AS A child, Pat Tierney, who hanged himself in the grounds of local church a week ago, spent much time as he could sitting on the window sill. At St Joseph's industrial school in Galway, where he lived from the time he was seven until he was 10, his bed was below a window and at night he would climb out in the darkness to watch the world.
To him, everyday life the lights of cars piercing the darkness, dog owners stopping while their pets sprayed the lamp posts, couples kissing and hugging in darkened doorways was as exotic and spellbinding as a television programme.
"To me", he wrote in his autobiography The Moon On My Back, "all of these observations were journeys into the future, to the other world that I hoped to live in some day."
One night, he was caught by the watchman and the next day he was moved to a bed away from the window. He spent the next 30 years trying to get back to a view of the street.
Like most people in Dublin, I knew Pat Tierney mostly from the streets where he busked and from public places. The first time I saw him was from the vantage point of a packed Hill 16 in Croke Park before the start of one of the great Dublin Kerry encounters of the mid 1970s. He and a few others ran on to the pitch bearing placards as part of some pro IRA protest. The others were quickly caught, but Pat evaded capture for a while, squirming and waving and ducking, until the Dublin forward John McCarthy tackled him.
The evident delight he displayed in his evasions blew whatever political significance the protest was supposed to have. What you saw was a skinny young fellow exulting in the sheer pleasure of showing off before an audience, knowing that retribution would catch up with him some time soon, but revelling in the moments before it came, treating every step between his grand entrance and his dramatic exit as a triumph of postponed failure.
ONLY much later, reading his book or talking to him, could you see where that doomed exultation came from. It was recklessness but hunger, a fierce, greedy appetite for attention. His need was the need of the kid on the window sill drinking in the life of the streets, but with a hollow, loveless desperation at his back.
He was a show off, with a brass neck and an urgent grasp, but only because he seemed to feel that if no one was watching him he would cease to exist. Even his death had to be a public event, stage managed, symbolic, much heralded, not a cry for help but a final statement of his presence in the world.
It would be nice to see his short life as a story of triumph against the odds and, at times, he tried to give it that kind of shape. There is a thin layer of truth in the notion. Assessed at the age of nine as educationally subnormal, with an IQ in the dull to normal range and with problems of emotional disturbance, he went on to write a book poems and a play, to be someone who could memorise huge tracts of poetry or hold his own on chat shows.
As an adult, he shone with alert intelligence and became a walking rebuke to "scientific" assessment of human potential. There is, if you are prepared to lie, a seam of moral uplift to be mined from his ability to defy expectations. But the lie would be like saying that his wild, zig zag run across Croke Park was a lap of honour. If you think for a moment about what he might have been if he had been born into different circumstances, you can get the measure of it.
With his driving ambition, his hard neck, his sense of enterprise, his initiative, his overwhelming desire for public recognition, he would, given a bit of money, a stable family and a good education, have become a man of consequence. Instead he spent much of his life in orphanages, institutions, prisons, shooting up on crystal meth in a camper van in Wyoming, bumming drinks in Newfoundland, standing in the rain in Grafton Street offering to recite poems for money, hanging himself from a tree in a cold, wet churchyard.
The distance between what Pat Tierney might have been and what he was is a measure of the importance of justice in a society, of the grip, whatever we may say about equality of opportunity, that social disadvantage maintains on a life. He may have been, in theory, a citizen of a free society, but he was never free to undo his past.
WE LIKE to hear stories of triumph against the odds, but not to remember hat most of the time those with odds chalked against their names lose the race. The truth is that injustice to the young is mostly irredeemable. That is what is most unjust about it.
Abuse, neglect and indifference mark children in ways that are permanent. If their effects are not dealt with early on, they become as much a part of a person as bones and blood. After a while, it is too late to do anything except cope with the consequences. The things that happened to Pat Tierney in the last few years respect in his adopted community of Ballymun, an outlet for his campaigning talents with Dublin AIDS Alliance, a degree of public recognition were all too late.
They may have given his life a meaning, but they could not save it.
And not just because of AIDS. It is easy to pretend that his death was essentially the result of natural causes, of a virus in his bloodstream that drove him to despair. But for one thing, that virus itself was a result, not a cause, of his despair. He contracted it through using intravenous drugs to fill a hole in his life. And, for another, he had tried to hang himself long before he knew that he was HIV positive.
In reality, his fancy footwork was always a way of staying on the field a little longer, of postponing the inevitable ejection for a few years more. He seems always to have had a sense that death was just a few steps behind him and would soon catch him by the scruff of the neck and march him out of the public eye, back into the exterior darkness where he belonged.
His death reminds us that second chances are rare in life, and that only in the movies are the bad times beaten back forever. Happy endings have to be written into the plot. Unhappy endings happen all the time, but most of them don't make the papers because they are not staged with the kind of theatrical flourish that Pat Tierney could muster in his final hours. And they, too, are written into the plot from the earliest scenes.
What we are doing now to the children entrusted to us as a society is laying down the tracks for future destinations. Evasions, postponements, and excuses shape destinies by default. If we find them tolerable, we have no right to be shocked when those destinies work themselves out to their logical and terrible conclusions.