Days of Heaven (16 page)

Through all sorts of
Hot Press
-related contacts over the years, Liam had come to know Bono (a lot better than I did, to tell the truth) and on this occasion he had just bumped into him
down the road in Dun Laoghaire. Now, I’m only telling you this because, by the late 1980s, most people in Ireland had sat down and chatted with Bono at some stage. So if we’re trying to
convey the spirit of that time, we should observe this formality. And there is a direct relevance to our project in the sense that
U
2, represented by Larry Mullen, had
cranked up the build-up to Italia 90 with arguably the best football record ever made, ‘Put ’Em Under Pressure’.

So it was a very Irish occasion, with Bono sitting there by the fireplace drinking his mug of coffee. He spoke movingly about the startling new direction in which the latest album was going
(this would be
Achtung Baby
) before embarking on a series of anecdotes about various legends of Irish life and culture, especially in the showband realm.

In particular he recounted tales of a man called Jim Hand, one of the famous Hand twins from Drogheda, the other being Michael the journalist, a former Editor of the
Sunday Independent
— Michael indeed, got his start in journalism with
The Argus
newspaper in Dundalk, after a job interview for which Michael’s place was actually taken by Jim, the interviewer
being unaware that the wrong twin had turned up to fool him — or if he was aware, it didn’t trouble him.

And though they would eventually conquer Dublin in their chosen fields of journalism and showbusiness, Jim would tell John Waters that he had never got on a bus in Dublin, ‘because
you’d never know where they’d be going’ — an observation which, with the passing of time, seems wise in a Beckettian way.

Launching into an extraordinarily accurate rendition of the Drogheda accent, Bono shared his favourite Hand line, in which Jim Hand is introduced to someone at a social function and tells this
person that he would very much like to get to know him because he seems like a very nice fellow, but that this is out of the question because unfortunately, he already knows enough people.

Bono told this story not in the superior tone of the rock star making fun of the boys of the old brigade, but with relish, admiring the fine clarity of Hand’s vision, the originality of
the statement. Psychologists may feel that Bono, here, was subconsciously identifying with Jim Hand because of his own desire not to have any more human relationships of a meaningful kind, having
already reached his quota. And since the record shows that he still had about fifty million people left to meet and to empathise with between then and 2010, his current state of mind in this regard
can only be imagined.

Interestingly, Larry Mullen’s aforementioned ‘Put ’Em Under Pressure (Olé Olé Olé)’ also seemed to embrace the heroes of another time and to
celebrate this interconnectedness by blasting off with the riff from ‘Dearg Doom’ by Horslips — you will recall that a member of that group, Eamon Carr, was present on that night
that I agreed to write Paul McGrath’s autobiography.

And to complete this great Celtic circle, Liam Mackey was also an indirect contributor to ‘Put ’Em Under Pressure’, because a filmed interview which he conducted with Big Jack
was used on the record, supplying those rousing lines about going out there to compete, to put ’em under pressure.

Jack had been talking to Liam in an interview for a feature-length video called
Que Sera, Sera
made by Billy Magra, a manager of rock ’n’ roll bands, a founding father of
Irish stand-up comedy and later a
TV
producer. But Billy was a man ahead of his time in other ways. I remember an interview he did for
Hot Press
in which he said that
one of the things he liked least about Ireland was the amount of private pain caused by alcohol. It was such a strange thing to read at the time from a creature of rock ’n’ roll, that
it stuck in my mind and has never gone away.

Ah, the fates are sending us these messages, but we do not receive them.

Billy’s film, which I watched innumerable times while experiencing the private pain caused by alcohol, and which tells the story of how we got to Italia 90, was a brilliant piece of work.
It captured all the rising fever of the campaign and the anticipation of what was to come.

As we prepared for Italia 90, it seemed as if so many strands of Irish culture were coming together,
U
2 allied with Horslips allied with Big Jack allied with many other
worthy contributions in the national interest. And mercifully, the involvement of the rockers, as distinct from the usual old showbiz hacks, would mean that Ireland’s ubiquitous anthem for
the tournament, would actually be good.

‘Put ’Em Under Pressure’ was more than good, it was outstanding, it was powerful. There was ‘Give It A Lash, Jack’, by Liam Harrison and the
GOAL
celebrities, which
actually wasn’t bad at all. It had a thing almost unknown in the long and unhappy history of the football record, it had charm.

And The Pogues got involved too, with ‘Jack’s Heroes’, accompanied by a video starring Tom Hickey, himself a seminal figure in Irish theatre and television drama: ‘And
the shout goes up / When the World Cup / Is raised on Stephen’s Green’, it went. And while it didn’t quite establish itself in the hearts of the people, it confirmed our status as
a nation with some gravitas. England could call on New Order and Keith Allen for their beguiling Italia 90 anthem ‘World in Motion’, and now here we were, with mere football songs being
put together by the likes of
U
2 and Shane MacGowan, while these supposed aristos from Holland and Italy and Spain would be represented by ... who? Certainly no-one from the
top drawer, or even from the fourth or fifth drawer, probably some cabaret act trying to get himself noticed for next year’s Eurovision. A sore point there, perhaps, because we ourselves had
not yet risen above that particular weakness. And even in the fat years to come, we would gorge ourselves on several more Euro-romps, becoming serial winners of this thing, just because we
could.

Poignantly, after the second or third time, one recalls a certain fear that took hold when it seemed certain that we would win another one and it was argued that
RTÉ
and the country in general just couldn’t afford to keep going like this. The figure which frightened us so much was something like £1.5 million, which these days
is not much more than the take-home pay of a couple of top
RTÉ
executives, but which was considered so onerous back then, it seemed to involve making a straight
choice between hosting the Eurovision or cancelling all other
TV
programmes planned for that year.

We did it anyway, so anxious for recognition of any kind, we could not contemplate letting go of this weird knack that we had somehow mastered.

Money and the rise of the new nations of Eastern Europe would eventually free us from this need, but until then, Eurovision would embroil Paddy in many of the old familiar contradictions —
even in his moment of celebration there would be a lingering pall of shame; even the thing he was good at was inherently bad.

But even this would have at least one unambiguously happy development, further on up the road — the director of the 1988 Eurovision, Declan Lowney, was a talented and ambitious chap and
enough of a free spirit to complain openly to me in an interview for the
Sunday Independent
about some low-class act called Scott Fitzgerald that the Brits were sending over to represent
them in the
RDS
. His outspokenness would have cost him a few extra moments of anxiety on the night, when the same Scott Fitzgerald was narrowly pipped for the top prize by
the Swiss entry, sung by one Celine Dion.

In the 1988 show, Lowney had tried to do something genuinely different, replacing the usual half-time bullshit with a video of Hot House Flowers busking ‘Don’t Go’ in cities
all across Europe. The Flowers were supposed to become huge after this, as huge as Michael Flatley would become after a similar spectacular, but mysteriously, they didn’t — too Irish,
maybe. But Lowney would do the best work of all, leaving
RTÉ
to move to London and eventually becoming the director of
Ted
.

We were all trying to move beyond that Eurovision state of mind as we prepared ourselves for our debut on the vast, unforgiving stage that was Italia 90. And given the enthusiastic involvement
of almost every element of Irish society, from the clowns of Official Ireland to the serious players of Killiney Hill, it seemed that we were looking at an unprecedented display of national
unity.

Which, in many ways, we were.

Yet, after all these years I can still hear the voice of Father Michael Cleary coming through the wall.

Yes, there was always something there to remind us that the country, as they say, was not half-settled.

Needing a bit more space for child-rearing purposes, Jane and I and Roseanne had moved to an actual house on the other side of Dun Laoghaire, a very small terraced house, which of course we
rented. And through the wall of that house every night, came the voice of Father Michael Cleary.

The old lady next door was hard of hearing, so she used to listen to his programme on 98
FM
with the volume turned up loud, this rambling show which sounded like an extended parish bulletin,
frequently featuring members of Youth Defence and the voices of various other ‘conservative’ Catholic organisations. They had been on a war footing for most of the 1980s and had won
some and lost some, and had nothing else to be doing for the foreseeable future.

So while we were presenting ourselves to the world as these wild and crazy guys who can go anywhere and enjoy the football and hold our drink, at home there was still a substantial minority who
felt that a man such as Father Michael Cleary was a credible figure who still had something to contribute to the great debate.

Now that it’s all over, it seems that the decline of the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland was some sort of an inevitable process, like the changing of the seasons, but in these
pivotal years, the Church and its various storm-troopers were cocky after their victories in the abortion and divorce referenda and there was still a feeling that it could go either way.

Jane and I would feel the need to send Roseanne to a non-denominational school, something that wouldn’t bother me greatly these days, but which at the time seemed like an issue that needed
your full attention; Bishop Eamon Casey was still a prince of the church, much-loved and a gas character and most people were unaware that Father Michael Cleary was effectively a married man and a
father in the biological sense.

Or at least they were unaware, up to a point.

Deep down, at some intuitive level, they must have known it. I don’t exclude myself from this complex system of denial: I ‘knew’ that Cleary had a child, or children. Or at
least I ‘knew’ that in the course of a lifetime doing what he did, in the way that he did it, it would be inconceivable that The Singing Priest did not have a child or children. I had
this running joke with a friend who worked in a tabloid paper at the time, whereby I would always greet him with the words, ‘Find Cleary’s children’, in the pompous tones of a
Roman senator calling for Carthage to be destroyed. We ‘knew’ that there had to be at least one of them out there, but we also knew that it would be damnably hard to prove it. The aura
of power still protected him, so that even a blackguard on the Father Michael Cleary scale seemed elusive, still free to roam.

Yet he was a more fantastic creation than we had imagined at the time. Until Italia 90, perhaps the greatest single gathering of people on the island of Ireland in the latter part of the 20th
century was for the visit of Pope John Paul
II
in 1979, and Cleary had been the master of ceremonies.

He was there on the stage in Galway with Bishop Eamon Casey, getting the crowd going in that vast arena as if he was working the room at the Old Shieling.

We often hear commentators musing on the way that sport has replaced religion as the great communal activity of our time, except usually they are lamenting this, seeing it as an example of how
we have lost our way. Perhaps they should reflect further on this in the case of Ireland, where the Pope’s visit would be followed by a decade of want, while the Charlton years would be
followed by a decade of plenty. Perhaps they should reflect further on this, as they recall that the cheerleaders for the Pope would turn out to be deeply disturbed individuals while Charlton would
never lose the respect and the gratitude of the people. And perhaps they should reflect even further on this, as they observe that we no longer felt the need to be supervised by priests and
religious on our feast days. That we had surely grown up just a little, when we had Bill O’Herlihy up there as the chief moderator and John Giles and Eamon Dunphy getting us up for it,
instead of Cleary and Casey — if that is not progress ...

I have already alluded to the fact that I lived across the road from this Father Michael Cleary for a while. For about two years, indeed, I lived in a flat in Leinster Road in
Rathmines (didn’t we all?) and Father Mick lived in a house on the other side of the road, maybe fifty yards away.

Another
Hot Press
contributor, Michael O’Higgins, was also living in the neighbourhood, in a flat that was actually smaller than my own, from which he would emerge to join me for a
late pint in the Leinster Inn, both of us entirely unaware of the true nature of Father Mick’s living arrangements — nor indeed would Father Mick have been aware that his daily
movements were being observed by fellows from that well-known anti-God magazine.

Mick O’Higgins, back then, was more exercised by various other blackguards in our midst, conducting interviews with the likes of Christy Dunne and Martin Cahill, all of which doubtless
prepared him for his eventual career as one of the country’s best criminal lawyers and one of the few Senior Counsel who has spent any meaningful amount of time on the inside of a Rathmines
bedsitter. Yet even O’Higgins’ forensic skills didn’t crack open the truth about the lifestyle of Father Michael Cleary.