had issued mixed messages about its intentions, MacSharry became Minister for Finance in Charles Haughey’s minority government. Haughey himself clearly didn’t really know what to do about an economy with which several recent administrations, including two of his own, had achieved nothing but to make things worse. Haughey, in an attempt to differentiate Fianna Fáil from the outgoing lot with their talk of ‘fiscal rectitude’, had spoken vaguely during the campaign about ‘developmental policies’, giving the impression that there was a kinder, gentler way of snatching the country from the icy grip of death. But MacSharry was having none of it.

With his slightly stern air and what Olivia O’Leary called his ‘Transylvanian good looks’, MacSharry conveyed the right blend of reassurance and reserve. He didn’t mince his words and, though we whimpered a little in our hair shirts, Mac made us feel safe. Rolling up his sleeves as we looked on in apprehension, he gripped the economy by the scruff of the neck and, in a few short if painful years, shook it into a better shape than it had even been in before.

MacSharry came from a working stock family in Sligo town. In 1988, a year into the term as Minister for Finance in which his zero-tolerance of budgetary excess would pave the way for the Celtic Tiger, he gave an interview to
Magill
magazine in which he spoke eloquently of the values he’d grown up with. In one quote that reads like a Bruce Springsteen song, he recalled the MacSharry family’s first new car: ‘One of the most distinctive memories I have is the first new car bought by my father. I was ten or eleven at the time. It was a Ford Prefect, EI 5043, and we were trading in a Baby Ford, IZ 3534, at Gilbride’s Garage. The night before, I was with my father and my brother Louis when we counted out the money – three times – before going to bed. £230. And it was billions as far as we were concerned.’

When he took on the stewardship of the national finances in 1987, qualities of thrift, frugality and familiarity with life’s harsh realities, which had attached themselves to him in the tough years of his childhood in 1940s Sligo, stood also to the country. It was not easy, back then, to implement cuts in health, education and social welfare. But MacSharry pulled it off because he possessed a moral authority that exuded from personal connectedness to the reality of Irish life. He was not an ideologue seeking to impose an agenda. Nor, despite his ominous nickname – Mac the Knife – did he seek out easy targets. To the extent that human nature and reality will ever allow, the pain was evenly and fairly spread.

Even if you take the view that there has been a degree of exaggeration of MacSharry’s role in the rejuvenation of the Irish economy in the 1990s, it is inconceivable that the disaster that befell us in the Noughties could have happened had he been anywhere in the building.

MacSharry is still hale and hearty, a strong, handsome man, only twenty years or so older than the present generation of Irish leaders. In cultural and ideological terms, however, a millennium separates him from the pampered generation that inherited his efforts in the 1990s.

Back in ’88, the voiceless were the outrightly poor. But, although they suffered along with everyone else, they did not do so disproportionately – perhaps the greatest tribute that can be made to Ray MacSharry’s integrity as a leader and as a man. Today the truly poor have battalions of spokespersons, and the voiceless are those who have just a little to lose: those who own their own houses and perhaps an apartment in the centre of town in anticipation of their children going to college later on, the people who maybe bought their first brand-new car in the past decade. A generation ago, such people did not need spokespersons because the political leadership came from their ranks and therefore saw the world as they did. But now they are the truly voiceless people in a society responding largely to cant and humbug, in which it is no longer possible to observe without controversy the obvious fact that wealth should be generated by effort and creativity, rather than by stock-jobbery and sleight-of-hand.

It is well we may rant and rave and gnash our teeth on account of losing the greatest Taoiseach we never had.

24
Jack Charlton

D
uring those halcyon days of the Charlton Era, the Manager seemed constantly to be repeating the refrain: ‘A nation of three-and-a-half million people cannot win the World Cup.’ His intention, obviously, was to dampen down the growing public expectation that was to leave the widest street in Europe completely empty during more than one unforgettable encounter with one of the great sides of world football. Jack, of course, could not have been expected to know that Ireland is not a nation of three-and-a-half million people, but a nation of 75 million people dispersed throughout the world. And because Jack was a Brit, we were much too polite, what with all the baggage attaching to this insight, to bring up the matter.

Charlton brought possibly unprecedented joy into the lives of Irish citizens, at home and abroad. Often it seemed as if he had been sent from on high to cancel out every evil deed his countrymen had perpetrated in Ireland, and he certainly left the balance sheet a lot healthier when he eventually departed.

But therein also lay the problem with Jack: his Englishness was both the greatest asset he offered Ireland and also his fatal limitation. He was accomplished in an art form that was not indigenous to Ireland, but which had come to be a key medium in which we sought to express our sense of having arrived in the world. He came to Ireland with modest expectations, and in the end seemed astonished by what he had managed to stir up. Far more effectively than any native son, he had awoken the Irish to the possibility of success. And yet, neither he nor almost anyone else seemed to look beyond the prospect of a modest achievement.

One man who seemed to sense that much more was possible was Roy Keane, who would end his international career in a distressing little drama at the 2002 World Cup in Japan. Perhaps there are those who remain convinced that what concerned Roy Keane in Saipan was the quality of the facilities. But, as he was to make clear as the years passed, what he was really seeking to express was the frustration of someone who had grown to see his own dream come true, wanted to make it available to the country he loved, and, though convinced that more was possible, found himself confronted and confounded at every turn by the ineluctable pathology of losing. ‘Win or lose,’ he would derisively remark on a radio programme a few years later, ‘hit the booze.’

Perhaps the Roy Keane saga carried also signifiers of a frustration that goes deep into the Irish psyche – a feeling buried under the weight of centuries of self-loathing that we might actually be as good as anyone else, and yet are expected, and therefore expect ourselves, to be delighted about getting knocked out in the quarter-finals. Perhaps Keane’s response was some kind of existential roar of frustration at the idea that not only do our dreams always seem to get short-circuited, but the entire edifice we construct around our endeavours appears to make this inevitable.

The Irish attraction to soccer has long been more than an infatuation with the novelty of a global sport. Deep in the warped culture of late-twentieth-century Ireland, it was a form of subversion. There was a sense for us then that it provided a form of liberation from the weight of authority represented by GAA leaders, clergy, teachers and self-appointed cultural gurus who told us what being ‘Irish’ could mean and what it could not mean. It wasn’t that we were actively rebelling against the re-Gaelicization of our cultural horizons, but rather that this process, for all that we may have supported or engaged with it, could not touch some other part of us that still needed to be nurtured: the colonized part, the part that remained incapable of expression in any identifiably indigenous code.

It was perhaps inevitable that soccer would become a vehicle for the unashamed expression of our post-colonial imagination, a sort of surrendering to that which, in other contexts, the national project of de-Anglicization sought to eliminate. Once you’ve been colonized, invaded, violated, you ever after need two distinct forms of self-expression. One is indigenous, a way of telling yourself who you still are. It needs to be of yourself, for yourself, by yourself, yourself alone. The other needs to be Other, of the outside, a means of saying to the rest of the world: I/we are still human, still living, still here; I/we can do what you can do (almost just as well, at least not as badly as you would expect). We are not as shite as we have been led to believe! Usually this means of expressing ourselves to the external will have been received from the violator, and will provide a way for the violated to seek the approval of he who has tried to persuade him that he is nothing. The two forms, obviously, operate at cross purposes. The very act of participating in something indigenous, however necessary this may be in one sense, validates the violator’s poor opinion in another. And by succeeding at the other, I/we affirm a part of our own dread that we may no longer be fully ourselves. We cannot win, but please don’t say it aloud.