LOCKER ROOM:In these dark days, what we still have left to us is a sporting life, a cussed wild flower clinging to the bare rock, writes TOM HUMPHRIES
MAINLY THESE days I watch the cartoons and the old sitcoms. Soothing stuff. Just cling to the raggedy blanket and the bottle of tequila and let the days wash over me. Sometimes I’ll doze and when I wake there will be a panel of talking heads on the television. Shiver. Then it’s time to open up a vein and bleed.
My friend has a mad idea that I’m thinking of signing up for. I’m available as a talking head myself to discuss this as a real way forward. We’re late but what the hell, it will still work. Every time an IMF official gets off a plane at Dublin Airport we just shoot him. Pop. Not me and my friend personally. Army personnel. They arrive. We shoot them. Or else we just make them disappear.
No statements. No discussion. We are as baffled as anybody by the mystery of the disappearing bankers. We just continue telling the world we want to pay off this old debt. Swear blind we know nothing.
What can happen? They shake their heads and leave us alone to our madness? Grand. We’re an island. We could do with some “us” time to sort out all the inbreeding. We owe the world a little trial separation from us, since the whole misfortunate Riverdance thing for which we have never properly apologised. Or they invade us. And take away our sovereignty? Aha. You find it, you can have it amigos!
The other night in the gloaming of a room lit only by the television I awoke and there was a grave four-headed panel on discussing the apocalypse. I’m suffering this grand Nixonian-style paranoia these days. I always expect to get named personally on these damn shows. Named, complete with a close-up of me sweating while eating a large dinner. On this show now there’s handwringing going on about how we’re all guilty. Mostly I don’t feel guilty but I know, I know that they know about that second side order of fries at lunch back in 2008. Next thing we’re a hundred billion in the hole and they want to hang me for it.
They moved on to the question du jour for every damn jour, “how did we get here?” Death, pestilence, famine and Enda Kenny still to come. Our particular journey has been discussed and dissected more often by now than how the pilgrims got to Plymouth Rock. Nobody really knows where we are going, so they keep discussing how we got here.
One woman, an American panellist by persuasion, spooned out one of those lists you haven’t heard or believed in since college. The political, the economic, the religious, the social, the artistic and the intellectual. These are the factors, the realms, which are held to underpin society and which when they change, can be said to have altered society.
Maybe that’s where we all went wrong. I mean the first four you can see where they are coming from. The political, the economic and the religious? Are they dead? With O’Leary in the grave.
Social? On a drip but we’ll get back to it. What can be said though of our intellectual and artistic life in this country.
What intellectual life? That’s the first question. There are counties in Ireland where you still wouldn’t walk around the place carrying a book for fear that an indignant posse of locals might throw stones at you. We got some money and we turned into tabloid nation and what passed for intellectual life was those mumbo jumbo merchants explaining to us slack-jawed peasants what a Breakfast Roll man was and sharpy Cork types telling us how to get rich and stay rich.
And our artistic community? Was their last piece of grand performance art not that festival special where they disappeared into themselves never to come back.
There are exceptions of course, people who are relevant and useful and interesting, but to imagine that they are or have recently been central to the way we live or think is fantasy.
Having walked with Seán Browne one night when he locked up the gates of Bellaghy GAA club I always have a mix of sadness and amusement when I think of the story concerning Séamus Heaney’s moving lines about being in Olympia when he heard the news of Seán Browne’s murder. The jarring change in language from the lustral wash and run of river shallows to the hose-water smashing hard back off the asphalt at the murder scene always seem to me (though not to many others) to insist upon the primacy and immediacy of place in our imagination no matter where we wander.
(The story by the way concerns the woman at a reading who turned and muttered to her neighbour that news like that must have ruined Mr Heaney’s holiday. For some reason this forces me to picture the Nobel laureate in a pair of red speedos.)
Anyway Seán Browne and the Wolfe Tones GAA club were as much a part of the surface of Bellaghy as the flesher’s shop on the hill was. But in terms of the spirit of the place they were more essential.
Our intellectuals and our artists seldom venture into any exploration of the tension between that sporting and cultural world or ours and the homogenous version of eurolife that we are expected to embrace. Instead they dig through the rubble of the political, the religious and the economic looking for shards in which they might see their reflection. Where is the great Irish dream, the understanding which underpins all our forward movement as to where we want to be as a nation and how we want to get there. Is there nothing more important to us than a low rate of corporate tax and the thought that the big guys might use us for labour.
What we have left to us though is a sporting life, a cussed wild flower clinging to the bare rock. A sort of national obsession which keeps us permanently (thank your god) from growing up. It keeps the imagination lithe and nimble. Pretty much the only ones who don’t get it are those who spend their time agonising about their standing within the Lilliputian intellectual and cultural spheres.
Where is the great Irish artistic work which addresses the centrality of, say, hurling, in large parts of Irish ruraliana. How the game girds community, boosts identity, heightens yet diminishes the sense of exile, how it defines relationships, grants to ordinary people the chance of extraordinary lives. How a game can be culture, social glue, the wellspring of volunteerism and still be extraordinarily breathtakingly beautiful as it collides with the vector of wealth or sudden bankruptcy.
Or soccer. Not the Premier League (though those mass weekend pilgrimages to Anfield and beyond must tell us something about ourselves) but the feeling of being on the outside, of being anti-establishment which so many men who have loved the game in this country express. The GAA’s ban was an ugly and unwieldly implement but it’s heyday oddly coincided with the heyday of domestic soccer in this country. The GAA men have gotten over The Ban a lot quicker than the soccer men who lived through it. We’re still messed up about that one.
Rugby. Its entrenchment in certain places and communities and its election as the sport of the Tiger era, our chosen means of expressing our wellbeing. Where did that spring from?
Right now with the snow banked against the door and the unmolested IMF hoods roaming the streets beyond, seeing if there’s anything that they might sell on eBay, sport feels so far away and remote. Does anybody else literally ache for its distraction, for its comforting presence as a reason for coming together, as a topic which courses through every conversation, as an obsession so satisfying that it makes the fringe shows of Irish intellectual and artistic life seem like minor diversions and not the other way around.
I’m yearning for the O’Byrne Cup and Walsh Cup. I say to myself, four more All-Ireland hurling championships and the worst of this will be over. Sure that will fly. Especially if Dalo stitches together three in a row at the start. I care more about whether Conal Keaney will come back to hurling than I do about our give away rate of corporation tax. I think the people should be angry – but mainly over the way Seán Óg was ditched.
It seems like a lifetime away now but spring will bring us the great distractions we need. We should learn to value our sport for the quality of friendship it has given us in good times and bad. We are the people. It is our opium. Riddle us the dialectics of that.
