Days of Heaven (6 page)

Roche, his jersey plastered with the logos which he insisted be in place before any pictures would be taken, had left us all behind. And we revered him for it, gathering in multitudes in the
centre of Dublin to welcome him home from the Tour de France, where he had stood on the podium on the Champs Élysées with the paws of our Taoiseach all over him, claiming credit where
none was due.

Again, Roche had performed his miracles despite being Irish, where his sport had had a storied past but no future at the time he emerged from the suburb of Dundrum, radiating class. It was the
French on that occasion who supplied the training and the stage and whatever else you needed to get yourself up the Alpe d’Huez and into the yellow jersey.

But usually it was Johnny England who made our sporting wishes come true. Whether we liked it or not, the English first division had for decades been regarded as the natural destination of the
most talented Irish ball-players. And support for English football ran deep in the cities of Dublin and Cork and the garrison towns too, and beyond — I grew up in the garrison town of Athlone
in the 1970s, when almost everyone in my school had a natural affinity with Leeds or Liverpool or Man Utd.

But the country lads weren’t exactly immune to the attractions of association football either. What Jack did, with the results he achieved, was the popularisation of football in Ireland,
beyond this hard core of aficionados which had always existed. And in so doing, with the primitive style which he favoured, he alienated the football men, the people who had always loved the game
and kept it going.

Jack certainly didn’t bring football to a new level in Ireland, at least not in a good way, but he brought the popularity of football to a level whereby Gaelic matches were cancelled
because they clashed with World Cup matches and English football, as represented by the Premier League, has arguably become our
de facto
national sport.

You could suggest that the
GAA
has obvious merits as a ‘community’ organisation, but equally, on the sporting side, it actually demands a lot less of its
followers than the English game. A Kerryman would get away with not making a trip to Dublin until the All-Ireland final, an extraordinarily light load to bear, when you consider that the same
Kerryman, if he supports Liverpool, would be giving his full attention to at least two games a week from the month of August through to the following May. And then there are the Leinster hurling
finals with Croke Park only one-quarter full, because Kilkenny fans don’t suppose their team will be needing them yet.

Certainly the
GAA
provides a few big days out, generally in fine weather, but ‘the ban’ on its members from playing foreign games, a ban that was only lifted
in 1971, showed that sport in itself was not necessarily the
GAA
’s main priority, that it was also a political and cultural movement which defined the nation in a
narrow and discriminatory fashion, which was perversely against the national interest. The
GAA
concocted a kind of sporting version of the Iron Curtain, behind which the
purity of the Gaelic project could be maintained without interference from the more decadent culture on the other side. And it banished all dissidents.

It was indeed one of Bill Graham’s more inspired moments when, in another context, he described the old Soviet Union as being ‘like an entire continent run by the
GAA
’. He was right at the time, but if Bill had lived to see the new Croke Park, with ‘soccer’ matches being played in it, he would doubtless have reviewed his
position. He would have acknowledged that like the Soviet Union, eventually the
GAA
had its
glasnost
and
perestroika
. And unlike the
GAA
, the Soviet Union could only manage it with a President who was blind drunk most of the time.

And there was always the amateur ethos, a positive off-shoot of this generally twisted old attitude. It can be regarded as Paddy’s special contribution to sport in a world mad for money.
Paddy can be in Sydney or Chicago looking at the All-Ireland final in which none of the stars are being paid a weekly wage, and he can be thinking: we are indeed a great sporting nation.
That’s the ‘big ego’ bit there. But there is also a little voice which nags at him, a voice reminding him that this is, after all, an exclusively Irish affair, and that if these
guys are as great as they’re cracked up to be, they’d surely be across in England playing the old garrison game, making millions.

That’s the ‘low self-esteem’ bit.

Like, we may be a great sporting nation, blah blah, but are we actually any good? And if we are, how can we tell if we never compete with people from other countries?

Gaelic games were at once a comfort blanket and a source of insecurity at the time of Euro 88. They allowed Paddy to demonstrate many of the things that he did very well. But was sport one of
these things? There had been a few iconic individuals — Christy O’Connor the golfer; Ronnie Delany the runner; a few rugby players who may have been nominally Irish but who in truth
belonged to an upper-middle-class élite which was beyond nationality; there were a number of phenomenal horses and jockeys and trainer Vincent O’Brien; Eddie Macken the show-jumper;
Barry McGuigan and the boxers who always did their stuff at the Olympics; Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche ...

There was strength and depth, in Paddy’s sporting contribution, but alas, the one that really counted was the one that had always eluded us.

Association Football, the garrison game, is the one that counts. The rest is not exactly bullshit, but football is the one which gives everyone a chance, simply because it is played everywhere
and it doesn’t require a set of golf clubs or a place at a fee-paying school, or a horse. And it certainly doesn’t require you to be from the 32 counties of Ireland, to know
what’s going on.

Jack Charlton would become quite fond of the big days out at Croke Park, though, as a typical ‘gruff Yorkshireman’, he would bravely express reservations about any sport which is
played in just one country in the entire world. He would also marvel at what he perceived to be the lowly status of football in Ireland, by comparison with these so-called national sports of Gaelic
football and hurling and greyhound racing.

But here he revealed that perhaps he didn’t know us that well after all.

Which is reasonable enough, since we don’t know ourselves that well either. He didn’t seem to fully understand, as he sat on a fine day in Croke Park with the stadium full, enjoying
the spectacle along with the great and the good and maybe even the followers of Kerry or Kilkenny who could now actually be arsed to come to Dublin in person, that it’s not like this all the
time. That the Irish were probably as good at football as they were at any other sport. Perhaps better, when you reflect on the numbers of high-class individuals who had gone to England and had
successful careers.

There was a man called Peter Molloy who owned a pub in Athlone when I was growing up, who had played for Aston Villa in the 1950s. He was part of a steady exodus of ‘good
professionals’. And then there were players of the very highest order, such as John Giles, Jackie Carey, Liam Whelan, Tony Dunne, Paul McGrath, Ronnie Whelan, Brady and O’Leary and
Stapleton. There were just never enough of them out there at the same time. And even if there had been, their best efforts would no doubt have been thwarted by the machinations of the
FAI
, the
dysfunctional sporting body that other dysfunctional sporting bodies call ‘the galácticos’.

So Paddy was perhaps bringing a tad more of his native genius to this than Jack seemed to realise. And now it turned out that there was more of it out there than either of them had realised. Not
that Jack ultimately gave a damn where the players were coming from as long as they did what they were told.

But for us, the ‘great-grandmother’ rule was about a lot more than fleshing out the squad with useful players. It was a thing of extraordinary psychic and cultural and historical
significance. It had been born out of guilt and shame, this provision in the Irish constitution whereby the children of emigrants could become Irish citizens. It seemed to be saying to the
‘diaspora’ that we could do nothing for them except wave goodbye as they left the country, but if their children were mad enough to want to come back here, we wouldn’t keep them
out. In fact, our citizenship laws back in the 1950s were partly influenced by the number of Irish women who were having illegitimate children in England because they were afraid to have them in
Ireland.

And there was the ever-present hint of bullshit too, because we knew that the overwhelming majority of those who left Ireland would never return.

Many of them would get married happily or unhappily in England, but never unhappily enough, it seemed, to risk the boat back. Their children would include the likes of Johnny Rotten and Shane
MacGowan and the Gallaghers of Oasis and all four members of The Smiths, who would enrich the cultural life of England while still maintaining a sort of Irishness. But on the whole, no good had
come to the mother country from this long-standing arrangement, apart from the relief of getting rid of a few more unfortunates whom the Irish economy was unable to support.

And there was always America, which was now taking in the Irish in numbers which would ensure a full house for Christy Moore every night of the year, if he so wished.

But the emigration to England was always the most damning and the most disgraceful, not just because it involved the old enemy solving our problems, but because it was so near and yet so far.
What kind of a hole were we running here that they would prefer to be sleeping rough in Camden Town than to be back in the old country for which they pined at closing time?

And now, through some strange alignment of the planets — or at least the planet football — after decades of this guilt and shame, something happened which would be of benefit to all
sides. A serious effort was being made to recruit the likes of Townsend and Houghton and Aldridge, McCarthy and Cascarino, ye gods, the sons and grandsons of emigrants, as swiftly and as legally as
possible to the Irish football team.

In Ireland we called it payback for emigration, conveniently ignoring the fact that we probably weren’t entitled to any payback. And for these players the association with the Republic
would be enormously beneficial to their careers.

Football, which has always been more important than most things in life, had worked a sort of national miracle which politics couldn’t, which religion most certainly couldn’t —
a re-unification of Ireland, the best we were ever going to get.

The arrival of the ‘English’ players gave the diaspora in general a powerful connection to this team of Jack’s, not to mention giving Jack a team which could qualify for the
tournaments which had previously eluded it. Dermot Bolger witnessed this at Euro 88, in his play
In High Germany
: ‘The crowd joined in, every one of them, from Dublin and Cork, from
London and Stockholm. And suddenly I knew this was the only country I still owned, those eleven figures in green shirts, that menagerie of accents pleading with God.’

As for Jack’s own Englishness, for us it had become either an amusing irony or just another fast one we had pulled on them, taking on the ‘gruff Yorkshireman’ who had once
applied for the England job and not even received the courtesy of a reply.

Again, we told ourselves what we wanted to hear, that this was the sort of Englishman we could take orders from, a rough-hewn individual, a plain fellow whose tastes were not unlike our own,
though he was also about as English as you can be, in the sense of having an unambiguous devotion to Queen and country.

Bigger things were happening for us, with a nation re-discovering a part of itself that had been missing, presumed dead. Discovering these weird new phenomena such as luck, and winning, and
being part of something that matters.

H
aving said all that ... having taken from England the great game of football and taken back the sons that she had nurtured for us and beaten her
1-0 in the opening match of the European Championship, a match which England could have won 5-1, or even 7-2, we did not feel any need to be magnanimous in victory.

The film-maker Alan Parker, when he was over in Dublin making
The Commitments
would be deeply disappointed by the wild rejoicing in the saloons of Ireland when anything remotely bad
happened to the England football team. Here was the Englishman, Parker, giving opportunities to talented Irish youngsters, making Ireland look and sound better than it actually was, and generally
doing us a big favour. And this is how we showed our appreciation. ‘But we support you’, he would say plaintively.

Indeed, apart from the more obdurate members of the National Front, most England fans would show a benign attitude to the Republic in the big tournaments, even willing them to win, as long as
England weren’t involved. Which some of us would automatically see as just patronising and just another demonstration of their lack of awareness of the bitter enmity which is supposed to
exist between us.