from his mind by the time he got back to London, tired but happy.
For the artistes who made it through these trials, there might be a few weeks in which they would be worth a theoretical half-a-million quid. A magical time in which they would be high on the
improbability of it all, until such time as the A&R man sobered up and thought better of his lost weekend in Dublin, or until they fired his ass and some other geezer
set about the gloomy task of reversing all the decisions he had made.
Still, for a few moments back then, men could dream. They could dream of sitting in the Bailey or the Rajdoot Tandoori rapping with the Frankies, or hanging out in the Pink with Gary Kemp. Or
maybe Sting. Drinking Harvey Wallbangers in the middle of the night with half of UB 40 and thinking that it must be their turn next.
Suddenly there were things in Ireland that had never been seen before, such as folks arriving over here to view the graffiti on the wall of Windmill Lane and to add their own insignia. And there
were things being done that were never done before, such as ‘house-sitting’. Around this time I heard that someone had a job which entailed living in the house of a rock star in South
Dublin while the rock star was away on tour.
Ireland had acquired its first house-sitters.
It was a way of life we had associated only with the ridiculously rich of American showbusiness, yet there were now Irishmen and women who were gainfully employed living in other people’s
mansions, most of them in the general direction of Killiney Hill. There were men living like rock stars who were not themselves rock stars, doing all the good stuff that rock stars do in their
jacuzzis and their vast four-poster beds with the mirrored ceilings and their Maseratis, and doing none of the bad stuff, like trying to write songs for the new album when they’d prefer to be
out enjoying themselves, or disgracing themselves at the MTV awards.
I mention these things to question again the accepted narrative of the 1980s in Ireland, that this was a time of almost uninterrupted bleakness, a line that has been asserted so often that it
just can’t be completely true. I have even been known to assert it myself.
Yet if we get beyond the received wisdom, we can see that the bleakness wasn’t uninterrupted. In fact it was interrupted quite a lot, which would perhaps make the bleakness seem all the
more stark when it resumed. But which should be remembered regardless.
We were moving from the darkness to the light, and back to the darkness all the time. And while the light was coming from some strange places, it was football, the old Republic, which had
brought us a night as dark as it gets without anyone dying.
I refer to that night in Brussels in 1981, Belgium v the Republic, which seemed to set the tone for much of the decade to come, an occasion of unparalleled ugliness, not just for the brutal
nature of the defeat, but in the light of what was subsequently learned by Paul Howard, then a journalist with the Sunday Tribune . In 2002, in his piece ‘I Wanted Ireland to Win this
Game’, Howard felt compelled to revisit those terrible visions of thunder and lightning and incessant rain when the referee gave the Belgians a dodgy free-kick with three minutes to go, which
they scored, to keep perhaps the best Irish eleven we ever had out of the 1982 World Cup.
And while that image of Eoin Hand with his head in his hands has defined that night, we tend to forget the earlier and more appalling injustice when a clearly legitimate Frank Stapleton goal was
disallowed for offside by the Portuguese referee, one Raul Nazare.
For the purposes of his Tribune piece, Paul Howard tracked Nazare down to his home in Lisbon, where he was living comfortably in retirement — or at least he had been, until the
Howmeister came to call with a video-tape of the match in question and a burning need to ask this Raul Nazare how in the name of God he could have done this
For the artistes who made it through these trials, there might be a few weeks in which they would be worth a theoretical half-a-million quid. A magical time in which they would be high on the
improbability of it all, until such time as the A&R man sobered up and thought better of his lost weekend in Dublin, or until they fired his ass and some other geezer
set about the gloomy task of reversing all the decisions he had made.
Still, for a few moments back then, men could dream. They could dream of sitting in the Bailey or the Rajdoot Tandoori rapping with the Frankies, or hanging out in the Pink with Gary Kemp. Or
maybe Sting. Drinking Harvey Wallbangers in the middle of the night with half of UB 40 and thinking that it must be their turn next.
Suddenly there were things in Ireland that had never been seen before, such as folks arriving over here to view the graffiti on the wall of Windmill Lane and to add their own insignia. And there
were things being done that were never done before, such as ‘house-sitting’. Around this time I heard that someone had a job which entailed living in the house of a rock star in South
Dublin while the rock star was away on tour.
Ireland had acquired its first house-sitters.
It was a way of life we had associated only with the ridiculously rich of American showbusiness, yet there were now Irishmen and women who were gainfully employed living in other people’s
mansions, most of them in the general direction of Killiney Hill. There were men living like rock stars who were not themselves rock stars, doing all the good stuff that rock stars do in their
jacuzzis and their vast four-poster beds with the mirrored ceilings and their Maseratis, and doing none of the bad stuff, like trying to write songs for the new album when they’d prefer to be
out enjoying themselves, or disgracing themselves at the MTV awards.
I mention these things to question again the accepted narrative of the 1980s in Ireland, that this was a time of almost uninterrupted bleakness, a line that has been asserted so often that it
just can’t be completely true. I have even been known to assert it myself.
Yet if we get beyond the received wisdom, we can see that the bleakness wasn’t uninterrupted. In fact it was interrupted quite a lot, which would perhaps make the bleakness seem all the
more stark when it resumed. But which should be remembered regardless.
We were moving from the darkness to the light, and back to the darkness all the time. And while the light was coming from some strange places, it was football, the old Republic, which had
brought us a night as dark as it gets without anyone dying.
I refer to that night in Brussels in 1981, Belgium v the Republic, which seemed to set the tone for much of the decade to come, an occasion of unparalleled ugliness, not just for the brutal
nature of the defeat, but in the light of what was subsequently learned by Paul Howard, then a journalist with the Sunday Tribune . In 2002, in his piece ‘I Wanted Ireland to Win this
Game’, Howard felt compelled to revisit those terrible visions of thunder and lightning and incessant rain when the referee gave the Belgians a dodgy free-kick with three minutes to go, which
they scored, to keep perhaps the best Irish eleven we ever had out of the 1982 World Cup.
And while that image of Eoin Hand with his head in his hands has defined that night, we tend to forget the earlier and more appalling injustice when a clearly legitimate Frank Stapleton goal was
disallowed for offside by the Portuguese referee, one Raul Nazare.
For the purposes of his Tribune piece, Paul Howard tracked Nazare down to his home in Lisbon, where he was living comfortably in retirement — or at least he had been, until the
Howmeister came to call with a video-tape of the match in question and a burning need to ask this Raul Nazare how in the name of God he could have done this
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