Days of Heaven (3 page)

Probably, we had become addicted to the moral victories, and we would have great difficulty in adjusting to life without them, if that day ever came.

So we had savoured that 2-2 draw with Belgium downstairs in the International Bar, our base camp close to the offices of
Hot Press
for whom I did most of my work at the time, because it
had featured an ingredient none of us had ever encountered before.

It wasn’t just the fact that Ireland equalised twice, away from home, against a team which had reached the semi-final of the last World Cup — we had always had the fighting spirit
— it was the fact that the second equaliser had come so late in the game: generally, we didn’t ‘do’ late equalisers. Late equalisers were done to us.

And it had come from a penalty, which was quite extraordinary, really, after all that we had been through. And the penalty had been a gift presented to us by the Belgian keeper, Jean-Marie
Pfaff, who had made a lunatic charge which upended Frank Stapleton in a position in which he had seemed most unlikely to score.

All of these things, coming together, had left us high on the improbability of it all.

It was on that night, that I first heard the line that Jack Charlton must be one of Napoleon’s ‘lucky generals’. It would later become such a common line that it would even
filter through to the panellists on
Questions and Answers
, the line that the quality which Napoleon most desired in his generals was that they be lucky. But I had first heard it said by Bill
Graham, my old
Hot Press
colleague and mentor — Bill was also
U
2’s mentor, in fact, he was everyone’s mentor, if they had any sense — in the
International Bar on the night that Jean-Marie Pfaff crazily gave us the penalty which was scored with thoroughbred conviction by Liam Brady.

There was a distinct sense of novelty about this ... this ‘luck’ thing ... and we didn’t quite know how to deal with it. But we were back on familiar ground anyway by the time
the Group was being wound up with Bulgaria playing Scotland at home. A win for Scotland would get us to Germany 88 — but it seemed certain that whatever luck we had had, there wouldn’t
be enough of it to see us through.

We would watch the formalities of the match in Sofia anyway, because someone had to. And we probably had nothing better to do than sit up at the counter of the International on a very grey
afternoon in November, supping pints and watching football and waiting for something good to happen.

By ‘we’, here, I don’t mean the Irish nation as a whole and certainly not the Olé Olé nation or the corporate nation or the
Q&A
nation, just a few
loyalists such as myself and my friends Arthur Mathews, who would later co-write
Father Ted
and
I, Keano
, and the controversial rock journalist George Byrne. And Con Houlihan was down
in Bambrick’s of Portobello. He has written of this grey day, bringing us the lovely image of the owner’s dog snoozing in front of the fire.

There was no-one banging a bodhrán, dressed as a leprechaun. Big Jack himself had gone fishing. In the International, we had to ask for the telly to be turned on, and it was just a telly,
not a big screen. There was nothing big about this. There was considerably more interest in the recent demise of Eamonn Andrews than in the inevitable demise of the Republic’s latest effort
— our most celebrated broadcaster would only die once: the Republic would die many times.

After a while we weren’t really watching it, we were just ‘keeping a watching brief’, as they say. Bulgaria had an awe-inspiring record at home in Sofia, an achievement which
was embellished by legends of referees loudly consorting in their hotel rooms with state-sponsored Bulgarian prostitutes, but somehow none the less impressive for all that. As for Scotland, we knew
that they were capable of anything. They could beat Brazil and then they could lose to Liechtenstein, for no reason except that they were Scotland. In them, too, there is a deep restlessness of the
soul.

But by the looks of it, they clearly weren’t going to be doing anything perverse in Sofia, on this day.

Then something good happened. Colette Rooney came in from
Hot Press
, just up the road, to ask me if I could go to London the following day to interview Robbie Robertson. Of course I
could. The former mainman with The Band had just released a solo album, which contained at least two wonderful tracks, ‘Somewhere Down The Crazy River’, and ‘Fallen Angel’,
which could stand alongside his classic cuts such as ‘The Weight’, and ‘The Shape I’m In’, and ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’. I revere The Band
above all others, and to meet Robbie Robertson himself would be a signal honour.

And then Scotland scored.

It is not true to say that everyone in Ireland remembers where they were when Gary Mackay of Hearts, winning his first cap, scored that goal for Scotland with four minutes to go. Because like I
said, the only people actually involved at this end were a few lost souls scattered around the country and Bambrick’s dog.

What they also forget, is the agony that was yet to come. Brutalised by the abuse inflicted on us over the years, despite George Hamilton’s now-frenzied commentary, we were loath to even
celebrate that goal until we saw with our own eyes that they were kicking off again at the centre circle.

So many times, it seemed, we had seen good goals for the Republic disallowed, we had lost hope that there was even the most rudimentary form of justice at work in this football world. Joy had
turned to disappointment so many times, we didn’t bother with the joy any more.

For years we couldn’t properly celebrate a goal until we had something akin to forensic proof that the referee had allowed it, that all the paperwork had been done and everyone had signed
off on it.

We had instant recall of some of the bleaker legends of Irish football, such as the times Frank Stapleton had vital goals disallowed against Belgium in Brussels and against France in Paris for
no reason, or at least none that was vaguely plausible. Had there even been an Irish goal disallowed for no reason on this very ground in Sofia, a long time ago?

So even though this Scotland goal was being allowed to stand, it seemed inconceivable to us that another four minutes of normal time and God knows how long of injury time could
go by without it all being taken away from us, in some uniquely twisted manner.

This is what Ireland had done to us.

This is the way we were, near the end of the 1980s. Not just the football, but all the other bullshit, the wrecked economy, the divorce referendum and the abortion referendum, the North,
everything that was done under the colours of green, white and gold, had eventually worn us down to this level. We were sick men. Anyone who made it out of here had made it despite all the
bullshit, driven by a desperate desire to be free of the bullshit.

It became strangely forgotten during the era of the Tiger, but as I recall, one of the more influential events of the late 1980s was the publication of a book by Professor Joe Lee,
Ireland
1912–1985: Politics and Society.

Again, because we got locked into that bullshit narrative of success breeding success, we overlooked the fact that failure was also a powerful motivator, and that we had it in spades.

This book, which was a surprise best-seller, was essentially a long and detailed history of failure in Ireland since the foundation of the State. The author was then Professor of Modern History
at
UCC
, a man who could increasingly be heard on
RTÉ
radio explaining how everything in Ireland was broken.

Clearly he was a man who loved his country, and who was scrupulously, even obsessively fair, about what had been done right, and what had been done wrong. He gave respect where it was due. You
would feel at times that he almost gave too much respect, even where it wasn’t due. But if anything, his well-known even-handedness made his book even more important and powerful and
depressing — this guy wasn’t saying this stuff for effect, he was saying it because it was true, and he could prove it.

Little wonder that so many of us bought his book, but so few of us had the heart to read it.

But we would hear those who had been able to read it all the way through speaking in solemn tones about the sadness of it all. About Ireland, and how we had done so many things so badly compared
with similar countries, who had somehow worked out how to govern themselves in a vaguely intelligent and responsible fashion.

All who heard this drank deep and were silent.

That big book felt like an epitaph for the whole doomed project that was the Republic of Ireland, one that was superbly and lovingly crafted in itself, but an epitaph all the same, for something
dead and gone. Lee stopped short of saying that we should just hand the country back to whoever we got it from and say sorry about all that. But to many, that was the only reasonable conclusion to
be drawn.

So that’s roughly where we were, near the end of the 1980s in Ireland, without even venturing towards the badlands of international football and the men who had been forging our destinies
in that regard. Throw in the
FAI
, described by writer Michael Nugent as ‘a perpetually exploding clown’s car’, and various Bulgarian hookers and so forth, and you get a sense of
what we were up against here.

Which is how, in the International Bar on 11 November 1987, even though this extraordinary thing had happened, with Scotland scoring so late in the game, we were convinced that it could only be
the precursor to some grotesque denouement. We were already steeling ourselves for it, as the Bulgarians were now playing with a wild urgency, the blackguards, startled out of their cynical torpor
by the unthinkable event which had just befallen them.

Sportingly, if insanely, a Scot had rushed to retrieve the ball from the net after the goal, a goal that wouldn’t have happened if the ref had stopped play for a bad Bulgarian foul in the
build-up.

Their captain, Nasko Sirakov, sent a shot from the edge of the area which seemed certain to squeeze inside the far post, but which somehow went wide. The equaliser was coming. We knew it was
coming. We cursed this savage new twist, this cruel raising of our hopes.

Then Arthur Mathews came up with a formula, which seemed to make it bearable. ‘There’s about three minutes to go, including injury time,’ he said. ‘That’s about as
long as “Teenage Kicks” by The Undertones.’ Which wasn’t long at all really, since he put it like that. And so myself, George and Arthur, in the privacy of our own tormented
heads, ‘played’ that record by the Undertones, that three minutes of pop perfection which itself had been forged against a backdrop of pain and terror.

When it was over, the
RTÉ
studio had become a place of madness.

John Giles was there, Maurice Setters and Mick McCarthy.

Jack couldn’t be found.

Gone fishing.

He couldn’t be phoned, faxed or texted, and even when these technologies became more common, Jack was not the sort of guy to be checking his messages when he had gone fishing. Avoiding any
flak that might have come his way when we didn’t qualify, he was now missing his moment of triumph, yet acquiring just a little more mystique in the process. What other manager in world
football would be incommunicado on such a day?

Arthur and George and I went downstairs to our usual spot in the International, where the real drinking could commence. Already I could tell that I would be severely hung over for Robbie
Robertson, but then he is a great artist and a great humanitarian, who would be no stranger to men in that condition.

I did not care.

We were still there at closing time at 11 o’clock on the 11th of November.

It was the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

B
ob Geldof was my landlord at the time. That would be Bob Senior, father of famous Bob, who owned a large Edwardian house on Crosthwaite Park in
Dun Laoghaire divided into flats. Liam Mackey, my friend from
Hot Press
, lived in the basement flat and when he moved upstairs to a slightly larger premises, I moved in to the basement along
with Jane — our baby Roseanne would soon be born.

He was a lovely man, old Geldof, still kicking around the world in a camper van which young Bob had bought for him. We were paying him more than we’d been paying for the olde worlde flat
in Leinster Road in Rathmines where we had been living, but Dun Laoghaire had distinct advantages such as the nearby
DART
, which, it was increasingly felt, might not be such
a bad idea after all. And there was Dun Laoghaire itself, where we now had characters such as Barry Devlin, formerly of Horslips, in the neighbourhood, as well as Sonny Condell, who played at the
first rock gig I ever attended, wearing the first pair of leather trousers I had ever seen, in the Dean Crowe Hall in Athlone. He’d been supporting Peggy’s Leg. In Rathmines, we had had
Father Michael Cleary living across the road.