Some cold comfort for weary GAA dual agent

If anyone’s actually reading this and they notice I’ve disappeared in the weeks ahead, just cut out the article and bring it to the Garda

IT WAS as nostalgic for me as for the other elderly people who attended Saturday night’s Horslips concert in Dublin, although maybe for different reasons. As an impecunious young man I was retained by the British government to keep an eye on anything smacking of ultra nationalism and from an early stage, had formed the view that closely monitoring the pioneers of Celtic rock would be a relatively undemanding way of fulfilling that brief.

In time, it was an obvious step to insinuate myself into the world of Gaelic games with a view to discrediting them.

Much has been written in these pages by my dear, dear comrade Tom Humphries about the Sports Editor. Being in possession of certain facts, I have so far avoided doing this. But I came to Dublin after a “source” had apprised me of the fact that “Malachy” had been forced to re-locate here, having exploited insider knowledge as a low-level CIA operative and expectantly moved a black market operation to Havana the week before the Bay of the Pigs.

Anyway, I was fortunate to find employment with this newspaper, which has helped temper the unreliability of the revenue stream from MI6 and my other – if it’s not too absurd a description – paymasters.

It was the late former Taoiseach Charles Haughey who wisely observed if you wanted to know what British intelligence services were up to, best ask the Russians. That was certainly the case with me and it was my “contacts” in the KGB that initially got me the work when I moved here. Of course, I had a history in the old days during my time at Cambridge, where I mingled with a motley collection of aesthetes and unpublished poets. My heedless socialising led to a poor degree and premature episodes of gout.

It wasn’t, however, entirely wasted and the time I spent hanging around the Cavendish Laboratory trying to bribe brilliant physicians opened my mind to the infinite possibilities of the intellect, which enabled me in later years to ingratiate myself with the Comhairle Árd Oideachais by helping to draw up the rules on eligibility for third-level competitions.

During the war I had found favour as a writer of propaganda leaflets designed to demoralise the Germans in occupied Europe and ended up, like so many idealists at the time, being recruited by the Soviet Union along with Philby, Burgess and Maclean, but due to unfair allegations of poor organisational skills, laziness and unreliability I was cut from the payroll (mercifully) before all of the unpleasantness came out.

Needless to say, I got no awards or any luxury dacha. I suppose in that austere old-style communist way my controllers disapproved of my “lifestyle”, although I did receive the occasional lump sum to pay off gambling debts and blackmail demands.

Russia has changed and not entirely for the better. I’ve tried to reactivate old contacts as a double agent (or “dual player”) but many have found themselves out of favour with the new regime. Too often my visits, under cover of All Stars tours or to investigate whether intercounty teams on “winter wonderland” holidays were in fact training, ended up in drunken reminiscence. I benefited to no greater extent than the free consumption of inhuman amounts of rather corrosive vodka and the occasional company of women bored beyond even the civility of pretending to listen to my views on the qualifiers and illicit payments to managers. I’m afraid the Official Secrets Act comes into play here – given this newspaper circulates in Britain – as does, to be fair, a rather welcome lump sum to help me see the importance of keeping quiet about the circumstances of my recruitment by an MI6 puppet master, Nigel someone or other but known to us as “Nancy”. Not, you understand, that I would compromise myself but the safety of any State is the safety of ordinary people.

My old contacts have been of assistance to me in undermining the GAA and vice versa. For instance, I sent studies of Frank Murphy and his “Cork model” of democratic centralism to the politburo, but by then I had become regarded as erratic and untrustworthy and the dossier was forwarded to North Korea.

My work continued with humdrum schemes such as planting people with firm backbones and logical instincts on the GAA's various disciplinary committees but ensuring both of those qualities were rarely possessed by the same individual. During the summer a long-standing project to use the techniques of the Manchurian Candidateto brain wash someone who one day would be in a position to do what club full forwards call "a bit of damage" to the GAA was dropped.

Having reviewed what a duly appointed but un-programmed referee managed to do in the Leinster final and the social unrest it fermented in Co Louth or somewhere like that, my handlers in London came to the conclusion there was no need to retain my services at as handsome a rate as previously.

It’s been an agonising decision for me to decide to come in from the cold. I suppose I’m weary of the whole thing and the economic meltdown has persuaded the wretched security service bean counters, who put a price on everything regardless of its beauty, to humiliate me but most of all, I no longer have confidence in the purpose of what I’m doing.

Some call me a fantasist, a charge I have strenuously disputed since tipping Cork on the weekend of the 2007 All-Ireland football final, but I should say if anyone’s actually reading this and they notice I’ve disappeared in the weeks ahead, just cut out the article and bring it to the Garda. At this juncture with so much pessimism and despair abroad, it would be easy to say the state we have found ourselves in might convince us in future to scrutinise more rigorously those who we elect to govern.

I could say that like the Cork footballers, we’ll eventually get there. I could say that, like Tipperary hurlers, we’ll some day no longer need to look enviously down the road at wealthier neighbours. I could say all of those things. But who’d believe me?