Ouch

Last August, as I embarked upon the second year of my thesis, I bumped into a fairly high-flying academic in the archive where we were both at work. He or she asked me what I was doing. I told her and was encouraged to 'keep up the good work'. This made Royston very happy, and he skipped off to tell all his friends.

I've just finished reading said academic's latest blockbuster. What is his/her last chapter, of roughly 100 pages, about?

a) The evolution of warts
b) A history of screaming (ten pounds to the lucky reader who guesses where this is stolen from)
c) Exactly what I told his/her I was doing last August

Ten months work down the drain. I'm screwed from a number of angles. Firstly, even if I go ahead with my research - I think I might be able to take a different approach with the material - my work, which is completely and unconditionally my own - it will look derivative. It might also be construed as plagiarism. Secondly, as this academic is a member of my department, I can't rip his/her findings to shreds because I won't be allowed to viva. Politics. Thirdly, if I go back to square one, I probably won't finish my thesis till approximately 2009.

I'm not the first person that this has happened to. I've heard horror stories of supervisors stealing entire research projects just as the student was about to publish. And I'm not even pissed off that I was beaten to it (although it is fairly gut-wrenching as the last 3 chapters are the only ones I've ever written that I'm proud of, and the last ten months have been prolific. Any budding academic reading this will now how bouts of industry might only actually come along once in a lifetime in this game) because that happens all the time too.

What does piss me off is that an established academic would willingly let me walk down a dark alley, that they would even encourage me to do so, while knowing that there was no way out. I've just wasted almost a year of my life because he/she hadn't the decency to steer me away from such a fruitless path.

Life sucks, doesn't it?

The Great National Bastard? (RIP)

As I write the Angelus bell is ringing. Somehow fitting as I attempt to eulogise a life without parallel.

A few years back, the former Minister for Health and Supreme Court Judge, Thomas O'Higgins, passed away. O'Higgins was notable for two events; the establishment of the VHI in 1957 and a Supreme Court decision that upheld the illegality of homosexual relationships in 1982. Neither of these moments would have found favour with me had I been alive at the time, and I said so in numerous conversations with friend and foe alike, questioning the fawning adulation afforded to him by editorials in the national media. I was berated for criticising the dead before the warmth had left his veins. Many friends who I've known and loved for years were appalled that I could be so cold.

This morning I announced the death of Charles Haughey to a number of colleagues in the tea-station. Aroused from their World Cup musings, they laughed and hollered. Their response to the passing of another human being reminded me of John Cleese's eulogy at the funeral of his dear friend, Graham Chapman; 'Good riddance to him, the free-loading bastard, I hope he burns'. Unfortunately the savage irony present on that occasion made no appearance in the tea-station this morning.

Never has a man evinced such a mixed reaction. I can easily imagine staunch FFers on their knees today, shrouded in melancholy and grief, mourning the passing of great man. I can imagine other FFers dancing reels and jigs at the temporal demise of the man who tore their party's unity to shreds. I can imagine Garret being genuinely disappointed at the loss of his adversary, accompanying his sadness with an elongated sigh that the great legislator eventually failed to realise anything other than a flawed pedigree. I can imagine Mara laughing at memories of his master's acerbic wit on the backroads of Ireland as Haughey courted the Cumainn. I can imagine students and righteous indignants howling and hoping that his last hours were more painful than the cold winters visited upon O.A.P.s in the early eighties as the fuel allowance was cut. I can imagine more than a few nod and wink merchants leaned against fences across the land revelling in the romance of it all, the undeniable reality that their man never suffered for being a cute hoor, and neither would they. Most of all, I embrace a vision of Brian Lenihan, perched on a silver cloud, delighted that his partner in crime is coming home, brimming with aphorisms that he's been saving up since his own death, redolent of his wit the day Charlie retired from politics. Surveying the pandemonium that was playing itself out within the party, Lenihan jibed, 'Look at them, they haven't a clue what do to! The bland leading the bland!'

Haughey was a brilliant legislator. Free Travel for Over 65s. The Succession Act. While his tax exemptions for artists allow greedy bastards like U2 to avoid putting something back into the society that created them, it also allows marginal artists to scrape by, thus enriching our society. The favours for the bloodstock industry, while less easily defended, prevented that industry's collapse; we need only to look to what happened in France when incentives were withdrawn as evidence that treating Magner et al favourably was on the money. Furthermore, his presence in government in the sixties with O'Malley and Lenihan represented a changing of the guard and a new, proactive approach to the problems of the day. One can only wonder what he might have achieved if the Arms Trial - on which I am no expert, so I will refrain from comment - hadn't cut his career short.

And then there was the dark side. Fine living while the country starved. A man dressed in Charvet suits while pensioners wrapped themselves in moth-ridden blankets. Island life while his own native island ejaculated its children to the furthest reaches of the globe. And his relationship to Ben Dunne.

I find it difficult to become irate when commenting on those payments. Did Charles Haughey create corruption in Irish life, or did corruption in Irish life create Charles Haughey? His dedication to the country in the early years of his career cannot be denied. As time passed, he became corrupted by the allure of power. Which one of us doesn't. We tend to look at Haughey now and see a distant murky past that has been left behind along with emigration and bosco. That murky past lives on in three words. The Galway Races.

My main criticisms of his tenure relate to his clenched fist approach to the corridors of power. In 1981, he informed the country that it needed to rationalise. He subsequently awarded a MASSIVE pay rise to a bloated public sector that had bled the country dry throughout the late seventies. It was an act of wanton political cowardice. As was his sacking of Lenihan - although the latter was more understandable; it was what the party wanted, and what Lenihan himself wouuld have done had the roles been reversed. But the eighties are littered with events that compromised the onward march of Irish society, motivated by short-term political gain, and the man at the centre of it all was Charles Haughey.

But such is politics. And such intrigue did not begin or end with the Squire of Kinsealy. You have the IFSC. You have Government Buildings, one of Dublin's most awesome architectural sights. You have DIT and Limerick as modern universities, at the forefront of global research. And you have the Bert, who was blooded by Charlie.

A mixed legacy. Undoubtedly. But in many ways, a brilliant one.

When Haughey bid adieu to Leinster House in 1992, the scent of Shakespearean tragedy hung in the air. On this momentous day, the words of the bard ring true once more.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;

Hi Diddle-de-dee, a journo's life for me

I've always wanted to be a journalist. A lenghty career on Fleet Street - or Tara Street as it soon shall be - followed by an eponymous novel documenting life in Ireland at our moment in time has always been the dream. But I've continuously found it hard to get started. Especially since I wasted my years at college being involved in something I shouldn't have been in involved in.

To remedy this, I entered a sports writing competition ran by my local paper. The winner was to be given a regular job and the freedom to graze his cattle on the town green. Well, not quite. Only Bono has been granted this privilege. My interest was nourished by the fact that Tom Humphries, Ireland's second greatest living sports hack, was one of the judges.

I didn't win. But I did come second. They'll publish my article on June 14th. For most readers, this is trivial, a minor triumph in a local rag. But for me, this is huge. Huger than huge. Words won't suffice.

Here it is.

SPORT AND MEANING

In the Beginning there was the Word, and the Word became God. And God created Man, who then created Sport. In retribution, disgusted that Creation had thought of it before Him, God created Luck. And therein lies the key to Manchester United’s victory in the 1999 European Cup Final.

The English social commentator Francis Wheen, analysing the exaggerated orgy of national mourning that accompanied the death of Princess Diana in 1997, concluded that the only rational explanation was humanity’s desire to belong to something greater than itself. The British people had been deprived of the means of communicating with each other through the sustained atomisation of their society. Eager to connect with their neighbours and to invest in sumptuous social capital, they flocked to each other’s garden fences and grieved in unity.

Sport is one of the principal alembics within which community, an ideal that has lost some of its currency through the modernisation of Irish society, might be distilled once more. The traditional bulwarks of shared identity – Church, one-eyed nationalism, Gay Byrne – have either disintegrated or disappeared. Yet while Catholicism still seeks to address the fundamentals of modern living, nationalism has, to some extent and not before time, given way to a more multicultural social model, and Gaybo contents himself with sporadic televised jaunts down memory lane, thousands of us still congregate, week in week out, at sporting venues across the land to participate in glorious athletic communion. And so it was that a crowd of us tumbled along to Parnell Park last weekend, where down-and-out Dublin took high-fliers Mayo on a whistle-stop tour of the National League Division 1a dance floor.

The rain was wild, and the climate far from mild, as we rushed down from Elm Mount Road to Dublin’s home ground, the impressive floodlights towering over sullen Donnycarney Church luring us ever onwards. Late as usual, we arrived just as the teams were taking to the pitch, and the presence among the visitors’ convoy of Ciarán McDonald was duly, gleefully noted. He wasn’t togged out, but that day would inevitably come. Anticipation rising.

Eyes fixed on Mickey Moran, the man who had breathed new life into our county team. His trawl through the vast reservoir of eager talent that lay dormant across the Plain of the Yew had bore sumptuous fruit, and a new wave of optimism spread through the county that always dares to hope.

For those of us who live away from home, ensconced in this ever-enlarging capital, another away tie against the Dubs, following on from last years Round One stormer, was a great blessing as our pilgrimage was shortened considerably. The floodlit sheen of the venue belied the uncertainty of the playing surface, which had in recent times endured torrents unheard of since the era of plagues and locusts. As we stood – had we any choice on the terrace? – for Amhrán na bhFiann, the importance to the scattered Diaspora of events like these began once more to dawn upon our brows. Glances traded with old school pals. Knowing winks and awkward nods. Friends long forgotten emerging from the woodwork of the past to remind you of who you were, nay, who you are. The impressive crowd populated by many émigrés whose knowledge of the sport might be deemed questionable. It mattered not; they were there to feel part of something. To belong.
The ball was thrown in, and the visitors slid into a two point lead, with Austin O’Malley chalking up the first score, followed by a cool brace from the fresher, Alan Durcan. The signs were comforting for Mayo. Alas signs in Ireland never really paint the full picture. The surface contained all the certainties of a glacial summit, and Dublin closed their opponents down in a determined manner that gave rise to an indefinable, yet ultimately recognisable anxiety. Benighted since the early promise shown against Tyrone by charges of indifference and anonymity, they finally took charge of their own destiny.

The goal, in the end, came quickly. Mark Vaughan, reminiscent of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, stole in between Higgins and Nallen to win the ball and begin a move that ended in rapture for the Dubs. Tomás Quinn ploughed the ball past John Healy, and the terrace erupted in a flow of navy and blue. Psychologically, the weight of the blow was tangible. A boisterous but apocalyptically cynical Mayo ‘fan’ behind us, bedecked in waves of green and red, cried “Game Over”, and promptly stormed off into the angry night. Such are the passions that these occasions excite.

No sooner had we rallied around the rationale that all was not lost, than our hopes were sullied once more. Dublin were awarded, or depending on your perspective gifted, a penalty. We steadied ourselves by sagely noting that penalties in Gaelic Football are notoriously difficult to convert. No such luck. Mossy drilled the ball home, and Dublin led by 2-2 to 0-3.

Behind the Mayo goal the chant rang out, ‘Come on you Boys in Blue, Come on you Boys in Blue’. We pinched ourselves, thinking for a moment that we had been wondrously transported to Stamford Bridge. The purists pursed their lips; we did not follow suit. Unsporting jeers and boos aside, the revelry added more than it took away from the occasion, and provided a stark contrast to our own fears and sense of self-pity.

Despite a Mayo rally late in the first half which narrowed the gap to three points at the interval, Paul Claffey’s half-time talk harnessed his men steadfastly to their task and they proceeded to tear through Mayo’s listless ranks. The visitors scored just one goal and four points to Dublin’s more assured tally of two goals and six. When Alan Brogan pounced to exploit a late backline error and scored Dublin’s final goal, it was all over bar the shouting. And oh how the faithful roared. Redemption was sought and assured.

Analysis? Dublin wanted it more. The dogs in the street had that for us as we descended once more onto Collins Avenue. All the hoary old clichés. The better team won out on the day. On top of them all, Mayo sorely missed Ronan McGarrity in the middle of the park, where they were duly annihilated, and of the senior players who did tog out, James Nallen and David Heaney were uncharacteristically guilty of prolific errors. Put simply, it was a bad day at the office. It seemed on this night the Dubs’ desire was greater.
It has been a wonderful league campaign – an institution that is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of irrelevance that plagued it in the past – so far for Mayo. From the euphoria of Round One, where the Kingdom finally witnessed a coup d’etat, to the drudgery of the contests with Fermanagh and Cork, the byword was regeneration. John Maughan’s era brought sustained success, but ultimate stumbles at the final hurdle. Mickey Moran’s task is to bring this talented team of gallant volunteers across the finish line. The result in Parnell Park was indeed a setback, but the Connacht Championship is still two months away. What’s more, it’s still all to play for in the NFL. Tyrone won’t be too worried. Then again, neither will Mayo.

As we walked out onto the Malahide Road and turned away from the ground, we were lost in thought. No floodlights guided us to our destination now, but the glow in our souls prevailed even in the wake of this most convincing and upsetting of losses. For over an hour, each of us had belonged to something greater than the sum of our parts, Dub and culchie alike. We were the faithful, concelebrants at an evangelical, ecumenical altar, where fortune favoured the brave, but also shone upon all who showed up. Our lives are so busy, and often so detached from our upbringing and those we cherish, that events such as these are solid gold. It was, as it always is, a privilege to witness these brave warriors do battle for their counties and for nothing else. There is a lesson in there somewhere. Sport enlivens and enriches national culture from the bottom up, from the under-10s kitted out each Saturday in Maypark, Burrishoole, Louisburgh, Portmarnock, to name but a few, through Derval O’Rourke hurdling towards History in Moscow, to the referee’s final whistle in the death-knell of September. It is to be cherished with the intensity the parent feels for the child, because it is ours. It is our heritage.

The West’s Awake. Even in Dublin 5.