Big Sky

Life, eh? What is it all about?

You go through school and the laughter that goes with it. For that was what your school was all about, for you and your kindred spirits anyway. Pure Laughter. It wasn’t about Maths, it wasn’t about English or God forbid, the waste of time that was Irish. Laughter ruled the day. Whether it was Stephen O’Byrne wiping his dog shit filled shoes on the saddle of the biggest fucker in school’s bike or just laughing about the fact he had the nerve to do it. You laughed at the bloke who was mad into Nirvana at fourteen and laughed even more when his hero blew his brains out thus making that stooge’s argument redundant. “I Hate Myself And I Want To Die”?. Off you pop,sun-shee-eye-nah.

You and your mates just missed Oasis round Benildus way. You and your mates did wear the three stripe ‘get-up’ and were roundly derided for it, I might add. For it was 1993. It truly was a shite time to be a football loving, secret music enthusiast teenager. Two more years and you’d have been Gods!
Oh how they laughed at the 1970’s around then. Hand on your heart, you cannot see a comeback for the shellsuit or ‘Grunge’. Noddy Holder and his mirrored hat had more of a chance of gracing our retinas surely?

The time comes for you to collect your Leaving Certificate results and you do what it says on the tin and you leave. Nobody really prepares you for the ‘what the fuck am I going to do with my life?’ moment we all face. Your life is in the hands of a faceless nameless ‘examiner’. Fuck it, life will be alright.
You get your results. You go on the piss. You get your CAO form back. Who gives a fuck really?
You’re young. You’re too young to make massive life choices. Gerry Ryan says so. Gerry would never lie or do something stupid would he? Believe in the words of your elders. That’s what you’re told.

Off you go to college or an apprenticeship or whatever life has dealt you. You do your best, for that is all you can do. Live up to your ability. It is all that’s asked of you.

You get somewhere eventually, you start earning a few ‘bob’. You get a bit cocky down in the pub some nights, thinking you’re the bollocks. You come crashing down to Earth on a Christmas Eve when some fucker that was in your class in school says he’s a millionaire. “But he was an idiot!” you protest to yourself whilst trying to piss the blue block out of the the plughole. And then you go outside and pretend to be his mate. You’ve sold your soul.
You’re the idiot now. Like Ralph from The Fast Show.

Things pick up. You meet the girl you were always meant to be with. The rest were just a training session. Love hits you right between the eyes.
You get married. You spent a fucking fortune on the wedding. Living up to the stereotype cast upon you. You have to do it. Felt the pressure didn’t you?
You both would have happily got married in a skip in Rhyl but no, you had to impress. Still, it was the best day of your life and it was worth every penny. Worth it to see the smiles on the guests faces. And most importantly, the smile on your beautiful bride. Every little girl dreams of her wedding. You hope she achieved all her dreams. You hope she did.

A year or so later you are blessed with this little blinking being that looks a bit like you, a bit like your wife and a lot like your Nan. All wrinkly and pink.“I’m your Dad!” you stutter through the tears.You hold her in your left arm and try to take a photo of her to send to your loved ones. They’re all expectant and all joyous. The feeling is indescribable. A nurse comes in and snaps you out of your fuzziness. “This is how you change a nappy, this is how you dress her”. “Say again?”. You are too blown away by the wonder to take notice. The nurse doesn’t give a fuck, it’s her job. It’s up to you. The feeling of responsibility. The feeling of not leaving this little breathing fragile creature alone takes you over.
You both bring this little creation home. Friends, family visit. It’s a magical time.

It gets tough. Not sleeping much are you? The feeds and the cathartic feeling of making up bottles or ‘bah-bahs’ as you are want to call them can’t make up for the lack of sleep. But still, everything is alright. You’re making the mortgage payments and the car payments and every other motherfucking payment you’ve engaged in. Living the dream. Fantastic.

And then things take a turn for the worse. Not sickness. Not real suffering, Thank God.
You have your health after all but you end up sailing upon the Great Redundant Sea. No hope. No nothing.
You’ve done a thirteen year stint in the one company and suddenly you have nothing. You feel like shit. You could’ve had it all. You did for a while. Didn’t appreciate it did you? Wish you could have saved didn’t you? All very well after the horse has bolted. You’ve always been a idiot deep down. The ‘Lads’ always told you so. Start believing it.

Down, down deeper and down you slide. You don’t want to start relating to Status Quo lyrics but inevitably you do. It’s the final straw. You might as well be a cooper and have songs written about you. But eventually you snap out of it. And one bright sunshine morning you realise that your future lies outside of the country of your birth.
A country riddled with corruption, parochialism, narrow-mindedness and banality. You complain about it but nobody listens.
Oh sure, it’s fine to moan to Joe Duffy about how hard done by you’ve been, but who is standing up and making themselves heard?....Nobody. That’s who.

You end up thinking about ‘what ifs?’.
What if the Irish of today were sat in coffee shops in 1916? “Hey Fionn! There’s a goy shooting over there!”, ”Fock it. Lets get another Latte!”.
The ‘much-lauded’ Wolfe Tones repertoire would be redundant wouldn’t it? .
We all remember all that ‘Ole Ole’ 80s/early 90s ‘proud to be Irish’ nonsense don’t we? Where are you now? Why aren’t you burning down Leinster House? Being comfortable and settled is no excuse anymore is it? Where has the passion gone? .... Ireland is full of bullshit and bluster.

Fast forward to now. You despair of this country and although your hand has been forced , you decide to leave. Leaving behind family and friends. Leaving behind a country that can talk the hind legs off a donkey, but when it has that donkey in such a state, won’t take a gun and put it down.

In spite of the anger and the despair and the fear of leaving all you know, you take a walk with your kid through the fields high above the city you grew up in and you look down at the sodium glow of the streets and the houses and all the dramas contained within and your two year old daughter lies down in the grass and says “ Daddy, look at the sky” .And you realize that it’s that simple.

....In Green

Recently I have conversed with people I haven’t seen or spoken with in a long, long time. Something struck me about two such meetings. The people involved had turned their backs on football or ‘soccer’ as they are now want to call the sport and had fully embraced the game of rugby or ‘egg chasing’ as I am want to call it. They’ve been to see the ‘All Blacks’ and ‘The Pumas’. I just listened and probably looked perplexed with a touch of boredom thrown in for good measure ,all the while thinking to myself that I should have seen this coming and kicking myself for not doing so.

As long ago as 2007, a good friend of mine met an American in a pub. “So I guess you guys are soccer guys, yeah?”, “No, I gave up on the football” said my friend “I took up the rugby”...”Oh, so which position do you play Mike?” said American fella. “No, no” said Mike “I just watch it”. Now, that was a surprise to all concerned because a)-Mike never watched football and b) no one ever knew he watched rugby either. The rugby bandwagon had obviously been a-beeping outside his front door and he left his home and belief system behind to happily jump on board. It’s a familiar scenario in Dublin right now. Success breeds interest.
Who do kids look up to these days? A Robbie Keane flailing his arms around and moaning at a referee whilst feigning involvement in general play? Or a Brian O’Driscoll taking time out from watching a scrum of men with their heads in other men’s arses for a few moments to score himself a try and win stuff? Unfortunately and reluctantly you’d have to say if you were twelve, you’d want to be Brian O’Driscoll.

Where does the blame lie for the current malaise in Irish football?

You could go for the easy and obvious target in the village idiot in a suit posing as Chief Executive of the Football Association of Ireland, John Delaney, should you so wish. A man who, when turning up at a FIFA event such as a qualifying group draw looking like a Neanderthal scarecrow, would instantly provide comics such as Jim Davidson with a get-out-of-jail clause for their Paddy The Irishman jokes.
A man who fronts an organization responsible for ridiculously over-pricing match tickets for internationals resulting in half-full/half-empty stadiums such as at the Macedonia game just past, where you had to also buy tickets for meaningless friendlies in Lansdowne Road against Uruguay and Cloudcuckooland. Not great business sense is it?
You can go on and on and on about the FAI and their hare-brained nonsensical flights of fancy but the bottom line is, if your team is not successful, bums will not fill the seats. Bohemians may yet prove that theory wrong this season but that’s as maybe. And there are only about a thousand of them.

Can we trace the lack of interest back to Giovanni Trappatoni’s play-it-safe tactics?
About as interesting as watching paint dry, sure, but I don’t think that’s the root of disinterest.
I have heard the argument that he only has a small bunch of eligible players to work with and shutting up shop and hoping for the best is the only route we can take to try to eke out some sort of success.
Again, nonsense, for our good ‘friends’ in The North have beaten Spain and England in recent times with a pool of eligible players smaller than ourselves and it being diminished, it seems, by the week by the Republic legitimately taking players who have no wish to receive death threats because they go to the wrong church of a Sunday.

No, our current predicament is inherently linked back to the 19th October 1988 at Lansdowne Road when we beat a rather poor Tunisian side 4-0. John Aldridge got his long-awaited first goal in a green shirt. Ireland were still flying high from a wonderful performance in the European Championship Finals in Germany the previous summer. We were at the start of our first successful World Cup Qualifying campaign.
But...a rather large spanner had been thrown into the works. And it sat there for years festering. It became a part of the furniture and ended up being hung above the mantelpiece in the stead of many a beautiful oil painting. For that spanner made its debut that day. A spanner with the footballing imagination of a derelict block of apartments. Hoof the ball, if unsuccessful, hoof again. Score by accident from a corner kick and try every time again to repeat this ‘feat’. Somehow go on to play 102 times for your country. When your captain walks out on the squad just prior to a World Cup, assume his mantle. Albeit, with none of the respect (or disrespect depending on which side of the fence you wish to jump down to). He’d have pinched himself to see if he was dreaming only he’d have ballooned that pinch into the air. And probably done it again. And again, until retirement. Ole O-fucking-le.

Said spanner has no need to buy a lottery ticket again, for all his numbers came up on the 12th January 2006 when he was appointed as manager of the Republic Of Ireland.
I’d blame John Delaney but this spanner should never have accepted the job in the first place. I see no difference and will never see a difference between him being appointed Ireland manager and me being put in charge of a major banking institution.

Cyprus was not a surprise to me or nothing else that followed on for that matter. If the Celtic Tiger began as a result of Italia ’90 then surely it died following the frenetic stabbing that was the appointment of Steve Staunton.
For that was the day that I and many like me, lost any modicum of hope.