Feckers (14 page)

This paradox defines the relationship between Gaelic games and soccer in Irish life and society. Gaelic games are the means of affirming ourselves to ourselves, a way of expressing our relief at the departure of the invader and celebrating his banishment. Soccer is the expression of that part of us that remains colonized, however long the visitors have departed. Soccer is the means we have unconsciously chosen to say, ‘Look, there is no need to be disappointed in our progress! Look, we can be like you after all! Look, we have not fallen back into barbarism! We are something, in spite of ourselves!’

The difficulty is that the very urge to demonstrate our capability is matched by a defeatism implanted also by the invader, which tells us that, no, we cannot ever win. What we crave more than anything is possible through soccer, but that, because it belongs to our former abuser, is infected for us with a pathology of losing. The very means we had found to express our desire to be as good as anyone has an in-built mechanism preventing us from becoming that which we crave to be.

Before Charlton, whenever the Irish national team took the field, the best expectations of the nation resided with the prospect of another ‘moral victory’. This was when you got sixty-four kinds of DNA kicked out of you but you still did not lie down. You might be beaten fifteen-nil, but if you hit the side-netting in the closing minutes, that was ‘a moral victory’, a sign that there remained a glimmering spark at the core of the unbending spirit of the Irish, and a portent of greatness still to come.

The incredible success of the national football team under Jack Charlton in the late 1980s and early ’90s, revealed itself in retrospect as a rehearsal of the Celtic Tiger economic miracle of the decade that followed – a glittering success that for a cosmic moment promised to wipe out nearly a century of failure. Both phenomena were managed, supervised and controlled by foreigners; and, more pertinently, both were based on a product that might be termed non-indigenous.

There is, then, a remarkable similarity between our responses in the respective arenas of industry and sport, and soccer tells the story more clearly than other sports. In both soccer and industrial policy, we like to leave it to outsiders. It is not that we lack self-belief – indeed, when someone comes in and takes charge, we find self-belief in open-top busloads. But we are poor self-starters, and especially poor at seeing ourselves in an area of expression or activity we perceive as belonging to peoples who can exude self-confidence without a barrelful of ale.

These are the facts of what Jack Charlton stirred up in us. The tragedy was not that he failed, but that he succeeded beyond his own wildest dreams, and thereby made visible what was possible but at the same time unrealizable.

Not once during his years as manager of the Irish football team was Jack Charlton asked: ‘Could a nation of 75 million people win the World Cup?’ If we had only had the belief to put it like that, he might have said ‘yes’, and who knows what might have happened?

25
Gerry Adams

E
veryone knows Gerry Adams was not just ‘in’ the IRA but in it at a pretty senior level. Innumerable times it has been written that for many years he was Commander of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA. He denies it, but has not sued anyone for what, if it is untrue, must surely strike him as a grave slur on his character. Books have been written linking him to some of the ugliest operations of the IRA – for example, the ‘disappearance’ of Jean McConville in 1972. Jean McConville was a young widow who came to the aid of a young British soldier dying in the street. For this she was abducted by the IRA, taken to a secluded place, shot once in the head and buried on the spot. It would be many years before her body was found, accidentally, by a man who came across a scrap of clothing while out playing with his child.

Gerry Adams told Jean McConville’s family that he had nothing to do with these events, that he was in prison at the time. This was untrue. Everyone knew that he was the senior commander in Belfast when this murder was carried out.

The great fiction of the ‘republican movement’ has been the idea of a separation between its political wing, Sinn Féin, and the ‘freedom fighters’ in the IRA. Everyone knows this was a necessary fiction to avoid imprisonment. When the conflict was brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, many republicans came forward to admit to their former freedom-fighting activities. Martin McGuinness, for example, admitted that he had been a senior figure in the IRA and took responsibility for the pain and grief he had inflicted on so many. He refused to go into details but still it was felt that he had gone some way towards atoning for any wrongs he had committed.

But not Gerry. Clinging to the fiction, Adams insisted that he had never been in the IRA. In fact, he told Gay Byrne on
The Late Late Show
that he had never so much as thrown a stone during a riot. He was a politician, not a freedom fighter. Mind you, he did not condemn freedom fighting – there had, after all, been a war on. It’s just that he hadn’t been a fighter himself.

In the immediate wake of the Good Friday settlement, this didn’t seem to matter. Adams had been a key figure in the delicate process by which peace was achieved. Indeed, as a senior republican who was prepared to risk his own safety by talking the republican movement around, he might well be deemed the most critical figure in that process. For a short time he was something of a hero. Commentators who had previously attacked Gerry Adams and all his works and pomp now acknowledged his statesmanlike qualities. Very few people in the Republic any longer believed that there had been any ‘war’, but were glad that, however it was to be described, it was now over. The voters of the Republic had even agreed to dismantle their own constitutional aspiration to the eventual unity of their country by agreeing to amend Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, just to stop the Provos slaughtering people. More and more nationalists in the Republic were coming around to the view that the whole thing had been an unnecessary exercise in egotism and viciousness by a generation of Northern thugs who sought to appropriate the national flag and the history it signified so as to legitimize what was really no more than a squalid turf war pursued by ruthless criminals. After years of extending tacit support to the ‘armed struggle’, many people had become persuaded that, although the Brits and the unionists had much to answer for, the IRA’s response had been utterly disproportionate and deeply immoral. After thirty years of conflict and more than 3,000 deaths, the Provos had achieved nothing more than had been on the table at the beginning. Now they were prepared to exchange all the alleged principles on which they had fought their ‘war’ for a few seats in an assembly that could have been agreed nearly three decades previously if they had been prepared to be reasonable. They had fought for ‘freedom’ and settled for power.

Nevertheless, in the early days of the new-found peace, people were prepared to indulge Gerry Adams in his fictive endeavours. People understood that it was sometimes necessary to be less than totally truthful in the interests of peace and harmony. Because everyone had been so anxious to ensure that the peace was maintained, it was considered that a certain latitude should be accorded to Gerry’s pretences. If he had just kept his mouth shut, people might have been able to live with it.

But in his every public utterance as a politician, Gerry adopted a high moral tone about corruption, criminality and wrongdoing. He seemed not to understand the contradictions of his banging on about the alleged criminality of others when he refused to admit to his own past. He berated bankers, freeloading politicians and paedophile priests, demanding that heads be delivered on plates and keys be cast off the edges of cliffs. He did not blink once at the irony of it all. Adopting the ideological palette of a left-liberal politician, he pontificated about equality and women’s rights. He seemed to have forgotten all about Jean McConville and her truncated life as a woman and mother. He attacked the continuing campaigns of irredentist republicans as though he had never fired a shot in anger in his life. Even when he was implicated in a controversy in which his own brother was accused of abusing his daughter, who came out to say that she had told Gerry all about it many years before, Gerry did not break his stride in demanding the resignations of bishops who had failed to blow the whistle on pervert priests.

All this has had a gruesome effect on the stomach of modern Ireland. People could not help finding it strange that a man who had, to their certain knowledge, been up to his oxters in the blood of innocents, should now presume to be regarded as the conscience of the Irish nation. It made people want to throw up. It sent their moral compasses crazy. But still they had to listen to it, because Gerry was now a fully constitutional politician whose past was nobody’s business but his own.

26
Bono

U
2 are more important to the story of contemporary Ireland than most commentaries seek to suggest. The standard analysis remains doggedly on the surface, celebrating the wondrousness of the idea that a rock’n’roll band originating in Ireland could possibly be regarded as the best in the world.

Little credence is given to the idea that U2, in their progress through the world, have unveiled a kind of secret history of Ireland. A deeper examination of their own history reveals a community of individuals who were somehow able to transcend the exterior climate of negativity and reaction, and to drive their receptors deep into the culture whence they emerged, acquiring a shamanic capacity to plumb the interior reservoirs of Irish creativity and genius, creating in the process a parallel dramatization of Ireland on the world stage.

In the 1990s, this became deeply infectious for their own people. Even that prevailing superficial idea of their world-conquering adventuring seemed to creep into the soul of their native land, provoking in their fellow countrymen a counterintuitive ‘Me too?’ followed by a defiant ‘Why not?’

But if we are to give them credit for in part inspiring the national reinvigoration that became world-famous as the Celtic Tiger, then we must also consider the possibility that, somewhere in the U2 story, there was also a portent of the unwinding of that miracle in the late Noughties.

When people find fault with U2, it usually tends to be about the extra-curricular stuff: Bono’s charity campaigning or the cartoon persona he’s fashioned for the stadium that is the modern mass media world. The first time U2 got on the cover of
Time
, over two decades ago, the ‘Rock’s Hottest Ticket’ headline provided their fellow citizens with an opportunity for an orgy of reflected glorying. Nowadays this kind of thing happens so often, we realize that Bono has not just outstripped the rest of the rock’n’roll pack and become far bigger than his own band, but has left his native country behind as well. This provokes a complex reaction in his fellow countrymen, which often comes out as resentment. And this, again, causes us to miss the main plot.

Much as it irritates so many people who insist that ‘it’s only rock’n’roll’, Bono has for some time been going bravely where no celebrity spokesman for his generation had gone before, earning considerable international respect for himself and his motivations, and offering an answer to the niggling question about whether rock’n’roll can move beyond its Dionysian obsession with sex, drugs and other false forms of freedom. These ambitions derive, whether we like it or not, from the Irish historical experience of wretchedness and want. Part of the reason Bono’s evangelicalism provokes such antagonism in Anglo-Saxon culture is that the experience he calls on has far more in common with the black societies in which rock’n’roll emerged than it has with the ‘white’ world to which Ireland ostensibly belongs.

The real problem, strangely, is with the music. In the beginning, U2 created a soundtrack that, in its innocence and innovation, retrospectively revealed itself as containing a prophecy of the shifts in Irish culture and fortunes. But then, deep in the 1990s, as soon as the prophecy began to take hold, something happened. It is as if U2, having discovered their essence, were struck down by the same condition that had affected their native country in their childhoods: a kind of retreating into a settled view of themselves, a solidifying around their own essence with a view to maintaining their brand and position.