Days of Heaven (9 page)

It is also universally acknowledged that Behan’s work in the theatre was championed and largely shaped by Joan Littlewood, who was born in Stockwell, a part of London not unknown to Paddy
in the 1980s. The young Conor McPherson was similarly nurtured by the Bush Theatre in London and Martin McDonagh, lest we forget, is a Londoner by birth.

Behan himself, who kept a close watch on the Paddy in all of us, would have noted the ironies and paradoxes of his revolutionary roots, the fact that the men of 1916 included Pádraig
Pearse, whose father was from Birmingham and would not have qualified to play football for Ireland, and James Connolly who was Scottish and who could only have played for the Republic that he
envisioned under the parentage rule. When you add in exotics such as Roger Casement to the mixer, you can see that even in the defining narrative of Irish independence, Paddy couldn’t quite
make it on his own.

Dana herself is from Northern Ireland, which is another country. Jesus H. Christ, even Foster & Allen, who gave us a few anxious moments with those kilts they were sporting on
Top Of the
Pops
, were singing ‘A Bunch Of Thyme’, which is thought to be of English origin.

The search for the ‘true’ Irish goes on: Bob Geldof’s people are originally from Belgium; Sinead O’Connor’s great hit was written by a little guy from Minneapolis
called Prince Rogers Nelson; Phil Lynott, being black, would not exactly be viewed as the stereotypical Irishman and rightly so, as he was born in Birmingham and his father was from Brazil, but his
statue now stands in Harry Street, just off Grafton Street, where Glen Hansard of The Frames used to do his busking; Glen, who somehow won the Oscar for best song, when the no-budget Irish movie
Once
miraculously became an international hit. Which might seem like an extremely rare all-Irish success story until you remember that the song ‘Falling Slowly’ was co-written by
Hansard’s co-star in the film, Markéta Irglová, who is from the Czech Republic — a new stop there on the traditional route.

No doubt I’m forgetting a few things here, but I don’t think I’m forgetting much — Seamus Heaney became very successful in the late 1980s but again we tend to forget that
Seamus is from Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. He would have played his football not for the Republic, but for Norn Iron.

All of which leaves us with ... Enya. Yes, Enya is entirely Irish, every day, in every way. And so is her music. Except, now that I think of it, Enya’s recordings are essentially a
collaboration with her producers, Nicky Ryan and his wife Roma, who writes the lyrics. And Roma is from Belfast, which is in Northern Ireland, which again we must remind ourselves, is part of the
United Kingdom. So Enya doesn’t count either, in our quest to find something that is purely Irish and in no way English or American or Belgian or Brazilian but especially English — and
that is internationally successful. To which the ‘wags’ might respond that the Boys In Green themselves have no place in this discussion, because they never won anything, or came close
to winning anything.

But we will ignore that gibe, for the moment.

In terms of a victory on the international stage that was down to Paddy and nobody but Paddy in the purest sense, that we could truly say was ours and ours alone, to the best of my recollection
there is ... the Eurovision Song Contest. In fact, there would eventually be seven Eurovisions. But wait ... There’s no way around this ...

Johnny Logan was born in Australia.

T
he breakthrough, I believe, was against Spain. As we look back on those years, we tend to see it all as one extended breakthrough. But there were
breakthroughs within the greater breakthrough. And the greatest of these was at Lansdowne Road against Spain on 26 April 1989, in the qualifying campaign for Italia 90. It was a game against a
great football nation that we absolutely had to win and that we actually won — it had never happened before in the Charlton era (we didn’t absolutely have to beat England in Stuttgart)
and it would never happen again (Romania is not a great football nation and while we would beat them on penalties in the last 16 of Italia 90, the match itself was a scoreless draw).

After the fine madness of Euro 88 we had been re-connected to reality in the first match of the new campaign, receiving a right royal rogering from Johnny Spaniard in Seville the previous
November. The result was 2-0, but it felt a lot worse than that. It felt just like old times, in fact, to be playing against these guys who were bred in the purple and to have our lack of class so
clearly exposed.

Reduced to the simplest terms, such encounters tended to demonstrate that those guys were just much better at football than our guys. Anyone who has ever played football can relate to that at a
visceral level. It brings you back to the schoolyard to an under-12 match, where it is plain to see that some lads are just better than others, they have more talent. You might keep them out for a
while, these lads who are just better at football, by dint of hard work and honesty of effort and the vague hope that they don’t really give a damn anyway. But they’ll get you in the
end.

And though you’ve tried so hard, maybe in the end it’s not that hard to accept. Because it is, after all, the truth.

So the slaughter in Seville, at one level, felt a bit like nature taking its course. We could live with that, as we have always lived with it. And maybe we felt we needed to be reminded of the
eternal verities, to submit ourselves to the tyranny of fact.

At Euro 88, we had played three, won one, drawn one and lost one.

We had not qualified from the group. It was a breakthrough just to be able to compete, but there was another breakthrough which had eluded us. Perhaps because, for all our undoubted charms, we
just weren’t good enough at football.

Yes, we had beaten England, but they had battered us, and on another day they would have scored. Yes, we had played something that looked remarkably like football against the
USSR
, but high on the improbability of it all, we hadn’t got the result. And they, with their innate Soviet know-how and cunning, had qualified. Not us. And while that late goal
in Gelsenkirschen had made us curse the baleful gods, it hadn’t fooled us into thinking that we were actually as good as Holland, either on that day, or on any other day.

So we were in a new place in the aftermath of Euro 88, an exciting place but a dangerous place nonetheless for Paddy.

Having established that everyone liked us, was it possible that they might also come to respect us?

It is one of our great character defects, this desperate desire to be liked.

‘What do you think of us?’, we openly ask, when foreigners come to Ireland, and they seem to understand that we don’t really want an honest answer. We don’t really want
them to provide us with a detailed assessment of our good points and our bad points, we just want them to say, ‘You’re great’.

Which they usually do, the way that you’d humour a child. We know they’re only telling us what we want to hear, but we don’t mind that. And we don’t exactly respect
ourselves for this, but then we are not asking to be respected. We are only asking to be liked.

At Euro 88, we had been liked. At least we assumed we had been liked and very well liked, because we had done everything in our power to achieve this happy state. We had behaved ourselves so
well, we had brought scenes of great joy to the terraces, with our green wigs and our bodhráns and our gas characters; we had been able to hold our drink.

At least that’s how we saw it, so we trusted that’s how everyone else saw it. Certainly a few English broadsheets weighed in with their usual generosity towards us and their loathing
of their own kind, the hooligans who can’t behave themselves like good old Paddy.

So there was some sort of official confirmation that we had been liked. So great was our need in this regard, we found it hard to imagine that the citizens of other countries might have gone
through that tournament without thinking much about Paddy at all — that they might indeed go through their entire lives without thinking about the Irish, let alone forming a view as to our
likeability, until they are asked a direct question — do you like us? — to which there can only be the one answer.

There would be a particularly poignant example of this acute self-consciousness towards the end of the Charlton years, when we had qualified for the 1994 World Cup and there was much speculation
about the possible venues for the Republic’s matches. It was widely suggested by well-respected commentators (well-liked at any rate) that the Irish were so popular all around the world, and
especially in America, that they were bound to end up playing in one of the great Irish-American cities such as Chicago or Boston.

Essentially, it was being proposed that
FIFA
, the football’s world governing body, would rig the draw for our benefit because we’re such great fellows and
they like us so much. In our imagination, we could see the top brass of
FIFA
addressing this matter of overwhelming importance, discussing at length how best to arrange the
tournament so that Paddy gets all that Irish-American support. We were ‘the best supporters in the world’, after all, so it wasn’t just that they liked us — that was a given
— hell, they needed us.

So it was utterly inexplicable, and bordering on the perverse, to discover that we were just thrown into the draw along with all the other countries, and that we would be forced to play in
frigging Orlando, in the blazing heat, against Mexico. You would almost think that we were just another team, that we were not the most-liked. And as for respect, you would have more respect for a
dog than to be dragging him from New York to Orlando and back again — yes, the Irish did get to play in New York, in front of their own people, but that could also be construed as a gift to
the Italians, so it didn’t count. It was down to the hot-house of Orlando and back again to New York for the third match against Norway.

You would hardly wish such a thing on someone you hated, let alone on the best supporters in the world.

Mind you, we would have gratefully accepted all these perceived slights, and a lot more, after the slaughter in Seville back at the end of 1988.

To maintain at least some of the morale that we had gained in Germany, we could reflect on the undoubted fact that in Seville, we had been without four very important players — Houghton,
Sheedy, Whelan and McGrath.

We had also given Steve Staunton his first cap, with Kevin Moran in front of him in midfield and David O’Leary beside him at centre-half — yes, Jack was desperate enough on the
night, to play O’Leary — all these things, by any standard, constituted a perfectly valid excuse.

So we still had hope.

But that, too, is a dangerous place for Paddy. We have sat looking into enough glasses of whiskey to know that hope is never too far away from ruin, in the order of things. Hope and ruin, the
old reliables.

Indeed the fact that the group also contained Northern Ireland seemed to exacerbate this sense that everything was still in the balance, that it could all go either way. We had no consciousness
of anything but bad things emanating from our relationship with Northern Ireland and we assumed that this would be no different.

Appropriately, after three games in the group, we had only two points, one of them garnered against Norn Iron in a match in Windsor Park which most of us have forgotten entirely — every
aspect of it, down to the last detail, has been entirely expunged from our memories.

Most people to whom I have spoken still have vivid and horrendous recollections of the match in Windsor Park in 1993 which sent the Republic to the 1994 World Cup, but in the case of the
scoreless draw back in 1988, when there was still a war going on, denial set in almost immediately, leading quickly to total amnesia.

There was also a scoreless draw with Hungary, in Budapest, in March 1989, which again raised the issue of our self-esteem. Because despite having supped the fine wine of Euro 88, we could not
see ourselves as the sort of people who might be disappointed with one point instead of three. After all, Hungary, as the Mighty Magyars back in the 1950s, had featured in one of the Ten Great
England Defeats. So we would naturally have a healthy respect for them. Or perhaps an unhealthy respect: for sure, they weren’t the Mighty Magyars any more, but from where we were looking,
they still looked mighty enough.

Hungary was the first international team I ever saw in the flesh, playing at Dalymount on a Sunday afternoon back in the late 1960s. I recall that the stars of Hungarian football at that time
were Ferenc Bene and Florian Albert, who exuded class, and that they won with a late goal, as was only to be expected. In general, they seemed to be much, much better at football than we were.

My memories of such matches are clouded by the fact that I never saw Ireland scoring a goal. When it looked like they might score, everyone would stand up, mad with anticipation and since I was
only a child, my view would be entirely blocked. I could only listen, either for the orgasmic roar or the sigh of disappointment. So I never saw Ireland scoring a goal, but I heard them scoring a
few.