Days of Heaven (8 page)

Paul had a header cleared off the line in the group decider against Wor Dutch in Gelsenkirchen. And he played in midfield, as distinct from the centre-half role in which he would appear to be
playing the opposition entirely on his own, anticipating everything and stopping it without ever apparently feeling the need to fall back on the more old-fashioned football tricks, such as
running.

But the Republic on the whole were not good that day, and Wor Dutch were not much better. I watched it at home in the flat in Dun Laoghaire on a small television — I would never watch a
match on such a small television again. My friend George Byrne had gone to Germany, and he would recall sitting outside the ground after the match, being consoled by a Dutch couple. Again and again
the crazy ricochet from Kieft which sent the ball looping and spinning past Packie, kept running in his head, along with this tormenting mantra: ‘Seven minutes ... seven minutes ...’
Mercifully he was unaware that the baleful gods had thrown in another sickener, what with Van Basten being in an offside position and unquestionably interfering with play, for Kieft’s
ridiculous goal.

And it was actually more like nine minutes still to go, or, if you like, ‘Teenage Kicks’ played three times in a row. Except this time it seemed to be playing at 78 rpm.

That Dutch couple found it easy to empathise with George — after all, they had seen a couple of World Cup Finals slipping away, one of them in Germany itself, playing
football of such mesmerising beauty even now the thought of it stirs the blood. But this was our first taste of losing at this level, of seeing some ludicrously large prize just out of reach, a
place in the semi-final denied us by these aristocrats who would duly go on to win the tournament. And we wondered if indeed we had any right to be knocking the likes of them out of the tournament,
as we would have done if we had held out for the draw.

They would play the Soviet Union in the Final. That would be the same Soviet Union that we had ‘beaten’ 1-1.

Holland would win Euro 88, by which stage we would be just enjoying the weather. I have no idea what the weather was actually like during those weeks. But in the mind’s eye, the sky was
blue and the sun shone all the time.

T
he Homecoming gave us not just another day out but one of the enduring lines of the Charlton years. Somewhere in the centre of Dublin City, from
the top of the bus, an elated Ray Houghton started up the chant: ‘Who put the ball in the England net?’

If there had been any question at all that Houghton was one of our own, this settled it. He was Paddy, to the core. And he also seemed instinctively to understand that while he was obviously
having his fun at the expense of the country which had provided him with an exceptionally good living and all the opportunities he needed to become Paddy in the first place, it was also just that
— it was just fun.

A few months previously, at Milltown cemetery in Belfast, the loyalist Michael Stone had materialised at the grave of three
IRA
members shot dead while on active service
in Gibraltar by the
SAS
. In a scene which was filmed as it happened by the television cameras, Stone fired several shots and threw grenades, and could then be seen shooting
at his pursuers as he ran from the cemetery. He had killed three people and injured 60, bringing a macabre new dimension to the North, where until that day, it was generally accepted that the one
safe place was the graveyard.

And then at the funeral of one of Stone’s victims, two plain-clothes British army corporals, who were observing the proceedings in an unmarked car, were spotted by republican mourners.
Their car was surrounded by a frenzied mob, some of whom would later claim that they feared another Stone-like attack. The two Brits were dragged from the car and beaten and shot to death. Pictures
of their naked bodies lying on waste land were seen all over the world.

Now, at the height of summer, Ray Houghton could be heard singing ‘Who put the ball in the England net?’ to the tune of ‘The Camptown Races’, and it came across like a
regular line of sporting banter. The sort of line you’d hear in the context of some ancient and intense sporting rivalry between, say, Kerry and Dublin. Ancient and intense, but perhaps not
quite as violent as the rivalry between Kerry and Dublin.

So it seemed as if the football team had carved out a territory in which we might have a normal level of hostility with our neighbours, played out in a sporting manner, the way that normal
countries do. It seemed as if the Englishness of Charlton and about half his team had helped to make that possible by demonstrating that there were just too many links between Ireland and England
to sustain the idea that we were implacable enemies.

And that those links were tending to redound to our benefit, rather than theirs.

Maybe it’s just the potency of football, the deep importance of it, that helped to convey this impression that something unique was going on here in the context of Anglo-Irish relations
and of our relationship with the rest of the world. But if we really take a look at ourselves, we can see that the emergence of the football team was just the most compelling example of a
phenomenon which had been happening in an understated way for a very long time.

It’s not entirely true to say that Paddy just can’t make it on his own, but it is certainly true to say that Paddy generally does a lot better when he mixes it up a bit, when he
fuses his own talents with the talents of others.

And it goes well beyond the ‘great-grandmother’ rule and the diaspora.

It even goes beyond the human, when you consider that the world’s greatest trainer of racehorses, Vincent O’Brien, sought the best of American bloodstock. And to get them across the
line he had the greatest of all English jockeys, Lester Piggott.

In so many fields, for a very long time, we have been quietly availing of the services of those who do not belong to our gene-pool, who were not born in Ireland, but who have been an intrinsic
part of almost every ‘Irish’ cultural project which has been internationally successful. Starting with the most bleeding obvious example, two of the members of
U
2 are not Irish in the straightforward sense of being born in Ireland or having Irish parents: the Edge’s people are from Wales, and he was born in England, as was Adam Clayton.
And Bono’s mother came from the Protestant tradition, which is more a part of our English than our Irish heritage. Their mentor, Bill Graham, was from the North. Or, if you like, the United
Kingdom. And their manager, Paul McGuinness, was born in Germany.

The film
My Left Foot
was universally regarded as an all-Irish international success, and of course director Jim Sheridan and producer Noel Pearson are Irish to all intents and purposes,
yet one of the Oscars was won by Daniel Day-Lewis, who is in many ways, deeply English. Due to his complex bohemian background, he is also deeply Irish in many ways, but again, there’s a
mixture here. Would a conventionally Irish actor, born and reared in this country, have delivered such an extraordinary performance? Maybe he would have done. We will never know.

But Neil Jordan surely, is Irish in every way? Yes, but much of his most successful work has been done in collaboration with the producer Stephen Woolley, who is English. They would appear to
understand each other at a creative level. And Jordan would also acknowledge a debt to his mentor in film-making, John Boorman, who has lived in Ireland for many years but who is definitely
English.

It is an interdependence and a source of mutual inspiration that was perhaps most powerfully seen in the relationship between Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, the Irishman and the Englishman who
were in captivity in Beirut at this time. They would be released in 1990 and 1991 respectively, having completely missed Euro 88 and Italia 90 and their friendship would be viewed as a rare example
of the Irish and the English coming together in a common cause.

But as we are seeing, it is not so rare after all.

We have already alluded to this potent fusion in the area of rock ’n’ roll, whereby the children of Irish emigrants would be regarded as Paddies by the English and as Brits by their
relations back in Ireland, in Roscommon and Cork and Mayo where they would go for their summer holidays. They were mixed-race in a way that seemed to lead to enormous creativity. Enormous pain, no
doubt, in many ways, too, but pain that produced Johnny Rotten and Morrissey and the Gallaghers and Shane MacGowan.

The Pogues were actually derided early doors by the traditional musician Noel Hill, for what they were doing to Irish music. But while the purists felt they were bringing us into disrepute with
their noise and their drinking, the rest of the world could see that a beautiful thing was happening here with this London-Irish combo. They had created this sound of the Irish in England which you
felt had somehow always existed, just waiting to be released — but not by the Irish acting alone. In this context the narrow nationalism of Sinn Féin, ‘ourselves alone’,
can be seen to have brought us not just a thousand pointless murders, but was Paddy’s sure-fire recipe for failure.

Roddy Doyle may have fulfilled all the criteria for full-blown Irishness, but his commercial success was assisted by the brilliance of Alan Parker’s version of
The Commitments
,
which was made with American money and which turned Roddy’s slim debut novel into a barnstorming modern musical — that would be the same Alan Parker, who was so disappointed to hear us
cheering the misfortunes of his England team as he scouted for locations in Dublin pubs. And then there were the film versions of
The Snapper
and
The Van,
superbly directed by Stephen
Frears, an Englishman, of course. Roddy, indeed, would be an obvious collaborator with the English, because English football is his game, and the game of his male characters. They speak of doing
things ‘the Liverpool way’, as naturally as their Gaelic literary forbears spoke of getting the pikes together at the rising of the moon.

I am thinking also of Arthur Mathews, Graham Linehan, Dermot Morgan, Ardal O’Hanlon and Pauline McLynn who were all football men and women — all, at least, apart from Graham. Whilst
they could put together one of the most successful comedy series of all time, featuring situations and characters who were quintessentially Irish, again they could only do it with the generous
support of the English, such as the late Geoffrey Perkins, a producer who believed in them. (You can still find people who think that Ireland’s indigenous
TV
service
RTÉ
turned down
Father Ted
, but the truth is actually worse than that —
RTÉ
never got the chance to turn it down, because
it never occurred to the lads to offer it to them in the first place.)

In fairness to us, we have always openly acknowledged the Anglo-Irishness of some of our most celebrated writers, of Yeats and Synge and Beckett. We have never denied that Wilde and Shaw and
Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan needed to join forces with all sorts of English types to make their genius known, or that Sean O’Casey — who, like Bono, is from the Protestant
tradition — eventually preferred to live and work among the English. There was Joyce, who might appear like a rare exception to the rule, until you recall that he may have been all Irish
himself, but he found it necessary to get out of here, in a hurry, in order to be discovered by the cognoscenti of Paris. And of course, the hero of
Ulysses
, the definitive Irish epic, was
the Jewish Leopold Bloom. Not exactly your card-carrying, bona-fide, full-metal-jacket Paddy there.

Nor were Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, founders of the Gate theatre, who constructed this weird and marvellous façade of Irishness around themselves, perhaps to
take our minds off the fact that they weren’t Irish at all, but English.

You might be thinking though, that Christy Moore is Irish, in every possible way and that is true. But then Christy is not universally known and internationally successful in the sense of having
hit records in Britain and America and all around the world. Not like Chris de Burgh, for example, whose father was British and who lived in Argentina as a child.

Brendan Behan himself, whose image would appear on any tea-towel featuring the faces of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, is an interesting case. Behan’s sensibility was largely
influenced by two things — his membership of the
IRA
, which involved him in the bombing campaign in England for which he was sent to borstal, and the borstal itself,
which broadened his view of life and gave him the material for his best work,
Borstal Boy.

You could compare this awakening to the way a raw young Irish footballer would go to England with a lot of ability but a lot of bad habits too, which would be knocked out of him in one of the
great ball-playing institutions of Manchester or Liverpool. All of which, in the fullness of time, would leave him better prepared to serve his own country, in a more constructive fashion.