GAELIC GAMES: TOM HUMPHRIESon how next weekend, in memory of Philly McGuinness, the strands of David Hickey's public life come together. Humanity, sharing, community and sport.
YOU NOTICE a second too late the phone has been vibrating. Missed call from David Hickey. You don’t need to have been a child of the glorious 1970s to vibrate with excitement yourself when you realise that one of the gods is on the line.
You just have to know Hickey and his enthusiastic engagement with life. You grab the phone. Dial 171, Hickey has left a message. Sardonic and self-mocking.
“This is David Hickey, former Dublin great . . . ”
There are men who couldn’t get away with that little joke, but few people inhabit their past as little as Hickey, the charismatic wing forward from the golden era, does. He left the 1970s behind to create a life of extraordinary usefulness for himself.
A leading transplant surgeon, he has performed over 1,000 kidney transplants since 1983. A campaigner and the best minister for health we will never have, he has abandoned the gold mines of private medicine entirely and works amidst the teeming public corridors of Beaumonts main hospital rather than the hushed rooms of the private clinic around the corner.
He is a cancer survivor, five years clear last week, and, surprisingly, a Dublin football selector.
When you meet him on a typically busy Beaumont morning he is much further into his day than you are. Dublin trained at 6:15am this morning. A full complement of players, and Hickey on the sidelines. And they will train again at 8pm. But he hasn’t called to talk about all that.
Not yet.
He wants to talk about first about next Saturday’s game with Cork and how it relates to a game played on another Saturday evening almost a year ago.
A Division One league match in Leitrim between Mohill and Melvin Gaels in Annaduff, the evening when Philly McGuinness, a hurler and a footballer, took a freak knock. Philly’s head collided by pure random circumstance with a galloping knee, a cruel intersection of paths which led him in quick turn to Sligo Hospital and then here to Beaumont.
Sometimes it’s a lazy cliche rather than a tribute to describe a fallen athlete in classical terms but Philly McGuinness was one of those players who epitomised all that was best about the GAA. The son of a great footballing family, he had a cut and a dash about him on the field which distinguished him. He was at the heart of it.
Philly never regained consciousness after Annaduff and on Monday evening in Beaumont he was pronounced dead.
Yesterday, a verdict of accidental death was recorded by Dublin city coroner Dr Brian Farrell at the inquest. “Sometimes it is not easy to find adequate words to express such a tragedy,” said Farrell.
David Hickey shakes his head. Almost three decades of familiarity with the business of harvesting and transplanting organs hasn’t calloused his soul. He is humbled by the process.
“Philly died last April after playing a game up in Leitrim and at that awful time for them his family donated his organs. That’s a humanity that is overwhelming in so many ways. He was a well -known lad, much loved and respected and the GAA wanted to do something for his memory. . .
“The concept is that the values of the GAA community, the solidarity, the generosity and amateurism are the same ones that people, who are under extraordinary pressure and stress, find to think of somebody else.
“Dr Con Murphy in Cork suggested that we do something for organ donation. The concept is that during the game or after the game with Cork there will be some publicity about the issue.
“The Dublin County Board are including some information in the programme and at the end we are presenting Mrs McGuinness with a little statuette, a piece of sculpture done by Blackie Coen” (the fabulous minor star of 1959 and another former Dublin great).
The link between the GAA and transplants? He talks with his trademark passion about organ donation. “For the GAA it is a nice thing to be associated with. A human thing, the ethos is in the air, the ethos of sharing. Both bodies will benefit. It isn’t a money thing, it is an awareness thing, a community thing.
“We have no legislation here. We have 22 donors per million people. Spain is the top at 35. People have to die under specific conditions. In ICU, if the brain dies rather than the organ you may have a viable donor. In the UK the figure is 16, in Holland it is seven.
“We are among the top four or five in Europe but it is entirely dependent on public support. We need to launch a few more events, into schools and colleges. We have a huge problem through the western world. Increasing numbers going on dialysis and the number of organ donors falling or staying stable.”
So far this year has been good if depressingly busy. The team in Beaumont have performed 30 transplants in six weeks. “A great run of donors.”
Over the last five years, which is the period through which averages are taken, the figure for viable donors is that alarmingly small 22 per million of population.
Hickey talks of the value and difference a donor can make to another life, about athletes like Kelvin Troy, Jonah Lomu or Ivan Klasnic who have all come through kidney failure, about how donations enable you to pass something forward in a chain of giving.
And he knows the pleasure of reprieve himself. Some years ago he felt sudden pains in his head which were diagnosed quickly as a tumour very close to the optic nerve. Not happy news at the best of times but for a surgeon potentially catastrophic.
He recounts the story as very few of us would. Going to Toronto for months of special radiation treatment (the tumour having been so near the optic nerve, the radiation had to be specialised) and finding himself spending day after winter day in a lead-walled bunker underground.
“It was an interesting experience , especially for a medic. Sobering. Like Behan, I’m a daytime atheist. All the prayers come in the dark! I’d be underground with these accelerators and lead-lined walls.
“I didn’t like Toronto but you’d be sitting there feeling sorry for yourself and a five-year-old child, bald and pale, would pass you by with parents who would just look haunted . And I’d think I’ve had a fair good 54 years. I’d be in tears coming out of the place some days, the things I would see in there.”
He discounts the ordeal with a typical Hickey line. “It’s like playing Wexford in the first round of the Leinster championship. It will be a very painful and unpleasant experience but you know you will get through it.”
After Toronto he escaped to his beloved Havana. A room with a balcony and a warm wind on his gaunt face, gently restoring the life to him. “All my buddies there said ‘hey you are looking great’. I see myself in pictures from that time. I look like the Russian guy, Litvinenko who had the polonium poisoning. I can’t believe them anymore!”
Cuba. In a week when Fianna Fáil released an election manifesto which didn’t have one mention of sport he can’t resist the comparison. He speaks of seeing Alberto Juantorena at the track in the morning time with kids before heading to work in the sports ministry, and then at the basketball court at lunchtime, of the hours in the morning when Havana’s broad but quiet streets are filled with the sounds of children exercising and playing as part of their school day.
“They are so proud of their sport over there, proud of their defiance, proud of Castro. They see things differently. A bigger picture. My equivalent is earning 200 bucks a year and professionally he is happy. They do great work, they have a great relationship with patients, a lot of them would have been abroad and seen the way things are.
“They are in a system which works. And ten per cent of what they earn goes on mortgage. The rest is theirs. We are spending on mortgages, education, health, insurance, pension plans. They don’t have those worries.”
He cites one of the more bizarre aspects of our health system, an absurdity in the style of a Yes Minister script.
“We have 100 people here in Beaumont who are long stay. There is no place for them to go. No nursing homes or anything. In a business like this you might think this is a desperate thing. But in the strange world we are in it suits. You just have to feed them. They are minimal cost. If we bring a guy in for an operation on his hip it costs us. Every hospital needs this long stay group. If all the bed blockers left tomorrow we would have 100 patients who would need something done. We can’t afford that”
He works in an environment incredibly top heavy with administration.
“We aren’t patient focused. Cuba spends 280 million dollars a year on health. That is smaller than Beaumont hospital’s budget. They have a lower infant mortality rate, a higher vaccination rate and the same life expectancy. Those are the criteria. They focus on health rather than disease.
“Primary care. They’ve a doctor and nurse for every block, for every 150 families. In Ireland we have 3,000 executive medics or surgeons and 120,000 helping them do their job.”
Life goes on though under these grey skies which house our docile little banana republic and a man needs a diversion to keep him sane. Pat Gilroy had enjoyed Hickey’s company and just had a hunch he would bring good things to the Dublin set-up.
“I didn’t know where I would come in. It wasn’t that attractive. They’d just been beaten by 18 points by Kerry. But I’ve always loved it. When I was a young fella my only ambition in life was to play football for Dublin.
“No interest in medicine or rocket science, anything. Playing for Dublin was my only interest and I got that at 17. I hit the pinnacle. I was Olga Korbut! Now my role is iconic former great who says nothing, so is obviously very wise! I was happy to be asked. I hope they don’t analyse too much what exactly it is I do. I like being involved again though.”
What he brings to the party according to Pat Gilroy is his intelligence and his infectious confidence and his personality.
“I’d been in his company a few times through the years,” says Gilroy, “and he is a fantastic man just to listen to. So first there is no such thing as a long coach journey or a long flight if you have David Hickey beside you. And then he has this confidence and belief which he brings with him. He makes fellas believe that anything is possible.”
Anybody old enough will know that the extension of possibility is a quality which Hickey brought to his beautiful, cavalier-style play years ago. In that Dublin dressingroom he was the intelligent, reasonable voice who had minimal respect for any other football county. Everybody was eminently beatable and imminently to be beaten. Just go out and beat them. With style.
The 70s though is an era he generally doesn’t speak about with today’s team.
“Nothing makes players more sick than hearing about ‘in my day’. It’s irrelevant. My role is to give them the belief that this isn’t as difficult as they thought it was. They lost to Kerry by 18 points the year before last and it seemed like they were a million miles off. They know now how close they were a year later to beating Cork in a semi- final.”
He believes totally in this Dublin team, sees them becoming the index team for the next ten years, the team that any side has to beat to get to an All -Ireland.
“They’ll make sure that our 70s team are no longer the reference point for Dublin football anymore. That’s how it should be.”
Hickey was a talented rugby player, performing both here and in France, but as he has grown older the maverick in him has come to appreciate more and more the ethos of the GAA and to connect the GAA’s strengths with some of the threadbare quality of Irish life generally.
Next weekend in memory of Philly McGuinness, all the strands of David Hickey’s public life come together. Humanity, sharing, gratitude, community, sport. And a bit of fun.
A welcome respite from the white noise of this dispiriting election.
