Free Days of Heaven by Declan Lynch Page B

Phil Lynott, being black, would not exactly be viewed as the stereotypical Irishman and rightly so, as he was born in Birmingham and his father was from Brazil, but his
statue now stands in Harry Street, just off Grafton Street, where Glen Hansard of The Frames used to do his busking; Glen, who somehow won the Oscar for best song, when the no-budget Irish movie Once miraculously became an international hit. Which might seem like an extremely rare all-Irish success story until you remember that the song ‘Falling Slowly’ was co-written by
Hansard’s co-star in the film, Markéta Irglová, who is from the Czech Republic — a new stop there on the traditional route.
    No doubt I’m forgetting a few things here, but I don’t think I’m forgetting much — Seamus Heaney became very successful in the late 1980s but again we tend to forget that
Seamus is from Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. He would have played his football not for the Republic, but for Norn Iron.
    All of which leaves us with ... Enya. Yes, Enya is entirely Irish, every day, in every way. And so is her music. Except, now that I think of it, Enya’s recordings are essentially a
collaboration with her producers, Nicky Ryan and his wife Roma, who writes the lyrics. And Roma is from Belfast, which is in Northern Ireland, which again we must remind ourselves, is part of the
United Kingdom. So Enya doesn’t count either, in our quest to find something that is purely Irish and in no way English or American or Belgian or Brazilian but especially English — and
that is internationally successful. To which the ‘wags’ might respond that the Boys In Green themselves have no place in this discussion, because they never won anything, or came close
to winning anything.
    But we will ignore that gibe, for the moment.
    In terms of a victory on the international stage that was down to Paddy and nobody but Paddy in the purest sense, that we could truly say was ours and ours alone, to the best of my recollection
there is ... the Eurovision Song Contest. In fact, there would eventually be seven Eurovisions. But wait ... There’s no way around this ...
    Johnny Logan was born in Australia.

T he breakthrough, I believe, was against Spain. As we look back on those years, we tend to see it all as one extended breakthrough. But there were
breakthroughs within the greater breakthrough. And the greatest of these was at Lansdowne Road against Spain on 26 April 1989, in the qualifying campaign for Italia 90. It was a game against a
great football nation that we absolutely had to win and that we actually won — it had never happened before in the Charlton era (we didn’t absolutely have to beat England in Stuttgart)
and it would never happen again (Romania is not a great football nation and while we would beat them on penalties in the last 16 of Italia 90, the match itself was a scoreless draw).
    After the fine madness of Euro 88 we had been re-connected to reality in the first match of the new campaign, receiving a right royal rogering from Johnny Spaniard in Seville the previous
November. The result was 2-0, but it felt a lot worse than that. It felt just like old times, in fact, to be playing against these guys who were bred in the purple and to have our lack of class so
clearly exposed.
    Reduced to the simplest terms, such encounters tended to demonstrate that those guys were just much better at football than our guys. Anyone who has ever played football can relate to that at a
visceral level. It brings you back to the schoolyard to an under-12 match, where it is plain to see that some lads are just better than others, they have more talent. You might keep them out for a
while, these lads who are just better at football, by dint of hard work and honesty of effort and the vague hope that they don’t really give a damn anyway. But they’ll get you in the
end.
    And though you’ve tried so hard, maybe in the end it’s not that hard to