Mortification of flesh and spirit will serve us

LOCKER ROOM:Are we not the most misfortunate herd of bent and shivering creatures ever to have hobbled around this cursed and rainy planet, feckless yet secretly admiring ourselves?

OCH OCHÓN agus ochón agus ochón ó. Anybody else feeling lower than Peig Sayers when she was hormonal? A thought struck me on Saturday while I was sending off e-mails to randomly chosen citizens of Nigeria concerning the passing of and the will of my uncle, the King of Ireland. Are we not the most misfortunate herd of bent and shivering creatures ever to have hobbled around this cursed and rainy planet, feckless yet secretly admiring ourselves? Any wonder they stuck us on this desolate, snot-green island, this floating asylum, and after 800 years of minding the place left us to our own devices for a little bit, just to see what would happen.

They weren’t a bit surprised to come back and find us huddled together under a deformed tree, all the grazing gone. All of us lowing soft and sad, mud and dung hanging in hardened clumps from our wet hides like teenagers just home from Oxygen.

We’ve learned our lesson. We’re too charming for this. Get us out of here. Poverty is a desperate inconvenience to our lifestyle.

Please. It’s not that we can’t look after ourselves. We are just unlucky. We are Fate’s natural prey. The punchline to misfortune’s jests. Or as they say in Brussels, poxed. After all, we actually had the money to keep the place open till next summer (no less), but they pressed their IMF billions on us with a lust that bordered on the vulgar. Making whores of us. We might have started winning again but now we are chattels.

If it wasn’t for bad luck etc. Ochón agus o-bleedin-chón!

And what happens after we are sold off? A great natural disaster, that’s what. An inch of snow hits us hard and we shudder to a halt. Nature’s Bank Holiday. None of us able to get to work for a couple of weeks. Too much snow for us to go labouring. Too little snow for us to stage a lucrative Winter Olympics celebration. Eh Günter, we’re going to need another few billion to get us through till the thaw. A slush fund. We are poxed.

Meanwhile, the raggedy childer will have to grate the free cheese and grit the roads with shredded cheddar. Which necessity leaves nothing to eat for the bit of Christmas dinner. Will we know it’s Christmas time at all, Bono? Will we? Poxed.

(Which reminds me of the little joke about the Fianna Fáil Minster who dies, as we all will, in poverty, and The Party, shameless as ever, organises a constituency collection to give him a State funeral. One euro per person. The moving response of the peasantry on hearing that it costs one euro to bury a Fianna Fáil Minister is to contribute a tenner and tell them to knock themselves out, bury another nine.)

I don’t know where it began to go wrong, but I have my theory. Sport. We got blindsided by it. Not the parks-and-fields-getting- changed-under-bushes sport which was the tradition when we were wealth-challenged, but the big time, big players, you’ll never beat the Irish stuff. It was the mirror in front of which we puffed ourselves up and admired our gaudy plumage.

We weren’t put on this earth to go en masse to World Cups. That’s for countries who once had empires. We’re the people who play with the bunny ears till we have decent enough reception to watch the World Cup. But once we got to one World Cup we convinced ourselves we were the earth’s darlings. We couldn’t handle being as popular as we thought we were.

I remember myself and a friend covering a game in discreetly wealthy Liechtenstein. On the morning of the match we were sitting outside a coffee shop, slurping lattes with the discreetly wealthy locals. A group of the greatest supporters in the world came around the corner and gathered in front of the coffee shop jabbing their fingers and roaring “You’ll never beat the Irish” at the discreetly wealthy locals. All locals except us two Paddy imposters hastened indoors.

The gang was lead by a turnip-headed fella in an Offaly jersey who was especially keen to get the point over with as little charisma as possible. Funny thing was, they didn’t actually mean to be menacing. But sitting amidst the discreetly wealthy on that sunny morning it was easy to see how our immense charm could be misunderstood.

Ah the hubris! We loved lighting up the big old stogie as a nation and hopping around the world from event to event. We’re rich now! When Bertie, comfortable with all that money he privately won on the horses, was losing all that money we privately won as a nation of far-sighted and hard-working individuals (the money which we then shared out equally), we were distracted by the wonder of Bertie in the Neller, Bertie in Old Trafford, Bertie at the airport welcoming back heroes. We followed in his double-quota footsteps.

There were auguries. We ignored the heavy metaphorical implications when Stephen Ireland spoke to us in parable. Two grandmothers dying. So obvious. And then he, Ireland, becoming unavailable for us, Ireland. No past. No future. Losing touch with ourselves. And lo, the prophet wore the pants of Superman and drove the car of Penelope Pitstop. And thusly he was cast out when all he had wanted was for us to identify ourselves in his excesses. And then to worship him.

He shaved his head and went into the wilderness of Aston Villa and the slow crucifixion that is Gerard Houllier.

Ah. We shrugged our shoulders when an Irish horse appeared to drug itself to win an Olympic gold. We debated endlessly whether to have two large stadia for one small city or a third in a sort of Stonehenge arrangement.

Silly things. Rugby went out and got us a second national anthem. Just like that. But then confusingly they wiped out 800 years of oppression for us by singing the original anthem very loud in Croke Park against the English. So now we have two anthems plus The Hucklebuckby Crystal Swing. Is there no chance of wiping out the national debt by singing very loudly at Günter and Hans and Otto? Of course not. Magic beans, Jack?

Values changed. In St Vincent’s, around by the lock-ups where we keep the gear (football and hurling gear, before some of you southsiders drop a dime on a call to the cops), there used to live a big fat black rabbit whom (us being a poetic sort of club) we called Vinny. He must have been a pet rabbit once because he was afraid of nothing. Kids loved him. Dogs feared him. Women fancied him. This rabbit was so big that if you fell out of the bar drunk of a night you could grab onto his ears and he’d drop you home.

And then he vanished. Like Jack Lemmon in Missing but without the persistence or charm, I asked once or twice where Vinny had gone. I was told he’d transferred to Parnells up the road. His people were from Laois apparently. They call him Parnellsy now. It seemed a small thing back then, but we could do with a rabbit stew on a cold Saturday in the bar. We miss him.

Perspective is going to take a couple of years. When London win the Liam MacCarthy Cup and New York win back-to-back Sam Maguires we’ll be there on the road to enlightenment. We’ll be grazing the grass verges, and whenever we smell flowers we’ll look for a funeral, but the mortification of the flesh and spirit will serve us well. When London Irish is the fastest-growing club in rugby. When the League of Ireland amalgamates into one badly-run club. We’ll understand then how good we had it.

Meanwhile, back to basics. Small things. Hard working and sticking together and being creative. Here’s my daughter’s foot, which I painted black earlier on. Watch now while I Tipp-Ex on some stylish Adidas stripes for that retro-wealthy look.