The Trib (32 page)

Bolger and McWilliams both focus on the impact the game had on the definition of Irishness. ‘In many ways, our view of the world was that of little Irelanders,' says McWilliams. ‘But when Ray Houghton put the ball in the back of the English net, did you care that he was Scottish? That team opened up the meaning of Irishness. If Andy Townsend could captain Ireland, [in Italia '90], we're not just little Irelanders.'

Bolger also believes it resulted in a broader definition of Irishness. It struck him that the fans following the Irish team in Germany had arrived from across Britain and mainland Europe. And, of the first eleven players that day against England – six grew up in Britain.

‘It was a great gathering of the Irish diaspora,' Bolger says. Coming from a large family where most of his uncles and aunts emigrated, he realised ‘this team represented my extended family. The Aldridges and the Houghtons were playing for my uncles and aunties; people who had been written out of Irish history ... The sense of narrow Irish nationalism took a dive.'

Bolger wrote a play based on those Irish supporters who were returning to life as emigrants after Ireland's exit to the Dutch (
In High Germany
is to return in the Bewley's Café Theatre on Grafton Street later this summer). ‘A lot of those fans were going back to factories in Eindhoven or Hamburg to resume life. When you have emigrated, you don't quite belong in the country [you left] but they belonged on the terraces,' he says.

Ireland has changed so much in the intervening years. The Troubles are no more. The people in the factories of Eindhoven and Hamburg have returned home and been joined by hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. We are one of the richest nations in the world.

Football has also changed. The Irish team has had its downs, as well as ups, since Euro '88. But the days when qualification was a distant dream are certainly no more. The euphoria of Euro '88 was surpassed two years later in Italy when the whole country literally came to a standstill. Soccer was by then a national game, no longer restricted to its traditional heartlands. It became fashionable, which it certainly wasn't when Ireland played its final qualifier for Euro '88 in a half empty Lansdowne Road.

Success, in the words of Bolger, ‘brought in a weird section of people who used the word “footie”, which sends a shiver down my spine.' Those of us who wept at the continuous near misses in the 1970s and 1980s had to come to terms with the fact that we were no longer part of an elite group after 12 June 1988. It was the day everything changed.

There's a lot more to national wage talks than meets the eye
.

14 September 2008

T
akeaway food is a highly potent weapon in the armoury of national pay negotiators, which has been deployed in the past to undermine the morale of the opposing camp. With negotiations dragging on into the small hours of the morning – as has been happening all week at Government Buildings – tiring the other side into submission is frequently the best and often the only option open.

Late into the night, just when you think the other side is going to cave in, there is nothing more dispiriting than to see another tray of takeaways being carried down the corridor. It is a sign of intent that they are determined to hold out, said one veteran national pay negotiator.

Major sporting events can also have a huge bearing, with talks being mysteriously adjourned and resumed ninety minutes later. In 1994, when Ireland's exploits at the World Cup clashed with national pay talks, extra TVs were brought into Government Buildings.

In late July, it was the August bank holiday and the approaching holidays that served to concentrate the minds of the negotiators. By midnight on Friday 1 August, Taoiseach Brian Cowen was strolling around Government Buildings with Tánaiste Mary Coughlan.

The third, absent member of the triumvirate of national pay negotiators, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, had a dental appointment.

In separate rooms inside Government Buildings, union and employers may well have been dreaming of dental appointments to get them out of pay negotiations that had been dragging on for months and were hours away from a well-choreographed ‘breakdown'. Some of the union leaders were hearing about the employers' offer from news bulletins even though the employers' representatives were down the hall.

One myth about pay talks is that the employers and the unions actually face each other across the table. They don't. Instead they are camped in separate rooms with Dermot McCarthy, the secretary general of the Department of the Taoiseach, shuttling between rooms and positions in an attempt to cut a deal. Of course, an ‘accidental' meeting in the toilets or a back corridor can result in a sudden breakthrough.

With the bank holiday deadline approaching, tempers began to fray among the unions, with some arguing that they should take the 5 per cent over twenty-one months on offer in order to preserve partnership and their continued influence at national level. Others argued that they would be massacred by their members if they brought back that offer. It was becoming a matter of self preservation.

By 3 a.m. on Saturday, McCarthy, a highly experienced facilitator, rang Cowen, who was still in the building, to say a deal was not on. Cowen made a courtesy call to each party, thanked them for their efforts, told them to go away and ‘reflect' and come back refreshed in September. And they did.

There was never any question of Cowen intervening with a compromise proposal. For a Taoiseach to successfully intervene and save the country from financial ruin, a deal has to have already been agreed or as good as agreed. This is how ‘dramatic eleventh hour interventions work' at national pay talks. They are meticulously rehearsed.

Cowen's predecessor, Bertie Ahern, was a master at knowing precisely when and how to intervene. A couple of national agreements ago, with the employers and unions seemingly deadlocked on pay, Ahern let it be known that he expected a deal to be done before he left for a state visit to Mexico. On his way to the airport, Ahern dropped into the talks and left a piece of paper on the table with a single figure – the proposed pay increase – written on it and proceeded on his way.

The next day, with the Taoiseach photographed pressing the flesh in Mexico, a deal was done and we all slept soundly in our beds.

Of course, the deal was cut many days before Ahern's intervention but the subterfuge suited everybody. While it boosted Ahern's image as ‘Mr Consensus', it also acted as a face-saver for the unions and the employers. If the deal they brought back did not go down well with the members, they could say that the deal was forced upon them by the Taoiseach and that they felt morally obliged to comply ‘in the national interest'.

The reality in these long and tedious pay negotiations is that while buckets of midnight oil are burnt, in most cases a deal or at the very least the outlines of a deal, have been agreed before the talks open.

So much of the sabre-rattling outside Government Buildings is for the optics, as union and employer leaders demonstrate the sterling work they are doing on their members' behalf. ‘I don't like going into any pay negotiations not knowing what I am going to get,' said one senior trade union leader.

Ahern was the master of being all things to everyone. He never took decisions until he absolutely had to. The effect of that was that he didn't antagonise people unless he absolutely had to.

‘Ahern never gets upset, never fights with you,' said one senior union leader, who has been at Government Buildings all week.

‘He might mean to say ‘no' but he would never say it like that. Then again he might say ‘yes' and you wouldn't know it was ‘yes'. And it worked,' recalled Peter McLoone, general secretary of the public service union, Impact, in the book
Saving the Future
on national agreements.

Visiting politicians, union and employer leaders who come over here to look at Ireland's partnership system are amazed at how it seems to be built and maintained on personal relationships between the so-called warring parties.

‘All the key players know each other very well and know what each needs. While that would be frowned upon in other countries, here the familiarity and friendship has kept partnership alive,' said one senior negotiator.

Former ICTU president Phil Flynn – a key player in the partnership process – recalls how Ahern resolved a bitter industrial dispute involving a vehement anti-Fianna Fáil trade union leader, over a pint in Kennedy's pub in Drumcondra.

Cowen's approach is more distant, although all employer and union leaders agree that he has been no less determined to cut a deal. It's just that he wouldn't lose as much sleep as Ahern if it collapsed.

The current talks are the longest on record, having formally started in the third week in April, although they have been interrupted by a change of Taoiseach, the Lisbon fiasco and the rapidly declining economic situation.

Even if a deal is reached this week, the parties could be back again in early spring to negotiate the next agreement. When it was put to one of the business leaders that in such a scenario they may as well hang on in Government buildings, he replied, ‘I think I'd rather kill myself.'

‘People are judging Shane Clancy on the last hour of his life,' his father Patrick says. ‘But that's not the Shane I know and love.'

4 October 2009

O
n Sunday morning seven weeks ago, Patrick Clancy got a knock at his front door that changed the course of his life. He was greeted by two gardaí standing on his front doorstep. Invited inside, it soon became clear they had come to deliver bad news. His son Shane's car had been discovered early that morning outside a house in Bray where a young man had been fatally stabbed and two others had been injured. The gardaí believed his son was responsible. ‘It was as if their words fell to the floor. I said, ‘If you're looking for him, you're wasting your time.' I knew immediately that my son would not be able to inflict that on other people and still be alive; I knew he could not live with himself.'

His paternal intuition was right. The twenty-two-year-old Trinity student was lying dead in the back garden of Sebastian Creane's family home in Cuala Grove, Bray. Gardaí had yet to discover his body, but Shane had turned the knife on himself after fatally stabbing Sebastian and injuring his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Hannigan and Sebastian's older brother Dylan in a knife attack.

‘It's not the Shane I know and love. He wouldn't hurt a fly. He was a pacifist. I know in my heart and soul it was Shane's hand that took a life – but it wasn't his mind. I do not know how he got to that point. He spent twenty-two years on this planet as a wonderful, loving person. But people are now judging him on the last hour of his life.'

The gardaí asked Patrick to try and phone his son that morning but it went straight to voicemail. ‘I don't blame the gardaí for not finding his body immediately. I'd like to thank the two gardaí who called to my house that day for how they handled it, and all the gardaí involved in the investigation. In the next few days, it was hard to take in the circumstances of what happened. It goes against everything my son stood for.'

Shane's personality was light years away from what happened on that fateful night in Bray. In the seven weeks since his death, Shane's father has been trying to reconcile in his mind how the well-adjusted young man he helped raise could be capable of such mindless violence. Patrick is acutely aware of the sense of loss and pain the Creane family are experiencing as a result of his son's actions. ‘The last thing I want to do is upset the Creane family. Loss is loss. There are no words. I can't give them back their son; I wish I could. But I owe my son this much. I have to tell people about the type of person my son really was.'