Some people see things as they are and say why? . Others dream things that never were and say why not? . Con Houlihan, like Robert F. Kennedy, must surely belong to the why nots? after all, who else could rate an encounter with a Spanish hen as an extraordinary moment of communication and study the continuing evolution of the four-hand reel with equal enthusiasm? Who else finds succour as readily in Semple Stadium as in Hemingway s back catalogue? Who else revels in the conjuring of trout recipes ( To avoid fragmentation roll in flour the trout, not yourself ) with as much enthusiasm as he brings to the poetry of Francis Ledwidge and Gerard Manley Hopkins?
Con defies the old adage that says if you look like your passport photo, you re too ill to travel. The three-dimensional Con may look a whole lot less coiffed than his sepia prints but he s a whole lot more colourful as a result. A physical and intellectual colossus, he s managed to meld Coleridge s definition of prose ( words in the best order ) and poetry ( the best words in the best order ) in more than a share of his writing. Windfalls, his latest collection of pieces (many of them written for The Xpress following the demise of the Press Group), is a delicious tsisin of Con s cuisine, where clichis find no shelter, and lateral thinking reigns supreme.
It s been four years since Con s last encounter with Hot Press and, like an Olympiad, it s an event that demands ample preparation, nay, apprenticeship, purely for survival purposes. Here at HP Central no expense is spared in this regard: Encarta 97 is duly devoured, the collected works of Hemingway, Hardy and Hans Christian Andersen are digested, and a selection of Con s back catalogue is chewed over in the four bellies of the HP beast after all, it s not too often we get lucky enough to buy this man a drink . . .
The mythology that lies in his wake is worth a pint or two alone. Stories of spurned marriage proposals on the Wicklow hills (with Con the spurner, not the spurned) that left him navigating his way back home on shank s mare; of his hejira to the big city in the early 70s; of his duels with rabbit and trout amid the hills and rivers of Kerry; of his penchant for firing the odd sod of turf at visiting innocents from the top of Glensharoon (alongside his partner in crime, Mick Doyle). Scials of cab rides from New York to New Jersey that all but skirted the Canadian border and trips to Mexico that failed to divest him of his anorak, despite noon temperatures that had the locals baking their tortillas on the terraces.
The stories go on and on. But their currency is worthless in comparison to the first-hand accounts from the man himself Con s argot is unequalled in the infinitely more mundane world we choose to call real life . And while Ireland s past might be inextricably intertwined with JFK, her present with bovine psychosis, and her future with Boyzone, Con s indelible imprint can be felt in all three time zones.
We meet in a local hostelry and renew old acquaintance. Con s already staked out the territory for our reconnoitre, but the collective spirit of the place is intent on overwhelming the hardiest of recording machines. Nonplussed, we sally forth and try three further houses before abandoning the trial by audio tape until the morrow. Meanwhile, we sup of the broth that s sent our way by his countless acquaintances and admirers as we navigate our way through the city centre s merchant houses. The Friday night punters warmth and affection for the man are palpable, their delight in this unexpected encounter clearly visible.
Long known as an early riser whose day s work was generally well finished by 9.30am, Con s custom usually coincided with the bread delivery vans, rarely with the late night revellers. But the demise of the Irish Press a community dispersed, as he poignantly notes has turned his life inside out and upside down. No longer tied to a forenoon deadline, his time is less stringently shackled these days.
He s got his own ideas about the reasons for the Press demise, not least of which is his assertion that it dipped in circulation for a complexity of reasons: one was the fact that it catered for people who couldn t buy it because they were dead. Changing times. And Con s been in the thick of it.
Reincarnation (of a terrestrial kind) is his stock in trade. More a maker than a breaker of tradition, where his UCC peers were seen to be following in their fathers footsteps, Con chose the infinitely more enlightened path of following in his father s trousers.
A doyen of mathematics tutors, his early years saw him presiding over hour-long grinds that mutated into day-long meditation on the nature of pi with gabhailfuls of Leaving Cert students spilling out of his sitting room and onto the main Dublin road outside the beleagured Houlihan household in Castle Island.
An eventful but short-lived career as election agent for local politician, Charlie Lenehan, saw him juggling editorials for their joint enterprise, the monthly Taxpayers News, with corralling and plamasing the natives towards the polling booths come election time.
Then, with his customary panache, Con decided to launch his career in the national media with a review of Dostoevsky s The First Circle. Not for him a lengthy apprenticeship in the doldrums of court reporting or graveyard shifts alongside the wire. Indeed, there are many who would suggest that without the Houlihan imprimateur, old man Fyodor might still be languishing in the Siberian wastelands . . .
From such exalted beginnings, Con stood up and took his place among the nations of the earth. His is an intellectual landscape that teems with milk and honey (despite, or perhaps because of, the spectacular failure of this country s genetic scientists to follow Goldsmith s suggestions of crossing a Friesian bull with a queen bee to achieve the same ends). Con s always been a couple of furlongs ahead of the posse. And some of them still can t catch up with him, some 71 years on.
Windfalls is already in its second printing. Chronicling the swings and roundabouts of the sexy (cycling, horse racing) and decidedly unsexy (hare coursing) sporting events, alongside meaty meditations on a rake of people (van Gogh, Thomas Hardy and Mickey Mouse) and places (Albania, Sliabh Luachra and Paris), it s balm for hurt minds, and fodder for more than a handful of quotes of the year. Admitting to an incurable paralysis of the Seine , Con lists Paris among his top three cities only, of course, after Castle Island and London. His longstanding love affair with Mulligan s continues apace, indeed intensified by his escapades to some of the more camera-shy hostelries abroad, whose decor renders Mulligan s like a Florentine palace in the heyday of the de Medicis. All of which begs the question: from whence did this man glean such remarkable powers of observation?
Well, I was born, he confirms, anxious to dispel rumours of more metaphysical origins. It was in 1925, I think, in Castle Island, Co. Kerry. In my early years, once I had a fishing rod and a couple of greyhounds I was happy. I wasn t a loner, but I liked being out in the mountains and by the rivers. That was the most important part of my childhood and of course, playing football and acting the maggot, you know.
A scholarship took him to boarding school in Castlemartyr, in East Cork, a sojourn cut short by his dastardly foray into the deliciously twilight world of newspaper publishing.
School wasn t too bad, he grants, I suppose I enjoyed it up to a point, yes. Yerra, I think I wanted to be expelled myself anyway at least I think I did. It wasn t an accident, no. It had been a great school, but a new boss came when I was in third year and he was a dictator. Either he had to go or I had to go, one of the two. Twas really a revolution, yeah.
There followed a calm of two years that saw Houlihan extricate himself from the perils of the murder machine relatively intact. Academia was far from the top of his priorities then. He had other fish to poach (and fry and bake).
After my Leaving, for two years I did nothing, he recalls, I had no intention of going to University at all. I messed around at home and in England, d you know, jobs of all kinds. Factory work, work on the buildings for a small while.
But the Houlihan resumi was only beginning to take shape. The lure of academia finally brought him to UCC where his brilliance was well honed and nurtured.
I went to Cork University in 1945, he recounts. I was curious. I wanted people to talk to, and I wanted to see what it was all about and I wasn t disappointed. That time twas a small college, only 2,000, and we all knew each other. At that time third level education was the privilege of the few. College was for the wealthy really. I got a scholarship there in my first year and I held on to that. You see, in those days, the fees weren t over-dear and the books were in the library, so you could live quite cheaply if you weren t taking a drink of course, which I wasn t at that time. I couldn t afford it. Not a hope in the world, no. In my first year in Cork I d say I was in a pub only twice, and that was meeting people up from home. I d no money. Pocket-money at that time was unheard of.
First class honours in both his BA and MA were a sop to the ravenous Houlihan, but his post-grad years saw another period of unsettlement, with his compass pointing first to England, then back home to Castle Island, and on to Bandon, where even the lure of a permanent pensionable post wasn t enough to keep him fettered for long. Unsurprisingly, rugby was one of the reasons for his homecoming.
I m very rooted in Castle Island, even though I m in Dublin 23 years now, he avers. I was teaching a bit here and there and I got by alright. Rugby and fishing were a big part of my life then, you know.
RTE was an early and unlikely refuge for this wandering minstrel.
Yerra, God, I did work in Radio Eireann a long time ago, back in the 50s, he reveals nonchalantly. I remember one of the first pieces I did was on Canon Sheehan, and then several pieces about music. One great piece called The Heart Of The Kingdom , I made with Andrias S Gallchsir with recordings from around home and around Lyrecrompane. And Sean MacReamoinn, who was head of the station in Cork then. They were good days alright.
Even then, Con was a willing creature of the multimedia age: it wasn t long before the boffins in television came a-courting.
My first piece for television was around 71, he declares. That was a thing called The Wheels Of The World with Pat O Connor (who later reaped the benefits of his Houlihan apprenticeship by way of the BAFTA-winning Cal SL). Sure, I made about 30 documentaries with Teilifms Eireann and I did one with ITN about hurling, which I enjoyed tremendously. But one of the biggest things we ever did was back in 1985, a programme called Green Fields, a two-hour film about the GAA. Twas a huge enterprise; we spent about a year doing it, that s true.
One of his personal favourites had nothing to do with his beloved rugby or with coursing, but with racing.
The one that I love very much, because we made it on our own, Bill Lawlor and myself, out of our own pockets about 15 years ago, was called To Win The Great Prize , which is a quotation from Master McGrath . Twas based basically on the Cheltenham meeting and even though we didn t make money on it, we were happy to see it screened several times since. Pirated all over the whole country! Twas shown in every pub and race meeting they re still showing it, sure. But we didn t mind. We enjoyed making it and that was good.
Such experiences haven t quite quenched his thirst for television. Con s intellectual escapades are taking him to pastures new budgets permitting, of course.
There s a man called Maurice Healy and we hope to do a movie on the Kerry poet, Sigerson Clifford, he explains. That s if we can get the money for it. Maurice is a brilliant man, and this is his great dream. It might come true this year, we ll see.
Con first dropped anchor in the national media, for a blissful spell as a literary reviewer for the Irish Press.
My years writing for David Marcus were very happy times, he confides. There was little or no money, but it was nice to see your name in print. That business with payment, you know, you wouldn t go out and buy a new car with it. You wouldn t even buy an old car, no, no!
Con s graduation to thrice weekly (and then some) columnist with the Evening Press in 1973 heralded a new dawn in sports writing: he was given a blank playing pitch with instructions to make of it what he wanted. He set about the task with a relish unparalleled. Any match worth its salt (and a few column inches) wasn t complete without Con s imprimateur being bestowed on it, along with a sizeable analysis of sundry other topics intricately interwoven in the tapestry. And so it came to pass that unlikely partnerships were forged: Jack Doyle and Jacques Brel; Robert the Bruce and the Loch Ness Monster; telepathic pigs and kindred-spirited hens.
If ever proof were needed that a man s age depends not on the accumulation of his birthdays but upon the elasticity of his spirit and the vigour of his mind, then Con s columns are cast-iron evidence. Whoever suggested that yesterday s news is tomorrow s fish and chip papers obviously never supped at Con s table.
Sometimes the column ran six times a week, he smiles, and in those days I set a record that I believe will never be beaten: I never missed a deadline in 23 years. Looking back now, I don t know how I did it, but I did.
His upper hand with deadlines is due in no small part to a decidedly idiosyncratic body clock, one that pays little heed to Greenwich Mean Time, and even less to the usual human demands for sleep. As for the need to knit up the ravelled sleeve of care, well, Con was well able to do his plain and purl with both eyes wide open.
Oh yes, that s true, he nods. I am very disciplined. It d often mean getting up at three in the morning, but I don t mind that. I love being up early in the morning, and I ll tell you why: you re lying in bed there in the morning and your thoughts are all grim and dreary and negative. You get up and make a cup of tea, put on the radio and suddenly you re a different person. I ve a great belief in this little formula or recipe, if you like: Dream at night and distil it in the morning . Pubs are great places where little imaginations ferment, and in the morning then, you can see them all in a clearer light. I m a great person about four in the morning that s if I ve gone to bed! Which isn t always the case!
He s one of the last gentleman writers to lay claim to his very own devil , a runner who had the task of collecting and delivering his copy to the sub-editors, thereafter returning it to him for proofing after the first attempts at deciphering the Houlihan hieroglyphics (Liam Mackey ) 1996). His schedule would ve been given short shrift if it had been defined by Union rates.
Twas a great life, he asserts with a smile. I was often up at two and three in the morning. Went into Burgh Quay at about, say, a quarter to seven, to give the subs a start. Up to O Regan s or The White Horse at about half seven; met lovely people, mad people, you were in the middle of a great mixed society, hearing jokes and little rumours and gossip. I d go back then about half nine to do the corrections well, Jimmy Rushe would bring it up to me at the pub. He was a lovely boy, six foot three and a great soccer player. We d have a pint together and then Jimmy d take back the copy to the paper. I often gave the morning in the pub. Sure my work was done by half nine. After that, my day was my own. Twas a great life you know. It lasted 23 years. It was the life of a gentleman, only I wasn t a gentleman!
He never let such petty concepts as annual leave sully his vision of the good life either.
I never had to worry about where I d go on my holidays because I never took a holiday in my life, he declares. The idea of lying in the sand in Spain would drive me mad. Then the travelling with the rugby and soccer was a brilliant bonus, you know. I ve been in places I couldn t hope to go to if I d been working as a civil servant or a bank clerk. Down to the bottom of the world, New Zealand. That was a tremendous I won t call it a perk it was a huge privilege. But I do miss it hugely, of course. That was a very happy time of my life, and I miss all my good friends in Burgh Quay.
The Houlihan wit recognises no borders and has been known to send ripples across every rock pool from Clounagh to Tirana, and points well beyond. He writes affectionately of his father, a man who excelled in wearing his heart inside his sleeve, indeed inside both sleeves. A man who reached his zenith in paternal uncare during the World Cup finals of 1978 when he was so bold as to suggest to one of Con s friend girls (for indeed, there seems to have been a few) that his wandering son was lounging somewhere in Patagonia, when in fact, the bould Con was nowhere near the Argentine Pampas.
Their relationship flourished while Con lived at home.
I was very fond of him. Like most fathers in this country, superficially we weren t that close, but fundamentally, we were, you know. He was totally honest. Even though poorly educated, he was very intelligent and very shrewd too. He had two great principles: Don t ever go out of your way to make an enemy and the second one was: Don t ever underestimate anybody . He told me that a million years ago and he was dead right. There s a famous phrase I quote from Thomas Hardy: At the graveside of even the humblest man, you see his life as dramatic . Take everybody as important. That s the fundamental of democracy although most of the time we don t obey it. No, no.
There can be little doubt as to where his rogue genes came from, but what of his mother s influence? She barely makes a cameo appearance in Windfalls and yet a throwaway observation that she instilled in him his love of books suggests a formidable presence in his work. Con recalls the day he finally departed Castle Island for the big smoke. Mass demonstrations of anguish were hardly the stock and trade of a clan of pragmatists from North Kerry.
The Ma came to the hedge as I walked down the road and said: I suppose we ll see you at Christmas . If you understand the peasants culture, you will realise that this was an extraordinary gesture of affection on her part.
Indeed, Con recalls her presence with more than a hint of fondness.
She was a great reader, he offers. One day when I was about seven, she went to town, maybe selling a basket of eggs somewhere, and she brought home two books: Uncle Tom s Cabin and Robinson Crusoe. Two hardback books. Cheap, but even so, sure they were books.
And so began the Houlihan literary voyage despite, or should that be because of, a formal education that only kicked in in the year of his sixth summer and seventh winter. The throwaway I was reading very early reveals that he was casting his eye over print from the age of four.
It was quite common in my mother s and father s time not to go to school until you were about six or seven, you know, he notes. I could read and write quite clearly by the time I went to school I don t know who taught me. I just seemed to pick it up, to be quite frank about it.
Wasn t he bored when it came time to trawl through the alphabet with his peers?
No, not at all, he says, dismissively. To me school was basically . . . about having great fun out in the yard. You had a break at 11, a break again at 1 o clock, and to me that made school very enjoyable. I liked it. Sure, lads used to go scheming from school for a week at a time, and they d come back bored out of their life. Better off at school.
Although he s made his name as a man of letters, the boy Houlihan had a first and ferocious love of mathematics. (And not a lot of people know that.)
I loved figures and numbers always, admits the man who dragged many an unwilling maths student through the delights of Euclid so successfully that QED really did end up meaning Quite Easily Done . A lot of maths now, people learn by rote, but to be given a problem that you d really have to think about, with no pattern to go on a nice little puzzle I loved that.
Houlihan s Saturday morning maths grind, like every pursuit he turned his hand to, evolved its own particular mythology. It wasn t long before the Saturday roll call chez Houlihan made Daniel O Connell s mass meetings seem like nothing more than street corner murmurings.
I d say I must have taught hundreds of girls around home, he notes. You see, what I like about maths is that you can gauge your progress. Tis like building a wall, brick by brick. By Friday, you can see what you ve learned since Monday. It s a logical process. There s no mystery about it at all. Don t ever be frightened of it.
Teaching English is a different thing altogether. You see, you come to secondary school now at 12 or 14, from a house where there isn t a book and you re supposed to have the same start as the girl who comes from a house that s filled with books, and where the conversation is about books and about ideas. The foundations have been built since about the age of three and one girl there is at a total disadvantage that can t happen in mathematics.
Despite Houlihan s obvious talents in the two spheres of English and Mathematics, when it came to the toss, he was in no doubt as to the path that he would follow.
There s a famous impasse in maths, a cul de sac, he suggests, that no matter how brilliant you are, you know you can t go any further. To go into new territory like Einstein or Copernicus, you want a special genius for that. Whereas in writing, you can write away forever, and you can think you re improving!, but in maths, you either know that you re improving or that you re not. I knew that I wasn t going to be Einstein, and that was that!
So he opted to fill the role of a literary Einstein instead, weaving a path through schools creative enough in their thinking to have him in their employ. His triumphs were many but the ones he recalls with relish are few.
There was a little boy at home long go, and he worked in a forge, he remarks. He left school at 12 or 13, and he had to get his Group Cert before he d be let in to do his apprenticeship. I got him through his Group Cert and that s my best achievement ever. He was a lovely boy and he got on fine.
By now our conversation, having been swamped by the tape-crunching decibels of the Friday night pub shenanigans, is heading for its final furlong in the cold light of day in his Portobello fortress. This ordeal by tape recorder , as Con christens our humble communion, has worked up a thirst in him for a taste of tannin. He urges me to put on the kettle, while he adjourns to the phone momentarily to log in with his minders for minders they are, friends and friend girls who cosset and look after him better than the fanciest of pre-nuptial agreements could guarantee.
His sitting room is awash with colour. Rivetted with words. There are paintings to beat the band, lovingly hung to catch the light or to halt the gallop (like the Pugilist standing sentry outside the bathroom door). Of course there are books. And more books. If there was even the slightest doubt about the man s erudition, a quick scan of the bookshelves, revealing The Hot Press Yearbook, banishes such bolshie ideas.
There are compendia of golf, rugby, gaelic football, hurling, tennis, horse-racing and coursing. History books tackle the familiar and the not-so: (Appalachia Inside and Out Vol. 1: Conflict and Change). Seamus Heaney sits alongside Simone de Beauvoir and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and one supposes that this little quartet (avec Con) engage in some mighty fine dissertations in the small hours. Cobbet s Grammar of the English Language accompanies A Dictionary of Modern Welsh, and to cap it all, there s a pair of size 13 Converse runners ( Con s boldly emblazoned on the back in the event of an identity crisis, perhaps?) hugging the fireplace, poised for the day s planned jaunt to the rugby pitch in Donnybrook.
With a steaming teapot our only prop, the HP court reconvenes. Con hits the ground running, now that the talk is turning to home.
I venture to suggest that the reason for his infrequent returns to Castle Island might find echoes in LP Hartley s observation that the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
That s definitely true alright, he nods, but the reason I don t go home anymore (except for funerals) is basically because I m too lazy, too indolent. Yerra, I know that if I start to go home, I d get in the habit of going home quite regularly, and when I go home, I get this awful feeling that I don t want to come back.
Then again, there s a sadness too, you see. Many of my friends who I used to go fishing and drinking and acting the maggot with are dead now. After all, I m 71 now. That s a fairly handy age. They weren t all rugby players. Some of them were publicans and ordinary human beings.
Ageing is a process that, like good wine, Con cherishes. It neither bothers nor preoccupies him unduly, despite his accumulation of 71 winters and 70 summers.
I fear neither death nor old age, he declares, but as to what kind of playing pitch the Grim Reaper might choose to deposit him on, he s nonplussed. The afterlife? You re speaking there now in some kind of language that doesn t grasp reality at all. There s some kind of afterlife alright but I couldn t define it in terms of places or people or happenings. I think we haven t yet developed the language to grasp that concept. I believe your spirit will never die but what form twill take, I couldn t tell you.
Not everyone can expect the same exit off this mortal coil, according to Con.
If you re a teacher it will take one form, in that people you have taught (if you re a good teacher), you ll have left an imprint on them, and on their children. In that sense you ll never die. In that sense, as a writer too, you ll never die. If you make a contribution to the world that ll go on forever and ever. But whether I or you have some kind of presence after death? I doubt it. I don t even think about it, no.
Has his concept of death changed as he s grown older?
No, not one bit, he insists. Twill come like a thief in the night. I don t remember being born and I probably won t feel death either. So I don t think about it.
He has little time for doctrines either, apart from one small gathering which he admires.
The one religion I admire are the Quakers. They have no ceremonies, no steeples, no cathedrals, no chapels even. The Quakers are great people. Sure they had a huge part in the making of America, for better or worse. Look at Pennsylvania, that was William Penn. I know a few of them here in town. They re great people, not at all gloomy or dull, but they have a great outlook on the world. They don t recognise kings, princes, or bishops. They re the ultimate democrats.
Some things in life are less immutable than birth and death though. Con s renown as one of our great Romantics shows little sign of abating. Indeed his elder statesman status appears only to have enhanced his reputation as a man with an elysian perspective on life. He could hardly, however, be accused of spectating through rose-tinted glasses. His is a far more pragmatic perspective, yet one essentially fuelled by an incorrigible optimism and faith in human nature.
I have been in love many times, aye, he admits, and no, I never married. I ll tell you why. I had this awful concept about being free even though it s a romantic myth about people being free. Nobody s free. But it s a myth I like to cherish. D.H. Lawrence said: We are as free as the tree that s rooted in the ground . A lovely metaphor. But I wanted to be a little more free than if I got married, that s the way. I could never see myself with a woman or a girl getting on indefinitely. I don t think I could ever have been happy if I had married.
Though living alone, he spurns any suggestion that he might feel lonely. A sharp intake of breath and he s dissecting the proposition with surgical precision.
That question brings us right back to the meaning of words again now. Take the word lonesome , a sentimental longing for something that you ll never again have. Lonely? I can be, yeah, but you see, there are different kinds of loneliness. I ll quote my favourite here now. Van Gogh said that the ultimate loneliness is knowing that you re not doing good work. You begin painting a picture that doesn t work out and you feel hopeless, which is another form of being lonely, in that you aren t part of what you should be. Sure, we all feel that. But being lonely in the sense of being depressed and miserable? I don t, no. I have little lapses, but they don t last too long.
There s a great anodyne for loneliness: start doing something, like washing the spuds. I remember Hemingway saying his psychiatrist was the Underwood typewriter. Mine is my biro.
I don t care how miserable you are, how lonely or how depressed you are, all artists have the same mental attitude. Sit down there at the table, anywhere at all and write a few lines.
The anonymity of the city doesn t hinder his thought processes any, despite his rural beginnings.
In my book I half-jokingly refer to my three favourite cities as Castle Island, London and Paris, he smiles. But it is only half joking. A city is a state of mind, tisn t only the bricks and mortar. It s the ambience if you like. But for pure enjoyment for more than a few days I d have to say Paris is the place to be.
It s a city that s welcomed him equally into its rugby and soccer pitches, and onto its racecourses, and a place that allows him to earn a living in paradise.
You see, there s one great thing about being a journalist, he enthuses. You go to Paris to do a match and you re working. You don t feel like a tourist. You feel part of the place. It s a bit of a myth but it s a nice myth though. Childish, I know, but I love feeling part of the place.
With the ink barely dry on much of the best writing of his career, Con Houlihan s in the throes of wrestling with his first novel. One thing he s shy of revealing is the likely duration of its gestation.
It s fermenting at the moment, alright, he allows, and tis hard to say what it ll be like. An intellectual novel, a philosophical novel basically. Without being heavy. It ll be like no novel ever written before, that s all. That s typical of myself of course! And that mightn t be any commendation!
He concedes to a brief peek inside the gestating being.
I ll give you one little intuition I have now, he offers, his endurance of this trial by audiotape finally beginning to wilt. In some countries the seasons are quite marked. The weather changes quite dramatically. But in this country the seasons are so mixed up. You could have tremendously fine days in winter and bad days in summer, and I think that has moulded our attitude towards time. Time flies away here: before you know it, the year is gone, whereas in Mexico or Switzerland where they have clearly marked seasons, they re far more aware of time than we are. That s my intuition anyway.
And I think it s an awful weakness in our national character too. We re great to dream, great to hope, but we re not so good to fulfil. Long go TS Eliot said Between the dream and the action falls a shadow , and I think that that s part of our character. Even in our politics, we have a history of defeat.
Then again, we used to have this suspicion that the real world was elsewhere. That s the emigration syndrome again. That your own little parish wasn t the real world. But I think that that s dying out now. I remember an old teacher of ours in UCC asked us once: When man goes to the moon, what will be the effect on people? Of course we all took wild guesses but he said: People will become aware of their own back gardens a shrewd Corkman. And he s dead right. I love going to big matches, like a World Cup game in Barcelona, but at the same time I m more enthralled now by little local matches around here. Like today s match in Donnybrook. That, to me is much more interesting than the game next Saturday between Ireland and France.
With so many column inches and so many stories, Con must surely have a heap of advice to offer those less well-versed in navigating a path through the bush these days?
Long ago I defined intelligence as common sense in action, he offers. That s all tis. I think if you learn to think for yourself, and you don t accept other people s ideas, you ll go a long way.
Of course, thinking for oneself generally requires an intact skull and forehead, an anatomical appendage apparently deemed optional by The Irish Times. Con s anxious not to repeat that particular performance.
Will you beg of Colm [Henry Hot Press ace lensman] that when he s publishing a picture for this piece to leave me my forehead and my hair. You see, two weeks ago I went to great trouble to wash my hair for the picture in the Times and it never came out. They cut off my forehead. I could kill the hoor who did that! n