Jack Charlton Tribute

It was late in the game and we were chasing a rare victory. The ball was punted into the corner and I went in pursuit, as fast as my chubby thighs could drag me. Sweat and condensation had combined around the edges of the Muirhevnamore indoor sports centre that cold November night in 1987 and while I had recently qualified as an Accountant, I wasn’t earning enough to afford decent trainers.

I slipped and twisted my left ankle to such an extent, that thirty three years later, I still feel it when the barometer falls or a stone in a road tilts my foot more than five degrees.

I was hauled off the court and driven home by my boss, who made up for the crap salary he paid me by telling me to take the next day off and to stay in bed resting my ankle. That next day was the 11^th November 1987, a day that will go down in Irish History, although few expected it at the time.

Ireland were in group 7 in the qualification process for Euro 1988. A promising campaign was petering out, as many others had since I started watching football in the early 70s. We had completed all our games but Bulgaria only needed a draw at home in their last match to finish ahead of us and take the only qualifying place. Their opponents that damp and dreary night in Sofia were Scotland, a team that were the definition of being less than the sum of their parts. They had nothing to play for apart from their pride, a commodity that seemed to be of low value, if the first eighty seven minutes of the game were anything to go by.

My dear old Dad had rigged the portable telly up in my bedroom and perched my stricken ankle atop a bed of pillows. RTE, the Irish state TV service, had secured rights to show the game in a fit of optimism that wasn’t shared by the general population. The match was meandering towards its expected conclusion and the Bulgarians looked happy enough to settle for a point. Then something happened that changed my life and the life of millions of Irish people around the world.

Scotland had shown no ambition and seemed to be in a hurry to get of town as quickly as possible, given that communist Sofia in 1987 must have made Glasgow look like Las Vegas. One of the Scots was ambling towards the side-line when he was needlessly hacked down. The ref played advantage and the violence of the tackle seemed to finally rouse the tartan dragon, as the ball broke to Gary McKay and he slammed it into the net.

What happened afterwards is probably the cause of my still occasionally aching ankle all these years later. I jumped up and ran into the living room to hug my Dad. We held onto each other while injury time was being played and wept when the final whistle blew. My Dad was 54 at the time and this was the first time he’d ever seen Ireland qualify for anything.

Seven months later, I was living and working in London. My mates were in Germany for the Euro 88 finals. I had tickets for the games but couldn’t get off work and so I watched them from behind a sofa in a mates flat. Two years later I was in Italy for Ireland’s debut at the World Cup. I look back now and those years were among the best of my life. I was heading out into the wide world at the same time that Ireland was playing itself onto the world stage.

Jack Charlton was the Irish Manager then and he captured the zeitgeist of a country bursting to be free. We danced in fountains, we strove to outdo each other in garish 1990s attire and we murdered “The Fields of Athenty” in pubs from Stuttgart to Seoul. It was a gift to be an Irish person during those wonder years. To stand tall among the nations of the World and to burst with pride. But I feel particularly blessed that I got to experience this during the years when I was most able to enjoy it. When I still had a sense of wonder for what the world might offer and had the appetite to go out and gobble it up.

I started a relationship just before the World Cup kicked off in 1990. That relationship fizzled out during the World Cup four years later. The team was getting older and more cynical by then and so was I.

Jack’s final game in charge was in December 1995. I watched that in a pub in Auckland on my second day ever in New Zealand. That was when I first came here and fell in love with the country, a love that led to move here when the opportunity arose in 2015. In many ways then, the Jack Charlton era book marked my life.

He died last week and those memories came flooding back. It seems I’m not the only one. There has been an outpouring of nostalgia and sympathy in the Irish media, often from people who weren’t even alive when Jack Charlton was in his pomp. He is being credited with kicking off the Celtic tiger, something that I guess will be passed on to Mary Robinson when she passes away.

But I’ll remember the packed pubs, the away trips and the fact that it is now thirty five years since England last defeated us in Football. There were many magical nights, my favourite being one at Wembley when my mate climbed the fence that separated us from the English fans and screamed “You’ll never beat the Irish” at what turned out to be the wheel chair enclosure.

I miss those lazy hazy days. We’ll never see the like again. Rest easy Jack. You made us realise that not everything needs to be shit.

 

Black Lives Matter

I was racking my brain to try and think of the first black person I ever met. I went on holiday to England when I was ten and there were certainly a lot of Caribbean’s living in the streets around my Aunt’s house. My brother also had a Nigerian friend in college who called down to our house once or twice and sparked off lots of ‘behind the curtain’ curiosity from our neighbours.

Then I remembered a story my Mother used to tell me about the moment of my birth. She loved regaling her five kids with tales about stitches in places sons didn’t want to think about and blood soaked sheets. In my case, the main point of the story was that Mam had paid for an expensive doctor who was supposed to be present at my delivery. But I popped out early and so the first person I saw in this wide old world was an African midwife as I dropped into her welcoming hands.

I wish I knew her name. I wrote to the hospital when I was 18 to ask for the details of my birth. I spent the first three weeks of my life there and wanted to find out what was wrong. It turned out to be pretty mediocre but what struck me was that it mentioned the white middle aged male Doctor who never showed up, but not the black midwife who did all the work.

I like to think that I’m pretty ‘woke’ in respect of Black Lives Matter. I’ve certainly tried to avoid racism and treat everyone equally. But I don’t pretend to be perfect.  When I was twenty two I left the mono culture of 1980s provincial Ireland and headed for the bright lights of London. I got a job with an Insurance Company on the outskirts of the City. There were 120 of us in the department, including twenty Accountants who held all the management positions. All twenty (including my then young self) were white males. There was a smattering of Asians among the general staff but only one black person. His name was Leroy and I became quite friendly with him. He HYe

 He had an easy going manner and a sense of fun that mirrored my own Irish personality. He was also a big hit with the ladies on our regular social outings and I clung to him then in the hope that I might gather some of the crumbs that fell from his table.

I have to say that I envied him in some ways. He was relaxed, cool and better dressed than anyone else on our floor. But I ended up sitting beside him at lunch one Friday, just after the annual promotions had been announced. He wasn’t his normal ebullient self and I made the mistake of asking what was up. I didn’t get up for another hour or so as Leroy downloaded centuries of racial oppression and how it stopped him from ever getting a promotion. I tried to be as empathetic as possible, but I’ll admit that inside my opinions were mixed. I was a young Irishman who grew up in a working class background and fought hard to qualify as an Accountant and to get to the position I held in work. I figured if he’d worked a bit harder he could have achieved the same.

If I was charitable, I could argue that I didn’t see his skin colour and thought he was just the same as me. But time has taught me that the world isn’t that straight forward. I faced a few hurdles growing up as a working class lad in 1980s Ireland. But it was still a world where an Accountancy office was willing to offer an apprenticeship to a seventeen year old from the poor part of town. And when I got my qualification and headed to London, my social background was unknown to those I met. I could hide my thick tongued accent if needed and even when I didn’t, a rough working class background held a certain cache in the burning embers of Thatcher’s reign.

Leroy couldn’t hide his colour and looking back now, there were lots of idiots promoted at that company, when he was stuck in the same role for years. He faced the challenge of being working class and black and that meant he had all my challenges and many more.

Class and classism has always been a burning issue within me. I used to think that if we could solve inequality and class discrimination, then racism and sexism would be automatically fixed too. But poor white people don’t get stopped and searched by the Police and don’t get their necks knelt on by the cops. Skin colour and sex are physical manifestations and can trigger responses on sight. Discrimination based on class usually starts with your address or the school you went to. A well-dressed working class person can often pass for middle class. It’s harder for a black person or a woman to hide their true selves. Not that they should have to anyway.

I have to accept then, that while I grew up with a sizable chip on my shoulder based on my social class, that truth is that I am now a middle aged white man with tremendous privilege. I have lived in five different countries and never once questioned my entitlement to live in any of them. I can go wherever I like at whatever time of night I like and not be accused of bringing harm on myself if anything happens to me. I’ve earned some of this privilege by studying and working hard, but I have to accept that I was born with much of it.

When I popped out of Mam into the welcoming arms of that African mid-wife I was a certified white male, born into a western European country. She had none of those benefits and that’s not right and needs to change.