DEPARTMENTS

DIARY ... o o o o o 4
THE ROAD TO TOTALITY
By J ohn Cooney
MEDIA. o o o o o o o o o o 5
Charles 'Haughey is convinced that
Sinn Fein must be a partner to any
F ADE IN, F ADE OUT durable peace settlernent. He is al so
Gabriel Byrne returns to the land of cornrnitted to initiating dialogue with
The Quiet Man .. o o o o o o 34 the unionists and to fully irnplerrien.
ting the Hillsborough accord. John
BUSINESS Cooney examines his chances of
nie recent strike at Bailieboro Co-Op reconciling these seemingly incom-
resulted in an uncharacteristc capitu- patible aims o o o o 10 '0 o o o o

lation by Larry Goodman. Tornmie

Gorrnan , RTE's North Western corres-
pondent, tries to discover what he's up
to . o o o'. o o o o o o o 36

SPORT

THE SLIGOER
By Tommie Gorman
N oel King, national coach and former One 'of Ray MacSharry's genuine
hero 'of the Brandywell assesses the achievements is that he has managed
Republic of Ireland's chances in the to come through the Sligo layer of
forthcoming European soccer cham- self-mutilation. He is shrewd and
pionships, Ro bert Allen profles the ambitious. He says he doesn't want to
main contenders for the title '" 45 be Taoiseach ... o 26 o o

The Glasgow Celtic Story THE BIG HEWER

FRONT PAGE HA TE By Fintan O'Toole
Eamonn McCann concludes his two-
part feature on Scotland 's most famous By Liz Curtis
The art of Ewan Macf.oll has always
football club. o 50 o o o o As thismonth's cover story shows, the been intended to influence, to en-
British tabloids have few scruples courage, to scorn, to educate, to affect
VISUAL where Ireland is concerned. But pecple 's lives. For every person who
Gibraltar is but one mor of a long line knows his name there.'s a hundred who
Syd Bluett on Charlie Whisker,
of smears perpetrated by these news- know a snatch of one of his songs,
Ireland's leading computer artist . 56
papers in instan ces where Ireland million who have absorbed indirectly
is involved. Liz Curtis examines the his influence on radio, television
WIGMORE o , o o 60 chronicle of hate 6
o o o o '"
and theatre o o o 40 o o

A TABLOID JOURNALIST OF MY
acquaintance has kindly offered to put
"topspin" on the message : on my
telephone answering machine.
"Topspin", it would appear, is that
quality in the first sentence of a pie ce
of writing which persuades the reader
that he simply must read on. In
tabloid joumalism, getting topspin on
a story usually involves, quite literally,
turning the facts upside down. Thus,
in respect of a 'juicy court story,
whereas for example the Iris Times
would in the first paragraph state that
the story related to something which
had come before the courts, and go on
to give the salient facts about the
hearing, a tabloid news story reportng
the same case would more than likely
begin with the most interesting aspect
of the case, preferably something
involving sex or lump hammers.
Apparently all the major airlines
are reportng massively increased
business in recent months as a result
of all of the heavy-duty tabloid
experts being flown in to teach Irish
journalists working for the new home-
based tabloids all about topspin and
the other niceties of the discipline.
Anyway, the problem with my
answering machine is that hardly
anyone ever leaves a message on it. It
is not that people do not ring up -
they do. But practically without
exception they ring off again once
they realise they are talking to a
machine. This, 1 feel, rather defeats
the purpose of having such a machine
at all.
1 have tried everything, inc1uding
beginning the message with the plea
"Please don't hang up", but all to no
avail. The most that ever happens is
that the caller leaves sorne smartass
message about sending the guards
around to rescue me and take the
kidnapperswho are holding me
hostage into custody. Then, delighted
with their tremendous display of wit,
they hang up without stating the
purpose of their call.
Other wiseacres record comments
about, for example, my use of the
word "acknowledge" instead of "re-
turn". 1 am sick and tired explaining
to people that if 1 say "return",there
is in this an insinuation that the caller
may expect to be called back, but that
by using "acknowledge" 1 simply have
to walkaround the telephone three
times repeating "1 acknowledge this
call from the tax office" and my
obligation will have been fulfilled.
Sorne people are very slow on the
uptake ,
To avoid having to throw the
machine in the wastepaper basket 1
amprepared to give a year 's Magil]
subscription free to the reader who
comes up with a script for a message
4 MAGILL JUNE 1988
'DIAlRY,
~~
Tall Tales
and Topspin
which has sufficient topspin to stop
this nonsense.
ON THE WAY BACK FROM
. Gibraltar recently, a col1eague and 1, as
well as the rest of the passengers on
our flight, were herded into a lounge
at Gatwick Airport in London and in-
formed that we should sit in rows, put
our bags on the ground in front of us
and wait for our bags to be checked
for drugs by a sniffer dogo In due
course a labrador was led in to the
room and he - or she, it did not
occur to me to check - procecdedro
walk along the rowsof people sniffing
at their baggage and occasionally
sticking his/her nose into their lapso
No drugs were found.
This is the first such experience 1
have had and 1 am not sure that 1 liked
it very mucho However, practically
everyone 1 have "told about it seemed
to think that it was perfectly reason-
able in the context of the war against
drugs and so on. My travelling com-
panion thought the exercise was great
fun and dec1ared himself far happier
being searched by a dog than by a
member of Her Majesty 's police force.
In future, he says, if he is taken in by
police he is going to start shouting,
"1 demand to see a labrador".
Am 1 completely alone in thinking
that this sort of thing strikes directly
at the heart of the dignity of the
human person? The answer is probably
probabTy.
I'D IMAGINE THAT AT TRIS VERY
moment Jerry Hall is poring over
cookery books in search of high
calorie recipes to enable her put a
little flesh on the wimpish Mick Jagger
following the recent offer from an
Australian millionaire of spectacular
amounts of money for Jagger's ashes
when the latter departs for the Great
Gig in the Sky. The Australian plans
to make ultra expensive egg-timers
from the ashes, and obviously the
more ashes the more dosh he'll be
willing to pay ,
Those who in the past have made
idle fun of the rather rotund figure of
sorne of our local showbusiness
people, like Big Tom, Brendan Grace
and Jim Hand, will be laughing on the
other-side of their gobs when it dawns
on them that, with their usual ad-
mirable foresight, these giants of Irish
entertainment have selflessly been
attemptng to provide for the future
welfare of their families by maintain-
ing as much of themselves as they
possibly can.
minded
Thinking about this, 1 was re-
of the following story , which 1
am assured is absolutely true, of the
one recorded instance of a meeting
between Mick Jagger and Big Tom.
SOME YEARS AGO, MICK JAGGER
was given to making frequent weekend
trips to Ireland to visit a landed
member of the Irish gentry in County
Monaghan with whom he shared an
interest in sorne exotic forms of
experimental music.
Jagger liked Ireland, not least be-
cause no one here seemed to recognise
him. He walked freely round the high-
ways and byways of Monaghan week-
end after weekend without attracting
as much as a single autograph hunter.
Having spent over twenty years con-
stantly on the run from Stones fans,
he couldn't believe his luck.
One evening he and his titled friend
were standing at the bar in a hotel
in Castleblaney when Jagger noticed
a group of young women congre-
gated outside the door of the lounge.
All of them were looking in his
direction and whispering among them-
selves. It occurred to Jagger that his
luck might be on the point of running
out.
His suspicions appeared to be
confirmed when the door suddenly
burst open and the young women
rushed headlong across the lounge in
his direction. "Oh fack," muttered
Jagger to his companion, "I've been
facking lumbered".
To his further consternation, how-
ever, the women tore right past him.
Jagger turned around to see them
gather round aman who had been
standing right behind him. The man
was built like the side of a house and
the women wereall but undressing
him in their attempts 'to obtain his
signature.
"Who the fack's that?" demanded
J agger of his companion. It was ex-
plained to him that the big fellow was
Big Tom McBride, a country and
western singer and a big star round
these parts.
"1 must get his facking autograph,"
dec1ared the Rol1ing One.
When the crowd of females had
dispersed, Jagger sauntered up to Tom,
stuck a piece of paper under his nose
and demanded his autograph. .
."Who'll 1 make it out to?" enquired
the Big Fel1ow.
"Mick Jagger, man", replied the
rubber-lipped one, rather nonplussed
and not a little miffed.
Big Tom studied him careful1y for a
whle.
"Aye," he pronounced fnally ,
"and you look like him too."

Prurience and
thePublic
Interest
TEN YEARS AGO THE REPORTING
of court cases in this country was a
sornewhat sedate affair. Murder cases
were cornrnon and offered the reader
occasional glimpses into the detall of
brutal, sordid or squalid crime. Those
who wanted the lurd detall of sex
crimes had to resort to the English
tabloids or the srnall print of page
three of the Daily Telegraph.
In those days the reporting of rape.
trials, indecent assault or child moles-
tation was infrequent, subdued, almost
blando Language was general, and spec-
fics - especially of a nasty or vicious
nature - rarely featured.
Suddenly all that has changed. On
the average day now court coverage is
dominated by crimes or alleged crimes
of a sexual nature. Rape, incest, child
molestation and indecent assault have
now become the staple diet of news-
paper coverage, Burglary, fraud and
even murder have all been forced to
take a back seat. The contrast with the
situation of just ten years ago could
hardly be more marked.
Even more striking now is the de-
tall and the explicit natur of the re-
porting. Little is left to the jrnagna-
tion in the vivid and raw recounting of
acts of assault as outlined in the courts.
This type of reporting is new to
most Irish readers and there is little
doubt but that many, especially older
readers, are shocked and offended by
what they find, morning after morn-
ing, in their newspapers. For sorne the
reporting of sex offences in such de-
tall is unnecessary and offensive, others
feel it has a corruptng effect especial-
ly on young people and others again
see it as a two-faced attempt by the
newspapers to appeal to the prurient
whle at the same time c1aimingto act
in the public interest.
The central point however is that,
for whatever reason, the situation has
changed dramatically and many ordi-
nary readers are puzzled or angry or
both. So, what has changed, and why?
THE FIRST REASON IS THE SIMPLE
and obvious one - that far more of
these cases are now coming into court.
Partly because of great public aware-
ness and concern, partly because of
the political determination of feminist
groups and partly also because of a
wider acceptance of the gravity of
.Maurice Mqnl1ing
such crimes, there is now a greater
readiness to bring prosecutions - in-
deed an expectation that prosecutions
will be brought. This does not neces-
sarily mean that there are more such
crimes being committed but it does
mean that more are Iinding their way
into court and consequently there is
more for the newspapers to report.
The second reason why there is
greater coverage has been mentoned
already - and that is a growing (though
far from universal) acceptance that sex
crimes against women or chlldren rank
very high indeed on any sca1e of
gravty. Until recent1y there was often
a tendency to sweep such matters
under the carpet or view them as rela-
tively minor infringements.
Clearly then our newspapers have a
duty to ensure that the public knows
what is happening in the courts - and
Iby extension what is happening in the
country. Equally, if justice is tobe
seen to be done, the public is entitled
to a reasonably cornprehensive account
of the evidence given and the news-
papers can hardly be expected to sani-
tise the evidence presented in court or
to be selective in their presentation of
such evidence.
Thus, what has happened has not
been - as sorne would claim - in any
sense a conspiracy on the part of the
media to subvert moral standards.
Rather it has been a serious atternpt in
a responsible way to bring to public
attention one aspect - and one very
worrying aspect - of our society.
Unfortunately all of this does not
remove the fact that many ordinary
decent people are worried and upset
by this recent trend. Journa1ists are
not saints andsexual exploitation does
sell newspapers. Thus, high-minded
concern can too easily give way to
prurient pandering, Suffering can too
easily be exploited - or at least its
vctms can. We already have enough
examples of this at home without
crossing the Irish Sea for more exten-
sve confirmation of its existence and
efforts.
THERE MAY WELL. BE A STRONG
case at this stage -for the media to col-
lectively establish acceptable guidelines
on the reporting of these cases. The
Supreme Court recently performed a
singular public service by laying down
guidelines for the treatment of and
. sentencing in rape cases. In so doing
they establish the gravity of the offence
beyond any doubt.
It would certainly be in the public
interest if our media could also agree
on standards or guidelines to ensure
that whle the public's right to know is
respected, victims of sexual aggression
are protected from media exploitation
and the public is spared the prurient
and often sickeningly hypocritical com-
mercialisation of such misfortune. And
as things stand we are not too far away
from such a situation in sections of
our media, while others have crossed
the barrier already.
Such a suggestion, however, begs
one important question and that is the
absence of any forrn of 'watchdog'
authority or Press Council to draw up
such guidelines and with the power to
impose sanctions against those who
offend aganst thern,
We have long needed sorne such
body - preferably one drawn from the
media itself. There is, however, litt1e
likelihood of one being established in
the near future. It is a matter which
deserves the serious attention of our
Irish media - and sooner rather than
latero 4t
MAGILL JUNE 19885
6 MAGILLJUNE1988
MAGILL JUNE 1988 7
8 MAGILL JUNE 1988
"It is still my view that an all round constitutional conference summoned by bound to be a casualty. Irish public
the two Governments will ultimately be necessary to pro vide a lasting opinion could hardly avoid nterpret-
solution and dialogue now between representatives of the different traditions ing the no-prosecuton decision against
could be a beneficial forerunner of such a conference. " senior RUC officers implicated in the
Mr Charles J. Haughey, TD, to theFriends of Fianna Fail in the Waldorf Stalker-Sampson affair, the failure to
o btain the release of the Birmingham
Astoria, New York on Thursday 21 April.
Six, the making permanent of the
Emergency Provisions legislation, the

T HE REINS GOVERNING the apparently everlasting British Prime Aughnacloy border shootingof Aidan
Northern Ireland policy have Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher. McAnespie , the release of Private Ian
been firmly held by Mr Charles A constant complaint of Opposi- Thain and the killing of three IRA
Haughey since he became Taoiseach tion leaders is that Mr Haughey has active service members by the SAS in
for a thirdtime fifteen months ago. In not used the machinery of the Agree- Gibraltar as evidence of a British
contrast to the bountiful praise heaped ment to bring about changes in the establishment conspiracy to inflict
on his minority Fianna Fail adminis- judicial, security and political policies lethal damage on the Agreement.
tration from all quarters for its austere of the British in Northern Ireland that In the meantime, the apologists for
economic recovery programme, Mr were being advocated with daily fer- the Agreement have had a hard time
Haughey's handling of the North re- vour .by the FitzGerald Government. explaining how an accord designed to
mains a matter of considerable centro- Another regularly voiced criticism is bring peace and stability had been
versy, The Survivor may have rehabili- that, unlike Dr FitzGerald, Mr Haughey foHowed by a period of intensified
tated himself as an economic manager does not have a good relationship with violence and intra-cornmunity tension.
but doubts linger on about his mastery Mrs Thatcher so that the quality of The initial expectations of sweeping
over 'Northern policy , This suspicion Anglo-Irish decison-making is im- changes beneficial to the minorty
remains in spite of- his pragmatic scru- paired. 'Furthermore, recent .months nationalist community have not sub-
pulosity in working the Anglo-Irish have presented Mr Haughey and Mrs stantially materialised while Unionist
Agreement which he so publicly Thatcher with an unrivalled set of opposition to Hillsborough has re-
scorned when it was signed by his crises which have run so close into mained obdurate if somewhat con-
predecessor, Dr Garret FitzGerald, and each other that basic mutual trust was fused. As the two Governments app-

10 MAGILLJUNE 1988
roach the three year review of the
workings of the conference in Novem-
ber, the agenda gets bigger but with
many issues unfulfilled.
S ENIOR POLICY-MAKERS IN
Mr Haughey's adminstraton
pour scorn on Opposition crit-
cisms that the infrequency of con-
ference meetngs in its early months
reflected indifference towards an
agenda which needed vigorous push-
ing. Ths early period also coincided
with a general electionin Britain
which ruled out regular conferences.
But they insst that the irregularity
of conferences did not sgnify an ab-
sence of policy. On thecontrary, they
point out that within days of assuming
office Mr Haughey travelled to Wash-
ington for a St Patrick's Day meeting
with President Ronald Reagan at
which he confirmed publicly that he
was pre pared "to run" with the Agree-
ment. A positive gesture of Mr Haug-
hey's determination to work the
Agreement was hs appointment of Mr
Brian Lenihan as Minister for Foreign
Affairs and co-chairrnan of the Anglo-
Irish Conference.
According to officials the return of
Mr Lenihan to Iveagh House had a
two-fold significance: frstly , afrosty
working atmosphere which had marked
the relationship between Mr Peter
Barry as Minster for Foregn Affairs
and Mr Tom King, the Secretary of
State for Northern Ireland, was re-
placed by a genuinely warm rapport
between Mr Lenihan and Mr King.
Secondly, as was indicated by Mr
Lenihan in an interview in the Irisk
Times on 11 May the new Govern-
ment's intention was to broaden the
agenda of the conference and to iden-
tify fair employment as a key issue.
"Frorn the outset the Haughey-
Lenihan strategy was to seek progress
onthe jobs front which would pro-
duce benefits for the minority com-
munity," an official said. "At con-
ference meetings Mr Lenihan called for
"legislation with teeth " as he ernpha-
sised to Mr King that radical measures
ment patrols would be accompanied
were needed to reverse the situation
in which Northern Catholics are two-
and-a-half times more likely to be un-
employed than their Protestant neigh-
bour. A measure of Lenihan.s success
in getting this message over to the
British is how the phrase 'legislation
wth teeth' has been quoted back to us
by the British."
As Mr Lenihan manoeuvred to tilt
the focus of the conference agenda,
while still pressing for an end to
harassment of Catholics by the security
forces and by the courts, Anglo-Irish
relations ran into difficulties in late
September as a result of an untimely
contribution from Dr Garret Fitz-
Gerald at the exclusive British-Irish
Association in Cambridge. In a quasi-
public criticism of Mrs Thatcher, Dr
FitzGerald revealed that prior to the
signing of the Agreement he had ob-
tained undertakings that there would
be reform of the single-judge, non-
jury Diplock courts, that a code o
conduct would be introduced for the
RUC and that Ulster Defence Reg-
by RUC officers. Progre ss on these
matters was, Dr FitzGerald con-
MAGILL JUNE 1988 11
firmed, specifically linked to the
Republic's implementation of the
European Convention on the Sup-
pression of Terrorism. Accession to
the Agreement was signed by the Fitz-
Gerald Governrnent as early as Feb-
ruary 1986 but when it carne up for
ratification in the Dail at the end of
the year when the Coalition was col-
lapsing it scraped through but with
the proviso that it would not be im-
plemented until December 1st 1987.
By then, too, Mrs Thatcher had writ-
ten privately to Dr FitzGerald reject-
ing Dublin's case for the appointment
of three judges in the Diplock Courts.
While Dr FitzGerald was being in-
discreet in Cambridge, Mr Lenihan in
Chicago was maintaining that there
was no link between legal reform in
the North and the Decernber applica-
tion of new extradition procedures
under the European Convention. Un-
wittingly but in one stroke Dr Fitz-
Gerald had questioned Mrs Thatcher's
bona fides towards the Agreement,
had revealed the failure of his Govern-
ment's diplomacy to achieve legal and
security changes in Northern lreland
policy and had blown Mr Lenihan's
cover at a sensitive time when Fianna
Fail backbenchers were not convinced
of allowing the extradition law to
come into force.
Ulster Unionist expectations of a
serious fall-out between Dublin and
London over the terms of the Agree-
ment failed to materialise as the two
Governments concentrated on security
cooperation in response to the O'Grady
kdnapping by the O'Hare gang, the
150 tonne haul of arms, ammunition
and explosives discovered by the
French authorities on board the
Eksund and by the widespread revul-
sion against the IRA killing of eleven
worshippers at a Remembrance Day
ceremony in Enniskillen, Co Fer-
managh.
The mood in Dublin-London rela-
tions improved when immediately on
hearing of the Enniskillen bombing
Mr Haughey sent a note condemning
the outrage and assured Mrs Thatcher
of his readiness to take decisive action
against subversves. Anglo-Irish co-
operation reached a new peak when
Mr Gerry Collins, the Minister for
Justice, launched his nationwide
search for IRA arms and men with
the assistance of sophisticated detec-
tion equipment on loan from Britain.
Mr Eamonn Doherty, the newly ap-
pointed Garda Commissioner, found
more than an U1ster birthright in
common with Sir John Hermon, the
Chief Constable of the RUC, as the
two Governments fretted over in-
telligence reports that four cargoes
of IRA arms equivalent in size to the
Eksund haul had been landed c1an-
destinely in Ireland between 1985
12 MAGILL JUNE 1988
and 1986. Despite strong backbench
discontent in Ireland Fianna Fail, Mr
Haughey did not baulk, as had Dr
FitzGerald, at actually implementing
the European Convention on the Sup-
pression of Terrorism. Although not
happy with the amended legislation
to safeguard Irish citizens from arbi-
trary extradition to Britain and Nor-
thern Ireland, the Foreign Office
appreciated the realpolitik behind Mr
Haughey's delicate balancing act and
Mr Nicholas Fenn, the British Arn-
bassador, took the unusual step of
going on RTE radio to give an assur-
ance of his Government's readiness to
work the new legislation.
After Enniskillen Mr Haughey had
become "Charles" in private commu-
nications from Mrs Thatcher. This
was viewed by senior British officials
as a remarkable shift in her attitude to
him. For it was well known that cold-
ness and contempt consumed her
attitude to him, Her long and unfor-
giving memory recalled his oversell-
ing of the "totality of relationships"
Summit in Dublin Cast1e in 1980 and
more insidiously his refusal to support
EEC sanctions against Argentina after
the sinking of the Belgrano. Only a
few months earlier, at the photograph
call for EEC leaders during the summit
in Brussels, Mrs Thatcher did not con-
cea! her distaste at being pictured with
"that little man."
Mr Haughey did not retaliate des-
pite the pointedness of the snub. His
passivity on this and several other
embarrassing occasions drew the corn-
ment from a British diplornat: "Charlie
is a true patriot. He has put Ireland
before his natural instinct to get back
at Mrs T."
In retrospect, this uncharacters-
tically Haughey-stoicism was stored
into the consciousness of the Foreign
Office and lay behind the concilia-
tory speech last month by Sir Geoff-
rey Howe, the Forign Secretary. His
reference to Mr Haughey's patriotism
was greeted with cynicism by a Fleet
Street which invariably still associates
Mr Haughey with gun-running and the
arms trial. What was missed by Fleet
Street - and by Irish commentators
too - was that Sir Geoffrey was sig-
nalling to Mr Haughey appreciation
of his refusal to engage in public re-
crimination against Mrs Thatcher. Sir
Geoffrey was not endorsing Mr Haug-
hey's republicanism but was applaud-
ing his recognition that Irish national
interest required avoiding a bitter
slangng-match with Mrs Thatcher.
Unlike Mr Fenn, Mrs Thatcher had
not appreciated the modifications in
the extradition law. Nor did she take
kindly to Mr Haughey 's subsequent
reference to impasse over Stalker-
Sampson and the Birmingham Six.
Even within days of basking in the
courting c1imate engendered by Sir
Geoffrey's accolade, Mr Haughey was
again on the receiving end of Mrs
Thatcher's sharp tongue. This time his
adherence to the Anglo-Irish Agree-
ment was questioned by Mrs Thatcher
who was outraged at what appeared to
be his recantation of Hillsborough
during his trip to the United States.
In the pasta Taoiseach visiting the
United States would be assured of
shoring up a few dodgy marginal Dail
seats by playing the green card in New
York, Boston or Chicago. A particu-
larly rip-roaring speech on Irish unity
would see him poised to canter through
the next election. This unwritten but
basic rule of Irish politics has not
worked in the case of Mr Charles
Haughey's visit to New York, Boston
and Cape Cod in April.
Rernarkably, too, this much publi-
cised visit has brok:en another funda-
mental rule of how to succeed in Irish
politics. This rulegoverns relations
between a Taoiseach and a British
Prime Minister. It is a rule which has
proved itself to be effective especially
during Mrs Thatcher's period in Down-
ing Street.
It is this: when a British Prime
Minister rebukes a Taoiseach, the as-
sailed leader of the Irish Republic is
guaranteed the aggrieved support of
not just his own outraged party but. of
the Opposition parties, the public
and the media. The application of
these two rules at the same time
should see a Taoiseach ensconced in
office for life.
Instead, Mr Haughey returned to
Dublin to face a unique coalitin of
critics. These ranged from Mrs That-
cher in the House of Commons to the
Opposition leaders in the Dail, from
Tory backbenchers to officials in the
Northern Ireland office, from the
Sunday Times to the Irisb Times. Un-
cannily, the criticisms struck a com-
mon note: that in his speeches in the
United States he was not forthright in
his condemnation of the IRA and its
Noraid supporters; and worse still, that
he appeared to be on the point of pro-
nouncing the Anglo-Irish Agreement
to be a failure. It sounded like the re-
turn of the old Charles J. Haughey
with his belief that Northern Ireland
is a failed political entity and that new
political and constitutional structures
are required to bring about a durable
sett1ement on this island.
Ta1kof a unitary Irish state or of a
federal Ireland - which so dominated
the deliberations of the New Ireland
Forum before Mrs Thatcher's OUT,
OUT, OUT intervention - has crept
back into the debate by courtesy of
Mr Haughey's Yankee tour.
It was not therefore surprising that
Mrs Thatcher demanded assurances
that Mr Haughey remains wedded to
 the Anglo-Irish Agreement, particular-
ly to the fight against terrorismo It
was equally predictable that .Peter
Barry of Fine Gael and Desmond
O'Malley of the Progressive Democrats
should renew their calls for Mr Haug-
hey to encourage unionists and na-
tionalists to agree on a power-sharing
devolved administration within the
framework of the Hillsborough Agree-
mento
Whatsurprsed most people was the
contrite speech from the Foreign
Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, ack-
nowledgng the hurt felt by the Irish
in recent months. This was in response
to Mr Haughey 's assertion that since
the shelving of the Stalker-Sampson
report in January British policy had
contributed towards making the situa-
tionin Northem Ireland even worse.
, Overall, in spite of the criticism Mr
Haughey was satisfied with the out-
come of his American visito In a presi-
dential year he courted important Irish
American politicians who will use their
influence to toughen up the British
Govemment'sproposed legislation on
ending job discrimination aganst Ca-
tholics in Northern Ireland. He insists
that he marginalised Noraid by not re-
ferring to them in speeches to sophis-
ticated Irish-American audiences which
renounce violence any way. His ad-
visers complain that the Dail Opposi-
tion leaders have failed to understand
the subtlety of his position but that
the Foreign Office has recognised the
logic in his strategy, as have Unionist
leaders.
As a realist he recognises Un:ionists
will not enter negotiations so long as
the Hillsborough Accord remains oper-
ational, By offering to meet Unionists
for talks without preconditions, Mr
Haughey, in effect, is offering them a
new channel to engage in dialogue
about a lasting settlement. This offer
of parallel talks outsde the Hills-
borough Agreement may fail to entice
Unionists to the conference table,
though Ken Maginnis's stragetic pres-
ence in Boston must be classified as
dialogue of a sort. While the British
Govemment would favour discreet
Dublin-Unonsr contacts it is wary of
these being conducted in the fore-
ground of the current complex round
of ta1ks which include the SDLP- Sinn
Fein ta1ks, the SDLP-Tom King talks,
the Tom King-Unionist talks about
ta1ks, and Mr Peter Robinson's talk of
an independent Ulster, The situation
has become more fluid than was en-
visaged by the architects of the Hlls-
borough Agreement. Perhaps Mr Haug-
hey's Boston brew will be served at a
Belfast tea party in due course.
M
ARK TWAIN'S REMARK
that reports of his demise
were premature can appro-
priately be applied to the Anglo-Irish
Conference which met in Dublin on
Wednesday 4 May.
Rather than crumbling as predicted
by Unionists, the conference is increas-
ingly resembling sessions of the EEC
Council ofMinisters: lengthy, complex,
generally inconclusive but ongoing,
routine and even boring. The Belfast-
based secretariat of civil servants from
Ireland and Britain serves a similar
function to that of COREPER in
Brussels, the committee of civil ser-
vants representing the twelve national
govemments. Like COREPER, the sec-
retariat prepares the agenda for minis-
terial meetings. It tries to secure as
much agreement as possible on issues,
leaving the more difficult points for
political resolution by ministers.
Whereas EEC Councils have become
fairly elaborate events, conferences
rernan intimate gatherngs ...
Like the participants of EEC meet-
ngs, the two sides at the Anglo-Irish
conference compete in the presenta-
tion of their assessment of what hap-
pened or what might happen, Journa-
lists scramble after the principals for
comments as they arrive and as they
departo Usually the two sides brief
afterwards on their own territory.
Because of the latness of the finish-
ing of the 4 May meeting, Mr Tom
King, the Secretary of State for Nor-
them Ireland, decided to avail him-
MAGILL JUNE 1988 13
self of the facilities at the meeting two Governrnents had re-seized the
place itself. So for the first time since initiative after the Andersonstown
the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agree- killing of two British soldiers. Added
ment in November 1985 a member of to a busy agenda are a fresh look at
the British Government conducted a the Northern judicial systern and plans
press conference in Iveagh House, the to crack-down on IRA involvement in
splendid 18th century town mansion racketeering and smugg1ing. More im-
on the south side of St Stephen's portant, however, than the conference
Green which is now the headquarters table topics was Mr King's fifty minutes
of the Department of F oreign Affairs. tete a tete with Mr Haughey. Neither
The conference was given by an Mr King nor Mr Haughey would dis-
ebullient Tom Kng, flanked by his close what they said to each other,
studiously silent and enigmatic deputy, but wecan assume it was a lot more
John Stanley, and by his media pro- direct and colourful than what was
tector and dispenser, Andy Wood of doled out to the press at the Iveagh
the Northern Ireland Office. It was not House news conference.
a particularly newsworthy news con- Irish Government officials described
ference, and that was the way Mr King the conference as a good day's work
wanted to play it. He fielded awkward which had gone a long way to re-
questions fram journalists probing for moving mismderstandings about Mr
signs of continued friction between Haughey's commitment to the Agree-
the British and Irish Governments on mento They insist that Mr Haughey is
Stalker-Sarnpson, on the Gibraltar both committed to working the Hills-
killings by the SAS of three unarmed borough accord and to initiating dia-
IRA members and on extradition logue with Unionists outside the frame-
arrangements between the Republic work of that agreement. Certainly,
and the United Kingdom. In his seas- U1ster Unionists now rest assured that
oned manner Mr King spoke in sen- if ever their fancy takes them to Dub-
tences many of them long enough to lin the press conference facilities in
fill a full column of the braadsheet Iveagh House are second to none. In
newspapers and to deprive journalists the meantime, on the margin of the
of juicy quotes. Hanover Summit the Taoiseach will
His message was the unspectacular find out fram Mrs Thatcher whether
confirmation that the "business al he is Charles or Mr Haughey. Either
usual" sign was firmly attached to the way it should at least be another po-
Anglo-Itish Conference, a message lite encounter in the Hanseatic cty,
which .was reflected in the editorial
columns of the Irisn Times and the
M EANWHILE, AN DNAN-
Irisn Independent. nounced summit meeting
According to an Irish official, the took place in Dublin on
14 MAGILLJUNE 1988
Tuesday 10 May between Sir Patrick
Mayhew, the British Attorney General,
and his Irish counterpart, Mr J ohn
Murray.Sir Patrick was in town to end
a six month stalemate over extradition
pracedures which he himself had crea-
ted. Sin ce December he had refused
to comply with legislation requiring
him to pravide evidence that the per-
son wanted for extradition to Britain
or N orthern Ireland had charges to
face. This requirement was passed by
the Dail and Senate to safeguard Irish
citizens whom they feared might not
get a fair trial in British courts. In
Dublin Sir Patrick agreed to accept the
procedures.
There was quiet satisfaction among
Irish ministers over Sir Patrick's not
unexpected decision. Privately , minis-
ters felt that the outcome was a vic-.
tory for Mr Murray and a capitulation
by Sir Patrick. But there will be no
public Irish Government triumphalism
about Sir Patrick's belated and reluc-
tant acceptance of the sovereignty of
the Irish legal system, Nor will there
be any crowing by ministers that Sir
Patrick played an important part in
recent Anglo-Irish difficulties follow-
ing the decision not to prosecute
senior RUC officers implicated in the
Sta1kerjSampson "shoot-to-kill" con-
troversy.
Although the British and Irish
Governments are now ready to work
the new extraditiort law, its procedures
are expected to be challenged in due
course by those whose extradition is
being sought by the British authorities.
This could produce a lengthy period in
which extraditions are agan at a stand-
stillwhile the validity of the law is
tested in the High Court and perhaps
even the Supreme Court.
T HE USUAL PUBLICITY SUR-
rounded the latest talks about
talks meeting in Stormont
Cast1e on Wednesday 11 May between
Tom King, Jim Molyneaux and Ian
Paisley. It would appear that what was
billed as D-day for Unionism turned
out to be the day when talks about
talks finally graduated into plain talk-
ing, In his most persuasive manner
Paisley told television that neither he
nor Mr Molyneaux would be prepared
to come back to Stormont if Mr Kng
was notprepared to consider an a1ter-
native to replace the Anglo-Irish Agree-
mento
The missing link was that there was
no response in Dublin to Mr Paisley's
upbeat talk about being the Neil Arm-
strong of Ulster politics taking the first
short step on the moon. The real1y
intrigung pont is that : theGovern-
'ment in Dublin was neither over the
moon at this D-day landng. Nor was it
snarling menacingly that the Anglo-
Irish Agreement must not be touched.
It did not even rouse from its slumber
to comment on the endeavours of the
Stormont astronauts. Nor did Tom
King confirrn nor contest the explora-
tory claims of the Unionist leadership.
Like the Taoiseach, Mr Charles Haug-
hey, Mr King appears to be quietly
pleased that political dialogue is beng
entertained by Unionists even at the
cost of tacitly accepting that the Hills-
 nfPrnl01: 'lh;~rnz8t,~',io,:iM )'" ,"'' ' , '" ', , \% 'Mi 'i6' wr"
f~l'ing in,ltl:sh pollUca wereinjudici~us."~,
!;ij~~l' Do;n: . :the .htilliant put "ai:i. ,
~{~I~'n1 a~cetic Seer~t~1;Y'01 }te U~;"',,
,a:ttmen!' o!,..F:qr~g,~Affaitscontin~~s;;,
'tq"~re~eu,a ':co:nsidetable int1uenee, 'lit,

,o~~inglp~hpolicy! YBut~q'cim~~,~'.
the over tl;te',.'
b~~,Y,~f
lll"'.".,.
pr:esiditg
~ 8 'd"'il
natlolt ' "
.p omtlc'
sen;t<:e at ".a.tine"":II~'
Jill ', .'"

,wQeu so'mcn' pflV!l'aglt1Bouse '8 tl'adi~,f:

':i0'iill functiDtt~lt.'Ve:been ll'ssumedb,y :,
~e'!Ll'3'9:seach's/." denatmeullNdll<~rli!lJ
0M];l~v)quj,,,,,,,y~.oL~~, J~rUi'kN",:'~I!ffli',,"li0,i'<~U-iliF:P\W{B~1[MhU~1'
,]t~laW,l.fvucy
, ,,' ",:' .,>,><..:"".>
S v'l:ual!tbr;ril'~rve'll!1,:
'--;!F'; ,;;~,,'i'" ': '~r""
,'~i,',,' ',,', " ',jiii ,. ,> .1' 4i h, , ," ,o,

~1~l~CJ!t~t!!~bw~~'~~~vr~
_a~p&i'AI~. "S1mu:
',i~
.H'll~.:tts~~6:'IwI
':iO$W:eR l1d M.a:~~y. !T; Ili L\;IlifP!:~

,.::~!~nsion,Petw~~h~overtlttl'~mJf!1l1
~:;'g~ ,ait.d lv~agh HQUSe'hilSbel:1~~. '
.s.lPet,bly (bmpeJ\~d~:b,Y 'lg,' ell''sYJ,1g'Uii
Ill'slytei,o:f tbt\' TaQll1Ste and'.Mbri$te:~;>r 'i
~ar4te:Jin~ff:itSj l!l'an 'Lenihll:n. 'Buth.1S'~ill
~~P1:oiQPll~~: illresS ,nas depriYed i1!1:Mi~,i
"i'augill:ly:~,"Qf ,:tbe skillsof a'U uu4er~ i
.;;" , 1i!1'll
:~i
':lrltJea:ihut:~e'6":olent Tll'ileY.rand:ir:i'b i4iJ~W
,,,,,1,,& o, "" ',', ',' '1'; .,;, "V

OJU'1'~lt"tortuous aegotiatious with:

~'erfid<>uSi~b~Ol. ()ffieialsin'lvet.~lli~~
i!Bo'll~,:prl:ld~.;:.~.r (euihan~re.tnruto ';
dlltym }~e ~fotthis' m~u!b'sEE.C .'
. Summitn Hanoverr Takmg':np Mr ,el
iJ.enilian1s :agenda at cruCial eoufer~;!11l
\~nce rile''tgs' has been' J{ay 'llqtke .ii I
i~e: MiRiil:r*'~r tW.a"relci>Vt: Buergy
':'mtticatious. "1Ju:rke's ag8te~ive app- 'w~.
iilto~his :~;w~rkedcontrast(o .~~i;:
han's .distmct~~, conC:ililtt0:~,but .car- ,,,"
,@'qtaea . lil~~~.;.()f 'doing ,P11itieallll,
k~Usness.~~~Or$il tQ offi<.il~:Burke::
"yitas snowri eonsiderblemas!i!ry 01 em:
" ploy:meutprOposals "in his~discnssio'is
e witn,'omKing. Ji;:!i %, ',

;ii'Uii!li~l~;I:su ';Pla~ing ,a' hll1'dsetVice' wifh 'i"

o o ""'+V!~L'!,:~,"',
:', 'ib"'O " ,c' ,""
";jio , " ' ",,' , ,~ ':~~~; -"0' :",,,;

, i~Y "BurKe~ iA ihe;double.s mat.cheS'i:;

.gainst Kifigllnd lonu Stanley "'lSwtlte .
:Veteran of tiBbi eorners, Getr;yt:illins~ ,
,tb'Min:sterll:lol: ,Justice, wh,o .iSeq}
,~h~itm~ i~ Mr Lenihan's aJ>seMe~
"In\j& secona termin JUstroe, t:on~~s"
y~l:iilhess has. been put'to Qctodeffect'
k~~'y bn J~~,~g~~~renc.;eJ!fhl;.Bi~
H perfonnan~ has. r~ivedhii ;st:atlding,
w'insid~:the:.ll'lil:~iFa:lllttettehY nd he'
,is iippe(fl}y~mn.y t<l tke ,ovet Ft:eign.
Atfa1s' ir Mr Lenihan .were unable to
, :;il';ut;liU in sl:tch 'u, delhanding. affice.
'i:Mr Burke 18 e6nsdered a strong'an-
~~;iil!\te fnr~momo1lion tO.,1:he Depa'tt
~~~me,j~ t!!')ust:e. wheJ;e meSf.cretary.
, lles,Mathews, has become oue.of,.the
~c~Q,r50f tbe,:aau8~ey aa~nistr,~;i
tion~snglo.ldsh "'olicy'"
,'~ ", 1', ..,
;'dW
4m w;

. "~f." 't~,datEf \as ~.em~ed, Mr Baugiley

:~fl~(f fre~ 1{Ieet Stt,e.et.but 1>,.1, liara"
t,~~:t>u:t1'l:':'ted lo eha'tm' and scold thtl'~
i:'i%Y;~t:n~hm~dia tep~seut~~iy~sin Ireland:
"On occasions he hag.d.one wt>nd.ersin
@'1tr;ar:sf\?rminglitne et)yerage~f n Du:
,,~
'in m'''thequlWt1
'l' _1: "+, "d 1 elU.lY
.papers. _~. cmJUe,;.ll,.
"'I '% T 'W~,
N

mentary to Mal'a is Dick. Q'Bren,th.e ql

;,'P,l~SscQup:senor in the De~artmenNJf
'.".f~r~gll 'Aq:'aul ~tto8e g.tarnre in the
r.1:ha11ldessand grinding tsk o briefing ':':
ti:joumalists putclas.se'S(~f of his Many
",':'4istinsuisbed p;redee~l'S in titat mo,st/
,.dip~matic4}f,Rosts.~,_~ ..x

16 MAGILL JUNE 1988

 borough Agreement s not as unchange- doned for nothing his long-standing
ably saerosanct as it looked in ts ear1y belief that Northern Ireland s a failed
days of exstenee. poltica! entity requiring new struc-
A few days later Mr Haughey and tures whch transcend its bcundaries,
hsadvsors purred wth delght when By offering talks outsde the frame-
to Frank Millar on UTV's 'Weekend work of the Hillsborough Agreernent,
World' Mr Molyneaux announced that Haughey, as he told the Dail 011 17
he would be prepared tomeet the May, has contributed to the new flui-
Taoseach once officals had prepared dity in Northern poltics.
an agenda. As surprised as Millar, the However, .he is conscous of the
former Young Turk of Offcial Unon- rnrnense gam ble in this dialogue wth
sm, to hear ths postive response, Mr Unionsts, He does not want t en-
Haughey immedately made it known gender such a mood of camaraderie
that he was ready to forward position wth the Unionists that they expect
papers to the Unonist leader. hm to abandon the Anglo-Irsh Con-
The new flexible note struek by ferenee and the secretarat. Whatever
Molyneaux was seen in Merrion Street hs ntial hostlity to Hillsborough,
as a vindication of not only Haughey's Haughey now deeply values these in-
stance at the New Ireland Forum but stitutions,
of his repeated invitations earler this While preserving these, Haughey
year to Unionists for talks. Despite the appreciates the behind-the-scene dip-
righteous criticism of the Taoiseach lomacy of the Church of Ireland Pri-
from Fine Gael and the Progressive mate, Dr Robin Eames, who has per-
Democrats for not putting devolution suaded Molyneaux of the need to
proposals on the table at the Anglo- work for a new agreement which
Irish Conference, Haughey's aides had would "constitutionally and chrono-
accepted the judgernent of Seamus logcally" supersede the Hillsborough
Mallon. This was that the Unionists accord.
would spurn any proposals through Magill understands that Archbishop
the channels of the Agreement from Earnes was inf1uential in setting up an
Dublin. unpublicised meeting between Moly-
Aceording to Mallon the Unionists neaux and John Hume. It is therefore
would have dismissed Dublin blue- not surprisng that on the same UTV
prints for devolution with venom, programme Hume immediately respon-
leaving Haughey in the doubly em- ded positively to Molyneaux's new
barrassing position of having aban- realismo Unequivocally, Hume con-
frmed that whatever unionists and
nationalists agreed on would "tran-
scend in importance any prevous
agreernent ever made."
Haughey, too, calculates that any
successful settlement o the Northern
Ireland problem not only nvolves an
hstorc Irish Government-Unionst rapo
prochement, it also requres the IRA
to abandon the armalte and the bomb
and to st down at the conference
tableo Under the Coalition Dr Ftz-
Gerald nstinctvely opposed any sug-
gestion of talkng to Sinn Fen, But Mr '
Haughey has quietly encouraged J ohn
Hume in his talks wth Gerry Adams
and other leading Sinn Fein members.
Both Haughey and Hume are con-
vinced that a pacflc Sinn Fein must be
a partner to any durable peace settle-
mento A central feature of the months
ahead will be the cornbned attempt
by the Taoiseach and the SDLP leader
to persuade the IRA to endorse the
approach of the New Ireland Forum,
and to take the path of constitutional
na tionalism.
Equally dffcult will be the task of
persuadng Unionists to accept the
bona fides of Sinn Fein. The odds are
that Jim Molyneaux and Ian Paisley
will shrnk autornatically from any
suggestion of talking to Sinn Fein. But
a process has begun in which all sides
know that the price of failure will be
this island's collective doom.
The 01

:ARMEN PR rrn
P EOPLE WHO HAVE SEEN HER ONLY ON
televisin, or - worse still - read about her in the
newspapers might, 1 suggest, like to know what she
is really like. She smiles and suddenly looks shy. "1 would
say that I'm a very sensitive person and that 1 like helping
people, that I'm a normal married woman with three kids,
with a great sense of sensibility, humanity. 1 am very sen-
sitive towards humans and 1 consider myself a fghter. 1
don't think there is anything strange or weird about me."
Thus the "Tart OC Gib", as she was labelled by the Sun,
describes herself, in ever-so-slghtly broken English. It is dif-
ficult, on meeting her in the circumstances of recent weeks,
to avoid being struck by the similarities between her and
that other female lead-player in the developing drama' of
Gibraltar, Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Carmen Proetta is direct
and assertive, strong and self-assured, coherent and reso-
lute. She would need to be all of these things to have sur-
vived intact up to now and to deal with the ordeal which
stilllies before her.
Sometimes, she says;she feels "like the one who shot the
people." For the past month she has been made to feel
"like a criminal", ever since she featured in Thames TV's
documentary , 'Death on the Rock', and stated that on the
afternoon of Sunday March 6 last she saw, from the * that she is the .drector of a "vice agency" which
window of her nearby flat, three men emerge from a police provides "vice girls" for the rich Arabs on the Costa del Sol,
car on Winston Churchill Avenue, Gibraltar, jump across a * that her husband has been in jail for drug srnuggling,
barrier in the road and shoot repeatedly Mairead Farrell and * that both she and her husband "hate the British",
Daniel McCann, in spite of their having their hands raised * that she was one of only forty-four people who voted
"like giving themselves up.' for the Rock to become Spansh in a 1967 referendum,
Were she to be believed at the forthcoming inquest, *that both she and her husband have criminal records on
Carmen Proetta's evidence could have devastating con- Gibraltar.
sequences for the British government, the British rule of Investigations by bothMagill and Thames Television have
law and for the SAS men who carried out the killings of uncovereci not one shred of evidence to substantiate any of
three IRA members that Sunday afternoon, (Sean Savage these allegations, and Carmen Proetta emphatically denies
was gunned down in, according to other eye-witnesses, each one of them. She says that she was never a prostitute.
almost identical circumstances out of sight further up the She says that the cornpany, Eve International, which the
road by another gunman). Sun alleges to be an escort agency, was in fact set up as a
Since then, sections of the British press - in particular tourism agency , Carmen Proetta became a director in name
the Murdoch-owned newspapers - have left no stone un- only byvirtue of the fact that she worked in the solicitor's
tumed in their search for dirt with which to discredit both office in Spain where the company was initiated. Spanish
Mrs Proetta's testimony and her personal reputation. The law requires that at least fifty per cent of every company
Sunday Times over the past few weeks has published set up in the country be owned by a native. Carmen
weekly stories designed to show that Mrs Proetta's story Proetta, though she divides her time between Spain and Gi-
is untrue. It. has quoted other witnesses as describing braltar, is a Spanish citizen. She allowed her name go for-
Mrs Proetta's version as "ridiculous." These witnesses have ward to facilita te the twoBritoris who wanted to establish
since denied that they said any such thing. the company , This is standard practice in Spain. She never
But the Sunday Times reports have been mild compared subsequently took any interest in the activities of the com-
to the smear campaign launched by the Sun newspaper on pany and ayear later surrendered her directorship. She has
Saturday April 30, two days after the TV programme. In an documentary proof of the termination of her interest in
articIe written by "Michael Fielder in Gibraltar" and
bearing the now infamous "Tart of Gib" headline, the
paper alleged:
* that Mrs Proetta was once a prostitute, by John Waters
MAGILL JUNE 1988 19
 Eve International. She has learned since, in fact, that the
company never traded.
Mrs Proetta denies also that her husband, Maxe, has a
criminal record for drug smugglng. He current1y faces char-
ges in Span of having rented out a boat for the purpose of
drug traffckng but claims he is innocent and will be plea-
ding "not gulty," He maintains that his boat was beng
used for smuggling cannabis in his absence and without his
knowledge,
Carmen Proetta describes as "rubbish" the Sun 'a alle-
gatons of anti-Britshness. Now forty-four, she was born in
London during the Second World War and says that she
. loves England. She says she dislikes poltcs and has never
voted in her life.
The "senior police offcer" namedin the Sun story as
having conrmed that the Proettas have criminal records in
Gibraltar has denied to Magill that he said any such thng to
the Sun, He would never divulge information about polce
dealings with any individual to a newspaper, regardless of
the circumstances, he says.
M ICHAEL FIELDER, THE SUN REPORTER WHO
wrote the story, says that he obtained the initial
information from Nigel Bowden, a British-born
freelance [ournalst who lives in Spain. He says that Bowden
speaks fluent Spansh, has "a wide knowledge of affairs in
that part of the world" and is, accordngly, "someone we
would trust."
The details supplied by Bowden relatedonly to Eve In-
ternational and to Mr Proetta's alleged criminal record in
Spain. Fielder than travelled to Gibraltar and fleshed out
the story himself. In an interview with Magill, Fielder made
no attempt to deny that the story rnght contain naccura-
cies or misinformation. "It's all very well with hindsght to
say that you could have checked and rechecked the facts,
and in an ideal world one would certainly like to be able to
do so. But when one is up aganst deadlines and working
against the clock this doesn't always prove possible. You
have to rely on instinct and what your sources on the
ground are able to tell you. Maybe it's a bit hit-and-miss,
but that is the nature of the business."
Fielder claims he based his story on information he ob-
tained about Mrs Proetta from Nigel Bowden and also from
people in Gibraltar, rght from the time he arrived. "I've
never seen so many people willing to say so many uncom-
plimentary thngs about a woman. She is one very
unpopular lady," he says. He claims that "dozens of people,
including a senior police officer" told him Carmen Proetta
was a prostitute.
In fact, the only "senior police officer" quoted in the
Sun article, Chief Inspector G1en Viagas, has told Magill
. that he was misquoted in the article. "1 speak to many
journalists from many newspapers," he said. "1 am the
police press officer. I do not remember what I say to each
of them, but you can take it that the story is inaccurate."
Chief Inspector Vagas denies that he would ever have ds-
cussed the criminal record of any Gibraltarian with a [our-
nalist. In relation to one quote to the effect that Mrs
Proetta "is somebody we have had dealngs with in the
past", Vagas says, "You must remember that as well as
beng a police officer I am also a citizen. Gibraltar is a small
place - it is the kind of place where everybody knows
everybody else. So yes, 1 may have said that, but these
people ust mix with words. I have been quoted in many
newspapers and I think the less said the better."
Michael Fielder denes that the story was politically in-
spred and says that he has no regrets about wrtng it. It
seems "odd" to him, he says, that Mrs Proetta should have
come forward with her story after so much time had
elapsed , but he is unable to advance any reason why Mrs
Proetta might have anythng to gain by so dong, "Mrs
Proetta has only herself to blame," he says. "She appears to
be the architect of her own annihilation in print."
20 MAGILL JUNE 1988
Nigel Bowden, the freelance reporter in Span, is
similarly unapologetic, although he do es say that the
information he supplied was "greatly exaggerated" by
the newspapers. In a telephone interview with Magll,
Bowden repeated the allegatons which he had passed on to
the Sun in relation to Eve Internatonal and then went on
to make further allegations about Mrs Proetta which have
not yet been stated in prnt, "If Carmen Proetta is gong to
sue everybody, I know a lot more about that lady than I'm
really prepared to let on over the telephone," he sad. He
denied that he has a personalgrudge aganst Carmen Proetta
and said that he sees no reason why anythingthat has been
said about her should in any way devalue her evidence to
the inquest. ''The fact is that Carmen Proetta has a flat
which overlooks the spot where the three lrishmen (sic)
were killed. She's not blind and I don't see why she should
lie. She has no reason to."
The only reason he became involved, he says, is that in
the wake of the 'Death on the Rock' programme his tele-
phone "fell off the wall" with the number of calls he
received from joumalists wanting to know more about
Carmen Proetta. He claims to be able to substantiate the
information he supplied to the Sun about Eve Internatonal
and, by way of proof that the company still exists, sug-
gested I rng the Cook Report at Central Television who, he
claimed, last year unsuccessfully attempted an investigation
of that company. The Cook Report say they cannot recall.
such an investigation though reporter/presenterRoger Cook
describes Ngel Bowden as "very reliable". Cook says he
knows nothing of Carmen Proetta.
A
8IDE ALTOGETHER FROM THE F ACT8 THAT
no one has yet come up with the slightest evidence
to show that Carmen Proetta has done anythng
llegal, and that none of the people who have attacked her
are able to suggest a single credible reason why she mght
lie, it should be noted that, even if everything that has been
alleged about her were true, this would not diminish in the
slightest the validity of her testmony. "The eyes of a
.prostitute are the same as the eyes of an ordinary woman,"
she says. "And they can see exactly the same."
Carmen Proetta speaks with obvious hurt of the ordeal
she and her family have gone through since the Sun story
appeared. Almost irnmedately after the programme was
broadcast in Britain and Ireland, the Proettas were given
due warning that there are consequences to be faced for
sticking your head too far aboye the parapeto The following
morning Carmen's husband received a phone call from a
man who claimed to be a policeman, telling him that the
family's life would be "made a misery". Since then, two of
the couple's three children have received similar phone calls
informirig them that their mother ran a brothel and that
their father has a criminal record. Carmen Proetta doesn't
so much mind for herself - she can deal wth the dirty
looks she gets from taxi drivers - but the hurt it has caused
her children is something else agan,
"Unless they want to say that I was in a concentration
camp in Germany,buming the Jewish people, 1 don't
believe they could say anything more. That's all they need
to say now. They've said everything now, haven't they?
They've said the worst about a woman that they can say."
Although she never thought it could get so drty, she had
a fair idea that coming out when she did was unlikely to
make her Fleet Street's or the British govemment's flavour
of the month. "But in my conscience I felt I had a moral
obligation to say the truth, It would have been comfortable
to sit back, but then I hear a lot of people complaining that
there's no security in the world anymore, that people don't
say thngs when they should. And I felt that f you see
something and it is the truth, regardless of who are the bad
people and who are the good people, I think you ought to
say the, truth as you see t. They didn't carry flags which
said "We are the IRA" and "We are the SAS", or "We are
the cowboys"and "We are the indians". I couldn't detect
which was whch, I merely had the misfortune to see
something which I shouldn't have seen. If it had been the
other way round they would have liked it a lot more, and
they wouldn't have come out with the story they have
come out with. They would have said that I was a heroine,
and the best of women, and the most ntellgent, and I
would be next toMargaret Thatcher every day in the
papers."
''But,'' she adds, "it is a principIe of justice. I always like
justice done. It could be my own father or mother - any-
body - and I'd still stand up to it andsay 'This is the way
it happened'. Justice aboye everythng".
Carmen Proetta appears to have an unshakable belief in
the rule of law as something inviolable and immutable. She
does not express opnons on what she saw, merely
describes a sequen ce of events and leaves others to draw the
conclusions. You get the feeling that there is a sense in
which she believes - wishes - her evidence mght yet reveal
a benign interpretation. She believes in the rule of law, that
it must - and do es - work. She appears to believethat,
even at its worst possible nterpretaton, what she saw was
an aberration. In recent years she has worked as a translator
in Spain, interpreting for English-speaking defendants
before the courts. The notion that the law is only as good
as the people who implement it genuinely does not appear
to have crossed her mind.
She is not political in any conventional sense and is
certainly not a liberal. If governments wish to implement
capital punishment, she says, then they should do so - but
after a fair trial. She has no time for terrorism and, judging
from my own brief conversation with her on the subject,
has practically zero knowledge of lrish politics or of the
IRA. "A person who kills has got to have sorne strnge
thing in their bodies. I couldn't hurt a fly. There's got to be
sorne sort of strong feeling inside them to drive them to do
these thngs."
Mrs Proetta plans to sue five British newspapers, in-
cluding the Sun, as weIl as Nigel Bowden, for libel. She be-
lieves that the smear of her character was officiaIly nspred
and maintains that it originated within the Gibraltar police.
She also has sorne harsh words for neighbours 'of hers who
were quoted in the Sun artiele as saying that she (Carmen)
was "the sort of person who would do anythng for
money ", It is this kind of "chitty chatty", she says, which
has led to her having to go to Span to work. Gibraltarians,
she says, are in the main, smalI-minded, uneducated and
uncultured people, "Their minds are narrow. They're very
good people but their culture is,' I would say , minimal.
l've got a lot of human qualities in me, I believe, but
something's wrong here and I don't know what it is. They
just don't let people develop. I feel very bitter about it
because 1 feel that Gibraltar has known me for years and
years and years, They know I've always been a very lively
person, very friendly, but l've never, ever, ever, done any
harm to anybody, And I am very bitter to think that there
are people questioning my kids, and friends of mine, to see
if it's true what's printed in the paper, because they know
it's not true. But it's better for them if it is true - it's a
very convenient situation. Sorne of them wsh it were true."
Rock was that the Gibraltarian taxi drivers indeed did not
appear to be Carrnn Proetta's greatest fans. But many
people, right across the board, frorn barmen rght up to one
government minister, were prepared to repeat aIlegation
after aIlegation about Mrs Proetta so long as there was no
chance of them being quoted or identified in print. The
allegations were generally along the lines of those printed in
the Sun,
There are a very limited number of possible explanations
why this should be so.
The first, of course, is that there rnay be sorne truth in
sorne of the rumours about Carmen Proetta. There are
rumours about everybody at sorne time or another; sorne of
them are true, many of them are noto It goes without sayng
that, even if any, or even aIl, of the rumours about Mrs
Proetta were true, it would not diminish her evidence in the
slightest.: What can be said is that those rumours which it
has been possible to check have proved falseo Those who
made them seem unable to substantiate them. Others who
. are willing to repeat them refuse to do so publcly. And, for
what it is worth, I personally found Mrs Proetta infinitely
more persuasive and impressive than any of her detractors,
ineluding the government minister.
Another possible explanation for the ongoing vilification
of Carmen Proetta might be what we will describe as the
Elsie Tanner Syndrome, Viewers of the British soap opera
'Coronation Street' will remember the character of EIsie
Tanner, played by the late Pat Phoenix. EIsie was a middle-
aged woman who refused to be the drudge or the frump
that her neighbours seemed to want her to be. She was
strong and independent, she enjoyed life, she was attractive
and sexy and didn't see the necessity to hide these qualities
from anyone. Most of the series' storylines of a few years
ago had to do with her uneasy relationship with her neigh-
bours- the gossip, the rumour, the innuendo and the
insinuation which surrounded her every move.

T
HERE IS INDEED ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFI-
culty about finding people in Gibraltar who are
willing to badmouth Carmen Proetta. Unlike with
such controversies when they occur in small communtes in
Ireland, where there is usually either what seems like a
total conspiracy of silence or a complete openness,
Gibraltarians generally tend to be reticent at first but
voluble once they feel they can ta1k without becoming
nvolved or showing their own hands. Mrs Proetta believes
that much of the gossip about her that appeared in British
newspapers was obtained from local taxi drivers and my
own experience of spending three days going about the

MAGILL JUNE 1988 21

 lt is impossible to avoid the para11elsbetween E1sie and
Carmen Proetta. Mrs Proetta is a very beautiful middle-aged
woman who has managed both to rear her family and hold
down a career which she is proud of and which earns her
respecto Gibraltar - although , as the natives continua11y
remind the visitor, not an island - is a very insular society ,
The economy is overwhelmingly -servce-based. There are
few opportunities for most people to do anything other
than malee a reasonable living;having a career which is more
than just a meal ticket is something which has obvious
potential for inviting resentment. And not alone does
Carmen Proetta have a career which is uplifting, enjoyable
and fulfilling, but that career is in Spain,
O .
FFICIALLY, SPAIN STILL REFUSES TO
recognise Gibraltar as a separate entity and con-
tinues to c1aim sovereignty over what is geo-
graphica11y one of its own peninsulas. The Spaniardshave
been claiming the Rock since they lost it to Britain in 1704.
The Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713, gives Britain legal
tit1e to Gibraltar, but also gives first preference to Spain in
the event of Britain relinquishing its interest. Independence
is not an option. Gibraltar is the 1ast remaining source of
maior difference between Britain and Spain and has been
the cause of much tension between the two nations for
almost 3PO years. The Rock has strategic importance in the
Mediterranean way out of proportion with its size of a few
square miles. However, in recent years it has become sorne-
thing of a burden to Britain and it is commonly believed
that she would now gladly relinquish responsibility .
Gibraltarians lay much emphasis on their identity and
culture, though there is little overt evidence of ether.
The native population comprises a mixture of English,
Spanish, Genoan, Portuguese, Moroccan, ltalian, Jewish and
even sorne lrish people. Most of them seem to have very
little in common other than their suntans. Despite this, the
average Gibraltarian would ideally favour sorne kindof
ndependence, but given that ths is not possible, everyone
tends to be strong1y in favour of the continuation o the
link with Britain as by far the lesser of two evils. Gibral-
tarians are deeply suspicious of Span and seem to be
willing to suffer almost any indignity or privation rather
than have any truck with her. In 1967, for example, the
Rock voted by 12, 138 votes to f'orty-four against breaking
the link with Britain and integrating with their neighbours
(this is the referendum in which the Sun a11egesMrs Proetta
proved her anti-Britshness), Shortly after that vote, Spain
retaliated by closing its border with Gibraltar, thus virtua11y
isolating the Rock and its inhabitants. The move misfired
in the sense that it made the Rock more dependent than
ever on Britain. Evidence of the link with Britain is by far
the most overwhelming thing about Gibraltar: pubs ca11ed
The Londoner and The Old Vic, British newspapers in the
shops, Union Jacks everywhere and British sailors in most
of the pubs chanting "Here we go, here we go" and "Ya
wot?, Ya wot?, Ya wot?, Ya wot?, Ya Wot?, Ya Wot?". Of
the 30,000 population of Gibraltar, about twenty per cent
are British military people and their families. They have all
the best land, the best work and the best place s to live.
The natives suffer this situation in silence and with great
insouciance. lt is as though they know deep down that
Britain is their only hope of maintaining their current
reasonably peaceful and prosperous exstence. In recent
rnonths, the former government under Gibraltar's most
prominent statesman since the war, Sir Joshua Hassan, was
booted out of office because it had begun to be suspected
of favouring sorne kind of deal with the Spaniards, The new
government party, the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party,
which is made up of ordinary workers including a former
store-keeper , a fireman and a typist, is in favour of con-
tinuing the link with Britain.
In this context it can be imagined why Mrs Proetta's
evidence was rather less than sweet music to the average
Gibraltarian. Most of the natves will freely admit that they
would have preferred her to remain quiet. Their vew is that
the IRA were going to plant a bomb which must inevitably
have killed a large number of innocent people - the
terrorists therefore got only what they deserved. Most
Gibraltarians would have said n othing at a11- and indeed it
would appear that there are still many witnesses to the
shootings.who have not come forward. As one native put it:
"lt's the three wise monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil,
speak no evil. Only they're not just up on the rock [a
reference to Gib's famous apes] , they're down here as
we11." Siding with Carmen Proetta, for many Gibraltarians,
would be almost tantamount to expressing support for the
IRA; attacking her is a way of showing support for Britain.
"If they say anything about it," she says, "other people
listening will take it that they are on my side - on my side
in relation to the incident, not on my side in relation to the
smearing of my character ... If you see what I mean,"
OMETIMES SHE THINKS THAT SHE WILL
S soon wake up and it will a11have been a terrible
dream. Ever since she appeared on television her
life has come to be dominated by the events she witnessed
on March 6, and this is something which she is far from
happy about. She has no desire for publicity. There are
crumbs of comfort, however: phone ca11sof encouragement
and congratulation from Ireland, letters of support and
admraton from Englsh people, even a couple of marriage
proposals. On the day of the inquest, she says, she will be as
she has been up to now: honest, forthright and braveo "1
suppose 1'11feel nervous, but 1'11try to be calm and to
answer as well as possible to every question."
The case on behalf of the families of the three dead will
be conducted at the inquest by Be1fast solicitor Paddy
 McGrory who will have to be specially called to the
Gibraltarian Bar for the occasion. At present the case is
being collated in Gibraltar by local firm Finch and Partners
who will also provide assistance at the inquest.
The inquest is expected to last for anything from three
or four days up to a fortnight, depending on the approach
and pace of the coroner. If the coroner decides that the
events leading up to the shootings are relevant, rather than
concentrating on the logistics of the killings and the events
of that Sunday afternoon, the inquest is likely to last for a
longer periodo The authorities - the British government and
the Gibraltar police - will obviously be hoping for the most
cursory examination of the killings, but the local coroner,
.Felix Pizzarello, has already indieated both that he is un-
happy with the manner of the poliee investigation and that
he himself is unlikely to be a pushover.
Carmen Proetta is the strongest card in the possession of
the families' lawyers, but there will be at least seven other
eyewitnesses who will give evidence whieh wll eorroborate
her version of events. These will include the British barrister
Stephen Bulloeh and his wife Lueinda; Josie Cecelia,
another resident along Winston Churehill Avenue, and a
number of passing tourists who witnessed either the
shootings of Farrell and MeCann outside the petral station
or that of Sean Savage out of sight around a comer.
A
FTER IT'S ALL OVER, CARMEN PROETTA
will have to pick up the pieces of her own life. Her
attempts to sue a number of British newspapers
will have been encouraged by a number of substantial
awards of late to people who have been libelled in the
tabloids. But equally, a number of recent cases have shown
that people who attempt to obtain vindication through re-
course to the law or the British Press Council need be pre-
pared for even worse vilifieation from a press which many
people regard as being increasingly aboye both the laws of
decency and of the land. Lastyear, a British newspaper
lorry driver, Terry McCabe, had a complaint against the
Sun upheld by the Press Council. McCabe had refused to
pass a picket at Wapping, but instead had got out of his cab
to briefly jon the picket. Immediately he was declared war
upon by the Sun who claimed that as a Labour councillor
he had allocated housing in exchange for sexual favours and
that he had a criminal record. The Press Cbuncil described
the article as "malicious" and condemned the Sun for
printing it. The Sun, as it is obliged to do under law, .pub-
lished the findings of the Press Council, and underneath
repeated every one of the original allegations against Terry
McCabe as well as an editorial addressed to McCabe, en-
tit1ed "Sue you liar". .
The Press Council responded to this by saying that "The
Sun has jeopardised the future of self-control by British
newspapers. There is no justification for the conduct of the .
editor." The editor of the Sun responded to this in turn by
.telling the Press Council to mind its own business.
It is obvious that Carmen Proetta will need every fibre
of her obvious steel if she is to survive intact the ordeal
which now faces her. She has coped well so far but
occasionaHy it is possible to detect in her a lack of com-
prehension of the enormity of what she has taken on. She is
a very brght, intelligent woman, but she does, however,
tend to see thngs in black and white. She trusts people, she
believes in right and wrong, she has an almost unshakable
belief that if you do "what's rght" this will bring its own
reward.
"If 1 see a beggar in the street 1 would sometimes give
him all my money, everything 1 have in my pockets, in my
purse, because 1 would know that his need was greater than
mine. But 1 also know that, even though 1 would then have
no money, someone the next day would ask me to do
something and 1 would have money again. If you do what
you think you should do thtm you will be alright."
 A Profile of Ray MacSharry
by Tommie Gorman
~6 :uAGILL JUNE 1988

TIS THE NIGHT OF APRIL 22 1988 AND
I
three hundred and seventeen people, in for-
mal dress, gather at the Sligo Park Hotel.
Tickets for the Sligo Chamber of Commerce
Annual Dinner cost f.20 each. The dignitaries
present include the South Korean ambassador
to Ireland who enjoys golfing, and his wife, a
devoted mountain climber. The guest of ho-
nour, though, is a local: Raymond MacSharry,
exactly a week away from his 50th brthday,
the most successful Sligo politician since the
foundation of the State.
The atmosphere is good-humoured, the meal
exquisite, the fare one would expect at a ban-
quet ... seafood-stuffed melon rings, clear ve-
getable broth, roast fillet of beef in black pep-
percorn sauce, meringue with fresh strawberry
and kiwi ...
Austin Jennings, at seventy-two, one of the
senior figures in the Chamber, is addressing the
guests: "What should we call him ... Sugar
Ray ... Sligo Ray ... ?"
"Mac the Knife," interjects the guest of ho-
nour. Everybody laughs. Soon they switch pla-
ces. At the podium the Minister reads from a
prepared script, copies of which have been cir-
culated to national media newsrooms sorne
hours before. The message is that the treatment
is working so the suffering must continue: "The
Government are trying to create the right con-
ditions for higher economic growth and more
jobs. Lower interest rates, low inflation, more
compettive costs and more exports are all part
of that strategy ... We still have quite a dis-
tance to go to achieve a sustainable budgetary
position and free the economy from the dead-
weight of the debt burden. lf we relax too
soon, our efforts will have been to no avail .. "
Mr MacSharry moves on to the white pages
section of his speech, an attachment for local
consumption only. Progre ss in Sligo is review-
ed: the new hospital and bridge are coming on
nicely; the building to house 300 Department
of Social Welfare staff is under construction;
the Aer Lingus Sligo-Dublin service is proving a
great success; business in the area has increased
since the forty-eight hour "trans frontier"
clause was introduced; the town will soon begin
to benefit from a state-aided urban renewal
scheme; work has started on renovating the fac-
tory where the Korean video tape company,
Saehan, says it will employ seven to eght hu n-
dred people within three years.
.The guest of honour then reads from the
next section of his white pages and the goodies
tumble forth. A total of f.4l3,500 in grant as-
sistance through the Department of the Envi-
ronment and Education frorn the National Lot-
tery is being dispatched to Sligo town and
county, Twenty-nine different locations are in-
volved ... f.2,000 for a community centre in
Cloonacool ... f.l 00,000 for the provision of a
community hall at St John's School, Sligo ...
f.10,000 for the Streedagh Armada Comme-
moration Society , And the machine is still
paying out - seven Co Sligo schools will have
major renovations carried out later in the year,
including Colaiste Mhuire post primary school
in Ballymote where i750,000 will be spent.
And then the jackpot - the biggest single con-
tribution to a regional sports centre from the
National Lottery funds is destined for Sligo, f.l
million towards an indoorheated swirnming
pool, f.300,000 in 1988, f.400,000 in 1989 and
the balance in 1990. And the money may be
matched, pound for pound, from the European "It is problems
Regional Development fund under the Border which keep you
Areas programme, giving Sligo f.2 million to in- goz'ng and make you
vest in the development of sports facilities.'
The Minister departs from the script on the what you are. I
white pages: "1 would like to thank you for in- don't know how
viting me here this evenng. 1 am delighted to be people can sit down
in a position, one year into Government, to re-
in their house or
port significant progress in a number of areas. 1
will probably get killed for it in every other anywhere and say
part of the country but 1 make no apologies to 'Cod I haven 't a
anybody, because all we are doing and getting problem in the
for this region is what we are entitled to, not-
withstanding the difficulties."
world.' I mean,
"Hear, hear," the audience replies. A res- what do they lioe
taurateur with Fine Gael leanings edges for i] they are not
towards a friend at his table: "Jess, even I'm
lioitig to try and
going to vote for hirn next time."
Sorne minutes later, after the rapturous ap- solve their
plause has ceased, a different speaker is on his problems? There is
feet. Ki Choo Lee, the South Korean ambas-
really nothing else
sador, is obviously enjoying himself and pro ves
to be the wittiest character of the evening. Be- to live foro "
fore leaving, he hops a ball: " ... 1 know that
you are very proud of having produced a very
prominent politician from your community.
You may be aware to whom 1 am ref'erring. 1
respect his excellency , Minister MacSharry, very
much, and 1 wouldn't be surprised if he is cal-
led to serve his country in a higher position."
T
aE FAMILY OF FIVE BOYS AND
five girls was reared .in a three-bed-
roomed house at St Patrick's Terrace,
near the centre of Sligo town. Raymond was
the fourth child, the second boyo Both parents
shared the considerable task of breadwinning,
Pat MacSharry was a "rentman" with Sligo Cor-
poration while his wife, Annie, was a national
schoo1teacher. The MacSharry clan had Leitrim
roots - Raymond's grandfather was a cobbler
and mountain landowner from Killavoggy in
North Leitrim. His mother's people were the
Clarkes of Lismacbrien, Be1tra, fifteen miles
west of Sligo towards Ballina, and were invol-
ved in catt1e exporting.
Raymond grew up in a world where money
was scarce and husbandry a great virtue. A wo-
man in the street who considered her family
twice as wel1 off as their neighbours used to ad-
vertise her position at mea1time: "Boys, come
on in now, your two eggs are ready." His first
national schooldays were spent in West Sligo
where his mother taught, near her home place.
Later when she took up work in Sligo town, he,
MAGILLJUNE 1988 27
 too, switched and went to the Ursuline nuns
and later to the Marist brothers. Emigration
from Sligo and the west wassevere: the Second
World War had ended and Ireland, on the edge
of Europe, had to take its place at the back of
the queue while the western world prepared to
rebuild itself.
The wealthy people of Sligo were the pro-
fessionals, the merchants and, thanks to the de-
mandng markets of Scotland and the North of
England, the cattle exporters. Industry in the
area was very limited. Raymond's uncles, the
Clarkes, were partners in one of the largest live-
stock exporting companies from the West, Cos-
grove and Clarke. The boy took a keen interest
in the business; summers were spent with the
relations at Beltra. He wasn't academically bril-
liant in Summerhill College but at that stage he
was rearing chickens in a shed behind the fa-
mily house. After a row about smoking he was
suspended from Summerhill: the difficulty pas-
sed but when he returned it was only for a
short while. His mind was made up ; without sit-
tng for the Leaving Certificate, he closed the
schoolbooks and set out to make his living.
Immediately, he had a full-time job, helping
to run the Cosgrove and Clarke factory at
Sligo 's Deepwater where catt1e were killed for
exporto He had energy to burn and lined up
"One ofthe most new challenges, first managing a mart in Tulsk,
distinctioe memories Co Roscommon and then a second one in
Ballina, Co Mayo. Mornings were often spent
l have is the first going to fairs, and afternoons at the factory and
new car bought by marts. Next Raymond Macsharry, haulage con-
my father. l was ten tractor, carne into being: his deals inc1uded
work for the GWI joinery in Collooney seven
or eleven at the miles from Sligo and for a local basket factory.
time. It was a Ford
Prefect, El 5043,
and we were trading
in a Baby Ford,
The delivery of Kosangas was a lucrative con-
tract and included a set payrnent per mile tra-
velled: MacSharry's vehic1e burned up the
roads.
One summer's night in the late Fifties,
lZ 3534, at Elaine Nealon, the daughter of a solicitar from
Gilbride's Garage. Roscommon town, carne with her aunt and
unc1e to visit a priest friend in Sligo. It was Au-
The niglit before we gust 13, her brthday, and she was due to be-
counted out the gin work as a qualified nurse the following
money - three week in Dublin. At a "hop" in Merville Tennis
Club she met Raymond MacSharry for the first
times - before
time .. They were engaged ayear later andrnar-
going to bed. ,E230. ried fourteen months afterwards. Raymond at-
A nd it was billions tended a mart in 'Ballina the day before the
as far as we were wedding.
Like much of the country, Sligo was infec-
concerned. " ted by an optimisrn of sorts in the Sixties. Suc-
cessful, energetic Rayrnond MacSharry joined
the .Junior Chamber of Commerce. One of his
many business activities inc1uded looking after
cattle at Clogherevagh, four miles from Sligo.
The land borderedSt Angela's, a training col-
lege for domestic science teachers, where his el-
dest sister, Nina, was a student. The Principal,
Mother Brid Hanley, met him on the road one
evening. She considered him "an able, dashing
young man" and had known him from his days
in national school, She felt there was a need for
"new, young people to play their role in Irish
society" and suggested to Ray MacSharry that
he should take up a career in politics.
Others were reaching the same conc1usion,
among them Rosie Kelly. A tough, straight-talk-
ing businesswoman, she had returned with her
28 MAGILLJUNE 1988
husband and young family from England in the
late Ffties and bought a hotel in Sligo. She re-
activated the Frank Carty Cumann, called af-
ter her late unc1e, and became a matriarchal fi-
gure in Fianna Fail, "Rayrnond MacSharry was
full of beans, doing things for tourism in Sligo
through the Junior Chamber," she recalls. She
asked hirn to join the party, He failed to get no-
minated for the Slgo County Council elections
of 1967 but the decision was overturned and
the names of MacSharry and Willie Farrell were
added to the ticket. Both were elected, Aged
twenty-nine, MacSharry was a member of Slgo
Corporation and Sligo County Council.
Fortune favoured him when Eugene
Gilbride, a Fianna Fail TD for twenty-one
years, dec1ared he wouldn 't be a candidate in
the 1969 General Election. But he made the
most of his luck. Sligo/Leitrim was beng re-
duced from a four- to a three-seat constituency
and Macsharry, two years in politics, appeared
the minnow against three sitting TDs, James
Gallagher (FF), Joe McLoughlin and Eugene
Gilhawley (FG). Among the factors which
helped him oust Gilhawley was his appeal to
key personalities in West and South Sligo that
they should replace their Fine Gael leanings in
favour of MacSharry family loyalties. He was at
an election rally in Drumshanbo when he heard
that his lorry , parked near the Sligo Garda
barracks and loaded with baskets, had gon e on
fire, It was asevere financial setback. Soon
after entering the Dail, he wound up the
haulage business and became a full-time
politician.
W AS THE KENNEDY ERA OF
handsome, well-groomed men
with flashing smiles the influen-
tial factor? In twenty-one years of politicallife,
Raymond MacSharry has rarely been seen with-
out a tie and a stylised crisp, white shirt. Ano-
ther ever-present accessory is the pioneer pin (a
great asset in the Sixties, less so in the aff1uent
late Seventies, but regaining its prestige in this
age of earnestness).
His period in the Dail has coincided with a
change in fortune for Fianna Fail in Sligo/
Leitrim. From 1943 to 1965 the party's first
preference General E1ection vote varied from
30.3 to 44.1 per cent. Since MacSharry's elec-
tion in 1969 the figure has ranged from 46.7 to
50.6 per cent. His base in the working c1ass
areas of Sligo town is considerable. He has a
small band of highly dedicated canvassers. His
rule is absolute.
His style is to seek out and listen to varying
opinions on an issue before making up his
mind. But once his opinion is formed, he backs
it with utter conviction. As one local observed,
he is the ideal man for his present role in Go-
vernment: "decisive, stubborn and likely to
steamroll anyone who attempts to modify 01'
alter his course." He is direct in giving his views.
His vocabulary contains a generous helping of
expletives. He frequently uses strong language
when aske d to pull strokes 01' break rules, a ha-
bit which often surprises callers to his clinics.
An annual summer holiday is spent on an is-
land off Burtonport in North Donegal. Former
FF senator, Bernard McGlinchey of Letter-
 kenny, owns a house there. Other friends in po-
litics include Flor Crowley, the former FF Cork
South West TD and MEPs Niall Andrews and
Mark Kllilea. He likes sport and current affairs.
He is an accomplished poker playero A teetotal-
ler all his life, he is not in the habit of buying
rounds for supporters.
The arrival in 1981 of Fine Gael's Ted
Nealon interrupted his total dominance of lo-
Sligo is a town cal politics. The rivalry between them is in-
where the slagger is tense and they tussle for prominence on the
front page of the Sligo Champion. MacSharry,
revered and where more so than his rival, has a love/hate relation-
kn ocking is a way ship with the local newspaper: part of the "pro-
li]. Often it's the blem" is that the editor, Seamus Finn, is also a
strong-willed man with his own views of the
case that the world around him.
stranger is auto- MacSharry's energy reserves are enormous;
matically more the briefcase, full of documents, is brought on
all car journeys. Working weeks of one hundred
acceptable than the
hours plus are common. He doesn't hold many
local. When a local clinics around the constituency but meets
shows ambition, clients at the office attached to his home, at
the tendency is to weekends. The office is staffed, Monday to Fri-
day, by a full-time secretary, He usually ans-
build hirn up then wers the telephone when at home. He can be
kn ock him down quick-tempered and sarcastic. He gives the im-
again and, when he pression of being extremely alert and naturally
suspicious.
is on his knees, set All four of his brothers and four of his five
about restoring Mm sisters live in the Co Sligo area, AH but one of
again, his six children are in Dublin: Heather-Ann, a
marketing director with a cosmetics company
recently married an accountant, Gary Britton;
Helen, a qualified nurse,is due to marry next
year; Raymond junior is an executive with
a meat exporting company; Brian is a student
at TCD while Mark is a pupil of Castleknock
College. Lisa, a building society employee, mar-
ried into the hotelier Byrne family of Strand-
hill, five miles from Sligo town.
Ray 's brother, Jude, a general practitioner in
Ennscrone (he is married to a sister of Matty
Brennan, the other Co Sligo Fianna Fail TD)
and daughter, Heather-Ann, are the two most
obvious successors in the political dynasty,
M AYBE WE WOULD BE
better off away from it all , .. "
The sen ten ce uttered by a tired
E1aine MacSharry in the early hours of No-
vember 26 1982 didn't make sense. Minutes be-
fore, by a margin of eghty-seven votes, her hus-
band had taken the last of the four seats in the
Sligo/Leitrim constituency. All that day the
Gillooly Hall count centre throbbed with ten-
son as the possibility increased of an outgoing
Tanaiste losing his seat. MacSharry, the stra-
tegist, was in dire trouble: the plan to hold
three of the four seats for Fianna Fal had gone
disastrously wrong. Ted Nealon and Joe
McCartin of Fine Gael were home and dry and
the three Fianna Failers, Mattie Brennan, John
Ellis and MacSharry were in the dogfight for
the last two places. In the afternoon MacSharry
acknowledged on radio that his position looked
grim. But ultimately it was John Ellis who mis-
sed out. MacSharry's misery was to continue,
though: that winter was the most troubled
period of his twenty-one years in political lfe.
And in the weeks ahead the reason why his wife
had expressed her disillusionment with politics
became abundantly clear.
The year had begun well. In the days imme-
diately after the February General Election,
MacSharry played an mportant role in helping
Charles Haughey survive an internal party re-
bellion and when the Cabinet was announced in
March, MacSharry was named Tanaiste and Mi-
nister for Finance. At a coming home ceremony
in Sligo that night, he made his pro mise to re-
place "doorn and gloom" with "boom and
bloom," He busied himself in his new brief and
the strife within Fianna Fail continued: was
there ever a more incident-packed period in
Irish politics? During that summer a number of
stories, all without foundation, involving
MacSharry, circulated in Sligo, One had him in
financial trouble, others were more personal
and not about rnoney , In the course of a dis-
cussion at a Sligo school, a pupil openly repea-
ted the rumours. The suggestions reached his
home on Pearse Road: sorne were aired in quiet
corners of Dail Eireann.
In the third week of October Ray MacSharry
met with his colleagues in the special ministers'
dining-room at Leinster House. He asked sorne
of them if he could borrow a tape recorder. The
then Minister for Justice, Sean Doherty, got
hold of a machine, with a sensitive microphone,
through Assistant Garda Commissioner, Joe
Ainsworth. Ray MacSharry then used the
equipment to bug his conversation with Dr
Martin O'Donoghue, a Fianna Fail TD, He has
always insisted that a rumour was circulating
suggesting his loyalty could be "bought off"
and that his reason for taping the conversation
was to try and discover more about the
rumours and protect his "good name." The
bugging incident occurred five weeks before the
November election and the nght when E1aine
MAGILL JUNE 1988 29
 MacS"na::y voiced her disillusionment with
poltii
Fanna Fai1 were in opposition the following
January when the O'Donoghue affair became
public knowledge. Unknown to MacSharry,
Sean Doherty had obtained a transcript of the
taped conversation and this was one of a num-
ber of "skeletons in the cupboard" discovered
by the Fine Gael Minister for Justice, Michael
-oonan. MacSharry resigned his front bench
position: the party leader,Charles Haughey,
accepted that his former Tanaistehad thought
honestly that he should record the conversa-
tion but added that he himself wonld never re-
cord a conversation with an individual without
their knowledge.
Raymond MacSharry was a quiet figure for
months afterwards. Friends recall him as being
"withdrawn and appearing tired." It was the
European Elections of June 1984 that provided
the end to his "dark night of the soul." He top-
ped the poll, winning 56,803 first preference
votes, ahead of Joe McCartin (Fine Gael) and
Sean Flanagan (Fianna Fail). MacSharry's re-
habilitation was achieved at the expense of Neil
Blaney , who lost his Euro seat. Ironically,
Blaney had been one of MacSharry's mentors
during his early Dail years.
Europe restored his political taste buds. All
Sligo/Leitrim party cumann secretaries received
regular briefs on his activities; he began is-
suing newsworthy statements on matters like
the Common Agricultural Policy and the Anglo-
lrish Agreernent. Gerald Barry , political corres-
pondent of the Sunday Tribune, wrote on
Sunday May 4 1986 that MacSharry, once the
favourite to succeed Charles Haughey as leader
of Fianna Fail, was now back to the centre
stage of lrish politics. But the figure emerging
this time had more self-confidence than before
and his experences of '82/'83 had convinced
him that he owed no favours elsewhere. During
that term in Europe, MacSharry also had consi-
derable renovations carried out on his home
in Sligo; for possibly the first time he was
showng a profitfrom his full-time career.
MacSharry can be
quick-tempered and
P
ADRAIG BRANLEY, A DIRECTOR
sarcastic. He gives of a small, Sligo-based oil distribution
the imp ression of company, is one of Ray MacSharry's
being extremely closest associates. The friendship goes back to
alert and naturally the mid Sixties when the two were part of the
new blood in the rejuvenated Frank Carty
suspicious. Fianna Fail cumann. Branley was his Director
of Transport for his first Dail election campaign
of 1969 and constituency Director of E1ections
a number of times since. He is candid about the
nature of those roles:
"The fact of the matter is Raymond
MacSharry directed his very first election cam-
paign and has always done the same since."
After the '77 campaign , MacSharry's third
success, Branley took it on himself to go visi-
ting Mount Street HQ.
"1 went to Seamus Brennan who was party
secretary at the time. He was a great guy in
headquarters - he had a great oul han dIe on the
organisation. 1 told him that the people in the
constituency were very disappointed in the way
Raymond got no position in the Government."
(Branley takes no credit in the fact that sorne
30 MAGILL JUNE 1988
months later MacSharry was appointed a Junior
Minister under George Colley in the Depart-
ment of Finance and the Department of the
Public Service.) "Rayrnond has always relied on
only a small handful of people. He is a very
hard taskmaster. He works the tail off every-
body involved with him. He expects people to
be as dedicated as himself. If he has something
to say, he won't hold back, irrespective of whe-
ther it will go down well or noto He is aman for
pure action. He will only do something when he
is ready to do it. One of his greatest abilities is
the way he can anticipate a situation - he can
see around corners; he often knows what some-
one is going to say before a word is spoken ....
1 think if he had his choice, he would be a
farmer."
On January 10 1987, Holly McLoughlin and
her five children had plenty of callers. Hours
before her husband, Dermot, an army corporal,
died in bloody , controversial circumstances -
an Israeli shell landed in the United Nations
post where he was resting, mortally wounding
him. Her memories of the day are vivid:
"Raymond MacSharry was one of the first
people up to the house. He waited until we
were alone in the kitchen and he put a signed
cheque into my hand. 1 told him that 1 was al-
right for money and he just said 'you'd never
know when you might need it.' "
Mrs McLoughlin was reared in the area of
Sligo town known as 'The Hill', a collection of
Corporation estates where the community 18 as
tightly-knit as the houses. Her grandmother,
Nancy Callaghan, at her prime was the Queen
ofthe Hill, an authority on everything from
Sligo Rovers to how her neighbours should
vote.
"After Eugene Gilbride retired, my grand-
mother, Nancy , put Rayrnond MacSharry up on
the back of a lorry and told everyone on The
Hill that this was to be the next Fianna Fail
man in the Dail. They were great friends -
when people weren't able to get up as far as his
house on Pearse Road, Granny used to put their
names on a list and he would call down and see
them in their houses. When she got sick with
cancer, there were no hysterectomies in those
days, so she used to go to Dublin every few
months for adose of radium treatment. Ray-
mond would collect her and bring her to Dublin
and he'd have his car fixed so that she could lie
down during the journey. After he'd arrange a
place to stay for Ned, Nancy's husband, while
she was getting the treatment. When Nancy
died, sixteen years ago, Raymond cried like .a
baby. He gave Ned an envelope with two hun-
dred pounds in it. That was a lot of money at
the time."
Millionaire businessman and chairman of
Knock Arport board, Seamus Monaghan, is a
MacSharry friend and supporter.
"He was ayear and a half older than me and
ahead of me in the Brothers school but r
remember him. He was always ambitious, never
one to take the -baCk of the crowd, l11.-themid-
Fifties,' even though he was only a young fella,
he had a senior job in the meat factory - there
must have been fifty or sixty people working
there, 1 was one of them.'
Ray MacSharry bought a truck and went
into haulage: Seamus Monaghan headed for
 America where he learned how to make and
mind money. "When 1 carne back in '69, he had
been elected to the Dail. He was a young, green
politician, but within a short time you could
see the change in the way he talked and in the
presentation of his speeches."
Monaghan, an industrialist, restaurant owner
and electrical contractor, got actively involved
with Fianna Fail in the Seventies and runs the
campaign to raise tI5,000/tI8,000
each election.
needed for
"It's very hard to get really close to Ray
MacSharry. I don't think that anyone is very
close to him besides his family. He is always
aware of his image, always watching his back.
He is very farnily orientated and he loves Sligo,
His wife, Elaine, is his greatest asset and I'd say
that he confides in her."
E MEET AT HIS HOME ON
W Saturday , May 21. He has seen
several clients at his clinics that
morning, The phone rings often. He still has a
few extra pounds weight since giving up
cigarettes last year.
He is very factual when recalling incidents
from his childhood: "One of the most dis-
tinctive memories I have is the first new car,
bought by my father. I was ten or eleven at the
time. It was a Ford Prefect, El 5043, and we
were trading in a Baby Ford, IZ 3534, at
Gilbride's Garage. The night before I was with
Raymond grew up my father and my brother Louis when we
in a world uihere counted out the moneyj- three times - before
money was scarce going to bed. t230. And it was billions as far as
and husbandry a we were concerned . , .. "
, And what of his job nowadays, dealing with
great oirtue. A billions? "1 am doing the best job that I can.
woman in the street Finance was the place to be ten years ago but it
who considered her is a different role now. It is rewarding when
you see that things are shaping up right. We
family twice as well are exercising control and we will be doing
off as their more of it in 1989. But I don't think anyone
neighbours used to could say he gets a kick from the fact that he is
reducing services to people or cutting back on
advertise her
things that they are used to or irnposing taxes
po sitiori at on them. But for now ithas to be done."
rnealtirne: "Boys, In the middle of a long co nversation, a
come on in now, glimpse of the inner MacSharry unfolds:"It is
problems which keep you going and make you
your two eggs are, what you are. I don't know how people can sit
ready. " down in their house or anywhere and say 'God,
I haven't a problem in the world.' I mean what
do they live for if they have nothing, if they are
not living to try and solve their problems? There
is really nothing else to live for - we all have
pro blems."
I remind him how he once told me he would
retire from politics at forty-five and wonder
about his interest in the job of European
Community Commissioner.
"Well, I was ' forty-six when I went to the
European Parliament and 1 probably would
have stayed there except pe ople who had been
close to me for almost twenty years asked me
to run in Sligo/Leitrim again for the last
general election. I enjoyed that period in
Europe. As for the Commissioner's job, it has
not come up for discussion, as far as I know it
has not been offered to anybody and I'm just
working away at my job , ... "
He is a little more definite when asked
whether he has ambitions to become Taoiseach
someday.
"1 couldn't see myself as a Taoiseach and the
man who is in there at the moment is doing a
very good job.'
HEN A MEMBER OF THE
W
. present Dail was once asked to
explain why a prominent West
of Ireland politician with a notorious repu-
tation for hustling and rule-bendng was suc-
cessful in politics: "Down here, when people
have a cow that's giving plenty of milk, they'll
use her until she runs dry. Then maybe they
think about gettinga new cow."
In Sligo, on the other hand, it's possible
that such a good cow would be kicked rather
than milked. Sligo is a town where the slag-
ger is revered and where knocking is a way of
life. Often it's the case that the stranger is auto-
matically more acceptable than the local. When
a local shows ambition, the tendency is to build
him up, then knock him down and when he is
on his knees, set about restoring him again. This
most unromantic trait is rooted in bitter ex-
perience because so often when Sligo people
have dared to dream, they've been let down. In
1975 the GAA team won the Connacht Final
and the county went daft with excitement.
Against Kerry at Croke Park they were humilia-
ted. Sligo Rovers, recently relegated for the se-
cond time in three years, delight and disappoint
with dreadful regularity , Snia, an Italian-owned
fibre plant, threatened to make the town and
its environs prosperous during the Seventies
but four hundred jobs disappeared in 1977 and
those who had dared to hope were suitably
punished.
One of Ray MacSharry's genuine achieve-
ments is that he has managed to come through
this Sligo layer of self-mutilation. In his time he
has provided oil for the local rumour-machine
but these days even the biggest cynics acknow-
ledge that MacSharry has sorne good qualities.
The respect, however fickle, also exists cur-
rent1y at nationallevel. Economist Sean (Knock
Knock Airport) Barrett spoke of him as a
future Taoiseach on a 'Questions and Answers'
RTE programme recent1y: Mary Holland, wri-
ting in the Iris Times, hoped he would stay in
his present position for the sake of Anglo-Irish
relations. The financial whiz-kids haven't abad
word to say about him,
"Christ, he surely is ridinghigh" is how one
Sligo County Council member puts it. The
cards have been dealt and MacSharry, the
expert poker player, is looking at his hand of
fouraces. On current form he has a great
chance of becoming Taoiseach. On another
front there's the EEC Commissionership ... the
chance of banking a quarter of a million pounds
or double that after two terms.
All but two of his six children are reared,
only one of them lives in Sligo. Furtive, suspi-
cious, able MacSharry, he (in Olivia O'Leary's
marvellous phrase) of the Transylvanian good
looks, the child of shortages in the war years,
the man who talks about his deepest fears and
ambitions to just one person ... he must soon
declare his hand.
I think he will go to Europe if he's let. e
Tammie Germen is Narth Western
correspondent tor R TE
MAGILL JUNE 1988 31

by Gabriel Byrne
Return of the
Quite Man
W
HEN I RETURN TO MY
hotel in Vienna, there is a
phone callo A friend of mine
is :e<E:ti:!,g for the Sta tes on holiday and
r.:;-a-~-=ETS if I'd come to spend a month
l.i:i:s eottage in Ireland.
-COme play the Quet Man," he
;;r~. For real. Because there is an on-
.oing strike in Hollywood I accept at
once and book a flight for the follow-
ing day,
"Well you can tel! the party of the
"irst part that 1go for it, "
The rattling train from Dublin de-
eats sleep and three hours later I step
onto the platform at a tiny station in a
shower of early evening rain.
"A fine soft day in the spring it
Nas when the train pulled into Castle-
'own and himself got off. "
The tarpaulin on the roof of the
rus flaps wildly in the wind and sun-
ight hits the window giving it amad
lashing eye, as it charges over the hill
:owards uso
We climb aboard, an old man in a
.ap with twine shopping bag and my-
ielf , We swing out of the town into the
ilue black hills. The old man sways
owards me holding the seats to steady
iimself.
"Are you who I think you are?"
"1 hope I am who you think I arn."
He thrusts a pencil and a torn ciga-
ette packet in my hand.
"What name will I write?"
"Your own of course." A repri-
nand.
"Are you down making a filmor
vhat?"
"No,just holiday."
"And other things; Mickeleen. Other
hings. "
Now and then, the doors of the bus
.pen in a hissing sound and without
asing speed, bundles of newspapers
re thrown to land on pavement or
ravel or in shop doorways. Down the
ill, and the last of the day dying, to
inally halt under a sign that says CIE
winging rusty in the wind.
The clock on the town hall tower is
topped forever at twelve-twenty ex-
ctly , and under it a group of men are
moking and playing pitch and toss.
34 MAGILLJUNE 1988
They stop to watch me, the strange
among thern. The bus turns and heave
itself back up the hill, canvas stil
flapping madly over the hedgerows.
approach the men, purposefully , I en
quire of them the whereabouts of m)
friends's cottage.
"Christ you've a step to go yet
You've a right to go over to Kelly
and root out The Vampire. He has
sort of Taxi." They laugh,
"Can you tel! me the way to Innis
free?"
"Innisfree is it?"
"Happen you know the road te,
A ughanure?"
At the bar aman who looks as if ali
the blood has been drained from hs
body is watching rhe Nuacht. On the
TV, Yasser Arafat smles into a micro
phone,
"You see that hoor with the dsh-
cloth on his head? That's a crafty hooi
if ever I se en one.'
We shake hands. I offer hm a drink.
"Wetl that being the case, it is a
pleasant evening and 1 will have a
drink, Sean Thornton. "
"So you'll be stayng out at the
Lake-House, far from the maddening
crowds is it? A blowy spot but f it's
peace and quiet you're af'ter , no better
place."
"Innisfree?"
"This way I "
It begins to rain again, Long nails of
rain in the carlight. The rubber from
the windscreen wiper is mssng and it
scrapes across the glass. Dave Fanning
talks low on the radio. Suddenly,
without warning, two white porties
stand in the roadway before us staring
us to a swerving standstill. Dave Fan-
ning's voice fills the night, and my
heart is exploding in my chest.
Further on, cars are parked out-
side a football field. Men lean against
them with shoulder bags and hurleys,
staring and saluting as we pass. Aman
in a vest is frozen momentarily by the
headlights, one leg in his underpants,
his backside bare to the night, The
Vampire rolls the window down as the
man dances for cover.
"By jazes Finnegan , you've a lovely
Irse, God bless it .' The journey seems
endless,
"The young May moon is beaming
'ove, the glow-worm/s lamp is gteaming
ove. "
"It's a good job you can't see where
ve are now," says the Vampire.
"Why is that?"
"Oh, that's why ," he laughs.
At last we arrive, A light shines
rom the cottage set among trees. We
iart on a handshake.
"Tis a nice soft night, I'm thinking
171 go and talk a litt1e treason with my
friends. Goodnight Mickeleen Og.
Goodnight Sean Thornton. "
I find the key under the stone by
the door. A fire flames in the grate in
a crooked blue room. Sleep comes fast
in a settle bed.
I AWAKE TO THE MORNING AND
call of birdsong, and a wind that
moves the trees outside the win-
dow. These only disturb the stillness
and I realise that these sounds have
become alen to me, and I must learn
to listen again.
I open the door of 'White O' Morn-
ing' to the garden and a wooden gate
that gives on to a sloping field of dan.
delion and daisy. And beyond this the
lake. The water is a sheet of grey glass
furrowed by tiny waves that break
regular as breathing among the tall
reeds. A scatter of swans moves slow
in the still day, and a heron flies
heavy-winged aboye.
The hlls beyond the lake lie like
dark cats waiting to pounce. There is
something dangerous, threatening
about them even in sunlight as they
cast shadows and take on the moods
of sky and water.
Of course I am aware that my
stranger's eye sees it so, but still it is
not the chemically coloured Innisfree
of a film director's romantc imagina.
tion. And I am victim to the fallacy
that this landscape has always been
thus, It is pagan and tirneless, yes, but
the only constant in any landscape is
change, however imperceptible. And
so for a time I feel I belong here, for
there are times when the feeling of
being part of a landscape is greater
than the sense of being outside it.
On my walks I notice everywhere
small battles between growth and
d ecay, between man and nature. The
nettle that grows solitary from a con.
crete wall. The Massey Ferguson aban-

doned in the corner of a field , grass
growing in the gearbox. The hare that
starts from under a broken boat, a
waddle of ducks bending under a rust-
ing gate,
By the railway track, unused now,
for many miles 1 walk till 1 come to
the station house, A ruin, where rooks
have built their nests and groundsel
grows in the waiting room. And f 1
look to the distance, it's Sean Thorn-
ton 1 see, hs face as dark as the black
hunter he rdes along the tracks to the
waiting train, And she, Mary Kate
Dannaher with her freckles and her
temper and her flame red hair, leaning
out the carriage window as she waits
for him.
"Don't go Mary Kate. You've mar-
ried a better man than you know. Tis
Sean Thomton lo ves y ou surely, "
And he kisses her upturned mouth
as the smoke of the engine swirls
about them.
"Oh there 71 be no bolts or locks
between us Mary Kate, only the bolts
and bars 01 y our mercenary little
heart. "
A shutter on a broken hinge bangs
closed.
Across the boreen from the cottage
there is a wood, dark and mysterious.
Easy to imagine Grainne against a tree
there asking Diarmuid if a droplet of
water on her white thigh is more brave
than he. And arnong damp grass,
splashed with wildflower there are
paths that meander drunkenly, yet
Ingical and ancient as the trees them-
selves, In this, the most secret and
pagan of places, the peace of a chapel
pervades. Once surrendering to a delin-
quent urge to shout out, 1 am imme-
diately shamed with a feeling of dese-
cration. This wood is for silence, or at
the most for whispers only,
Hours 1 spend in the garden, watch-
ing the beginning of lilac and apple-
blossom, pink and whte ignite in the
branches of a fallen tree. Through an
ivy-covered break in the wall, a view
of the lake beyond. Behind an out-
house , plum trees have been planted
and everywhere bees hang in the bells
of flowers. Now is the season for
nettle soup, but a poem by Peter
Fallon haunts me stilI and 1 cannot
think to pluck them.
M y NEARESTNEIGHBOUR
Iives across a field in a mo-
bile home, sheltered by the
ruin s of hs former home. An old
Bosch fridge door serves as hs gate
and in the pathway , in rain or shine,
his old rag of a dog Iies sullen and sad
dreaming of long ago sheep, He talks
across the hedge to me with the shy-
ness of a child.
"Yo u that's been abroad, what
would you thnk of this place now?"
He offers me a Silvermint and watches
me under his eyebrows. Between the
peak of his cap and his forehead is a
birthmark of red skin, Once, he tells
me, he caught a great black bird, a
stranger to the lake, bringing it down
with a single shot, dragged it home and
tied it to a post with ropes, tilI it died
screeching a week latero At nght he
comes with poteen and he talks of a
brother beyond in Amrica.
"Cincinatti? "
"No. Pittsburgh, "
"Oh aye, Pittsburgh, Massachusetts,
where the steel and pig iron Iurnaces
are so hot aman [orgets his [ear 01
hell. "
We talk of the Quiet Man and the
little fella with the horse called Napo-
leon and Maureen O'Hara giving lip to
John Wayne and the way he put his
shoulder to the door in the storm and
thrun her down on the bed and it
broke under the weight of them,
"That was a great pitcher. Very true
to life," he laughs.
More poteen in his blue mugo
"1 never married, no, 1 suppose 1
was kinda choosey, and the Mother,
God be good to her, wouldn't hear of
another woman in the house. Sure
everyone has sorne fad or mi-adh on
them. That was mine 1 suppose. When
we were childer we carne visiting in
this house and we'd sit in the corner
there by the fire and look up the chim-
ney and count the stars."
Maire is his sister, a tiny timid
woman who never speaks and moves
like a ghost between the caravan and
the fields. She hides her hands under a
spotted apron and they move in there
like little trapped birds.
"There are some things a man can 't
forget Mary Kate, "
back across the water and along the
"Like what, supposin?"
O N SUNDAY 1 GO TO MASS.
The men stand outsde the
railing till the last bell calls
them in, stamping out their cigarettes
which they hold under their palms
away from the wind. The chapel smells
of damp. 1 stand at the back among
the latecomers, the women in scarves,
the men kneeling on handkerchiefs
to protect Sunday suits. After the
silence of the Consecraton, an ex-
plosion of coughing and then the slow
eye-roving procession to Communon.
1 waIk the three miles home, passed
by men on bicycles who say morra,
and cars stuffed with gawking children
beep their horns in salutation to the
stranger among them.
1 stop at the shop named Open and
buy the papers from another world
and cgarettes for the long Sunday
afternoon in the room where the clock
made in Romania ticks crazily back-
wards.
Sadly it is time for me to leave.
There will always be the coming and
the going, the breaking of camp, the
journey towards something else. The
goal is always another place.
1 have lit the room with candles
that shiver in the draught from under-
neath the door and throw my shadow
huge across the room. 1will miss hear-
ing the chimney winds and the spitting
of rain against the crooked window
and the drip of it from the thatch.
And outside in the darkness, the bleat
of sheep and the call of wildbirds and
the twisty fingers of trees against the
sky, Tonight clouds cover the stars,
but as always you watch for one that
falls and tells a soul to heaven goes. No
houselight shines in the distance near
or far, but only sorne pulse of yellow
light unknown to me, flickers in the
trees beyond the lake.
Are the swans sleeping now? And
the cows, immobile as ornaments all
day, gone happily home? Have the
ponies galloped away beyond the hills?
"Living in a shack near the slag
heaps White O 'Morn and Innisfree
come to mean a little bit 01 heaven,
Mickeleen Og, "
1 keep it all like a movie hidden in
the vault of memory, to be screened
at wilI, at any time of day or night,
wherever my road may take me.
Now and then a dog is barking but
if 1 listen now, the silence answers
fields'of night.
MAGILL JUNE 1988 35
Battleof Bottl
Larry Goodman is known as a tough, no nonsense businessman. Yet, he recently appeared
to capitulate to 250 striking workers at his recently acquired Bailieboro Co-Op,
What exactly is he up to? TOMMIE GORMAN
Tommie Gorman is North-Western correspondent for RTE
S UITE 638 IN DUBLIN'S BER-
keley Court hotel costs t345
per night. The bedroom has a
.::cular bath with gold-plated taps and
o:: jacuzzi, the bed is king size. Next
~::lOris a 1arge room with lots of sofas,
z zable which seats ten comfortab1y
=:=c, in the very essence of good taste,
z - ice litt1e bar tucked comfortab1y
::':-0 a corner. This was the location
~:-:~-e on the morning of Monday,
~; 9, three gentlemen exp1ained how
C::~~-wou1d form the twe1fth 1argest
:::::cpanyon the Irish Stock Exchange.
Brian Britton, a deputy chief execu-
me of Goodman Internationa1, did
most of the ta1king. A1ex Spain, the
man who successfully administered
laxatives to B&I, added his bit. The
e1dest of the three, the one who spoke
least, James O'Mahony, recent1y re-
tired Secretary at the Departrnent of
Agriculture, knows most about the
ehallenges ahead for the new creation,
Food Industries plc.
.36 ~L-\GILLJUNE 1988
investigates.
An hour later the briefing by the
three directors was overo The new
company would have a turnover of
t84 million wth projectedafter tax
profits this year of more than t4 mil-
lon, Goodman International wou1d
have a two-thirds stake with the rest
taken up by financial nsttutons and
private investors. Food Industries plc
would have three divisions, dairy and
grain processng and cold storage,
incorporating all the major non-
meat activities with which Goodman
is already linked:
* Darying: Bailieboro Co-Op (ac-
quired in J anuary 1988).
* Cold Storage: Merchants Ware-
housing, in which a two-thirds stake
was acquired in September 1987 for
almost t5 million.
* Grain:' Drummonds and Do1an,
Minch Norton (bought for tl O million
in late 1987), and Baili'eboro's grain
dvson,
True to his style, the prime force in
this hghly-arnbtious undertaking
Larry Goodman, wasn't around for the
press conference. The event was ex
pertly p1anned and executed. C1early
Food Industries plc is an extrernef
important initiative as the man whos
beef business has an annua1 turnove
of t600 million takes on arnonumet
tal challenge. In the midst of all th
excitement, one little thought kej
interrupting: was the importance (
having Food Industries plc enjoy
flawless birth the reason why Goo
man International had, by its sta:
dards, accepted a hdng of sorts fro
250 workers in Bailieboro five weel
before? An interesting theory, There
Hes a good story.
T
HE CAREER OF m
Patrick McKiernan, a full-tr
Irish Transport and Gene
Workers Union official based in Cav
Town has se1dom been less than ce
troversial. Sorne cornpanes curse hi
 others begrudgingly respect him, every-
one has an opnion about him. For
four years, at the behest of manage-
ment, he was excluded from negotia-
ting on behalf of Transport Union
members at the troubled Bailieboro
Co-Operative while hs employers at
Liberty Hall agreed instead to the un-
usual practice of sending down some-
one from head office to do the hagg-
ling.
AIsoduring that time many angry
words about McKiernan were uttered
by managernent at McCormac Pro-
ducts in Killeshandra which closed
down in 1986 with the loss of 185
[obs after a bitter strike. (The com-
pany has since re-opened as a non-
unon house with forty-two workers.)
In the course of the recent Holy
Week Rising by 250 workers from fve
unions against Goodman International,
Pat McKiernan spent his words very
carefully. But after being verbally
scourged f not crucified, on Baster
Sunday mornng he emerged from the
dust-up smilng. In Bailieboro at least,
the resurrection of Pat McKiernan was
complete.
L IKE A POLITICIAN DURING
an election campaign, last wn-:
ter Larry Goodman was all
things to all men while he battled it
out wi1h Killeshandra Co-Operative for
Balieboro, But once he had seen off
that challenge, Goodman made no
secret that he was going to gut his new
acquisition before begnning recon-
struction (see Magill Feb 1988). His
first action was to send in a "hit-
squad" of consultants to sort out the
mess. Among the team was a Chinese
man called Frank Go, who is great1y
respected by one of Goodman's close
pals, Jim O'Mahony, the chef execu-
tive of Golden Vale Co-Op, (In the
subsequent strike a placard near the
picket line outside the plant alluded to
Go's intentons: "Chinese Takeaway"
it suggested - he took it in good
spirits.)
As the hit squad moved through the
various enterprises a litany of excesses
was uncovered. Each worker was in-
terviewed and many of them claim
they were asked two leading ques-
tions during those sessions - is there
any job besides your own at the plant
that you think you could do ... in a
strike situation, how would you feel
about passinga picket?
By the middle of March the master-
plan emerged. Goodman International
wanted to:
* Sell off all of the stores as well as
the engineering dvsion with the
protection of as many jobs as
possible.
* Concentrate on the dairying divi-
sion and have much of the work
there carried out by contract wor-
kers rather than staff employees.
The Goodman Group issued redun-
dancy notice to 189 of the 248
workers employed at Bailieboro. The
first sxty workers from the dairying
division would finish work on March
31. The rest, due to go, would be ern-
ployed on a week-to-week basis while
efforts to sell off the engineering and
stores divisions continued. The cash
offered to those beng let go would
come from three sources: statutory
redundancy payments, computation of
pension rghts and a termination bonus.
In an atmosphere of anger and uncer-
tanty, the workers from five unions
voted by a three to one majority on
Friday, March 18, to begin an official
strke ten days later. A handful of
dairy operatives passed the pickets
when they were up outside the factory
on Monday, March 28. But the vast
majority joined the lineo
B AIUEBORO'S DISGRUN-
t1ed employees could point
out how even durng its
troubled times the Co-Op had adhered
to an Irish Co-Operative Organisation
Socety (ICOS) agreernent about re-
dundancy terms. It provided for pay-
ments of four weeks' wages per year
of service plus statutory entitlements.
They were unsure about sorne of the
details in the Goodman offer but they
suspected it carne nowhere near the
ICOS deal. This matter apart, the
union officials involved were partcu-
larly windy about the principle of
contract workers being taken on in
place of staff employees. Events at
Bailieboro under Goodman are beng
watched by co-ops throughout the
country and union leaders are loath to
allow new practices which threaten the
livelihoods of their members.
If sorne of the issues involved in the
conflict were new, the same couldn't
be said about two of the chief adver-
saries. As a Federated Union of Em-
ployers' official, Eamonn Hanley had
crossed swords with Pat McKiernan of
the Transport Union many times.
They had faced one another at McCor-
mac's Killeshandra, Bailieboro Co-Op ,
Star Plastics Ballyconnell and Alfa
1,
Rubber Cavan. After a brief period as
a private consultant, Hanley joined the
Goodman group and as the Personnel
and Training Manager he was squaring
up once more to an old enemy. They
get on badly. McKiernan has diffi-
culty in digesting the suggestion that,
years ago, Hanley was a Transport
Union shop steward at a Unidare
plant.
The company was adamant in the
beginning that it would not recognise
McKiernan in the negotiations. His ex-
clusion from matters at Bailieboro
went back four years but McKiernan
could point to an agreement, reached
with the Co-Op the previous Octo ber,
allowing his partcpaton. Hs case
was backed up by the union members
who doggedly stuck by him. Jimmy
Somers, the National Group Secretary
of the Transport Union and Bill Kearns
of MSF were down -for the different
negotiating sessions but McKiernan
was also involved in them all.
o SUCCESSFULL y COUN-
T teract the strike, the company
would have to continue pro-
cessing milk. Traditionally it is brought
to the plant by a firrn of contractors
and by farmers. A small number of
dairy workers, who passed the pickets,
would join management inside and
process the deliveries. A number of
outside drivers, believed to be from
over the Border, would ferry the pro-
duct away to a secret destination.
On the opening days of the con-
flict those delivering milk were de-
layed at the factory gates for an hour
or so and then went ahead with ther
business. But temperatures soared as
the processed milk was driven away.
Sorne of the strikers claimed they
followed one vehicle as far as Lime-
rick and another towards Mullingar.
Often they would try to stand in the
path of vehic1es Ieavng the plant and
gardai would intervene. One night a
man on picket duty received stitches
for a head wound after an incident on
the picket lineo
Listening to the roars of "scabs"
and lots more was a thirty-two-year-
old dairy science graduate from DeC,
Paul Marren. Just weeks before he had
been appointed the new General
Manager of Bailieboro. A native of
Cork, he had an impressive track
record in the Dairying Division of the
solid but not spectacular North Con-
nacht Farrners Co-Op with its head-
quarters in Tubbercurry Co Sligo,
(His boss there, at one stage, was
Jim O'Mahony, now of Golden Vale.)
Marren had been head-hunted by
Goodman and in the first half of the
dispute he seemed a trif1e shell-
shocked in his new surroundings. All
that was to change before Easter
Sunday.
"'1
'M A DUB, BORN AND REARED
and a most unlikely character to
be stuck in the middle of a row in
Cavan." Bill Garrett was having fun
trying to explain his presence in the
MAGILLJUNE 1988 37
~.-~ z: Bailieboro. But the role underway: Ryan, a spirited, anxious are at gross eamings rate, rather than
::=..:. ~=- ::F this Church of Ireland man, jumped to his feet with every the flat week plus fixed allowances
=-........-=- ~d several leading citizens strange sound. Several times the com- rate involved in the ICOS scheme. Men
:f :..:.= ::J';ffi had a crucial influence on pany team carne out to confer with who were offered !:8,000 for eighteen
E::: ..... .=: e dispute. the intermediaries. Shortly after nine years service ended up with ;El 8,000 as
-,,-= William Garrett was one of o'clock they appeared for a final time. a result of industrial action, Pat Me-
~ =-r-e-<limensional characters in the Jimmy Somers wasn't far behind Kieman claimed .
.Cr::- 30m in Dun Laoghaire in 1929, them: "the talks are going nowhere. Initially the settlement terms sug-
f-=. -:- _i;:ed in Alee Thom's print works We are miles apart." gested the unions had won an outright
=:::=2snevin after leaving school. Half an hour later the workers held victory on the contract labour in the
ir..:.=:::he Smurfitt group took it over, their second meeting in the Church of dairying division issue. But the agree-
1:::.= =~ a management job in the litho Ireland hall and it is doubtful if such ment didn't stipulate how many wor-
s=:-::~. By the early Sixties he was noise was ever before generated at the kers were employed in the particular
'="=:=: ith his wife and son in Black- venue. As that gathering concluded section. And management subsequent-
~- - it was then he decided to the intermediaries announced their ly clawed back sorne ground by en-
.!..-.- - ~_ the call of the church. "During withdrawal from the problem. "We suring that the term "dary division
:::::"""S:-.ldies money was tght - 1 had a have done our best, what more can we personnel" applied to only a handful
,-;-7- grant and 1 used to supplement do, what would you do?" Canon of people. As a result, the Lab and
:: 17--l summer jobs. 1 worked as a bus Garrett asked reporters. Within min- Weighbridge areas at the plant are
,:l-;--''''.1ctor in London and as a porter utes, more than a hundred people were likely to have at least sorne contract
c. ?.oches Stores. In those years 1 be- back on the picket lineo New are lights workers even though the sectons are
:-r- :0 see things from the other side had been erected outside sorne of the bound up with the dairying division .
.:":::::'e desk," he says. office buildings, Up and down they
Ordained in 1967, Bill Garrett

B
marched, sorne shouting "ye won't y LARRY GOODMAN STAN-
W'::~ed for four years in Dromahair get us out: we won't be pushed aside." dards (his opponents rarely go
C: Leitrim where his third and young- A number of windows were smashed. the distance), the unions had
esr son was bom. The family then Inside the buildinzs anxious eves every reason to feel pleased. So why
=,ed to Kildallen near Killeshandra did Goodman International back off
=::1 1975 when they settled in and compromise? Was it the depth of
-;;o'lieboro. Canon Garrett has 250 syrnpathy for the workers among the
souls, less than ten per cent of the Bailieboro communty, milk suppliers
:;:.:lpulation, but he believes it is his job included? Was it the influence of the
ro get on with everyone in the district. likes of Paul Marren and Frank Go
::::. the run-up to the strike he spoke by from inside the office windows? Did
:;::ilone to Larry Goodman: "1 found the prospect of ongoing hostilities
2im a hard businessman. He empha- interfere with the plans for a smooth
sised that he was not going to be in- launch of Food Industries plc five
timidated by people and 1 tried to weeks ahead? Such were the thoughts
point out that those involved in the viewed the scenes. The needle had bouncing around near the jacuzzi and
proposed strike action had no wish to dropped to its lowest level and was the king size bed in the Berkeley Court
be there either. Most of us expected it about to turno the day that company was unveiled.
would be two or three years before the According to Canon Garrett, on The Stock Exchange formalities in-
new owners would begin expanding Good Friday a group of about eighteen volving Food Industries plc should be
their activities but we certainly didn't people, including a local Garda Ser- tied up shortly. The selection of a
anticipate redundancies on the scale geant, was asked to a meeting in the chief executive sn't yet complete but'
proposed. The Co-Op affects most town by the cornpany. Paul Marren such technicalities won't delay Larry
people in the Bailieboro are a - even outlined how it would be in the best Goodman. The enterprises mus now
sorne of the local gardai have rela- interests of all concemed to set up a blossom and grow.
tions there. That's why we were all so favourable climate for discussions. The Even blood sports enthusiasts rnight
concemed about it." sides got together the following even- be advised to keep an eye on Bailie-
From the beginning Canon Garrett ing. boro in the weeks and months ahead.
and others sought to bring the sides' The conditions accepted by the Management now has a slimmed-
together. Their committee included workers at a meeting in Bailieboro on down workforce but could do with ten
Tim Ryan, an ACOT officer and a Easter Sunday included: to fifteen million gallons of extra milk
Fine Gael member of Cavan County * An agreed deal on redundancy per year to maximise the use of faci-
Council, milk suppliers Sean Rahillah, terms. lities. It is rumoured that up to
Jim McGuire and Sean Lynch, and * No contract labour to replace staff !:400,000 may be spent preparng the
Chamber of Commerce representatives, workers in the dairyng division, cheese plant for reopening, If this
Gabriel Connell and Vincent Cooney. Goodman Intemational afterwards happens, Bailieboro wil1 definitely go
The warring factions and the go- continued to insist publicly that the hunting for milk. The quickest route
betweens ta1ked for several hours in a redundancy payrnents were made up to extra supply is through poaching
Kells hotel on Tuesday March 29. of three elements (computation of from neighbouring co-ops, Lough
Important meetings were agreed for pension rights, statutory entitlements Egish, Town of Monaghan, Killeshan-
the following night. and a termination bonus). But in the dra and Tir Laighean. It's a practice
Spy Wednesday was hectic in East case of each worker involved, the within the law. Bailieboro may have
Cavan. The workers met with their settlement amounted to three and the lowest costs so it could shape its
officials at 6.30 in the Bailie Hotel. eleven-sixteenths weeks' pay per year mi1k pricing policy to woo suppliers,
The mandate to join managernent for of service. And union sources were A milk war looms.
talks across the road in Brennan's quick to point out that while this may Is Goodman in search of an honour-
Hotel was a forrnality. Canon Garrett, seern slightly less than the old ICOS able draw, a victory on points or a
Tim Ryan and their colleagues sat terms, it works out as more in pounds knock-out? No need for an astrologer
drinking tea as the negotiations got and pence because the weeks involved but is there a doctor in the house?

38 MAGILL JUNE 1988

 THE
The Bailad 01 EwanMacCol1
by Fintan O'Toole
T B
HERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS ART FOR
a.rt 's sake in the indoustrial Lancashire slum of Sal-
ford when Ewan MacColl was growing up there,
Everything, every song, every dance, every tune
played on the sawn-off pianos that were shunted
around on wheelbarrows from street to street had a point
or a purpose, The most basic point was merely to live, to
survive these hungry Thirties: choirs of unemployed Welsh
miners singing for money around the streets, redundant
cannery workers from Grimsby or Hull tuming shanties and
sea-faring songs into pennies and ha'pennies, escapologists
struggling to wriggle free from the tightening ropes of star-
vation, bones players rattling away to keep flesh on their
own bones. The street performers who seemed to pass every
ten minutes through his own slum street of two-up-and-
two-downs, which had been condemned as unfit for human
habitation as long ago as the 1840s, knew the tricks of sur-
vival: how to make' a verse of a song last from the top of
the street to the bottom, how tocatch the eye of those
who carne to window or door, making them feel guilty for
not tossing you a coin.
There were other points too. He remembers his mother
singing in a hypnotic voice at the ironing board, the song a
lullaby to the senses, making her forget the huge piles o
other people's washing still to be pressed, after a day in
which she had risen at half past four to clean other people's
offices and houses, Or songs could be an essential accom-
paniment to street garnes, a way of marking a festival and
the turn of the year. The kids clubbed together and bought
songs from the ballad-sheet sellers, and used the songs in
their games. At Hogmanay, all the Scottish iron moulders
in Salford carne to his parents' house and for five days sang
every song they knew. And that was a lot o songs: his
father alone had upwards of 150 in his repertoire.
.. Since then, everything Ewan MacColl has done as a
singer, an actor, a playwright, a director, a broadcaster, has
had a point, has been to sorne purpose. His art has always
been intended to influence, to encourage, to scom, to edu-
cate, to affect people's lives, In return people have sub-
sumed him into their own culture, to the point where, for
every person who knows his name, there's a hundred who
know a snatch of one of his songs, a million who h ave ab-
sorbed indirectly his influence on radio, television, and
theatre.
WAN MacCOLL WAS BORN IN SCOTLAND IN
1915 but raised in Salford because his father had
gone there looking for work after being blacklisted
by practically every iron foundry in Scotland and
England for his trade union activities. He was the
only eme of his parents' six children to survive early child-
hood. Shortly after Ewan (then known as Jimmy Miller -
the new name carne over twenty years later under the in-
fluence of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid who was
trying to re-establish a specifically Scottish literature and
had chariged his own name from Christopher Murray Grieve)
was bom, his father went to Australia to look for work, but
was deported after ayear for trade union organising -
"That's an achievement, to be deported from Australia."
His father was blacklisted yet again in Salford, but the
family stayed there,having found a strong community of
ironmoulders from Perthshire and Lanarkshire, most of
whom he hadbeen apprenticed with and had "shared the
same jokes and the same privations." Their presence made
their area of Salford, backing onto a river that was so dirty
they said you'd asphyxiate in it before you'd drown, an off-
shoot of Scotland, where Scottish customs and especially
Scottish songs were fiercely guarded.
Even before he left school, Ewan was steeped in left-
wing politics and philosophy, His father was one of the last
of a generation of self-taught working-class radicals who
read French and German philosophy and argued utopian
theory in the pub on a Saturday night. His mother's brother
had been denounced from the kirk in Perthshire for reading
work by Alain Lesage, an eighteenth century French nove-
list, the book having been passed around the young men of
the village. Ewan was taken to his first political meeting, an
open-air rally in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-
American radicals framed and executed on murder charges,
while still young enough to be carried on h is father's shoul-
ders. The year before he left school he jo ned the Clarion
Players, a Labour Party-sponsored theatre group. "1 found
them- very slow and very casual, whereas even at that age I
was all for having a highly drilled tool th at could be used in
the interests of the revolutionary struggle. I was in a hurry.
I didn't want to wait centuries. I felt that I didn't h ave that
amount of time."
Theyears after he left school - two days after his four-
teenth birthday - and tried to pick up whatever casual
MAGILL JUNE 1988 41
 ing he could, were years of fermento There was little
e., = and no work. The district next to his had gone bank-
_-::: and had no electricity or gas for three and a half years,
-~tors who were used to addressing crowds of twelve
':;":enly had audiences of thousands. "Y ou just had to
up and you had three hundred unemployed around
__ right away." The National Unemployed Workers'Move-
- ~t went in two weeks from a membership of a few hun-
to a few hundred thousand. All over Europe fascism
as on the rise, It was now or nevero The revolution was at
-~d.
Still just fourteen, EwanMacfloll decided to establish an
","='ational theatre group called the Red Megaphones, He
zs involved with the Young Communist League and word
~ filtered through of the work that Communist street
=eatre groups were doing in Germany. "Ours was a group
::.::beginners, and because I had formed it I was made the
-:....-oducerand the scriptwriter." His interest in the theatre
~ough had nothing to do with the love of greasepant.
"The only mainstrearn theatre I'd seen was when the
-nole school had gone to a very shoddy producton of
~Dme play about the French revolution - absolutely ridi-
rnlous. I was not impressed by the British films of the
period either - the actors' expertise seemed to consist in
being able to light a cigarette lighter gracefully, or shake a
cocktail shaker or whatever,and they were lost when there
was no Tudor fireplace to lean on, no French windows to
nass through." His own theatrical impulses, on. the other
. and, were all for the cause. His scripts were about unem-
ployment or Indian trade unionists imprisoned for leading
a rail strke, performed in Saturday moming market place s
or on the steps of the public baths.
At the sarne time as he was leading theRed Megaphones,
he also startedwriting for clandestine factory newspapers,
He would col1ect information on foremen and managers,
tum it into a political squib and have the squib printed on
the duplicated sheets that were passed around the factory,
In a few years, he wrote hundreds of these satires, in be-
tween writing and performing plays and rising at 4.30 in the
moming to sel1 the Daily Worker outside the Metro Vickers
factory. He was also a dedicated hill and moorland walker,
helping in 1932 to organise the Rarnblers Rights Movement
which, through its mass trespass carnpaign aganst private
ownership of the hills and mountains succeeded in winning
rights of way for the ordinary walker.
He was already developing the working method which
was later to produce most of his best-known songs, that of
researching particular situations and occupations and then
writing songs and sketches based 01} the interviews he had
carried out. The method crystallised during the "eight 100m
strike" which broke out arnong the Lancashre weavers
when management tried to force machine operatves to
look after eight looms-instead of the customary four. Mac-
Coll and his group toured the weaving towns performing in
support of the strike. "You had to have new songs for lite-
rally every town, since every town's workers were involved
in different processes of weaving, highly specialised crafts.
If you didn't know their trade and their language you were
sunk." He becarne so adeptat putting his own words to
traditional tunes, that people all over Lancashire when they
heard traditional songs, would murmur "They've taken
Jimmy Miller's song and put new words to it." His own
voice helped the identification, a unique mixture of classi-
cal grandeur and street-fighting power.
All the time the sense of imminent cataclysm was to the
fore. In 1932 he visited Berlin for a Communist rally and
remembers the atmosphere of violence and breakdown.
"Coming out of the Sports Palace where I attended a big
meeting of 25,000 people and seeing the Nazis lined up at
every entrance with their blackjacks out, just lashing out
right and left as the audience carne out. Shouting, 'luden,
juden!' at al1 these Berlin kind of guys, most of whom were
42 MAGILLJUNE 1988
engineering workers. And the Communist 'Red Front
fighters coming into battle: organised street warfare, The
Communist Party was incredibly highly organised, over-
organised. In big working-class districts, the party leaders
had brass plates in front of their flats: 'Cell Leader Number
53 - So-and-so'. They even had their own factory for pro-
ducing leather briefcases for party functionaries. It was
dead easy for the Nazis to liquidate them in the end - they
just had to consult the directories."
I
1934,
N WHILE MacCOLL WAS WORKING AS A
fUl1-t.ime agitator in Salford and Manchester, a young
woman was walking all the way from London to
Stoke-on-Trent, Joan Littlewood, just ayear older
thanMacfloll, had decided to become a tramp, As a
student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art she had
won virtually every prize going. On graduation she was
offered a place with the celebrated Gaston Baty company
in Paris, but shortly after she arrived there the theatres were
closed because of fascist agitation on the streets. She re-
tumed to London, was unable to get work and decided to
take to the roads. She got as far as Stoke before collapsing
outside a pub, where she was taken in and given work as a
cleaner,
She wrote to Archie Harding, the head of the BBC's
northem region, who offered her sorne casual radio work.
At the BBC in Manchester she met Ewan MacColl and a few
months later they were married. Littlewood also chucked in
a job with the Manchester Rep and joined Theatre Union, .
MacColl's successor to the Red Megaphones. Out of that
partnership grew Theatre Workshop, the company which
was to revolutionise British (and to an extent lrish)theatre
after the Second World War, spawning, amongst others,
Brendan Behan's The Hostage, Shelagh Delaney's ATaste
01 Honey, Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark, and Oh,
What A Lovely War!.
By the time Littlewoodjoined him, MacColl had already
begun to feel constrained by the demands of straightfor-
ward agitprop. ''Theatre Union had been developing a style
of its own. Al1 its members had worked inindustry, where
the thing that you did liad to be done well, and theycarried
the sarne attitude into theatre, If six of you have to shout a
slogan together, let's do it better than any other six have
ever done it. It was a bit like being in the army - we drilled
and drilled and drilled, and I was the drillmaster. But bit by
bit I began to feel I wanted more than slogans, however
good the slogans were. You want something that will in-
volve you not just as a political human being, but as a
human being per se, somethingthat will talk about your
feelings, experiences and all the rest, So I began to develop
a much more complicated type of documentary theatre."
These new forms included a pageant on the Spanish Civil
War with Paul Robeson, and Last Edition, a "living news-
paper", dealing with the events leading up to the Second
World War, which was closed down by the policeand led to
Littlewood and Maceoll being arrested and bound over to
keep the peace for two years, "It was a bit ironic being
bound over to keep the peace just as the world was sliding
into a huge and terrible war." .
After that war, during which MacCol1 served in the
army, Theatre Union was re-formed as Theatre Workshop.
MacCol1 married a dancer who carne into the company,
Jean Newlove, but his working relationship with Littlewood
remained close, Their aim now was to combine as many arts
- acting, dance, song, music, light - into a powerful form
of theatre that would get away from cigarette lighters and
French windows once and for ano MacColl experimented
with light and sound in his first Theatre Workshop play
johnny Noble, but he was also extending his old methods
of folk song and documentary, writing 'Dirty Old Town'
in three hours to cover a scene change, taking a crash course
in physics and mathematics in order to write the first play
on the atom bomb, Radium, produced just months after
Hiroshima and featuring, not characters, but protons and
neutrons,
With such work, Theatre Workshop was gathering a
national and international reputation, constantly on the
move, without public funding, the actors sharing the box
office receipts among themselves. But that very success
exposed divisions in the company between those who
wanted to establish a permanent base in London, and those
like MacCon, who insisted that it had to remain true to its
working class roots. When Theatre Workshop bought the
old Theatre Royal in Stratford East in 1953, Macfloll left
in disgusto "1 felt the whole point h ad gone in moving to
Stratford East, Others felt that the company should be
where they would get consistent critical attention, but 1
felt that it hardly mattered what the critics thought of us,
sin ce they were probably completely hostile to our politics
anyway. In breaking through and becoming famous, Theatre
Workshop destroyed itself." Nevertheless one of the com-
pany's most successful early productions at Stratford East
was Macfloll's own adaptation of the great Czech satirical
novel The Good Soldier Schuieik .
T
HE COLLAPSE OF EVERYTHING HE HAD
worked for in the theatre for thirty years left
MacCon in despair .. Casting around. for direction,
he found a statement by the Hungarian composer
Bela Bartok in which Bartok remarked that ar-
tists must learn to create "in the way the folk create." The
phrase struck him like a revelation, making him think again
about the song-writng which had always been an integral
but subsidiary part of his theatre work. Other things were
happening too: a craze for skiffle , largely second-hand ver-
sions of American folk songs was sweeping Britain, and
Alan Lomax, the great American conector of folk songs had
arrived in Britain. Lomax introduced Macfloll to two men
who, with him, were to start the folk revival in these islands,
Seamus Ennis and Bert Lloyd, a British radio producer and
folk conector.
The three men were so excited with their discovery of
each other :that they stood talking in the street for hours,
swopping stories and songs, and planning their strategy.
They agreed that the medium which could save folk music
was at hand - radio. Ennis returned to Ireland to become a
central figure in reviving the heritage of folk music and song
I
through his radio programmes. Macfloll began to think
seriously about the medium of radio, a medium which was
then still the prmary form of popular entertainment.
He began with a series for the BBC which aimed at show-
ing the origins of American folk music in these islands and
directing attention to English, Scottish and Irish traditions.
The series was broadcast at peak listening times and attrac-
ted a huge audience response. But at the same time he was
also on the brink of becoming more closely involved with
the American folk tradition. He was appearing on a tele-
vision series which Lomax was producing for Granada, play-
ing with a group called The Ramble~s. Lomax invited an
American singer and banjo-player to join them.
Peggy Seeger was a member of a famous musical family
which included her half-brother Pete. She arrived from
Amsterdam in her usual untidy and bedraggled state, and a
horrified television company encased her hair in a bun, her
feet in high-heels, and her lips in lipstick. In this state, Mac-
con met her. "1 did notice about a week later that she
hadn't washed since then. 1 deterrnined that if she was
going to be my love, she would have to wash." The Granada
series ran for ten episodes, and over ten long train journeys
from London to Manchester, they fell in love. Shortly after-
wards, when she was playing in Los Angeles and he had
been denied entry to the US on political grounds she asked
him for a short song to finish a televised concert and he
composed, over the phone, one of the great love songs of
the century, 'The First Time Ever 1 Saw Your Face',
Radio continued to attract him. In 1958, Charles Parker,
a BBC producer, suggested that he write a radio script based
on the story of John Ackson, a train driver who had sacri-
ficed his own life to save a train load of children, MacCon
began to interview rail workers about Ackson and about
their jobs, using the newly invented portable tape recorders
to capture their language and their stories. He spent ten
days recording around the rail sheds, pestering everyone he
found and hanging on to the footplates of moving trains
trying to rescue the miles of tape that f1uttered in the wind
as he tried to change the spools. The tapes were meant to
be used as the basis for scripts to be spoken by actors. In-
stead, MacCon persuaded Parker to use the actual voices,
and, furthermore, to replace formal narration with songs to
be composed specially for the programme. No one had ever
used "actuality" in the broadcast media in this way before,
By using ordinary people's voices and his own songs with
MAGILL JUNE 1988 43
 " 'Ah now, Mr Behan, Mr MacColl has le ft strict instructions that you 're not
to be let in. 'By not tuming up, Brendan Behan had managed to be even
more disruptive than it he had come. "
2.l arrangements by Seeger, MacCollhad invented a
z::.d enormously influential art form, the radio ballad.
and television documentary would never be the
~~e Ballad 01 John Ackson, broadcast on 2 July 1958
".ollowed,in the years up to 1964, by seven more radio
zds, the most famous being Song 01 the Road which
= with the building of the motorways, Singing the Fish-
E hich won .the 1960 Prix Italia and inc1udedsuch songs
i"7.;oals01 Herring and North Sea Holes, The Big Hewer,
on the lives of miners and dealing with a legendary
-:.._t said to have been the ultimate miner, and The Trauel-
-j People which inc1uded songs like Freeborn Man and the
_~g-On Songo These radio ballads, recorded on- one-
_rl quarter inch tape, were a mixture of drama, doeumen-
::I::', social history and folk opera, combining precise1ythe
ents which MacCo1lhad sought to bring together in the
zz.eatre.
All this time, too, Maceoll retained an active interest in
:::::e theatre. Among his friends was the Theatre Workshop's
-..::;w star, Brendan Behan. Behan, arrested in Paris for vag-
ancy, told the French police that MacColl had money be-
gng to him, and Ewan was contacted to bail the play-
right out. The friendship could also be discomfiting, part-
znlarly when Behan would decide to hold a conversation
=om the back of a hall with MacCo1lwho was playng on
rtage, When The Hostage was running in New York ano
Behan was taking possession of the city, MacCon and
Seeger were booked to play a concert in the prestigious
Garnegie Hall. Behan located MacColl and told him he'd
be at the concert. MacColl warned that under no crcum-
nances was he to tum up and disrupt the occasion. Behan
left down the phone with a fanfare of curses, assuringMac-
con that he'd be there on the nght,
"1 was really worried so I left a note for the doormen at
the Cmegie to say that there would be a fellow called
Brendan Behan arriving, a big man with a strong accent, and
under no circumstances was he to be let in. Then Peggy and
I went for a meal before the concert at a nearby restaurant.
When we were leaving, I remembered that I'd left my list of
the songs I was going to sing back at the table and I went
back for it. It was getting late so Peggy went on ahead, I
was just going in to the hall on my own when the doormen
stopped me and said 'Ah now, Mr Behan, Mr MacColl has
left strict instructions that you're not to be let in.' I was
this big man with a funny accent behaving oddly , insisting
he was Ewan MacCon and demanding to be let in. Eventual-
ly the woman at the box office gave me a ticket - they
wouldn't let me backstage, so I had to go in through the
stalls. By this time Peggy was already on stage. There were
no steps up to the stage, so 1had to c1amberup like a mad-
man. By not tuming up, Behan had managed to be even
more disruptive than if he had come."
L
UKEKELLY WASIN THE SHOWERWHENTHE
nice Edinburgh couple in wh.osehouse he was stay-
ing - a doctor and his wife - started to hear
strange noises, strangulated throaty sounds corning
from upstairs. ''My God" they thought "he's an
epileptic, and he's having a fit." They rushed upstairs and
shouted through the door at him, but got no reply except
the same strange throaty sounds. ''My God" they thought
"he could be drowning in the shower." They kept calling
and getting no answer. Eventuallv, they smashed down the
!ocked.door, and found young Luke Kelly standing under
44 MAGILLJUNE 1988
the shower practising the vocal exercises which Ewan Mac-
Coll had set for him: "Mee, mee, mee, ahh, ahh, ahh ... "
Luke Kelly, like many other young aspirant foIk singers,
had joined, in 1960 a group called The Critics which Mac-
Coll had established in order to explore foIk traditions and
train young singers three years earlier. The Critics had
grown out of MacCo1land Seeger's Singers' Club in London,
and Kelly, an expatrate Irishman with left-wing connec-
tions had drifted into their circle in between journeys back
to Dublin where the' begnnngs of The Dubliners were
being formed. "1 remember him sitting spellbound at con-
certs and sessions.But he soon became an active member of
the group. He came to us a raw, young fellow but he deve-
loped with great speed into the kind of singer he became'
famous as." MacColl's fear for Kelly was that the very
strength of his voice might make a1l songs sound similar,
subsuming everything into its own sometimes raucous
power.
The idea of The Critics was something very different.
MacCon always looked on singingas an extension of acting,
and his teaching methods involved an almost Stanislavskian
approach to singing: why are you singing this song? What
does it mean now? How should you best communicate it to
an audience? Under MacColl's influence, Kelly began to
modulate his voice and to sing a wider range of songs: songs
collected by Seamus Ennis, songs of protest, traditional
songs in the style of J oe Heaney, the great Connemara
singer.
With this closeness to theatrical performance in the sing-
ing, it was inevitable that The Critics would develop back
towards the theatre, From the mid-Sxtes until 1971, The
Critics staged an annual Festival of Fools, based on the
mediaeval idea of a Fool's Day when the world was tumed
upside down and criticism was let loose, The Festival deve-
loped the methods of the radio ballads, using documentary
material reflecting the events of the previous year, topical
songs by MacCon and performances that gradually became
more sophstcated as tite young singers developed into
actors, It was also produced under the same frantic pressure,
MacCon rehearsing and writing at the same time, changing
songs and sketches throughout to keep up with events. But
this very plethora of activities also led to the break-up of
The Critics, Gradually, as the other members developed
ther own skills, MacCon's desire and ability to do every-
thing and control everything created resentment. In 1971
the group disbanded and never reformed. It was another
bitter disappointment for MacCol,as bad as the split which
ended his involvement in Theatre Workshop.
T
HE REVOLUTION NEVER CAME BUT MAC-
con survived the setbacks as he has survivedthree
heart-attacks in the last few years, Large doses of
. medication dry out his body so that, in order to
sing, he has to fill his throat and mouth with an
artificial saliva. Sometimes, in the .middle of a line, his
voice just dies, the song cut off like a frozen engine, lost
and hanging in the empty airoBut he plucks it out of the air
again and continues, now so adept at smoothing over the
gaps that often the audience doesn't notice him wriggling
free of the constraints of time with all the aplomb of those
escapologists -on the streets of Salford all those years ago,
And he still doesn't sit back in his chair. On stage, he sits
astride a back-to-front chair, leaning forward with the eager-
ness of a man ready to ride into battle on a foarningcharger.
He draws breath and advances.
 From a Jack toa King
T
HE LOUDEST CHEER
heard this year was the one
which greeted the very 'last
vote of the Dutch jury, which deprved
England of another Eurovision song
contest victory. Thousands rejoiced all
over the country, the degree of malice
varying from friendly rivalry to down-
right dislike of England.
Now the European Champonshps
in West Germany have presented us
with a tan talising prospect, an opening
game against England. The possibility
of stuffng the familiar names of
Englsh football is mouth-watering.
The lrish will not lack for motivation
or commitment nor will there be any
.shortcomngs in preparaton
manager Jack Charlton guarantees
that. Dreams of an historie victory will
soon tum to a nightmare, as the hard
facts are brought home to us that
England possess the best players and
will win.
However Wimbledon's recent un-
believable victory was encouragng, It
demonstrated the true value of work
rate and organisation - both the hall-
marks of Ireland's qualification. It
further shows the unpre dictability of
football. Wimbledon managed to stifle
the multi-talented players of Liverpool,
arguably the best team in Europe.
They subdued Englishman 10hn
Barnes who this season has taken the
Englsh league by storm with his
entertaining range of sklls, change of
pace, crossing ablty, and scoring
touch. His range of talentshave been
galvanised by a consistency he has
never shown before. With no reason to
suggest he cannot carry this form into
intemational football the question is
who have we got to handle him? The
task may well be beyond fullback
Chrs Mortis but a switch of the more
physically-capable Anderson to the
right side with Ray Houghton cutting
off a service to Barnes, and whenever
possble confronting him rst, could
well do the trick.
Stopping a .wde supply to
England's front two is mportant but
not crucial. The much malgned de-
fensive partnershp of Kevin Moran
and Mick McCarthy has the unenviable
job of containing the five million
pound duo, Peter Beardsley and Gary
Lineker. Moran has the strength and
commitment to nullify Beardsley, yet
his fearlessness will strike fear in the.
lrish defence. Kevin will not want to
lose his concentration, particularly
around the box where the tricky
Liverpool man invites challenges which
often lead to goals or dangerous free-
kicks. Moran's partner McCarthy will
not be given as much cover as he
would like in bis dual wth Lineker,
although aerial supremacy will rest
with the lrishman. On the ground the
electrifyng pace of the Englsh hero
poses a maior threat.
Gary Lineker s the preven article,
and much of England's hopes are
pinned on hm. His development as a
worId class player has been enhanced
by his transfer to Barcelona, where the
strict man-to-man marking is a weekly
occurrence. The physical presence of
McCarthy will not be enough and our
best hope of unsettling him could be
the offside trap, which when success-
fully sprung can be very costly, con-
sidering the amount of space behind
our back four, It will not surprise me
to see McCarthy and Moran change or
share roles throughout the game.
M IDFIELD IS WHERE THE
real battle for supremacy will
take place. Ireland will want
to bypass it in the buld-up stages to
deny McMahon, Reid or Robson the
opportunity to win early tack1es and
gain confidence-building involvement.
The defensive role of England will
involve tuming and tracking players in
an effort to cut out the forward
running lrish. But the team that picks
up the majority of the ensuing knock-
downs could set themselves up for
vctory, An appette for work without '
the ball will favour the lrish more than
the English.
When England have possesson their
build up will be slow, with more
people getting a touch and the wing
men, Barnes and Trevor Stevens wll ,
MAGILL JUNE 1988 4S
::::::::::
::::r:==:1Jy
gerous wide targets, They will ;
- T""
pro be the Irish midfield
,"""'; ::~cnce looking for opportunities
t::: ;;.,.7 :heir forwards through, In this
j"'"':"t - ::J..e dangerous forward running
::f ::'_.,;:n Robson must be stopped. It's
~ =-~d's hopes will resto Can we
..
_~ them early and often
e::...: .: '- to force mistakes and win the
r::.-:::.~The strong running Houghton is
~ :or the role and won't lack for
~ce from our front two.
:::-= what of the rest? McGrath has
~ .""5$ to adjust to a holding and dis-
--=- ;\ e role but he may be just short
o:;. coverng ground consstently. If
;;:i::: Sheridan is his partner he too is
.::.:-rt his strongest harrying for the
tz..... The return of a fit Ronnie Whelan
'",_=n offer more encouragement in
1:.:.='::entre,provided he is not required
r; .dt back to deal with the highly
':..."':'n Stevens. Tt is a bit of a dilemma
:.;:.. Charlton sorting out where to play
F' .. He's adept at both positions but
1Tould certainly opt for playing him
'::: ::te middle.
IT
HE LEFT SIDE IS A BIT
dodgy. Sheedy undoubtedly
has class when in possession,
== the injury-prone Evertonian would
zeed to graft more if we are to
~eed. Tony Galvin and Mark Kelly
zre two other contenders but neither
5:s the bill. Galvin's domestic season
':::1.>ll'tbeen terrific and despite coming
=om the fanatically fit Sheffield
'\fednesday he surprisingly still looks
~.bit short of fitness. Kelly could be
used effectively as a replacement
during games. His directness and flair
can change a game. He does not have
che maturity just yet for this standard
o competition but we will certainly
hear from him in the future. I don't
believe we can close England down
early and consistently enough, which
will allow them a platform to dictate
and control matters, where controlled
passing instead of hurried passing has a
greater chance of exposing the space
behind our back four. The English
possess another string to their bow,
and unlike the continentals they are
capable of making good use of the
early ball under pressure. This too is a
danger to Ireland when we succeed in
pressurising.
Up front we have a choice of four,
Stapleton, Aldridge, Quinn and Kelly,
Stapleton should lead the line, where
his tireless running and . leadership
qualities can be used to their fullest.
3ut following a string of injuries and
1:;} unhappy season at Ajax where his
abrasve style never clicked there are
~ubts about his fitness. The saddest
zspect of the Stapleton affair is his
=eatment by a section of supporters
d media. Captain Frank will be well
+~ YAGILL JUNE 1988
motivated for Germany to prove
everyone wrong, Dutch included, and
he could well tum those jeers to cheers
if he makes it. Adams, Watson or who
ever starts in the heart of the English
defence could be the first ones te
suffer. I hope so!
John Aldridge, who has also been
criticised, is the likely partner foi
Stapleton, even though his nablity
to score in the Charlton plan must be
causing concern. His goal famine has
to end, but whether he will be given
his full quota of games if it doesn't s
doubtful.
Meanwhile enforced absences in
recent internationals have allowed
Dave Kelly, Walsall's leading scorer
and most valuable asset, a chance to
stake a claim, that is growing with
. every match, forhis club and country,
His amazing scoring run is hard to
argue with and, despte the un-
certainty of his pedigree and the big
jump from the lower divisions to the
international arena, I feel certain that
he will force himself into action iIJ
Germany, if not from the start then
somewhere along the way. His willing-
ness for work and ambition to play at
a higher level could be the driving
force that will inspire Ireland.
To beat England in a toumament o
standing would leave memories that
would last forever. It would lift the
spirit of the entire nation and leave
Jack Charlton as the unrivalled "King".
The thought is so pleasing that to
dwell on it would make the bitter pill
of defeat all that harder to swallow.
Seldom has there been a more im-
portant ninety minutes. Success in this
one would forgive any other result
that rnight occur.
FOCUS-_ ON ITALY
.__ ._-~ .. ~~-_.
QUESTIONED ABOUT THE
relative youthfulness of bis squad
Italian manager Azeglio Vicini told
reporters that it could be a problem,
"but it would be better to pay that
price in the European finals now if iIJ
two years' time we get it right for the
World Cup",
It was the sort of comment,
managers usually come out with after
their experimental team has lost, but
Italy had just hamrnered the Soviet
Union 4-1, with the youthful Gianluca
Vialli doing most of the damage.
Vicini even replaced Vialli with a
younger player, twenty-year-old
Ruggiero Rizzitelli, just after half
time.
Withlikes of veteran defender
Antonio Cabrini retiriIJgfrom the
ti 1t V , . b ild f
na iona eam icmi must re u or
the World CUp iIJ 1990, yet sorne
observers believe it might be to It aly's
detrimerit in West Germany.
A FTER THE EMOTION OF
the English game we. travel
to Hanover and the Nieder-
sachens stadium where we will meet
the mighty Russians. This is the team
that has more than a flavour of a club
rtmosphere , due to the fact that its
nake-up is largely that of the crack
Kiev Dynamo, former European club
champons. The Russians have come
.hrough one of the mostdifficult
qualfyng sections in style, ousting
the fading former champions, France,
md eliminating the dangerous East
::;ermans, all this without the loss of a
garne. One of their heroes was goal
icorer Igor Belanov, who contributed
four goals. Igor, former European
Footballer of the Year, possesses tight
control and a terrific change of pace.
<\t twenty-seven years of age he will be
.ooking to make a major impression
m the finals, which he hopes will
ead toa last flurry in European club
'ootball, His attacking partner is the
'amous Oleg Blokin's replacement,
)leg Protasov, a player whose scoring
ibility is attracting considerable
rttenton, Again he is technically solid
out he might not fancythe physical
ittentons of Mick McCarthy.
The Russian style is based on solid
lefensive principles and they are
'enowned for making things difficult.
l'hey can soak up a considerable
unount of pressure. They also have
n Rinat Dassayev, one of the best goal-.
ceepers in the world. He lends con-
'idence with bis commandiIJg
ipproach and his distribution, setting
ip quick counter-attacks, is excellent.
l'he Russians will be techncally sound
md well disciplined. They possess pace
.hroughout the team and are at their
Still Italy will be hard to beato
They have lost once iIJ eleven games
and a1though comparisons are not
always fair or accurate they managed
to beat Sweden last November with
goals from ViaIli, something that
both the Soviets and the Germans
failed to do. During that time the team
has been fairly settled, with ViciIJi
making shrewd rather than forced
substitutions.
Italy should be better than Spain
and Denmark but it is unlikely that
they will beat the Germans, so if they
reach the serni-finals Holland should
be their opponents and that wiIl be a
game and a half, with the Dutch the
favourites.
TAL Y; Probable squad: Zenga, Tacconi,
Bergomi, Ferri, Maldini, Bagni, Baresi,
Ferrara, Francini, Cravero, Agoetini, De
Napoli, ru, Romano, Ancelotti, Giannini,
Donadoni, Altobelli, Mancini, Vialli,
Riezitelli.
 most dangerous when they counter-
attack. In the minds of many they are
one of the finest teams in Europe.
Football is not only about technical
ability, skill, and tactics, it also in-
volves the largely unmeasurable
.quality of passon or commitment. In
this regard a bg question mark hangs
over the character of the Russians, and
is never more glaring than when they
play away. They have promised so
much in the past and yet never de-
livered. I see no reason for this to
change. They have the ability to wn
the competition but they won't,
because they lack the guts,
I expect the Russians to draw their
opening match against Holland but I
believe they offer the lrish their best
opportunity for a surprse resulto With
our enthusiasm, passon and commit-
ment we are capable of stifling the
Russans' undoubted technical ability
and win a drw, Char1ton's preparations
pitted us rnostly aganst East European
teams and while none were of the
standard o Russia they were similar in
temperament and the experence will
have helped uso We must not forget
also our recent vctory over them,
when Mickey Walsh scored -the winner
in Landsdowne Road in the 1985
World Cup qualifiers, showing just
how realistic our chances can be.
As we battle to achieve a much
needed point the Englsh face the
Dutch. The result of this game will
prove very significant when the two
qualifyng place s are being decided, A
Dutch victory will guarantee them a:
place in the semi-final.
Maradona's Napol to win the Italian
charnponshp and Gullit's name is not
only being classed beside Maradona,
but by sorne aboye him. This I cannot
FOCUSONWEST GERMANY
"WEST GERMANY ARE NOT A
world class team," bemoan
German media, who doubt manager
Franz Beckenbauer 's credentials and
his sqtiad's strength, Constantly
criticised by his country's
writers, Beckenbauer has failed to
believe. Undoubtedly he is an
excellent player, but judgement for
this type of appraisal must be severe.
Ruud Gullit is filling a void in the
media that demands a fresh face every
so often. He is talented, colourful and
flamboyant but has yet to prove
himself. His test will come in Germany
and like that of any super performer
he must deliver on the international
. and world stage, If he lives up to
expectations it should be a very
exciting time indeed. How Ireland will
han die him is our immediate worry , I
remember him moving from the back
into midfield at Dalymount Park as .
Ireland led 2-0. He changed the whole
course of the game and scored two as
Holland recovered to win 3-2.
At twenty years of age he then
promised to be an exciting star of the
future. His free running and control
make him difficult to mark, and as we
don't possess a specialised man marker
it's unlikely that this course of action
will be taken. Rather as he approaches
dangerous areas he will be picked up
by the nearest defender. .
The Dutch team, however, does not
.revolve around one mano They are a
highly and skilful bunch who have all
the
soccer

G OING INTO THE LAST convince them that he has adequately

game of the series, and pro-
vided we have achieved a
point on the way , then our hopes of
progressing further will still existo The
odds however won't frighten the
bookmakers. Holland will beat us,
provided there are no unusual circum-
stances. They might field sorne
reserves knowing they have already
qualifed, The Dutch are unbeaten so
far and are being hailed as the team of
the future, Whether or not this is a
fair assessment remains to be seen.
Inevitably comparsons will be made
with the great Dutch .team of the
Seventies, and its refreshing brand of
total football.
Lifting that team of the past from
the good to the really good was one
rnan, Johan Cruyff, He belongs to the
select group of people who can lay
genuine claims to being the best player
in the world. In Ruud Gullit the
presenr Dutch team has a player
comparable to Cruyff.. At twenty-five
he is receiving raye reports in the
Italian and European press, His club
A.C. Milan have just dethroned
rebuilt the team that finished runners-
up to Argentina in the 1986 World
Cup.They prefer to wallow, he insists,
in the nostalgia of the early Seventies
'super-team' which won the World and
European titles.
Following those victories over
France, England and Denrnark, West
Germany have won only once in six
matches as Beckenbauer has struggled
to field a settled team. The em-
barrassing defeat by Sweden in the
Berlin tournament highlighted
Beckenbauer's agony, After Allofs had
given them a first-half lead the
Germans,as they have done in most
garnes over the past year, allowed the
opposition back into the garne and
Sweden eventually won on penalties.
West Germany have two games left
before the championships and with
the exception of possibly sweeper of Italy and Span but itis hard to
Mathias Herget, Beckenbauer still does believe that Beckenbauer won't take
not know what his defence will be. In them through to the final.
1986 West Germany won through to WEST GERMANY: Probable squad: Immel,
Illgner,Kohler, Herget, Buchwald, Berthold,
the World Cup final by dsplayng their Frontzek, Borowka-Matthaus, Dorfner,
strength and aggresson. This time that Reuter, Rolf, Thon, Bremhe, Pfluger-
Littbarksi, Voller, Klinsmann, Rahn,
mght not be enough aganst the likes Wuttke, Eckstein, Neubarth.

MAGILLJUNE 1988 47

FOCUS ON SOVIET UNION
THE SOVIET UNION HAS ALWAYS
proctuced potentially world beating
teams, yet only in 1960 when it won
the first European Nations Cup (the
forerunner of the present champion-
ships) has it achieved success. The
always skilful but pragmatic Soviets
have a good record in the champion-
ships, runners-up in 1964 and 1972,
fourth in 1968 and quarter-finalists in
1976. Since then their only success in
a major championship has been in the
World Cups of '82 and '86 when they
reached the quarter-finals. Their
manner of defeat in the latter, that
thrilling seven goal encounter with
Belgium , is a measure of the enigmatic
Soviets.
In form the Soviets have been
rated by many as the best team in
graduated from their own domestic
scene. Dutch clubs are in the middle of
a renaissance and can .no w provide
quality players from the giants of
Ajax , last year's European Cup
Winners Cup victors and the 1988
runners up and PSV Eindhoven, this
year's Dutch representatives in the
finals of the charnpions cup against
Benfica. Ironically , Johan Cruyff has
aad a considerable input into this
upsurge of Dutch talento He managed
Ajax where he implemented so many
cf his techniques.
John Bosman, is a name we will be
"i:.-a:ing much about. He is a' lethal
:x.;her from Ajax , and at twenty-
thr-e is averaging a goal in every
second internationa!. His shooting is
reminiscent of the great Rudi Kroll,
and he will need individual attention.
There is also PSV's most accomplished
defender Ronald Koeman, who allows
Gullit the confidence and freedom to
seek out attacking possibilities at every
opportunity , His reading of the game
stands out as the strength , and he has
8 \fAGILLJUNE 1988
Europe and while Protasov recovered
his goal-scorng instincts with a hat-
trick against Greece and two more in
the 4-2 victory over Argentina in the
Berlin toumament it is clear that the
team still lacks consistency. This was
proved when Sweden, in front of
Bobby Robson (England), Rinus
Michel (Holland), Jack Charlton
(Ireland) and Sepp Piontek
(Denmark), strolled to a 2-0 win in the
final of the Berln toumament after
Protasov had missed an early chance
to put the Soviets ahead.
Yet Protasov is still a threat, He has
consistently scored goals for his club,
Kiev Dynamo, and for his country,
and he has the skills to outshoot the
likes of Lineker, Van Basten, Vialli,
Elkjaer and Butragueno in these
championships.
Kiev still make up most of the
Soviet squad and many of the players
who threatened to take theircountry
to greater heights in Mexico two years
ago are still around. Kev's Alexei
Mikhailichenko and Gennadi
Litovchenko have the skills to provide
Protasov with all the goal scoring
chances he needs and that could be
enough to take the Soviets into the
semi-finals, but the doubts are still
there.
SOVIET UNIoN: Probable' squad:
Dossaveu, Chanov, Besonov, Sulakvelidze,
Khidiatuiin, . Baltacha, Demianeno,
Yakovenko, Rats, Kuznetsov, Bubnov,
Tishenko, Losev,. Aleinihov, Gotsmanov,
Lttovchenho, Mikhailichenko, Pro taso v,
Belanov, Zavarov, Pasulko. (Dobrovolski,
Rodionov and Btohhin. are also p ossibilities],
also been known to score in thunder-
bo1t fashion. There is also the mature
Muhren. His left foot and experience
could still pose a threat.
Hol1and have the players, the class
and the intention to keep the ball for
long periods. They are capable of
encouraging Ireland's enthusiastic
troops into ene rgy-sapping and fruit-
less pressurising. At the best of times
we will struggle to match them but in
what will be our third game, our'
workrate could be affected. This
control1ed possession, and the alert-
ness o' Marco Van Basten and Co
could lead to Ireland suffering their
heaviest defeat. Their forwards are
patient for a service and when t comes
it can often be of the highest quality ,
Van Basten, the A.C. Milan striker,
could turn out to be the leading scorer
in the competition. His individualism,
pace and goalscoring touch rnark him
out as another who has the potential
to make this charnponshp his own.
The European finals are a big stage,
and reputations can stand or fal!. The
Dutch stars, Gullit, Rijkaard, Van
Basten, and keeper Van Breukelen
have a chance to rid themselves of the
ghosts of yesteryear, redeemng the
barren years and securng a place of
ther own in their country's soccer
hstory , A hungry Holland will make
an impression, but I cannot see them
getting past the semi final.
The Germans who possess the
strongest league in Europe and are
playing at home, will have too much
going for them, while the Italans
possess too much craft and individual
marking techniqus, -Phe-tournament
will be the perfect progression for
Holland and will act as a platform for
a serious bid in the 1990 World Cup.
T
HE LIKELY LINE-UP FOR
the semi-finals is: Germany,
Italy, Holland and England,
all four having been World Cup final-
ists at one time. Irish hopes of
reaching this stage are unrealistic, even
if it is not very patriotic to say so.
Should we do a Wimbledon and prove
myself and rnany more wrong, how
would we compare with the likes of
Italy? '
The Italians, true to form, will just
scrape through to the semi-finals,
with probably three draws. Goal
average will do the resto They under-
estimate nobody and very often give
teams too much respect, which has
resu1ted in many lesser teams coming
away with shock resu1ts. They defend
incredibly well, even though t touches
on the cynical at times, but their in-
sistenceon a safety first policy does
not do justice to the ability and
individual flair of their team - Enzo
Bearzot, the manager who guided
them so successfully in the past, has
gone and new man Azeglo Vicini is
reshaping a youthful side that
promises so mucho Zenga is a goal-
keeper building a reputation worthy to
follow in .the footsteps of Zoff.
Scoring sensation Vialli and twenty-
year-old Ruggerio Rizzitelli are very
much to the fore. If Ireland play them
it would be an afternoon of fouls with
Italan defenders feeling threatened by
the long early ball over their heads and
obstructing and pulling to avert the
immediate danger. Our tackling too'
would cause sorne concern andonly a
strong referee could avoid sendings-
off. Italy might win by a quick break,
or Ireland on penalities.
Germany will wn.. Beckenbauer
will once agan be hailed as the Kaiser,
while the players and supporters dance
their merry way. Curious how similar
such responses are to the Irish cele-
brations followng our initial qualifi-
cation, but it just keeps the whol
occasion in perspective. Ireland under
the leadership of Jack Charlton have
taken a huge leap forward and are
 already successfu1. We go to Germany
in a learning capacity , not a s potential
champions. Of course we will try to
win , and hopefully cause an upset or
FOCUS ON HOLLAND
two , but the Irish mission will be well
served if our performances can con- UNLIKE THEIR GERMAN
solida te. and match the incredible counterparts the Dutch media are
interest that has been generated supremely confident about their
countrywide especially at schoolboy nation's success in .the championships.
and commercial sponsorshp level. Also unlike the Germans, Holland -
who are back in their first maior fina1s
since 1980 - appear to have a team to

J ACK CHARLTON DOESN'T match the success of their Seventies

doss about fcotball, he wants
to win. All his footballing life
he has been tasting the sweetness of
success, from league and cup honours
in Britain to the staggering heights of
international football and a World Cup
medal. His style is threatening and un-
comprornisng. He is living proof that
the game doesn't belong only to the
goal scorers and the flamboyant. Jack
is the role model for any Joe Soap of
average ability who has the heart and
desire to make it. He knows the value
of preven ting the opposition playing
football, a quality essential to any
successful side, but' which is fre-
quently disparaged or ignored in the
media.
The big man's directness on the
field has followed him .into manage-
mento He worr't be messed about by
anyone. He's dogged and, following his
initial period of barking in the Irish
camp , where he laid down the law and
crucially followed up with sorne severe
bite s such as the dropping of O'Leary ,
Brady and Robinson, the message
became c1ear; anyone wanting to take
him on was welcorne , but they would
lose.
The possibility of Charlton losing
hasn't bothered him. There was always
fishing, His independence of the jo b is
. his strength , The players know who
-the boss is. He had passed their test.
Of course the truth is, players are at
their best and happiest when they
are being controlled.
I see Charlton as a pragrnatist and
cannot believe he would use the same
tactics if he controlled a team of the
calibre and tradition of Holland.
Despite his undoubted belief in the
style of the present Irish team , I feel
it has sternrned from a deep analysis of
the squad at his disposal and the
opposition he is likely to face.
The following assessments would , I
believe, be the basis of his philoso phy.
1. The Irish squad doesn't possess
enough technically proficient players
to build the play through midfield
and defeat the Europeans at their
own game.
2. The squad available to him can
best develop on the principIes of graft,
teamwork and cornpetitiveness, with
matches played at blistering pace.
3. The continentals have been
'superteam '. In Marco Van Basten,
Ruud Gullit and John Bosrhan,
Holland have arguably the most potent
strike force in the championships.
Holland are unbeaten in 11 suc-
cessive games (exc1uding the 8-0 defeat
of Cyprus, in which Bosman hit five
. and Gullit scoredhis sixth international
goal in as many matches, dec1ared void
because of crowd trouble). Manager
Rinus Michels, who has said he will
retire from the job after fue finals,
has a settled team, strong in defence,
midfield and attack.
Gullit has said that he doesn't know
whether Holland can win the
championships "but people will enjoy
watching us try , We have an excellent
squad. If somebody is injured or
suspended then we have other players
of such.quality that no body is missed ",
When Holland played England at
Wem bley in March there were six
PSV Eindhoven players in the squad.
Keeper Hans Van Breukelen, Koeman,
and midfielders Gerald Vanenburg and
Barry Van Aerle started the game
while defender Dick Koot carne on for
Van 't Schip , The 1982 'Golden Boot'
winner with thirty-two goals for Ajax,
Wim Kieft was on the berich.
Add Van Bastem, Gullit and the
considerable experience of Arnold
Muhren and it is easy to see why the
playng unopposed possession at the
back for so long that a fresh approach,
pressurising them early could reap
rewards.
4. Continentals' heading ability has
been suspect over the years and can be
exploited by getting crosses 'in hgh.
and often.
5. The man-to-man marking with a
sweeper so favoured by the Europeans
can be vulnerable when defenders are
made turn and chase the ball played
over their heads, particularly diagonal
passes.
Like it or lump it this is the style
we are, taking to Germany and
ultimately it is what Charlton will be
judged on. Success has come from an
approach based on certain principIes
and their rigid implementation, and
with the finals at hand we cannot
afford an identity crisis. In recent
intemationals, flushed with success,
sorne players have started to indulge in
Dutch media believe the new Holland
may surpass the Cruyff era. Holland
were beaten World Cup finalists in
'74 (to West Germany) and in '78 (to
Argentina) and they were third in the
1976 European championships. The
Dutch are sending the largest con-
tingent of supporters to West Germany.
Who will stop them retuming home
happy?
HOLLAND: Probable squad: Van Breukelen,
Hiele, Van Tiggelen, Lanhhaar, Spelb os,
Troost, Koeman, Siloo v , Koot, Rijh aard;
Muhren, Wouters, Van Aerle, Gillhaus,
Winter, Varienburg, Kruzen, Van Basten,
Gullit, Bosman, Van't Schip, Kteit;
a contradictory short passinggame,
notably Morris, Houghton and
Hughton, building it down the flanks.
In a group that sees us as the weakest
of four nations we must stick to our
game-plan as diligently as ever. The
understanding of our real strengths
and weaknesses will show us the need
for uniformity in approach. Having
come so far we must not weaken now,
My idea of the beautiful game is
not the one portrayed by the present
team, but who can argue with success?
Perhaps the right results in Germany
will lead to a reassessment of my
thinkng, Nonetheless by achieving
their goal of qualification the Irish
managernent team have raised ex-
pectations and ignited the passions of
thousands. These finals represent the
big stage, the big rnoney, and the big
prizes, But, as is often the case in
affairs of the heart, 'affection betrayed'
can have traumatic consequences.

MAGILL JUNE 1988 49

 hoDrealD , .

With a last-minute Scottish Cup Final goal at Hampden Par k on May 14, Glasgow Celtic
realised the "perfect, daring drearu' of winning the League-and-Cup double in their
centeuary year. Here , EAMNN McCANN concludes his two-part account of the history of
Celtic - a club with a unique association with Ireland and Irish nationalism.

SO MAGILL JUNE 1988

E THE POST-WAR YEARS
. there were, on the face of it, few
objective reasons for the. persis-
tence of Celtic's identification with
Catholic Irishness. The flow of immi-
grants from across the water had
dwindled to a trickle. The vast majori-
ty of Celtc fans were third or fourth
generation "Irish". There was litt1e
happening in Ireland itself to fue1 pas-
sion. . ' . "The Five Sorrowful Mysteries', who,
As against this, all forms of ideolo-
gical expression are relatively auto-
nomous of their social roots, and soc-
cer-clubs over time can come them-
selves to be a major source of a corn-
munity 's sense of identity , Moreover,
the remarkab1e stabilityiin Celtic's
boardroom ensured that the founding
traditions wou1d live on. In 1952, after
a particu1arly vicious clash between
Ce1tic and Rangers supporters, the
SFA demanded that Ce1tic take down
the tricolour. Club chairman Robert
Kelly made it clear that Ce1tic wou1d
withdraw from football rather than
take it down from the masto He was a
son of James Kelly, the Kelly poached
from Renton away back in 1888 who
had subsequently become a director
and bequeathed the seat to young
Robert in 1924. "We are not ashamed
of where we come from, and we are
not going to deny it," said Kelly. The
SFA backed down. Kelly will have
been aware, too, that the crcumstan-
ces which gave the club its original
identity had not entirely withered
away. The chairman of the SFA in
1952 was Freemason and Grand
Master in the Orange Order. An addi-
tiona1 factor was the withdrawal from
soccer of Be1fast Ce1tic in 1948
because of what the Falls club saw as
Loyalist domination of the IF A. Be1-
fast Ce1tic fans switched their alle-
giance automatically and en masse to
the "real" Ce1tic across in Glasgow
who continued to keep the flag flying.
Large numbers travelled regu1arly to
Parkhead, as they still do. . Stein.
However, it was to be sorne time
before Ce1tic were able to produce a
lBS
team capable of satiating the long
h.unger f their followers. Rangers had
dominated in the Twenties. Ce1tichad
offered an unconvinging challenge in
the Thirties. But the war years had been
outright disaster. A1though the Scot-
tish League was suspended for the du-
ration the clubs kept makeshift teams
together and organised regional 1eague
competitions. Rangers managed a six-
in-a-row clean sweep in the western
1eague. Ce1tic stumb1ed to two run-
ners-up slots.
,. There was little improvement after
the war, when Ce1ticfielded a forward
line which the faithfu1 still refer to as
a1though two of them were Protestants,
apparently had enough left feet be-
tween thern to provide an all-Catholic
outfie1d squad. In the first nine
matches of 1948 they amassed a total
of one goal from play. 'Against all
predictions and odds, they lifted the
all-British Coronation Cup in 1953 and
went on the following season to
achieve their first 1eague and cup
doub1e since 1913-'14. But it wasn't
the beginning of a new period of solid
suprernacy - a1though the "doub1e"
team did provide the basis of the
squad which, in 1957, delivered the
second-greatest day in Celtic history.
Ce1tic had a great "cup tradition", as
befitted a club which savoured do-or-
die situations, but had an appallng
record in the League Cupo They'd
never won it, and many fans were con-
vinced that sorne blue-nosed shaman
had jinxed the competition. But at
1ast, in October 1957, a team including
Sean Fallon, Willie Fernie, Bobby
Evans, Bobby Collins and "Cheeky"
Charlie Tully, thrashed Rangers seven-
one at a sun-splashed Hampden. A
song to the air of a popular calypso of
the period stil features at Celtic cele-
brations: "Oli Hampden in de sunjCel-
tic ,~ven and Rangers one ... "
One reason the song became a
Ceitic standard is that the fans had
nothing e1se to sing about for seven
years. Rangers ruled the roost as if of
right while Ce1tic won nothing at all
until the cup final of 1965 - which
rnarked the Second Coming of Jock
Stein, a former Ce1tic player, had
been managng Hibs. He was a Pro-
testant (indeed, from a ''vehement1y
Protestant" famly according to Hugh
McIlvanney) and took delight in not
denying rumours that he had a "King
Billy" tattoo on his chest. Stein took
over in March '65, too late to do any-
thing about the Ieague, but in time to
inspire a young side to a three-two
victory over Dunferm1ine in the cup,
It WaS the dawn of what is arguab1y
the greatest period of glory in the his-
tory of any soccer team anywhere.
In the .twelve years of Stein's reign
Ce1tic won the league ten times, the
cup eight times, the league cup six
times - and there was Lisbon.
Ce1tic won the league in Stein's
first full season, 1965-66, and thus
entry into the European Cup. No
British team had ever won the premier
European competition. Ce1tic beat the
Swiss champions, the Yugoslav cham-
pions and the Czech champions to
reach the final, against the experienced
international campaigners of Inter
Milan. The match was played in LIs-
bon on May 25 1967. It was, certan-
ly , one of the greatest soccer games
ever staged, a beautifully-structured
morality play, a mighty clash of con-
trasts, full of passon, danger, skill and
high drama. As the teams lined up
alongside one another in the dark
tunnel before the game, Stein, sensing
the nervousness among the inexperi-
enced Celts in thin single-file behind
him, began singing softly: "It's a grand
old team to play for ... " The squad
marched out snging in unison:
" ... It 's a grand oldteam to know,
If you knew the histor-ee,
It 's enough to make your heart go
sa-a-ad!
We don;t care if we win, lose or
draw,
It's damn the huir we careo
We only know,
That there's going to be a show.
And the Glasgow Celtic will be
there!"
Seven minutes into the match full-
back Craig pulled down Cappellini in
the box and Mazzo1ascored from the
spot. Inter, "the most renowned de-
fensive team in Europe", put up the
shutters. The pattern of the match was
seto Ce1tic carne forward in wave after
wave, desperate1y looking for gaps in .
the Inter defence to pour in through.
Each wave broke and receded, to re-
gather strength and surge forward
again. To no avail. With Inter still
ahead well into the second ha1f the
question became, would Ce1tic lose
heart, wou1d their spirit become
depleted, or Inter's iron defence
buck1e first? Roared on by twenty
thousand insane1y fanatic Glaswegians
from the terraces the cub players of
Ce1tic grew visib1y into Lions.Captain
Billy McNeill drove them Iorward
when they wilted, which they didn't .
In the 62nd minute Craig passed back
diagonally from opposite the eighteen-
yard line and Tornmy Gemmell thun-
dered through to blast the ball magn-
ficently in from twenty-five yards.
One-one. Hgh on self-belief Ce1tic
pressed relent1ess1y for a winner and
shredded through an increasingly frail
Inter rearguard repeatedly, on1y to dis-
cover keeper Sarti devilishly inspired.
But five minutes from the final whist1e
a Bobby Murdoch shot took a deflec-
tion off Steve Chalmers and Sarti was
1eft stranded. Celtic were European
champs, Everything that ever happened
MAGILL JUNE 1988 51
to Celtic before or has happened sin ce
is illuminated by the glory of Lisbon.
The game entranced hundreds of
millions of television viewers and had
significance for the development of
soccer everywhere. Stein's team had
shown that it was possible to have
success at the highest level without
deploying tactics based on cynicism
and pre-programmed defence, that
verve, nerve, inspiraton and heart
were the qualities that best enhanced
skill. The Lisbon Lions (Simpson,
Craig, Gemmell, Murdoch, McNeill,
Clark, Johnstone, Wallace, Chalmers,
Auld and Lennox) are Ce1tic legends
not only on account of their soaring
achievement but :because in winning
they gave exact expression to the quali- ,
ties which are the quintessence of the
club. And none more so than Jimmy
Johnstone.
Jimmy J ohnstone couldn't be any-
thing other than an Irishman from
Scotland. A slightly-built wiry little
fellow with twinkly eyes and close-
cropped red hair, he had the look of
an irnpish hard-man. He had a strange
way of running which earned him the
nickname "The Flying Flea". His ball-
control was marvellous. He had as-
tonishing acceleration. Most of all he
had the cheek of the divil. One of his
tricks was to push the ball just too far
in front of him, or so it seemed, when
running at a defence so that defenders
would lunge in, only to find that
Johnstone had magically changed gear
and skipped p ast, leaving the defender,
too committed to recover, floundering
in his wake. Sorne defenders sought to
forestall such indignity by inflicting
bodily harm on their intending tormen-
tor. He was fiery, insecure and regu-
larly in trouble with referees and
managernent. But many's the defence
carne away from an encounter vwith '
Jimrny Johnstone convinced that they
had just met a leprechaun. Celtic fans
adored him , and quite right,
'ALL GOOD TEAMS COME
to an end. In the summer of
1975 Jock Stein, driving from
Manchester airport back to Glasgow,
crashed head-on into a car travelling
down the wrong carriageway. He was
to be out of action for the next y ear
and finally to leave Ce1tic in 1978. By
the time of the accident Celtic's nine-
season league reign was overo They
finished thrd : in the championship
that year, eleven points behind Ran-
gers.
In a sense., they had run out of
competition. In their Celtic biography,
'The Glory andthe Dream', Pat
Woods and Tom Campbell quote one
critic writing in 1974 after Ce1tic had
sewn up the ninth championship in a
row: "What possible sense of achieve-
ment can remain for an outfitequipped
52 MAGILL JUNE 1988
at world club level to keep visiting
places of less than 50,000 population
like Dunfermline and wiping the floor
with the local sides?"
And perhaps the times were chang-
ing too. It may not be entirely .f'anc-
fuI to see the [oyous, boyish commit-
ment of the Lisbon Lions as a "Sixties"
as well as a Celtic thing. Innocent
idealism was everywhere then in mass
entertainment. In the Seventies, people
who played in stadiums tended to
think of themselves as pop stars, and
had managers. The perceptions and
prejudices which had surrounded the
formation of the Old Frrn were less
well-grounded in reality than ever, and
had less resonance with prevailing
opinion. If the Sixties had left any
trace it was that overt support for
individual oppressions had become,
well, unfashionable. The "Irish issue "
had less local relevance to the Irish-
derived community in Glasgow than at
any time since their forbears' arrival.
They were still marginally underprivi-
leged and lumpen-proletarian bigotry
against them persisted. But the Pope
carne in 1982 and Paisley and his
Glasgow manikin Jack Glass were able
to muster only 1,500 to a protest
meeting in George's Square. And yet,
hostility between Ce1tic and Rangers
supporters waxed rather than waned.
In the second "Hampden Riot", at
the cup final in 1980, they filled the
pitch to fight toe-te-toe, and toe-to-
head.
Lisbon captain Billy McNeill took
over from Jock Stein in 1978 and had
a run which by the standards of any
club should have been accounted
high1y successful before leaving in
bitter circumstances in 19&3. Ce1tic
won the le ague in his first season in
sensational fashion, triumphing four-
two in the final match against Rangers
having been one down and aman short
with thrty-fve minutes to go. The
following year Ce1tic took the cup in
the "riot" final but Aberdeen, under
Alex Ferguson, ended a fifteen-year
Old Firm rnonopoly on the cham-
pionship. Celtic then notched up two
championshps ina row before Jim
McLean's Dundee United carne heart-
warmingly through in 1982-'83.
McNeillleft as a resu1t of a clash of
soccer ideologies as much as a dispute
over money. He was earning [21,000 a
year and had asked for a raise, but the
board said no. Celtic's septuagenaran
chairman, Bob White (son of one of
the 1886 Whites), took the view that
the manager was a servant of Ce1tic
and should know his place, not having
cottoned on to the fact that in the
1980s managers are stars rather than
servants, and that this had to be the
way of it in clubs with serious ambi-
tions about challengng for honours in
Europe.
The Sunday Standard wrote of
McNeill on his departure: "(He) had a
vision which extended beyond Scot-
land and Glasgow into Europe. He
must have known how close after a
win in 196 7, then a loss (in the Euro-
pean Cup final) in 1970, Ce1tic were to
breaking out of those haunting visions
of feudal rivalry into a place of world-
wide fame."
That the board was trapped in a
football timewarp seemed confrrned
by their refusal to carry out a thorough
refurbishment of the dilapidated Park-
head Stadium. By way of contrast,
Rangers were turning Ibrox into the
best-appointed ground in Britain. It
was Rangers' efforts to modernise,
signalled most clearly by the arrival of
Graharn Souness as manager, which
was to force Ce1tic to change tack and
bring McNeill home last year after
wretched stints with Manchester City
and Aston Villa.
If Ce1tic had difficu1ties struggling
free of the past, the problems facing
Rangers were far more daunting. In
the Seventies, for the first time ever,
ther refusal to ,contemplate signing
Catholics drew consistent attack from
the Scottish press, no longer divided
into "Catholic" and "Protestant"
papers. The critics linked the ugly
behaviour of Rangers fans at home and
abroad to the ugly attitudes the ban
on Catholics evidenced at the heart
of the club. In a typical broadside in
1976, afrer Rangers supporters had co-
opted Brummies as "Fenian bastards"
and run amok at Aston Villa, the
Glasgow Herald referred to the club as
a "permanent embarrassment and
occasional disgrace, the only club in
the world which insists on every
member of the team being of the same
religion." The Herald went on to ask
whether it would not be' better for
Scotland and Scottish football if
Rangers FC ceased to existo Two years
later the monthly paper of the Church
of Scotland's Glasgow Presbytery car-
ried a front-page attack on Rangers'
sectarianism: "This cancer in the heart.
of the warmest, friendliest city on
earth must finally be rooted out." In
the early Eighties a num ber of tele-
vision current affairs programmes spot-
lighted this island of Orange bigotry in
the middle of Scottish sport. In 1980
the Sunday Mail listed a number of
Catholic Scots players who might use-
fully have been added to the Rangers
squad when they were available but
who hadn't been considered: Joe
Jordan, Bi1ly Bremner, Frank McGar-
vey, Arthur Graham etc. It is fre-
quently pointed out too, and not with-
out glee, that in the late Sixties Rangers
had missed out on signing young
Rangers fanatic Daniel Fergus Mcrain
having assumed from his name that the
right-sided youngster who was to cap-

tain Ce1tic and Scot1and kicked with
the wrong foot. It was no way for a
team which wanted to be considered
alongside Juventus and Real Madrid
to go about its business.
Souness carne home from Italy two
seasons ago as player-manager. Ce1tic
had won the league again andAber-
deen the cupo Memories of the last
period of Rangers ascendancy were
fading. Souness was married to a
Catholic and announced that he would
sign players who would be usefui to
Rangers without regard to religion and
that he had the board's backing in this,
There have been persistent rumours in
recent months that he wants to sign
Ian Rush, a Catholic, for next season ..
But as yet, no Catholic has been in-
eluded in any Souness first-team squad.
AiJ. indication that opposition might
not come only from a frnge, fan
element, was given in December 1983
when at a Rangers iXGM a seventy-
seven-year-old shareholder was how1ed
down for asking the board to say
elearly that there was no official ban
on Catholics. Speculation is unneces-
sary about the likely reaction of that
.sizeab1e section of Rangers' support
which has as its favourite anthem:
"Hurrahl HurrahljWe are the Billy
BoysjHurrahl HurrahljWe are the Billy
BoysjWe're up to our necks in Fenian
blood ... "
Being a true believer requires an
adherence to the traditions. But there
are other reasons for the persistence of
old attitudes, of which much the most
obvious is the twenty-year war in the
North of Ire1and. There may be little
in contemporary society in Scot1and
itse1f to sustain Irish nationalism as
ideology , and the same goes for
Orangism. But the dvisions, although
b1urred now, in Scottish society have
tended naturally to make Catholics
sympathetic to nationalism and Pro-
testants to Loyalism. Moreover, the
tieswith Ireland, a1though tenuous
now, are nonetheless real. A surprising
proportion (certainly more than half)
of the Ce1tic supporters it was possible
to ta1k to in the course of pub research
after the Hampden semi-final had been
to Ireland on holiday or to visit rela- .
tives and knew what part of Ireland
they "carne" from. And the troubles
of the past twenty years have involved
regular sharp controversies on which
Ce1tic and Rangers supporters will
automatically have taken diametrically
different views. In this sense, Old Firrn
elashes are still symbolic reenactments
of cornmunal strugg1e, and in a con-
text in which commitment to one's
own side is necessarily total. It is
possible, if almost invariably mis-
guided, to urge the middle way in poli-
tics, but supporting the referee at an
Old Firm game is ridiculous.
G
LASWEGIANS ARE VERY
proud of being from' Glasgow,
and why not? It is, as the book
said, "no mean city." The place and
the people do have a character far
more distinctive and delightful than
that of, for example, self-deluded
Dublin. Those zany vignettes of Glas-
gow life which made Billy Connolly
the funniest comedian in these islands
before he took up with the Royal
Family and lost his edge were, of
course, caricature. But like all good
caricature they were based on an
exaggeration of real features. Hugh
McIlvanney once summed up the
difference between a Glaswegian and a
typical Brit in Mexico for the World
Cup with the story of the Londoner in
a cantina fumbling with pidgin Spanish
trying to order fish and chips while
the hu1k in the kilt shouts "Hey
Jimmy , gie us another yin o' thae tor-
tillas. "
There's more than a million living
in the Glasgow area now. They have a
Labour council which has behaved no
more disgracefully than most others
in knuckling under to the Thatcherite
assau1t. There are hoardings every-
where bearing the council's current
slogan, "Glasgow's miles better", which
somebody presumably reckoned elever
when they first thought it up. The
river bank is choked with blossom in
preparation for the city's first ever,
not surprising1y, "Garden Festival"
which opens ths month and which
people tell you about, gigg1ing.In two
years' time it's to be deelared "Euro-
pean City of Culture" by the EEC,
which is not just a tribute to the
lobbyng skills of local propagandists.
In the arts, hgh and low, as well as in
sport, Glasgow lacks nothing in vigour
and style. All that, and everybody
speaks with a Glasgow accent as well.
Its people are known for their hard-
ness. This is where the "Glasgow kiss"
was perfected, a gesture which in-
volves bringing the forehead into sharp
contact with the nose of a person who
has given or is suspected of being
about to give offence. -It's a tough
place where generations have had to
fight to tear sorne dignity from life. It
was ravagedby cholera in the last cen-
tury and in 1901 suffered the first
outbreak of bubonic plague in Britain
since medieval times. It had the worst
MAGILL JUNE 1988 53
 slums in Europe in the Thirties. Poli-
tically it has had a long, tumultuous
history. In 1787 it became the first
cty in Britain to be put under martial
law as a result of industrial dispute,
when the Lord Provost called in the
39th Regiment to smash a weavers'
strike, which set a sort of pattern. The
steady expansionof the last century
was marked not only by clashes be-
tween native Scots and newly-arrived
Irish but by. bitter and frequently
violent disputes between ndustrialists
intent on the rapid accumulation of
capital and workers out to organise
for a fair share. It is the homeof the
Red Clydesiders, of John Maclean,
who in the early Twenties was the
Bolsheviks' official consul in Scotland
in a brief heady period when it seemed
to Ministers in London that Glasgow
might be to Britain as Petrograd was to
revolutonary Russa,
. Life was better, and more tranquil,
in the long boom which followed the
Second World War. The slums tumbled,
new estates spread out around the
e'dge of the city and full ernployrnent
was the order of the day. But the
boom, as with all booms in a capitalist
economy, eventually went busto The
steady decline of the shipbuilding in-
dustry was arrested only slightly, and
temporarily , by the fight-back at
Upper Clyde "inrhe early Sventies led
. by since-reformed radicals like Jimmy
Reid and Jimmy Early. Unemploy-
ment rose through the Seventies and
accelerated rapidly after the accession
tooffce of the present Prime Minister
who seems to suffer from physical ill-
ness at the thought of working class
people being self-confident and having
comort, Even industries which seemed
secure, like Caterpillar, closed down as
capitalsm world-wide cut back to con-
serve profit.
The unemployment rate in the
Glasgow area now is over twenty per
cent, in estates like Easterhouse and
Castlemilk more than double that.
According to the 1981 census Glasgow
"tops the list o (the UK's) deprived
areas on any listof indicators." Social
security is slashed as the Tories put the
boot into the people at the bottom.
The machinery of state is tooled up
with a series of new laws specifically
designed to make effective resistance
illegal.
With the Labour Party unwilling to
contemplate llegality and no political
alternative in clear sight, even the
gallus indomitability of the typical
Glaswegian can fnd few reasons for
hopeo In this situation, just as a cen-
tury ago when the unions first liberated
Saturday afternoons, soccer can pro-
vide a sense of vigour, colour and
achievement in stark contrast to ds-
piriting dullness of everyday life.
There is an element of caricature in
54 MAGILLJUNE 1988
this, too, but the realty it is based on
may have as much to do as has Ireland
with the fervour that Glasgow still
brings to its football.
WKWARD AS IT IS FOR
A idea-impoverished "non-sec-
tarians", Celtic and Rangers
are not two sides of one debased coin.
The fact that Celtic have always wel-
comed Protestants, whereas Rangers
for most of their existen ce wouldn't
have a Catholic about the place, makes
for a sgnificant difference in the
nature of their appeals. At its most
simple: it'snot possible to support
Celtic on the basis that all Protestants
are bastards.
In Glasgow, as in the North of
Ireland, the hatred of Catholics that
lies at the heart of Orangeism can
readily be extended to any other easily-
identifiable "alien" presence. In Glas- is something Rangers believe they are
gow today it is the Asians rather than
the Irish who are targetted.
Twenty thousand of Scotland's
fifty thousand Asians live in Glasgow.
A survey last year by' the Scottish
Council for Racial Equality revealed
that eghty per cent of Indians and
Pakistanis have experienced racial
abuse and that fifty-eght per cent of
Indians had suffered physical attack.
The highest .incidence of such attacks
was in the vicinity of Ibrox Park .
The Guardian last month quoted
Eric Brand, Scottish leader of the neo-
fascist British National Party claiming
that "We can sell 500 papers in a day
at Ibrox." The Guardian writer,
Andrew "Tyler, observed that "The
BNP's hard wooing around Ibrox and
.its co-option of Orange insignia and
slogans are plain enough ..."
Brand's figure of 500 packages of
racist filth dispensed outside an aver-
age Rangers match is certainly an ex-
aggeration. And 'anti-black bigotry
isn't confined to Rangers supporters.
But it is notable that the political
papers which can find purchasers, in
whatever numbers, outsde Parkhead
are decidedly of the Left, not the
Right. This doesn't make Celtic a
left-wing football club. Indeed, there's
no such thing. But it does tell us some-
thing about the different trajectories
of thought associated with the two
clubs. And it is possible that this fac-
tor will make McNeills job easier than
Souness's as Ce1tic and Rangers con-
tend for suprernacy over the next few
years and seek recogniton on the
world stage,
Souness has spent more than six
million pounds trying to assemble a
side to realise Rangers' ambition. He
brought English internationals Chris
Woods, Terry Butcher and Graham
Roberts from down South, Ray Wil-
kins and Trevor Francis from Italy.
It was in response to this that the
Celtic board belatedly acquired wis-
dom and invited McNeill to return.
Rangers won the league title last
season but won few friends for the
style in which they did it. Souness has
built a side in thereal Rangers tradi-
tion, disciplined (mostly), rock-hard,
full of energy and aggression.
In winning the championship Ran-
gers amassed forty-four yellow and
five red cards (a1though, as the unoffi-
cial Celtic fanzine Not The View, with
typical gusto, conceded last month,
"They were just shaded out by Hamil-
ton Accies for the title of dirtiest
bastards in the Premier League").
There is a rage in Rangers when they
are not winning, exemplified by Sou-
ness's own horrendous assault on a
Steau Bucharest player in the quarter
final of the European Cup in March,
which seems to suggest that winning
entitled to: we, after all, arra people.
There is little joy in it, just as there is
little joy in hating other human beings
because of the colour of their skins or
religion. And in the long term, all
soccer hstory shows - soccer being
an innocent, simple game - teams
which don't enjoy themselves don't
enjoy real success either.
McNeill's philosophy on the evi-
dence of his first season back is as tra-
ditionally Ce1tic as Souness's has been
Rangers. In its openness, sense of ad-
venture and love of last-ditch triumph
it . evokes the do-or-die spirit with
which Celtic, a century ago, first took
on the dour Scottish soccer establish-
ment. It was perfectly exemplified in
the dizzy exhilaration of the final-
minute completion of the league-and-
cup double at Hampden last month.
And it leaves Celtic in fine fettle for a
real rattle at European fame next
season.
The way McNeill set about assemb
ling his team at the beginning of the
season says it all. Over at Ibrox
Souness calculated how to blitz Scot-
tish soccer with big buys. Souness
amassed power, McNeill went for
glory ,
He had to rebuild a side after the
departure of Mo Johnston, Brian
McClair, Murdo MacLeod and Allan
McInally and the retirement of Danny
McGrain. Bis guiding principle was to
remain true to the attacking style
which has been the hallmark of Celtic
teams for generations. He spent only a
third of what Souness had poured out,
and recovered almost as much in fees
for players transferred out.
Chris Morris, a Cornishman and
therefore, inevitably , a Republic of
Ireland international, wasa run-of-the-
mili winger at Sheffield Wednesday un-
til converted to a run-at-defences full-
back who has managed the consider-
able feat of adequately replacing

McGrain. The other full-back, Anton
Rogan , ex-Distillery , is -also to be
found regularly in opposing teams' pe-
nalty areas, spreading fruitful disrup-
tion. The endlessly enthusiastic Andy
Walker, bought from Motherwell for
.L350,OOO, has displayed a schoolboy's
delight in goalscoring that quickly as-
suaged fans' anger at the loss of
J ohnston and McClair. The experien-
ced Frank McAvennie, imported from
unhappy West Ham where his form
had slumped, has been an astute, in-
dustrious presence in the heart of the
attack. Fitting most neatly of all into
the Celtic tradition has been McNeill's
most expensive buy , Joe Miller, who
carne from Aberdeen for a club record
!650,OOO.
_. 'ReOS a jinky winger with a little of
Jimmy J ohnstone in him. At one point
in the Hearts match he tried a sort of
double-bluff dummy on Gary MacKay.
MacKay, as one would expect from
the reno"," whose goal for Scotland
agansr Bnlgaria put the Republic into
the European finals, would have none
of it, and won the tussle easily. Frank
McAvennie who had been coming
through the centre gestured "What
the hell was that all about?" to which
Miller grinned and spread his hands to
convey, "Sure it was worth a try."
And the two of them burst out laugh-
ing . Ce1tic were one down at this stage.
Over at Ibrox you'd get fned for be-
having like that. And there 's the dif-
ference.
Most of all, McNeill already had
Paul McStay. McStay, in a sense, is the
living embodiment of Celtic traaition.
He's a great nephew of Willie and
Jimrny McStay, two towering Celtic le-
gends of eras gone by. Only twenty-
three, he has already turned out 312
times for the Celtic first team since
making a debut that took fans'
breadth away when he was seventeen.
He has played for Scotland at every
Ievel from schoolboy up and won
twenty-eight senior caps. He's Scot-
land's Player of the Year and Players'
Player of the Year. On any sensible as-
sessment he 's the finest footballer in
Britain and can stand comfortable
comparison with the Maradonas and
Gullits in Europe, as next season's
European Cup will surely testify , He's
sallow-faced , deceptively fral-looking,
modest to meet. There's nothing flam-
boyant about him except his bril-
liance , His grace under pressure in
tight mid-field melees can give the
buzz of almost-spiritual, pleasure more
usually associated with a first reading
of a fine poem. His distribution of the
ball is a wonder to behold, his vision
inexplicable except by reference to ge-
nius. His unselfishness raised the game
of all those varound him. It's worth
stealing the money to travel over to
see hirn. It's perfectly possible Paul
McStay will make the difference that
wins Celtic the European Cup in the
first year of their second century , ,
Ce1tic's centenary is being marked
by so many dinners theboard of dir-
ectors are uninsurable aganst diseases
associated with gluttony and, more
approprately, by a beautifully-mounted
exhibition of memorabilia and cuttings
in the People.'s Palace Museum and a
play, 'The Celtic Story', to be staged
at the Pavilion Theatre by the radical
Wildcat theatre group. It's written .hy
Dave MacLennanand stars, among
others, Terry Neeson. Celtic has sub-
sidised the venture to the tune of
!l65,OOO. The play charts the club's
history through the eyes of a farnily of
Ce1tic supporters, the O'Burns. It;s set ,
in St Mary's Hall where Ce1tic was
founded. Itdepicts the hundredth
birthday party of great-grandad
O'Burns who carne over from Donegal
towards the end of the last century,
One of his grandchildren tells a racist
joke about a Rangers players. Old man
O'Burns remonstrates with him, telling
the family that racism contradicts
everything Ce1tic stands for. The group
illustrate his thesis with reenactments
of moments from Celtic history in
story and songo At the end the old
man voices his hopes for the future, a
world free of hatred, and Ce1tic sup-
reme. The family wheels in a giant
hundredth brthday cake, with the
icing in Celtic's colours.
And then there's a plan that on
May28, on theexact hundredth an-
niversary of the first game Celtic ever
played, in which they beat, who else?,
Rangers, that Billy McNeill, if he al-
lows himself to be persuaded, will pop
up out of the cake wearing the rig that
he wore on the night in 1967 when he
captained the Lisbon Lions and Cel-
tic were crowned kings of all Europe,
and the band will strike up and every-
body will join in oo.
"It's a grand old team to play for]
It'sa grand old team to know./And if
you knew the his-tor-ee ..... "
MAGILLJUNE 1988 55
Charlie Whisker's
quest for innocence,
by Syd Bluett
HIS IS PROBABLY NOT AN ORIGINAL THOUGHT, BUT my paintings - sorne very non-graphic

T
_
it has often struck me that those people we call artists seem
to have lives which ~n roughly parallel to ours. Artists
appear to be able to engross themselves, at times quite passionately,
images - and I showed them sorne of
my drawngs, They offered me the jobo
Before I accepted it I went over to
London to sorne of the facilities which
use the same machine as the one Fm
in the peripheral, the serendipitous, the impracticable and the
now using and sat in with the guys for
pointless. For all we know they might simply be talentedchancers a couple of days and became even
who have a better knack than we of exploiting oddball self-indul- more terrified, Later just sitting down,
gence. talking with my wife (the fashion
designer Mariad Whisker), I looked at
. But artists can be useful. Sometimes when they chance to veer the potential of the job for me -
towards our relatively humdrum existence they can fertilise it with coming to-terrns with this machine and
inexplicable enhancements. . satisfying myself that I could work in
three dimensons and in time. That
Charlie Whisker could be c1assified as a very useful artist. He
was the interesting part forme: work-
paints and draws better than most of his so-called peers and he ing in time. Hitherto as an artist my
also operates a Bosch FGS 4500 Elite, a highlysophisticated cm- job was to distill time into one image
puter graphics machine, in what is widely regarded as one of the - lookng back over my own Iife and
distilling it all into one painting or
world's most influential centres of popular culture, Windmill Lane drawing. And suddenly now in Wind
Studios in Dublin. mll I've got to take an idea and ex-
tend it in time, maybe over twenty or
thirty seconds of animation. The word

B
ORN IN LONDONDERRY, much of it comes back in such a 'animation' was the biggest challenge
Whisker has spent most of his tattered state it actually shocks you for me, that whole technical sde of
. working life as a teacherat all and deprives you of ever working with how to time things and how to choreo-
three levels of education, most recento those ideas or images agan." graph." .
ly at Dubln's National CoDege of Art Windmill Lane carne and rescued What he does he describes as "ver y
and Design which he found was him almost against his will, "Windmill simple" but there are a lot of techni-
sapping his creatvity , "If you're a Lane carne and, in a way, talked me cal things he's had to learn to maintain
working artist teachng in an art into taking the job there. I was initial- that smplicity. "1 work with a very
college, all the references and that ly quite reluctant, afraid even, because sophisticated graphic computer which
whole reservor of ideas and images I knew absolutely nothng about como is designed for artists rather than for
that you've built up in your own work puters, I thought here was an area of technical heads, everythng I need is
over the years is dished out to students knowledge that I could never absorbo in the computer, but I have to know
as projects or suggested to them as But they seemed very keen and very how to access it. I'm not involved in
ways of going about their work and so nterested, I showed them sorne of programming in any way, I don't need
to know about writing computer lan-
guages or anythng like that. For in-
stance we build the logos which are
handed on to us from advertising
agencies. We put them in the machine
and make them 3-dimensional, we can
bevel them and make them shiny, all
that kind of thng, whatever the client
wants. We can move them in space and
the machine Iooks after the perspec-
tive, we don't have to worry about it.
We don't have to do any airbrushing ,
we put Iights in space and they act off
the objects and supply al! the shading,
the machine do es all that."
I
LLOGICALLY, IN SPITE OF THE
fact that he knows his employers
are happy with his work, a residue
of his initial fear of taking the job
lingers. He still has nghtmares about
getting the sack. : . "1 hope it was fore-
sight on Windmill's part to hire me be-
cause they had many others, mostly
people who were au fait with compu-
ting, applying for my job and if they'd
hred any one of them they would
probably have begun recouping their
money right from day one;
"Instead they took me, who knew
nothing about the field and couldn't
get up and started for months. I read
endless piles of books on the subject
and made horrendous mistakes, I'm
not much good for anythng else - I
coukln't do anythng other than teach
or do computer graphics. I couldn't
run a business or see sornethng through
or take responsiblity. I've always been
allowed to just deal with fantasy -
through teaching art and now in com-
puter graphics and I'm just starting to
emerge again as a personality, within
this business. I feel now that I've passed
my cornputer driving test, as it were ,
havng stalled and crashed along the
way, I was definitely not a safe bet.
Ideally I'd like towork with lions or
iguanas."
He now thinks he knows why Wind-
mill Lane put their money on him: "1
see artists as shamans in a society, who
portray, for the most part , an accept-
able madness. Paintings are trophies of
a madness which people like to iden-
tfy with. That's what an artist is ~ an
acceptable madman. In Windmill Lane
I'm somewhat tolerated as slightly
mad, slightly tangent. And that's the
element I think they wanted to brng
in on the creative side."
It was Meiert Avis, the much-res-
pected video maker, who put Whisker's
name forward and probably got him
the job: "Meiert is himself a creative
person who references art all the time
when he is researching ideas for videos.
He immerses himself in books on artists
like Breugel or Bosch or strange photo-
graphers like Peter Witkin and Dadaists,
rather than confining himself to handy
or obvious thngs, Up to now compu-
ter graphics has been run mainly by
computer 'boffins' - people with
degrees in computer programming and
so on. It's only recently that I've se en
artists involved, painters, sculptors,
and I think that's a great thing, it's
suddenly becoming more than the pre-
serve of people who know the system,
how to manipulate the technicalities
and get away with t. At last there are
artists makng objects in computers. I
think someone from a different crea-
tive field who's brought in and doesn't
think along the normal path can arrive
and suggest a wholenew world and an
unexpected way of perceiving it."
T
WO THINGS ABOUT COMPU-
ter graphics sustain Whl.sker.
The first is that he doesn't
know enough about it and is stilllearn-
ing. The second is that it.'s a complete
fantasy world: "1 deal with Iantasy ,
which is also what Ideal with in my
paintings and drawings. In the com-
puter, Ideal with building an object,
which mght have a lot of complexi-
ties in it , and I move it around in
space or choreograph t to sorne story-
boardwhere it evolves or metamor-
phoses. I was taken on from the crea-
tive point of view and they hoped I
would learn the machne and learn to
do the whole job , but there was an
aspect of the machine whch I didn't
think would interest me. Now I know
it doesn't interest me - that whole
textbook side of things."
Luckly Windmill Lane employed
this youngster , Philip Owens, who is
"absolutely brilliant ". and who allows
Charlie hmself me opportunity of
concentratng on his own areas of ex-
pertise: "We work very much as a
team. 1 deal with clients and story-
boards, 1 do me Paintbox graphics, 1
work with people like Meert Avis on
videos. But when it comes to mana'
gng the machine and the technical end
of building complicated objects and
certain aspects of animation, 1leave
all that to Philip and he loves it. He
absolutely revels in the technical side
and in the meticulous sorting-out of
problems. If Philip wasn't there I'd be
faced with massive headaches and
would simply resign.'
W
HISKER IS VERY AWARE
that he's in a commercial
world - one of the ques-
tions he was asked when he took the
job was: "Charlie , you're a vegetarian
would you be prepared to work on a
McDonalds hamburger ad?" Yes, he
said after a short pause. Yes he would.
"What 1 do has really nothng to do
with the actual product, it might be a
bank or an o il cornpany or pork sausa-
ges. What I'm dealing with is not the
sausage or the oil or the bank or the
politics behind meat, oil or banking.
I'm dealing with this little structure of
colours and lights, so in that way its
quite close ro what I'm dong on can-
vas or on papel. Later 1 see what l've
done in the computer on public tele-
vison and 1 sometimes think, 'thats
terrible', but 1 haven't be en working
towards the sum of what I've just seen,
I'm working towards my little part of
it, maybe ten or twenty-f've per cent
of it, and making that look good.
"Cornputer graphics has its own
beauty. There is a beauty in computer
graphics which works when you know
what that beauty is and can include it
in your storyboard. You must extend
the mainline, do the job and bring that
beauty into it. We can do things in
computer graphics that can't be done
any other way , that can't be done with
cameras, or models or with cel anima-
tion. But a lot of people try to use
cornputer graphics as a cheaper way or
an easier way of doing a film optical or
they are imitating something they've
seen and they miss the point of it all.
Computer graphics is suspect and is
overused most of the time - take for
example the World Cup on television
where a shot of one part of the game
would twirl around and shrink and be
made to disappear up the arse of so me
footballer in the next scene."
Whisker travels once ayear to
America to a week-Iong convention
called Siggraph which is the biggest
meeting of computer heads. "They
also run a lt of technical and creative
courses and at the end of the week
58
they put on a show of the best anima-
tions and they're absolutely stunning
- computer graphics taken to a degree
we just don't see over here , Walt
Disney, for example, are back with a
vengeance in computer graphics, they
are doing thngs at a Ievel of excellence
they had in the heyday of cel anima-
tion - 'Snow White' or 'Pinoccho ',
now. they 're doing it three-dimension-
ally in computers with three-dimen-
sional objects moving in three-dmen-
siohal space with light. The pie ce' 1
remember was 'Oilspot and Lipstick '.
And other people are doing thngs
which are equally incredible - John
Lassiter's 'Luxor Junior' and 'Red's
Dream' can make grown men weep,
and on another level the pure simpli-
city of Prince's'Sign O The Times' -'
done on the same machine as ours."
Charlie and Philip have gained quite
a bit .01' cred ib ilir y , people are coming
to realise that these are creative people
who can add improvements to their
storyboards. "Quite often clients don't
know what the computer can do. At
the start we were content to just follow
the storyboards, a client would hand
us a storyboard and we'd say 'fine,
give us mo ney , w c'll have it f or you
Friday.' Now we 're very conscious of
suggesting to people better ways of
doing things. More and more, and es-
pecially with work from particular
people within R TE and a couple of
other clients, we 're brought in at the
conceptual stages and we very often
end up dong the storyboard ourselves."
I
RELAND, AS WE 'RE ALL TOO
well aware, is an island. Here Wind-
mill Lane alone has the Rolls Royce
of computer graphics. Does this cause
complacence, what about competition?
"We have no competition within phy-
sical Ireland, but people from Irish
agencies. have been in the habit of
going over to London to use the ser-
vices of machines comparable with the
one 1 use. They like using it in London
because it involves maybe two people
from Ireland going over there and hav-
ing a good time. They can fly over,
have a champagne breakfast, nip into
the production company, spend half
an hour chatting with my counterpart
there and then head off for lunch for
five hours and top off the evening by
going to a show. That's the kind of
competition we're up against , We're
also competing against tradition. For
instance I'm trying t get people to
come down here from the Northof
Ireland but everybody there seems
quite happy to go to the f'ar corner of
Britain for their computer graphics. 1
don't blarne them. I'd probably do the
same myself. But I'm saying to them,
'come here, it's only two hours on the
train, you'll get top quality service and
you'll be back at your job in the even-
ng.' Financially it makes per.fect sense
but 1 have an almost impossible task
of convincing them of that."
Windmill Lane Studios recently
produced a showreel to send out to
prospective clients to let them know
what they can do. "Nearly every show-
reel I've seen from other cornputer
graphics houses all over Britain and
America have been very sharp and
sexy with shiny images tumbling about
to a soundtrack of electronic music.
~'In our showreel we use non-
electronic music - we use gospel
music sung by the Original Five Blind
Boys of Georgia and some Country
and Western music. Our showreel also
has a lot of off-key humour in it. It
all shows that we can put a personal
stamp to an obvious package, and it
has been extremely successful in att-
ractinz new business in our direction"
C
HARLIE'S LAST EXHIBI-
tion of his work, along with
. that of his friends Gavin Friday
and Guggi, was an enormous success in
the Hendricks Gallery - not least be-
cause another friend, Bono of U2, also
exhibited. This caused the usual spate
of rnisunderstandng to issue from
members of the journalist fraternity.
"We all knew that the .. press would
accuse us of jumping on Bono's bando
wagon. As it happened, Bono and the
other two in a way had jumped on my
bandwagon. 1 was the artist with the
Hendricks Gallery , they were not ar-
tists in that field but wanted to work
in that field and are now working in it.
"It was the first time Bono had
taken photographs - solid photo-
graphs from someone with strong in-
tentions and ideas. He knew they were
good but he wasn't certain they'd go
down that way, also he didn't want to
be seen as the 'Golden Boy' again ,
That exhibition was an opportunity
for four friends - and pIe ase let me
make it clear that 1 didn't teach the
other three - to see sornething
through."
Many of the objects in Whisker's
pictures, particularly those in his
drawings, remind this uneasy viewer
of what might be the contents of sorne
genital srgeon's dustbin. Other objects
bear strong ties to what might be des-
cribed as memories of sornething or
other which perhaps were better left
forgo tten ... "1 do a lot of re-inventing
of objects. Also, a lot of the images in
my work are suggestive - of sexuality
and at the same time suggestive of evil:
A lot of them are set in sorne kind of
landscape which resernbles a beach or
a wasteland, this is very much going
back to my youth. Where I grew up I
spent a lot of time on the seashore , a
very good beachcombing seashore
where a lot of stuff would be either
washed in or left ly ing about and there
were things that I saw there and I had
no idea what they were', Sometimes
there were things like contraceptives
which I ddn't know about then, I
didn't know whether they were or-
ganic or inorganic. I've thrown in lots
of little irnages from at least a hundred
different sources, things I've read,
. thngs that I've stood in, things I've
eaten... And vits that amazed curio-
sity of when I was a k id that I try to
recreate by re-nvehtng mysterous
things which have certain tactile and
sensual qualities, theyare suggestive of
that wonderful experience of explor-
ing."
Sorne cornponents are thrown into
his pictures just to see if they work,
maybe favourite cartoon characters
like Little Nancy or Rupert The Bear.
"1 grew up in Rupert's 'Nutwood'.
put those charcters in as symbols of
childhood and innocence. I am very
bewildered by sorne of the things Ido.
Ir's very interesting .reading reviews
about your work. You do the work
and you know a certain amount about
ir but a lot of what y ou do is because
you don't know things about it, then
you stand back and you read percep-
rive reviews and you suddenly get an
nsght into yourse1f. And Aidan Dunne
"as right in his Sunday Tribune re-
ne" of the show when he said there
"as a lot in it about the loss of inno-
cence and the loss of childhood. My
mother had died just recently. I was
clo se to rny mother. i found rnyself
thinkng about her more every day and
1 guess if you're thnkng of your
rno ther you're thinking of your child-
hood rela tio nsh ip."
P
ICTORIALLY, WHAT WHIS-
ker tries to acheve is sorne-
. thing that intrigues on two
levels. Firstly , a t a distance there must
be something there to pull the viewers
towards it and when they get there
there must be so me th ing additional to
find , "1 think I'm a good draughtsman
and I can portray most things. There
are a lot of small-scale objects and
""ing so that when the viewer gets
!:;: clo se they're not just looking at
paint or marks, they're actually f'ind- incredible destruction, incredible van-
ing further informatiori. I like the idea, dalism - they killed him for no reason.
from comic strips and from Egyptian "L'm also interested in the subject
art , of telling several stories in the one of sexual deviation - really the ex-
page ,' tremes of volence and sex, of beauty
"Tve recently started to learn a lot and of ugliness, those are the main
from my four-year-old daughter India are as I work in. I'm a great voyeur of
- she was the bggest experience of things on the edge , things that are
my life , just watching her grow up. taboo: subjects, very much a voyeur
She often draws with me and she was and no more than that, I just go to the
in volved in a few of the drawings in edge and peep in."
the show. I'm learning from her draw- Whisker doesn't have any strong
ing - how she draws and why she goes political views, partly.Tie says, because
about thngs in certain ways, The liber- of coming from Northern Ireland
ties she takes with reality are wonder- which he sees as a very confused so-
ful, Th~gs more important to her are ciety - "So confused a socety that I
usually drawn larger, and perspective actually have no political views now ,
doesn't mean anything. I'ID looking at because I see both sides of the coin. I
all that again - this is going back to am one of the lucky ones - 1 could
just get up and leave, I've no religious
views, I'm a complete atheist. I've
nothing of any importance to say on
any of these subjects."
Writing. Not only does he write for
himself in sketchbooks but he has two
very good penpals, one in Canada and
the other in New Guinea. "1 may
spend two weeks, off and on, writing
a letter to one of them and they might
spend two weeks wr iting back and
that's a relationship which has gone on
for about fifteen years.
"In the last two to three years I
now approach painting and drawing
like letter-writing. I rarely start with a
fully thought-out idea, I just startat
the topleft corner of the surface with
I one small thing and I goalorig in a
"Many of my paintings concern death." line towards the right-hand side and
add more stories, more comments. I've
when I was teaching in primary school also , in a way , dispensed with pers-
in the early Seventies, I got a lot from pectve and the normal format of crea-
that period and then I forgot about it ting third-dimensional space. It's a sys-
and I'm now rediscovering that satis- tem which has worked very well for
faction. When you have a child it 's me.
easier to tap - and you can get advice! "Trn a very mpatient person, that's
"Many of my current paintings con- why I don't do a lot of painting. 1 can
cern death, which unfortunately has paint but I can't be bothered to wait
confronted me time and time again for the stuff to dry , 1 like the irnrne-
over the last couple of years. They in- diacy of pencil and charcoal, it's like
volve the death of very close frends, writing. "
and the death of my rno ther. Those He gets most of his inspiration from
people are represented in the pictures the writngs of people like Mervyn
by objects that I have either carved Peake , Rushdie, Robert Coover. Very
from their fr iendsh ip or h ave re- much from William Burroughs: "a
invented from their me mory. really tremendous writer - you can
"Death intrigues me. I've talked take so much out ofeach sentence , the
to my father-in-law and other people fact also that he could cut his books
around me who seern to know what up and paste them back together in
death is about because they're Chris- different ways and still make sense.
tians. I don't know what death is about "1 am principally inspired by poetry
and I just have to keep putting it down - Dylan Thornas, Timbaud, Eliot -
and looking at it artd thinking about Shelley in particular - the success of
it. When 1. talk about death - death poets at portraying things. Poets don't
d epicted in my own work - it includes understand things but they describe
a recentsuicide which is the most in- so well. More and more I cau't under-
tr iguing of all. stand artists, more and more 1 get
"1 also saw a person die. 1 saw him annoyed by exhibitions of other
executed and he died in my arms. That panters' works. Botero is the only
was sornething which is too strong to living artist that I enjoy. Alfred Bestall,
ignore. 1 can't work and not inelude who did the f'inest 'Rupert the Bear '
that. He was a sixteen-year-old boy - books, is gone."

Mediaoeraey .
AS WELL AS SERIOUSL y
misrepresenting the facts sur-
rounding the Gibraltar shoo-
ting in' recen t weeks the
Sunday Times seems deter-
mined to confuse the situa-
tion .of the Western hostages
in Beirut. In their issue of
May 22, the paper c1aimed than one. Of all the sacro- exempted but there is a mild
that the recently released
French journalist Jean Paul
Kaufmann, who spent three
years as a hostage in Beirut,
had seen British hostage
Terry Waite during his de-
tention. In fact, Kaufmann
never saw Waite or the Irish
hostage Brian Keenan as c1ai-
med by the Sunday Times.
What Kaufmann has said is
that he encountered another
western hostage in cap-
tivity who had in turn met
Keenan and the British hos-
tage John McCarthy. For fear
of jeopardising the safety of
the remaining hostages, that
is all that Kaufmann is pre-
pareo to say at this stage, as he
has been warned that the lives
of the remaining hostages
would be terminated if he
gave details about any of
them in the media. Perhaps
the reason for the irrespon-
sible reporting by the Sunday
Times is due to distinct lack
of activity by the British go-
vernment on behalf of the
British hostages.
At least the Irish Depart-
ment of Foreign Affairs have
been more active both in
Beirut and elsewhere and last
week officials at the Irish
embassy in Paris met with
Kaufmann to get the full
story about the al-
leged sighting of Mr Keenan.
They have in turn passed on
the resu1ts of this discussion
to Brian Keenan's relatives in
Belfast where there is great
concern about his well-beng
as he enters his third year in
captivity , Brian Keenan was
travelling on his rish pass-
port while in Beirut.
Pilgrims'
Progress
THE ROW ABOUT TRANSe Right Stuff will have had any
atlantic planes overflying' such doubts dispelled by. the
Shannon and coming direct fact
60 MAGILL JUNE 1988
to Knock will have been for-
gotten by the time pilgrirn
Cardinal O'Connor and
Jewish Mayor Ed Koch touch
down at Horan International
in July ,
It is quite a coup for the
board of Horan in more ways
sanct white elephantine
operations the mandatory
forcing down of transatlantic
planes at Shannon is the
The following error escaped our notice:
for n:lit:terlate read n:lit:er\ate
Slip of the Die
This is not a joke. The erratum slip reproduced aboye is aetually included
in the current edition of 'The Oxford Minidictionary of Spelling'.
Not SO Hot
rock in dustry. Hot Press dis-
CONGRATULATIONS TO missed
the Hothouse Flowers, our phenomenon
best and brightest young
band, who if they were un- musicianship,
sure up to now as to whether
they were in possession of the
that they recently
craziest. Done to ensure
Shannon was not overflown
in the new jet age, the people
and company who chafe most
at the imposition is Aer
Lngus. The company leads
the protest at the Knock
pilgrimage flight being
suspicion the national airline
would be happy to see the
Horan people create a few
more "precedents ",
received a slagging-off in Hot
Press, the organ of the Irish
the Flowers
- built, as
everyone knows, on superb
songwriting,
style, charisma and sheer c1ass
- as merely the result of a
massive campaign of hype.
Quoting "industry sources",
the article rubbished pretty
much everything about the
band, and on the cover of the
magazine asked: "Have they
got what it takes?"
Sorne people might recall
that the last band which re-
ceived this treatment from
the country's leading rock
journal was .the Boomtown
Rats, who went on to top
various charts all over the
place, and thereafter to save
the world.
Stateside
Sueeess
Stories
AND COULD THESE "IN-
dustry sources" possibly be
the same people whohave
recently being getting a
roasting from their head
offices in London and the US
for having let the Flowers
and that other world-con-
quering Irish star, Sinead
O'Connor, slip through their
hands? Certain record
company executives are said
to be sick as parrots with
hangovers at having missed
out on O'Connor, whose
debut album, 'The Lion and
the Cobra', is only two places
behind U2 in the US Top
Fifty , O'Connor is currently
on the Ensign label - the
same company ironically as
the Rats started out with.
STILL ON MUSIC,CHRISTY
Moore's legion of fans will be
interested to know that his
first album release in the
States - entitled, ap-
propriately enough, 'Christy
Moore', and featuring a
selection of material from
several of his recent Irish
releases - has received the
thumbs-up from Rolling
Stone magazine. A review by
Anthony DeCurtis in the
June 2 issue of the top
American rock mag speaks of
the "intimate conviction" of
Moore's singing and the "rich
simplicity " of his interpre-
tations. Christy's albums
rated three-and-a-half stars,
which according to the
Rolling Stone system puts it
somewhere between "good"
and "excellent". Wigmore
trusts that Christy will not
now go on to forget about
those who knew him when he
was nothing. .
 absence through illness of
Perking Up Brian Lenihan.
Lenihan was a big hit with
THE MOST-HO)'iCST-MO-
the Brits as he constantly
ment-of-the-Momh of May
provided reassurance where,
must be the assurance by
in recent times of crisis, other
Fnance Minister Ray
cabinet mem bers displayed
MacSharry that if Charlie
undisguised hostility.
asked him to take the jo b of
If Lenihan's illness is pro-
European Commissioner, he
longed and Ray MacSharry
wouldn't waste too 'much
receives the Commissioners
time thinking about accepting
job in Brussels, vacancies
the super-perk.
could exist for two senior
The incumbent, Peter
cabinet positions.
Sutherland, in town for the
Haughey is most unwilling
weekend during a mid-month
to release MacSharry who un-
visit is getting tired of fending
doubtedly craves the lucrative
off questions as to his future. post.
Friends say he went to see
An irnaginative appoint-
Charle to tell him he sh ould
ment for Foreign Affairs
not interpret the European
would be one of the last re-
presscampaign urging his re-
appointment as an orches- maining dissidents, David
trated one by his office. He Andrews.
suggested an early namng of Andrews, often regarded
as the unofficial spokesman
the Irish commissioner and
promised he would like to on Northern Ireland, has let it
have time to break in the new be known that he has no
Molyneaux goes too fast in for the' Fianna Fail Euro-
man and lobby for a good interest in a junior ministry ,
rus contacts with Southern ticket. Sean Flanagan has for-
portfolio for him, this as part He is a senior member of the
politicians he may go the way mally announced he is retiring,
of a debt he owed to the party who was first elected to
of his predecessors like Lord It should be good news for
the Dail nearly rtwenty-five
country for having entrusted O'Beill and the late Brian Mark Killilea, who is Galway-
years ago ,
hirn with the task for the last Faulkner into political based and has strong GAA
five years. In return the party might
oblivion. However, quite a affiliations which tipped the
require him to' deliver a
momentum has been built up balance for Sean last time out
second seat (out of five) in
in recent' weeks for when FF took Blaney's In-
Alan and Jim Molyneaux-Haughey talks. dependent seat.
his constituency
Laoghaire-Rath down!
of Dun
Since his meeting with Mark is a co-opted mem ber
BEHIND THE MEDIA HYPE 'Molyneaux Dukes has swung who succeeded to the seat
of a pending Haughey- Fine Gael in favour of winner, Ray MacSharry when Tras for Top
Molyneaux summit is the
little publicised fact that Fine
holding talks with Unionists
outside the fram ework of the
Charlie called Ray home to
be Finance Minister last year.
Job?'
Gael leader, Alan Dukes, has once sacrosanct Anglo-Irish Mayo 's Denis Gallagher, THE CONTEST FOR THE
already had a tete a tete Agreement. Even the god- with a big Central Council Presidency is causing a minor
encounter with the Official father of Hillsborough, Garret GAA connection, will be try- stir within Fianna Fail. When
Unionist leader. The meeting FitzGerald , supports this lineo ing for a nomination. Paddy Hillery finally leaves
took place in London, Obviously it was a con- Hot on the trail already, a Arasan Uachtarain in 1990
according to nformed structive Dukes-Molyneaux year before the off, is the ir- a presidential battle is antici-
sources. The go-between was meeting that must whetten repressible Roscommon man, pated for the first time sin ce
the Church of Ireland Primate Charlie's appetite for rus former Minister Sean Doherty , Erskine Childers defeated
and Archbishop of Armagh , surnmit with wee Jim, even if In a sharp political stroke Tom O'Higgins.
Dr Robin Eames. So secret big Alan has been there Doherty has spancelled former Half the parliamentary
was the meeting that even before him. Donegal Euro-candidate Sean party fancies itself for the jo b
key mem bers of the Fine McNiff of Bundorati to the but none more than the
Gael and the Official Unon-,
ist part ies were not informed
Eurodoc Doherty campaign, to nail
down Donegal and the critical
Cathaoirleach
Tras Honan.
of the Seanad
A devoted
of its having taken place. THERE'S A DOGFIGHT FF vote there. disciple of Dev she is said to
There are fears that if loornng on Connacht-Ulster McNiff lost to Blaney in believe that the Presidency
1979 when Blaney was a poll- now belongs to Co CIare by
topper. Now Doherty hopes right.
McNiff can deliver Donegal to Supporters of her chief
the centre-of-the-constituency rival, Jim Tunney , are
hopeful. certainly not suggesting that
the Cathaoirleach's loyalty to
,In from the FF will disqualify her from
such an elevation.
Cold But her opponents are
TOM KING, AS WELL AS scornfully pointing out the
the British Ambassador and embarrassing pitfalls of
most of the Anglo-Irish secre- electing a' candidate who has
tariat are thought to be a minimal knowledge of the
devastated by the continued first langua~e.

62 MAGILL JUNE 1988