The Rocky Road

1. What’s in a Name?

2. Out and About

3. Holy Ireland

4. Dessie

5. Game Changer

6. Culture Clash

7. Golden Age

8. Dreams Come True

9. Blackmail

10. Dessie Drifts

11. A Marked Man

12. European Dream

13. Doors Closing and Opening

14. International

15. To Manchester

16. A New World

17. Two Captains

18. Gone to the Dogs

19. Best Foot Forward

20. Happy Families

21. Falling Stars

22. Reality Dawns

23. Journeyman

24. The Lions’ Den

25. Glorious Controversy

26. Mickey’s Boy

27. Troublemaker

28. Bottler

29. Bloody Sunday

30. Disrepute

31. A Club in Decline

32. Where’s the Beef?

33. Going Home

34. Soldiering On

35. Blazers in Dreamland

36. Treachery

37. Welcome Home

38. The Quality of Mercy

39. Family

40. Survival

41. Happytown

42. Beggars Can’t be Choosers

43. The Decent Skins

44. Merrion Row

45. Epiphany

46. The Horseshoe Bar

47. Big Jack

48. ‘Bollocks’

49. Aengus

50. Unforgettable Luck

51. Nightmare Fairytale

52. Controversy

53. George

54. Mob Rule

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

1. What’s in a Name?

On St Patrick’s Day 1943 Éamon de Valera addressed the Irish people on Radio Éireann. He had been Taoiseach for eleven years. Dev was the most influential Irishman of his time. More than a mere politician, he was the nation’s spiritual and cultural icon. Often derided by Irish intellectuals in the decades that followed, his vision as expressed in 1943 resonated with a majority of the people he led, among them my mother, Margaret.

Two years after Dev’s famous speech, my mother would name me after him. If my father, Paddy, had been doing the naming, my given name might well have been Jim, after the charismatic labour leader Jim Larkin. Big Jim was someone my father deeply admired and frequently quoted. The difference between my parents’ political preferences was irrelevant when set against the deep love they felt for each other. Paddy would sometimes tease Peg, as he called her, about Dev; she might respond by reminding Dad that Larkin’s finest hour, his leadership of the workers during the 1913 Dublin Lockout, had ended in abject failure when, starved and humiliated, the strikers had shuffled back to work for the cruel merchants who had resisted their claims for a decent living wage.

When my brother was born two years after me, my mother named him Kevin after Kevin Barry, the eighteen-year-old medical student executed by the British in 1920. Barry was offered his freedom in return for the names of his fellow volunteers. He refused to give them and was hanged. Another martyr for old Ireland, as a line from a popular ballad about Barry put it.

My mother’s background, like that of so many Irish people, was rural, devoutly Catholic and poor. It was at that constituency that Dev’s radio speech was aimed:

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.

Before returning to Dev’s homily about the virtues of frugal living (there is some guff about patriotic sacrifice to follow), we should note that he was a massive swindler, a con artist who had robbed thousands of Irish and American people of $250,000, which he had raised to set up the Irish Press, a newspaper ‘for the people’ that he promised would be ‘committed to telling the truth in news’.

Founded in 1931, twelve years before the ‘Ireland that we dreamed of’ speech, the Irish Press was primarily an organ of propaganda for Dev’s Fianna Fáil (the Soldiers of Destiny) party, an organizational mix of the Moonies and the Mafia that was committed to one thing only: the retention of political power.

The well-meaning investors, most of them domiciled in the United States, which at the time was mired in the Great Depression, were gulled by a simple corporate manoeuvre. Instead of receiving shares in Irish Press Limited they received certificates from Irish Press Corporation, which was registered in the tax-haven state of Delaware. Once Dev had the $250,000, Irish Press Limited issued 60,000 A-class share certificates from Irish Press Corporation. Those pieces of paper were worthless. Control of the publishing company would rest with the owner of the 200 B-class shares, the God-fearing patriot Éamon de Valera. The scam that he ‘dreamed of’ would not be fully exposed for decades.

Viewed in the context of the share shakedown, the evocative speech of St Patrick’s Day 1943 acquires an element of cruel, peculiarly Irish farce:

… with the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the Island of the Saints and Scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland – happy, vigorous, spiritual – that fired the imagination of our poets, that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win political and religious liberty and will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties be preserved. One hundred years ago, the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such an Ireland before the people, inspired and moved them spiritually as our people had hardly been moved since the Golden Age of Irish Civilization. Fifty years later, the founders of the Gaelic League similarly inspired the people of their day. So later, did the leaders of the Irish Volunteers. (The IRA!)

We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in a like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought.

That last reference to ‘our nation as a whole’ was a sly signal that he had not forgotten the core principle of the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War – a united Ireland – for which so many of his comrades had given their life. This cause, upon which his leadership and the initial legitimacy of the Fianna Fáil Party were founded, had hardly been advanced during his period as Taoiseach.

The reference to religious liberty was similarly disingenuous: his God was Catholic; the Ireland that he dreamed of, ruled by Catholic dogma, was a place that would have been hostile to men like Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone and Charles Stewart Parnell, all of whom were Protestants offering a truly republican vision profoundly at odds with de Valera’s narrow Catholic nationalism.

I have often wondered what drew my mother to Mr de Valera. The answer may be that he wasn’t W. T. Cosgrave, Dev’s main political rival in the 1920s and early 1930s. It is impossible to imagine Cosgrave, a Dubliner, articulating, as Dev did, the romantic vision of Ireland that so appealed to a countrywoman.

In the fiction that is Official Irish history, Cosgrave is a revered figure. He took the pro-Treaty side with Michael Collins and led the first Irish government when the Irish Free State was formed in 1922. Cosgrave was a publican before becoming a gunman, or freedom fighter, as these killers have come to be regarded with the passage of time. My mother wasn’t mad about publicans.

But perhaps her affection for Dev, the pious romantic, was essentially a rejection of Cosgrave’s extreme right-wing politics, which are best summarized in a letter he wrote to a colleague in 1921, when he was minister for local government.

As you are aware, people reared in workhouses are no great acquisition to human society. As a rule, their highest aim is to live at the expense of the ratepayers. As a consequence, it would be a decided gain if they took it into their heads to emigrate. When abroad, they are thrown onto their own responsibilities and have to work whether they like it or not.

It would be wrong to conclude from my mother’s devotion to Dev and my father’s admiration for Larkin that ours was a political home. In fact, politics was rarely mentioned. My parents were too busy surviving to waste time chewing the political fat. Home for the four of us was one room with no hot water or electricity. The house was a one-storey-over-a-basement dwelling on Richmond Road, Drumcondra. The basement was occupied by a family of four. We lived above, across the hall from a childless couple.

Remarkably, I recall no contact between the three families in the fifteen years I spent there. While my father was a genial man, always in good humour, my mother was intensely private. She had no time for what she derisively described as ‘gossip’. So the door of our room stayed firmly shut. Her time was spent taking care of Kevin and me and her husband, Paddy, to whom she was so clearly devoted.

Peg was raised in Foynes, County Limerick. As a young teenager she set out for Dublin, finding employment as a nanny/housekeeper for a well-off Dublin family. She left Ireland on only one occasion: on a holiday with her employers to the Isle of Man. Often, while we were growing up, she would regale Kevin and me with the wonders of that trip. The funfair, the cafés, the buzz of the Isle of Man beguiled her, offering a singular glimpse of a world other than the one she, like so many of her generation, inhabited – the world of grinding deprivation and never-ceasing obligation to God, employer, priest or politician.

Yet in our room Peg was happy, sometimes joyously so in the role of mother and wife. She would sing the songs of John McCormack, which she loved, no less because he was a papal count. Another favourite was ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls’, the story of a Romany girl who dreamed of living ‘with vassals and serfs by my side’. A particularly poignant lyric, given our circumstances.

In our early years on Richmond Road, Peg was happy. There were many reasons, though, to regard the outside world with suspicion or grim hostility. As very young children, my brother and I were shielded from the problems our parents faced on an almost daily basis.

My father worked as a builder’s labourer for Macken’s, the most rapacious employers in a business notorious for its exploitative bosses. This was brutal work for any man, and particularly for Paddy, a gentle, good-natured soul. He worked six-day weeks except when rain stopped play and labourers entered ‘broken time’ for which they got no wages. It rains a lot in Ireland.

His daily return to our room was cause for rejoicing. He and Peg would embrace, she enquiring if he was all right, relief on her face that he had survived another day. While he washed off the muck and grime of the building site in the warm water she had heated, Peg would put his dinner on the table. The gaslight flickered, the room now filled with unspoken love and peace.

He would always have the newspapers, the Irish Independent and the Evening Mail. From a very early age I would grab them to read about the world. Pre-school and pre-friends, except for Kevin, the papers were my only contact with the world outside our room. I devoured them every night from back to front, from sport to politics, gossip and foreign affairs.

Before bed each night, the four of us knelt to say a decade of the rosary. This was no mere ritual, rather an intense expression of gratitude for all the mercies of that day.

It was almost thirty years later that my father told me about the difficulties he and my mother had grappled with after Kevin was born. We were having a drink in Fagan’s pub in Drumcondra, his local, a drinking shop that would hit the headlines many years later as the bar where Bertie Ahern and his courtiers hung out. The subject of religion came up. I was by then estranged from, if not downright hostile to, the Catholic Church. Still the story Dad told me – and the emotion he displayed while he did so – has remained indelibly in my mind. With two young children and one room to live in, Peg and Paddy faced a dilemma. There was no space for another body. While our parents slept in the bed, Kevin and I shared a mattress on the floor. That was fine for Kevin and me, but for a couple in their late twenties, sex became a risky business. Should my mother conceive – the purpose of sex, according to Catholic dogma – we were in trouble.

Seeking guidance, Peg went to see Father McDonald, the parish priest in Fairview, our nearest church. McDonald was a very visible character on the local landscape. Stern and stocky, he often strode the streets in search of sinners. Young courting couples in nearby Fairview Park might suddenly be confronted by the dog-collared bully who ordered that they stop sinning.

Young people hanging out on street corners – in the early fifties, there was little else to do – were also subject to McDonald’s wrath. Sometimes he got physical, his icy stare the precursor to a blow to the head from his meaty fist. He was also known for his sermons in which he hectored his parishioners for sins, real or imagined, they may or may not have committed. It was, it seemed, his mission to instil fear in the community. The impression left was that if you thought he was vengeful, the Creator whose message he was conveying would be much more rigorous when you stood before Him to account for yourself.

History has rendered such creeps a sick joke, but in our time, McDonald and his ilk were no laughing matter. It was to McDonald my mother turned seeking counsel. She was as devout as one could be, a daily mass-goer; a modest woman who sought nothing more than to live her life as God would have it lived.

McDonald treated her with contempt, according to my father. As he listened to her story, McDonald bristled with impatience. Why was she bothering him when the solution to her problem was so obvious? It was clear what she must do: stop having sex with your husband or suffer the pain of mortal sin.

Distressed as much by the callous manner of its delivery as by the message itself, my mother returned home to tell my dad. Reflecting on her pain three decades later, Paddy’s eyes filled with tears. My own response was anger, not just for the mother I loved but for generations of Irish women – and men – whose lives were scarred by monsters like McDonald.

The option of moving from our room to somewhere with more space had to be considered. Alas, on a builder’s labourer’s wages (minus ‘broken time’), the only possible alternative was local-authority housing, which posed a major problem for Peg and Paddy.

Both were, at heart, country people. Even though my father had been born in Dublin, his roots were in Kilkenny among the farming stock his parents came from. My paternal grandfather, Martin, was the eldest son of a comfortable farming family. He came to Dublin for love, forfeiting his inheritance to pursue his romantic dream.

Native Dubliners, real Dubs, as they were called, were very unlike their country cousins. The differences were magnified among the less well-off and this was keenly felt, especially by my mother, who often spoke scornfully of ‘Jackeens’, as real Dubs were dismissively known to proud country people. Real Dubs were coarser. They ate processed food from tins and packets. They couldn’t grow cabbages or spuds. They made nothing except noise. The women dressed immodestly, adorned with lipstick and powder, and they kept bad company in pubs and dancehalls.

At times, Peg spun much humour out of the fact that Paddy, Kevin and I were all Jackeens and the lesser for it. But beneath the banter something tangible was in play: a real alienation from what Peg perceived as the bawdy artifice of real Dubs, which was reflected in what they ate, what they wore and how they behaved. At best they were dumb, at worst loathsome.

My father was less judgemental: he got along with people in the way that many men do in pubs, sports clubs or, in his case, on building sites. Paddy suspended disbelief while indulging the male impulse for superficial buddydom.

Now, though, on the important matter of where to live and raise two children, he deferred to my mother. Staying in our room on Richmond Road meant bearing the burden imposed by Father McDonald. The alternative was to apply for local-authority housing in one of the inner-city flat complexes or suburban estates that were expanding around Dublin to accommodate the working class (or, as Peg would sometimes slyly suggest, the work-shy class).

The idea of living among the realest of real Dubs appalled my mother. The flats and estates populated by Jackeens eating from tins and packets or straight from fish ’n’ chip shops, wearing garish clothes, powdered and lipsticked and lazy, was not for her, her husband and especially not for Kevin and me.

By contrast with the real or imagined horrors of ‘Jackeen’ land, Drumcondra was an oasis of genteel respectability. Everybody worked most of the time. The locale was inhabited by junior civil servants, small shopkeepers, the better class of tradesman (printers being the princes), bank tellers, guards and nurses. Crucially, real Dubs were absent, by and large, and even more important was the fact that most at the Richmond Road end of Drumcondra were either country people or, like Paddy, first-generation Dubliners. That we were by far the least well-off mattered less, far less, than the comforting ambience of the neighbourhood.

The clinching point in my parents’ deliberations concerned education. St Patrick’s National School was less than five minutes’ walk from our room. With a renowned teacher-training college attached, St Pat’s was believed to be the best national school on the northside of the city. If celibacy was the price of a good education, Peg and Paddy were prepared to pay.

2. Out and About

I started school in September 1950. I was five, shy and small for my age. Our family had lived in what might be best described as contented solitude. Day one was a huge shock. I cried for my mother as soon as she left the school gates; nothing unusual in that. However, I bawled so hysterically that our teacher, Mr Hayden, had to summon her to take me home. Somehow I was coaxed back the following day. After my inauspicious start, things settled down. Looking back, the six years I spent in Mr Hayden’s classroom were hugely important. He knew my family circumstances, where we stood socially, relative to my classmates. Initially, he factored this into class work in a nuanced way: the odd word of praise here and there; a short reading from an essay I’d submitted; maybe selecting me to answer a question he knew I had the answer to. His kindness extended to everyone in the class: the insecure or those unable to comprehend were treated with respect. I was a diligent student, others less so; one or two were on a mission to disrupt. It was a normal class, I suppose. Mr Hayden never lost his temper or control.

He was a countryman from Leitrim. His thatch of wild grey hair sprayed ungroomed in all directions. His slightly disorderly appearance contrasted favourably to us with the pinstriped conformity of his peers around the corridors. Not for the last time in my life I found a badly needed ally at just the right moment.

At year’s end we got our exam results and a report to take home. In deference to the boys who had struggled, Hayden only announced the top three names. A genius named Bourke, the swot from Central Casting, came first. To my immense pride, I came second and a boy named Michael Tutty finished third. Michael, another swottish type, would later confirm his promise by becoming a senior civil servant in the Department of Finance and subsequently Ireland’s energy regulator.

Though still painfully shy outside the classroom, I began to make friends at St Pat’s. A boy called Ray Redmond became a particular buddy. Football was the passion we shared. I had been playing with a ball, usually a worn tennis ball, for ever, always on my own on a narrow strip of ground behind our house. We lived on the edge of what was known as Hennessy’s Field. Nobody knew who Hennessy was. All we knew was that he never tended his field, which was a jungle full of weeds and nettles. A group of local people had cleared a patch of land close to the road to create some space for kids to play. This was known as the Dump.

The uneven wall bordering the Dump was essential to achieving the objective of mastering the ball. When the ball was struck, the wall returned it speedily at crazy angles. The desired outcome was control with your first touch. Progress was control while turning past an imaginary opponent behind you.

Winter and summer I spent long, lonely hours absorbed in this exercise. Now with Ray Redmond, I went in search of real opposition. Such forays were not without their complications in the early fifties. First you had to find a game you could join. Ray, an extrovert, was the man for that particular task.

Griffith Park, close to St Pat’s on the banks of the Tolka river, was usually our best bet. ‘The Park’, as we knew it, was a wonderful amenity filled with all kinds of possibilities, the most alarming of which to me was the prospect of meeting girls. Incredible though it may seem, at the age of six I had never spoken to a girl. For several years to come, that remained the case.

But it was in the Park that I discovered I could play ball against real opponents, all of whom were bigger, stronger and, at first, more practised than me. The matches were improvised and played with savage intensity. Anyone could participate. There was no upper age limit, although for kids like Ray and me some street cred was required to get into the ball game. Ray had the street cred and it turned out that I had enough game to achieve some status.

With no referee and coats or jumpers for goal posts, the scope for disputes was mighty. For the most part things worked out, justice depending on the karmatic principle that what goes around comes around. If there was a greater conclusion to be drawn from the dispute mechanism used to deliver justice on the streets – Drumcondra’s anyway – it was that usually a majority favoured fairness.

Indeed, justice was essential to the proceedings, as was evident on the rare occasions agreement could not be reached. A fair score denied, or dodgy goal awarded, sometimes brought the match to a premature end. ‘Fuck it, we’re off,’ the aggrieved would declare, the Pyrrhic victory that ensued leaving a hollow feeling in the gut of the opponents.

As summer drew to an end and minds focused on the new school year, an added burden was placed on my mother’s weekly budget. New clothes were needed. Also, more critically, I would need new school books. The extra money required simply wasn’t there. Every week was a battle for survival.

For a couple of reasons, our circumstances were particularly acute. In the poorer parts of the city, where Fate (and Father McDonald) ordained that we belonged, there was at least a certain solidarity in the community: everyone was in it together. In the matter of dress, for example, frayed cuffs and collars were of little or no consequence when your mates were similarly togged out. Ditto patches on the cheap, flimsy flannel trousers we wore before the miracle of denim equalized the game for future generations. Thanks to Penneys and Dunnes Stores, kids’ clothes today are both affordable and durable. It is impossible to distinguish between rich and poor on the basis of clothing. In fifties Drumcondra the frayed cuff, patched trouser or darned sock was a sign of poverty.

With two growing children, my mother was in a ceaseless battle. Her problem was compounded by her ban on cheaper convenience foods from packets or tins. Food, or nourishment, as she described it, was the number-one priority for her children and her hard-labouring, adored husband. Fresh vegetables, fruit, good meat and fish were our staples. The room smelt like a bakery with apple and rhubarb pies and home-baked bread in the oven.

Her endless seeking out of quality food, an exercise conducted with missionary zeal, is one of the abiding memories of my childhood. Pre-school, Kevin and I would accompany Peg on her daily shopping expedition. Before the days of supermarkets, the hunt for food consisted of a tour of small shops where the fare on offer was variable to say the least. If, as was the case with Peg, only the best would do, tenacity was required. Many of the small shopkeepers were rogues. Drumcondra’s butchers – there were five – were her most persistent foes.

A countrywoman, she knew the difference between good, bad or indifferent cuts of meat. Of course, you couldn’t tell just by looking. The proof was in the eating. Beef properly hung and aged tastes an awful lot better. When she was duped, as frequently happened, Peg’s wrath was fearsome. Over the years she fell out with all five local butchers. On one memorable occasion, the offending piece of roast beef was returned to its supplier – who happened to be a neighbour on Richmond Road – with the suggestion that he feed it to his own family to see how they’d like it.

Embarrassed at the time, I now marvel at my mother’s magnificent defiance of Drumcondra’s merchant class. They were, in truth, many of them, bastards. What held for butchering was also true for vegetables and fruit. One of the butchers’ favoured strokes concerned minced meat, which was the dish du jour when funds were running low. Knowing that what was already minced was rubbish, Peg would order a pound of round steak to be minced in her presence. This was duly done. Alas, what was ground out of the mincer was the usual old rubbish that had been in the machine all along.

An identical trick served to screw people looking for decent fruit and vegetables: behind the handsome triangle of potatoes, apples or cabbages lay the stale, the rotting, the overripe, which, by a manoeuvre worthy of a three-card-trick man, was bagged out of sight of the innocent customer. This ruse would be exposed only when the purchaser got home. As with the butcher, my mother would take the rubbish back and demand the kind of produce on display.

Even the simplest everyday transactions of life were tainted by venality, though the local swindlers cloaked their dishonesty in piety. The churches were packed every Sunday, standing room only, as they sought forgiveness for their sins before duly returning to fumble in their greasy tills on Monday morning.

In the form of Moore Street, the bustling city-centre market, the Irish genius for myth-making (and thieving) scaled epic heights. The street vendors, or hawkers as they were known, were invariably women, representing, it was claimed, the heart and soul of the city, real Dubs. In the fifties, as now, a trip to Moore Street was deemed essential for crooked local politicians – Charlie Haughey was a regular – seeking to curry favour with the People.

Similarly, when Official Ireland’s media wanted to gauge the national mood, Moore Street was where they headed. Television and film cameras seemed permanently in situ to capture pictures of politicians, international celebrities and local chancers as they strolled among the People. The hard-faced hawkers played their parts to perfection: ‘How’ya, Charlie?’ they would holler, one eye on the cameras. He would incline his head like royalty and smile benignly, a statesman among his beloved people. Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Grace Kelly, all had availed themselves of this landmark photo opportunity. ‘How’ya, Liz?’ ‘How’ya, Richard?’ ‘How’ya, Grace?’ Had Adolf Hitler prevailed in the Second World War – and Official Ireland did little to prevent that outcome – I have no doubt he would have walked the walk down Moore Street. ‘How’ya, Adolf?’

For most Dubliners Moore Street was a place to avoid, a film set for politicians on the make and gullible international celebrities. Its denizens survived by selling shite to those desperate for a bargain, and enjoyed their fame as extras in Official Ireland’s fictional version of the real Dublin.

In moments of extreme desperation, my mother ventured to this dreadful, dirty place. Late in the day it was conceivable that a bargain might be had, a head of cabbage, some apples, some oranges that were just on the right side of edible. As Peg reached out to touch an item on display, she would receive a sharp rebuke from behind the stall – ‘Fuck off back to where you came from, missus, don’t touch the produce.’ We fucked off back to Drumcondra, where warfare was conducted on more nuanced terms.

In order to get my clothes and books for the new school year my mother went to the lender of last resort in those days, the pawn shop. The only item she had to pledge was Paddy’s Sunday suit. I vividly remember her folding the suit, packing it in brown paper secured by twine. Off we headed to Dorset Street, Kevin and I traipsing anxiously by Peg’s side. As children often do, we knew instinctively that this was to some degree a humiliating step into the unknown for this proud, defiant countrywoman.

Watches, wedding rings and fancy clocks were the usual offerings accepted by pawnbrokers. What price a Sunday suit from Burtons? As it happened, the gentleman behind the counter, perhaps sensing my mother’s distress, was courteous and respectful as he opened the parcel to inspect the pledge. ‘How much, ma’am?’ he enquired.

‘Two pounds,’ Peg ventured.

He smilingly assented, explaining the terms and conditions. As transactions go, this one was civil, with immeasurably more integrity at its heart than we were used to in Drumcondra’s meat and vegetable bazaars.

Just when we needed to we encountered a decent man. He was Jewish or, in the vile patois of the pious Roman Catholics we lived among, ‘a Jewboy’. The respect that man extended to my mother meant even more than the desperately needed couple of pounds.

Outside the classroom, football and reading were my consuming passions. Ray Redmond, extrovert Ray, was the leader of our gang of two. He started to organize pre-class football on Millbourne Avenue, the side street adjacent to St Pat’s. All kinds of obstacles had to be overcome to play effective ball: the kerb of the footpath, passers-by, cyclists on their way to work and the ire of shopkeepers whose businesses formed the opposite touchline to the school wall.

Another acute concern in the early fifties was securing a ball to play with. Known as a ‘bouncer’, the favoured alternative to the tennis ball was half the size and twice as volatile as a proper leather football. They were hard to come by. The kid who owned one was certain to get his game. It was a happy day when you had a bouncer that stayed unburst or unconfiscated by angry residents or grocers. Street soccer required uncommon resourcefulness even before the game began.

The best street players were masters of invention and guile. Seeing Lionel Messi today, you witness the street game at its most beguiling. The shimmies and swivels, the feint, the dummy, the rapid change of pace and direction, the knowledge without looking of where every foe is lurking and every team-mate waiting, the glorious elusiveness, the wit, all being consummated by the stunning final execution of a telling goal. This is the beautiful game of legend. No teacher or coach can impart the imagination and dexterity required to be a master of this art.

Eamon Dunphy

THE ROCKY ROAD

PENGUIN IRELAND

Contents

1. What’s in a Name?

2. Out and About