Days of Heaven (23 page)

Stapleton ruined the display by scoring and generally playing very well, leaving Jack with virtually no option but to include him in the panel for Italia 90, a move which Jack would bitterly
regret, telling Rowan that Stapleton had been a moaner and a pain in the arse to him.

But it was Brady’s last match for Ireland. Jack substituted him after half an hour and put on Townsend instead, a move which so infuriated Brady he resigned from international football,
insisting that he had been humiliated by Jack, that he should at least have been substituted at half-time.

Ugly, ugly stuff, this ‘putting ’em on display’.

Still, we should probably be more forgiving about the things men say when they’re riled. I have learned that in people of talent, there is often a blind spot, or three or four blind spots
— and that goes for Dunphy as well as for Jack.

So now that the ugly stuff wasn’t even working any more, we couldn’t find it in our hearts to turn on Jack, after all he had done for us. So we turned on Dunphy instead. When
you’re living in a beautiful bubble, you just don’t want to know about that ugly stuff.

Italia 90 may have given us a foretaste of the Tiger, but not necessarily in the way that the corporate dudes claim, with their talk of ‘confidence’. Maybe the boom was most like the
Charlton years in the sense that it was a bubble, maybe with less spontaneity than the original, but created by our desperate desire to be free of all that held us back, sustained by a degree of
self-deception, a lot of talk about what a great people we are, a certain amount of borrowing and a lot of drinking. And while it worked for us for a long time, it also meant that we had to give up
certain things that were part of our better nature, the way that we gave up Liam Brady and had very little use for Ronnie Whelan or David O’Leary.

It’s not that Paddy suddenly got good at everything some time in the mid-1990s, no more than we suddenly got good at football in 1987. If you recall, in the first pages of this book Paddy
was on Broadway and at Carnegie Hall and selling shedloads of
U
2 albums, so we had always had a flair for what you might call the finer things of life. And you don’t
end up on Broadway without ‘confidence’, you don’t end up at Carnegie Hall without knowing how to make a few quid either.

But perhaps the Charlton years showed us how to make the ugly stuff work for us as well. How to make money out of boybands and chick-lit and Irish dancing, the way we made our mark on the World
Cup, doing it Jack’s way.

And not being ashamed of it.

Except perhaps, for a little while, one afternoon in Palermo.

D
unphy’s car was surrounded at the airport and it was rocked from side to side by a bunch of blackguards, with Dunphy inside it.

It was a very, very ugly scene.

But when they look back on it, even these renegades of the Green Army would have to concede that Dunphy was bringing something to the party, because a great story needs a few dark interludes, a
few moments when disaster seems inevitable but is somehow averted. And we had had several of these during the England match alone, quite apart from this protracted agony-in-the-garden in the days
before the last match of the Group, against Holland.

The climactic nature of this encounter had cranked everything up to a new level of madness. It was anticipated that the entire population of the country would be watching it, that you’d be
able to walk down O’Connell Street on Thursday evening without meeting a soul, apart perhaps from the photographer who would be taking this unique picture of the main thoroughfare of a
capital city, deserted — but who would take that photograph?

It wasn’t good enough any more to assume that a woman photographer would take it, because the women had also succumbed. Since so many of the ‘social’ struggles of the 1980s
concerned them and what they were or were not entitled to do with their lives, it seems that women, too, were seeing Italia 90 as the perfect opportunity to wind down and to let themselves go. And
as Nell McCafferty would point out, the women were indirectly paying for a lot of it, because the men were spending money in places like Sicily, or maybe just down at the Submarine Bar, that would
otherwise be frittered away on household items such as food and clothing for the children.

But perhaps the most unheralded contribution of the women at this time was the way they facilitated the drinking.

Rightly or wrongly, Paddy has always felt that women are a controlling presence in this area, a barrier to his full enjoyment of the drinking life. He sees them essentially in a policing role.
When he is watching football on television, for example, sipping a few cans of cool beer, and slipping into a state of deep, deep relaxation, the voice of woman seems to call him back from that
happy place. And no matter what she is saying, this is all he can hear: ‘Stop relaxing ... stop relaxing ... stop relaxing ...’

Paddy has always found it hard to relax. There is no stillness in him, no quietude in his restless soul. So the month-long festival of football and drinking that was Italia 90, seemed to offer
to him the prospect of the deepest relaxation he would ever have, a spiritual journey.

Of course, there would be moments of terrible tension and anxiety too, but even they would be experienced in the context of this broader peace that he was enjoying, this retreat from the world,
into the World Cup.

And yet he could not share this inner vision with his life’s partner. He could share it only with other men, who had an effortless understanding of it.

So when women started to catch the Italia-90 virus in large numbers, there was an historical moment of reconciliation between two equal and opposite forces — and there was no need for
women to know the off-side rule or to know anything about anything. All that was needed was their indulgence.

The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989, and in Ireland a fair few monuments to repression had been coming down, too. But the collapse of this particular Wall, between the drinking football man
and the women of Ireland, was a marvellous thing to behold. Some critical mass of irresponsibility had been reached, which allowed women to desert their posts and to join the party.

In the build-up to one of the matches, on Philipsburgh Avenue, the poet and broadcaster Theo Dorgan remembers seeing a group of elderly Dublin women, attired in the national colours, lined up on
a street in a state of high excitement, doing the can-can.

Women realised at some point that all the normal laws of nature had been suspended, so they might as well go with it. They might as well get themselves a funny hat and a big inflatable hammer in
the Ireland colours and go down to the pub and stand there shouting at the big screen like everyone else — it was too late to stop now. Maybe it was something about the men so openly
displaying their emotions, men crying in public, that attracted them. Maybe they, too, just felt like getting drunk after all they’d been through, and decided that here was the perfect
excuse.

And it was a wise call, in that respect, because we have a perspective on this, which confirms that Italia 90 was indeed the greatest excuse ever to go drinking in the history of Ireland.

We have the perspective of the Tiger years, during which Paddy developed a near-genius for thinking up new excuses to go drinking, from the regular corporate lunch to the stag-weekend in
Vilnius, to the pheasant shooting and the feasting that would follow, but nothing compares and nothing will ever compare to Italia 90 as the ultimate cast-iron guilt-free all-singing all-dancing
excuse to go drinking.

Men knew this, and women knew this and children knew this. Indeed, men and women would have children as a result of this, with a World Cup baby boom materialising in 1991. But there would be a
rough side to it, too, represented in Sebastian Barry’s play,
The Pride of Parnell Street
, which has at its core an episode of wife-beating during Italia 90. And during the madness, I
remember witnessing a delightful scene one day in the People’s Park in Dun Laoghaire, whereby three generations of a family, a grandmother, a young couple and two small children, were
partaking of some sort of a picnic. The grandmother was holding what can only be described as a large bottle of whiskey.

A charming tableau.

But it is impossible to look at any set of photographs of Irish people at that time, without seeing extraordinary quantities of drink and extraordinary levels of drunkenness. There are men lying
on the floor face down, lost to the world. There are men sitting on toilet seats with their trousers pulled down, smiling at the camera, wearing a Viking helmet. There are men lying on a pavement
on some foreign boulevard, comatose after the night before, almost naked, an empty bottle of cider and a few cans of beer still standing beside them. There are men lying on unmade beds in some
foreign boarding house, sleeping during the day, with maybe a chair or a picture or even a television on the bed beside them, put there by their friends as a joke.

There are men vomiting. There are men on their knees vomiting into the toilet bowl, or just vomiting anywhere they feel like it. There are men vomiting because they are extremely ill from
alcoholic poisoning and men vomiting almost as a form of self-expression.

Everywhere, there are men pissing, and laughing at the fact that they are pissing. There are men pissing into ashtrays. There are men with condoms filled with vodka, laughing hysterically at the
camera as they drink the vodka. There are men drinking bottles of beer and bottles of spirits as they pose for a group photograph, fifteen of them on the bonnet of a car. There are men wearing
vests and shorts leaving flowers with the porter at the front door of the maternity hospital, where their wives and newborns are resting, indicating that they are too drunk to go in there
themselves.

Somehow Paddy, in these scenes of utter abandon, can’t help drawing attention to the depths of the repression he must be feeling in the normal run of events.

Who amongst us can exclude ourselves from this part of the story? Because it was more than just the greatest excuse to go drinking; it was an excuse to go drinking in ways that we had never gone
drinking before.

Other than tee-totallers, there is hardly a man alive in Ireland today who does not have some blissful memory of being terribly, terribly drunk during Italia 90 in the middle of the day, or some
strange hour at which he had never been drunk before.

It was suitably Mediterranean, except your Mediterraneans wouldn’t be throwing fourteen pints of stout into them as they lunched
al fresco
. We just couldn’t do it any other
way. We are anxious enough to begin with and that is partly why we drink, so the arrival of this great flood of anxiety was always going to carry us way over the limit. Not that that is the only
reason why we drink, which helps to explain how I had written most of the first chapter of this book before realising that virtually every man I had mentioned thus far was an alcoholic or a
recovering alcoholic — and they were the guys who were doing pretty well for themselves.

Norman Mailer had a theory about why the Irish drink so much. It came out in a story told by Frank McCourt to the
Sunday Independent’
s Barry Egan about his friend Joe Flaherty, who
had run Mailer’s campaign for mayor of New York during the 1970s. Joe had testicular cancer and was in hospital. Frank went to see him and noted that he looked especially tired that day.

‘Jesus, yeah, Norman was just here,’ said Joe. ‘He had another one of his theories.’

Mailer’s theory was that the Irish drink so much because they have an over-supply of semen and hormones and if they didn’t drink, they would go raving mad. It’s only a theory,
but personally I wouldn’t rule it out. You couldn’t rule anything out, when you’re dealing with something on this scale.

My own theory, or one of them, is that alcoholism is a form of immaturity. And that immaturity is an acute problem among the Irish, particularly the Irish male. We tend either to be late
developers, or not to develop at all. From the day a man starts drinking too much, to the day he stops, it is arguable that he stays the same age, emotionally and psychologically. He is just not
able to grow up properly, because he reacts to most difficult situations by drinking, thus avoiding whatever lessons might be learned.

There has been much useful work done on the reasons for the repeated failures of the Irish State and the various collapses of the Irish economy by journalists such as Kevin Myers, but my own
intuition tells me to look at the immaturity of Paddy, because alcoholism is a form of immaturity, and we keep screwing everything up in a way that deeply resembles the behaviour patterns of the
alcoholic.

We can have periods of prosperity, when we are ‘on the dry’, as it were, but because we don’t address the fundamental issues, we keep relapsing into the old ways. We always
secretly reserve the right to ‘hang one on’, to throw away what we have gained and to return to the darkness.