The Trib (5 page)

Before he left, he handed me his half of our walkie-talkie set. I traded it for some now-forgotten item. I couldn't share it with anyone else.

Years passed and we lost touch. We picked up our friendship again when he eventually moved back. Then we both got night jobs and lost touch again. We orbited the same crowds, but never seemed to meet up.

In November 1992, Brian walked into his local and settled a few small debts. He was in good form. He was twenty-five. Later that night, Brian turned the exhaust pipe in on his car. He killed himself. No one had seen it coming.

I try not to think of his final moments. How alone he must have felt. How his family felt when they heard the news. How whoever found him felt. How I felt.

The fourteen-year-old who shared my growing pains was gone. The reason why is not important now. I have other questions. What would his children have been like? Would he have enjoyed my wedding? Would we still be friends, tilting at the bar in Finnegan's?

Brian – that's not his real name – came back to me last Wednesday when I read that the Marks & Spencer model Noémie Lenoir had tried to kill herself. I was surprised at how hard that story struck me. Lenoir is young and beautiful: people like her don't kill themselves. People like Brian don't kill themselves.

Newspapers generally don't carry suicide stories because of the ‘Werther effect', where reporting might encourage copycats. Sadly, Lenoir's attempt will have sown the seed in some minds.

The suicide rate here has risen by 35 per cent since last year (CSO) as more people succumb to depression. Two years before Brian's death, I suffered a prolonged period of desperate sadness. I was luckier than him: I learned from it. I think of what I could have said to him had I known what he was going through. I could have told him we all crash emotionally, but it's possible to walk away from the wreckage. I would have told him that he didn't really want to leave, he just wanted the pain to stop. I would have told him that the darkness passes.

I would have told him that he will always be my friend.

I would have told him that he was never really alone.

23 January 2010

‘T
ell them what an idiot you are.' That was the curt instruction from the woman who edits this column. No political rants this week. Just explain to those who don't already know it that I'm an idiot. Here goes:

Men are idiots. Fact. Scientists proved this last week when they discovered that Man 'Flu actually exists. We exaggerate the symptoms of the common cold to idiotic proportions. We think we're the stronger sex, but we're not. We're also idiots who can't accept that ageing is inevitable. The Harley Medical Group has reported a 17 per cent rise in calls from men seeking Botox treatment since Louis Walsh admitted getting work done. Presumably hair weave enquiries also rose after Gordon Ramsay had his hairline restored. Men are idiots. Vain idiots.

The worst thing a man can do, next to wearing a wig or getting Botox, is to dye his hair. He is a preening knob if he does. He's cheating. Besides, grey is manly, grey is wise. Grey is the colour of silver-back gorillas.

Grey is also bloody boring. I've an admission to make: I'm a preening knob. I dyed my hair last weekend. No, please don't turn the page; let me explain.

I've been letting my grey hair grow for the past year. I love taunting my baldy mates by draping it over their shiny heads. Over the past few months, however, it's been turning a horrible shade of green. This is something the Baldies love reminding me about. (‘Look, it's the Not-So-Incredible Hulk!')

Sick of hearing me moan about it, my sister bought me a bottle of Super Silver Sensations. She promised it would sort the greenness out. I lathered half the bottle in, ignoring the instructions to rinse after five minutes. ‘I'll give it forty,' I thought. To get it REALLY silvery. An hour later, my hair was purple. Silver Sensations turns out to be blue-rinse shampoo. My head looked like Barney The Dinosaur's crotch.

‘No, you don't look like Barney,' my wife reassured me. ‘You look like old Mrs Slocum. You idiot.'

Shortly afterwards, someone told me ketchup can rectify yellowness. It took fifteen minutes to apply because, being a man, I had to mess around, teasing my hair into various shapes. I let it dry into a two-horned, devil ‘do'. Idiot.

The whang was appalling but I soon forgot about my saucy bonce as I caught up on household chores. Two hours later I went into the study to play with the cat. She shied away from me. ‘That's odd,' I thought, reaching out to pet her. She licked my face and hissed again. I looked up to see the postman staring in the window. I waved. He slowly backed out the gate.

My ketchup ‘horns' were melting down the side of my face. It looked like I was engaging in some perverted Satanic ritual with the cat. ‘Come back, I can explain,' I called, which only made him run away faster.

Ketchup doesn't work, by the way. It turns your hair ginger. My pub-mates started calling me ‘Rusty'. So I bought some Grecian 2000, but that turned my pillow brown, which was hard to explain to our disgusted (former) cleaning lady.

I bought a bottle of Just for Men hair dye, but I couldn't use it. I'm not that vain. I threw it in the bin. It came out again last Saturday in advance of an appearance on RTÉ's
Daily Show
. ‘Don't put that in your hair. You'll make a mess of it,' my wife warned, forgetting that men are idiots. We'll always press the button marked ‘Do Not Press This Button'. We'll always stick a knife in the toaster when it's plugged in.

I emptied the bottle onto my head. ‘Two minutes is all it takes!' the label said. I left it in for ten.

My wife says the screams were up to
The Exorcist
level. My hair was black with red roots. I was a cross between Elvis and Bono. ‘It's all YOUR fault,' I shrieked, as she locked herself in the bedroom with the cat.

I lathered Fairy liquid into it. I steeped it in lemon juice. It turned grapefruit pink. I shrieked some more.

It took my wife's hairdresser, Matt Malone, two days to rectify things. It still looks dyed though and I'm paranoid about it. The worst thing is when you catch someone staring at it and quickly looking away.

There's a lesson in this for all you fellow idiots who may be thinking of dyeing: don't do it. I really miss my grey hair.

The last straw came when I went for my first post-dye pint. A wag shouted: ‘You can't come in here – it's Just For Men.'

I'm staying in until I go grey again. If anybody asks my wife where I am she's instructed to say I'm at home, under the weather.

Knowing me, they'll probably think it's Man 'Flu.

28 March 2010

M
y great-grandfather delivered Pearse's farewell letter to his mother. As the fires crackled around the GPO, the rebel leader wrote: ‘Whatever happens to us, the name of Dublin will be splendid in history for ever. Willie and I hope you are not fretting for us ...' He sealed the envelope and great-granddad kept it safe. By the time he delivered it, Pearse was dead.

History sees Pearse's sacrifice in terms of bloodshed. My great-granddad, Matthew Walker, saw it in the face of a mother who had lost two sons.

You won't have heard of Matthew. He was one of those remarkable figures who prefer to work behind history's stage. You may remember from school that Parnell had lime thrown at his eyes during a rally. Matthew was the friend who shielded his face with his hat. Anonymous, forgotten.

On Easter Monday 1916, Matthew – who was sixty-nine – walked eight miles from Glasthule to the GPO. He was dressed in full Edwardian fig of topcoat and top hat. He also had corns on his feet, but his generation ‘didn't grumble'. He was determined to play his part.

As he entered Sackville Street, Matthew would have seen the first casualties – two dead horses belonging to the lancers. He would have felt the giddiness of the slum bystanders waiting to see blood.

He would also have seen a tricolour flying over the GPO.

For Matthew – IRB man and publisher – Easter Monday was the culmination of his life's work. He was given the task of printing Pearse's
Irish War News
, as bullets ricocheted around the city. Each night, he bravely walked home through the cordons.

His Abbey actress daughters, Maire and Gypsy, were ‘out' in 1916 too. Gypsy, my grandmother, lost her pacifist lover to a looter's bullet. A priest refused to marry the couple on his deathbed.

Despite the pain, their generation valued sacrifice. Their selflessness seems very remote as you survey today's Ireland.

Last week, the tricolour Matthew may have seen over the GPO failed to sell at auction. It had been valued at $500,000. I wonder how he would have felt about this. After the week we've just had with Brian Cowen's reshuffle and more turmoil with the banks, I wonder what he would make of the Republic he risked his life for.

If he was publishing a newspaper today, Matthew's editorial would probably compare our Taoiseach's power-at-all-costs philosophy to Pearse's. It would condemn the cynicism of hoarding power at the expense of the democracy people died for.

Coming from an age when people risked their lives for principles, what would he think of Beverley Flynn? Unprincipled Bev's belief that democracy should serve her was in evidence again last week. She said she deserved a place in cabinet. She would ‘flower'. She couldn't understand why the media picked on her. Drop around Bev, I'll tell you why.

What would he make of the people who keep electing her? Or Michael Lowry for that matter? Or Mary Hanafin, who along with seven other deputies still refuses to give up her teacher's pension? Or smug Mary Harney, with no party behind her?

Let's be fair to politicians, though. They're not the only self-servers living in this great Republic.

Matthew would have led his newspaper with the Civil, Public and Services Union's go-slow and how they are denying people their passports. He would have been livid. A passport isn't a bargaining chip. It's proof of the citizenship fought for by people like him and Countess Markievicz.

Not that we care about the Countess any more. She would appear on Matthew's ‘page 3' (with her clothes on). He would report that she isn't included in an MRBI poll of the greatest Irish people of all time. Neither is President McAleese. Louis Walsh is, though. What does that say about us?

Matthew would look at what the vacuous Tiger generation allowed happen to Tara and run a story warning about the same happening to under-threat Newgrange. How many would read it?

He would look at Seanie Fitz and wonder why we allowed a new landlord class of bankers and developers to be created.

He would look at the whole, sorry mess our Republic is in and scratch his head.

Over the next week, you'll hear a lot of misty-eyed manure about reclaiming the spirit of 1916. The Republicanism that Matthew and others strove for wasn't notional. It was based on the solid principle that your neighbour has a right to expect your help – as you do from him.

The current mess is being made worse by a general unwillingness to take some responsibility. We know who the chief culprits were, but we all bought into the Tiger crap to some extent.

If unity helped achieve our freedom, then it can help us maintain it. The refusal by some to take a hit is not acceptable. The new civil war of public sector against private has to end. We need to start behaving like a republic or stop calling ourselves one.

I wonder what Matthew would have said about that GPO flag being valued at $500,000. A copy of his
Irish War News
fetched €26,000 in 2007.

I'm sure he would look at that tricolour and see more than money. He would know its true value. He would know whether it was worth fighting for or not.

He would know whether we were worth fighting for. I hope we were.