What kind of a nation are we anyway?

When we first heard reports about a small, proud, independent nation on the western fringes of Europe weeping and gnashing its teeth at the loss of its sovereignty to foreign financial institutions, we had to do a double-take. Was this Ireland they were talking about, a people so proud of their heritage that an entire generation from Dublin 4 to Dingle have grown up speaking in a curious, bastardised and absolutely un-Irish accent born somewhere between the mid-Atlantic and the hills of Los Angeles?

Surely they didn’t mean the island where large swathes of the population spend inordinate amounts of their time obsessing over England’s lowest-rent reality television shows, the same place where every Sunday afternoon pubs fill up with men who use the first person plural when referring to Premier League teams in British cities they’ve never visited? How quaint that these very people are suddenly worried about ceding control of a country where the main shopping thoroughfares have long since become cardboard cut-outs of high streets in provincial towns all over Yorkshire.

The most unintentionally hilarious thing about the sorry events of the past month has been the way the word sovereignty has so quickly entered the lexicon. The same people currently hand-wringing about our perceived loss of independence are the very ones who a few weeks back would have reckoned sovereignty to be some sort of gaudy gold ring worn by men of a certain class. Against that unpromising background, the silver lining to this cloud is it might force us all to consider exactly what kind of a nation we are and, more importantly, what kind of nation do we want to be. The results of any such introspection might not be pretty.

Every dictionary definition of nationhood describes a people sharing a common language, history, culture, and religion. How many of those criteria apply to Ireland in the 21^st century. Well, there is a common language alright but it’s not our own. The dysfunctional relationship too many of us have with our native tongue, a consequence of decades of poorly-conceived educational policy, is perhaps best illustrated by events in Croke Park on a September Sunday five years ago.

That was the day Sean Og O hAilpin, a man who spent the first 11 years of his life in Fiji and Australia, delivered a magnificent speech as Gaeilge when accepting the Liam McCarthy cup at the conclusion of the All-Ireland hurling final. Most of those listening in the stadium and watching on television couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying. More pertinent yet, many of them then had the gall to complain about this fact like it was O hAilpin’s fault vast numbers of Irish people don’t know enough of their own language to comprehend a few basic phrases at a sporting event.

But the language was taken from us by the English, they argue. Well, what excuse do we have for our strange attitude to our own history? Most nations born out of a military and political struggle (not to mention one that endured for centuries) take immense pride in this fact and go to great lengths to commemorate the various landmarks on the journey to independence. In Ireland, many are so afraid of embracing our (admittedly bloody) history that the most they will do is cock a post-modern snook at it, belting out “rebel” songs once they are drunk enough or once they see the IMF coming over the horizon.

Of course, they only sing ironically because it wouldn’t do to have any actual passion for the story of how the nation came into being. Celebrating (or even acknowledging) the events (some good, some bad, as is always the case) that led to Irish independence is perversely regarded as embarrassing and old-fashioned. Over time, it has become largely the preserve of whichever political party lays claim to the person involved in the particular cameo being remembered. Worse again, the fear of being associated with Sinn Fein and the IRA ensures majority stay away from these occasions lest they be branded fellow-travellers.

In most post-colonial countries, the biggest national holiday of the year is held on the date traditionally associated with shaking off the shackles of the larger power. In Ireland, we prefer to celebrate St. Patrick bringing Christianity into the country. All those people currently moaning and groaning about future decisions being made for us by faceless bureaucrats in foreign cities were probably too busy getting drunk on March 17^th to ever wonder why, in allegedly post-Catholic Ireland, we never got around to cherishing our independence enough to actually properly celebrate it.

Any country which reveres its nationhood would have a better relationship with its own flag too. Somehow, somewhere along the line during the decades of violence in Northern Ireland, the tricolour was hijacked by the Provos. Beyond soccer internationals and World Cups, when do Irish people ever wave the flag? Upon moving to America, I saw more green, white and orange fluttering from residential homes in New York every March than I ever saw waving anywhere during a childhood in Cork. How many of those so concerned about sovereignty even have an Irish flag in their houses?

In every public school in America, the day begins with students placing their hands over their hearts and pledging allegiance to “the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Every single day for 14 years in the education system, every kid does this. Irish people deride this carry-on as jingoistic but it does explain why the average American loves the flag and honours it every chance they get. Do Irish children even learn the story behind the tricolour?

Of course, America is also a place where every year more and more movies dealing with the country’s struggle for nationhood go into production. If Ireland had any respect for its own evolution, surely the canon of films about the period between the Easter Rising and the Civil War would extend beyond two serious movies in quarter of a century, “Michael Collins” and “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”. If culture is an integral part of nationhood, what does it say about us that we can’t even attempt to revisit our past through the cinema, like any proper, mature country should?

The gaps in our culture extend farther than that. In Gaelic football and hurling, we have two of the last vestiges of our own uniqueness, ancient games which remind us we have a heritage all of our own, distinct from the American sitcoms and the English soap operas in which we find nightly solace. Yet, you can thumb through the entire body of Irish literature without finding either of those sports or the GAA (the largest organisation in the country) as the subject of a serious novel. Similarly, not a single movie has yet been made in which the games feature and are celebrated in the manner of say, baseball is in Bull Durham, or English rugby in This Sporting Life.

For all the liquored-up braggadocio and bravado of the Celtic Tiger years, the available evidence suggests we actually lack the self-confidence to celebrate the few remaining facets of our society that separate us from the rest of the world. We would prefer to try to fit into the pan-British and pan-American cultures with which we are so obsessed. This tendency fits the profile of an immature nation. Exactly how immature will be proven again in the coming weeks and months.

Some day soon, most likely during the forthcoming general election a politician in search of a headline and a campaign issue will announce the intention to demand more visas for the Irish from the American government. Everybody will cluck approvingly while conveniently forgetting the fact that during the brief window of our own prosperity, we were about as inhospitable as a country could be to those less well-off than ourselves. We took in those we were forced to by EU law and, ignoring our own tragic history of emigration, treated most others like dirt on our shoes. We even coined our own n-word to describe them.

Aside from evincing a worrying ignorance about karma, our over-reaction to people wanting to come and work in Ireland showed the national self-awareness deficit. Having traded for decades on the slogan “Ireland of the Welcomes”, we were the exact opposite and, here’s the best bit, we saw no contradiction in that behaviour. The same way we’ll see nothing wrong with putting out our hands out now and expecting Australia, England and America to take those we can no longer afford to keep. Just as they did so often throughout our history. Just as we might have done for others if we’d have realised being a nation requires responsibilities and sometimes doing difficult things for the good of the less fortunate.

The manner in which we treat the tens of thousands currently departing our shores is telling too. Every American citizen is entitled to cast a postal vote in every American election. No matter where in the world they are, no matter how long has lapsed since they left their native land, they are entitled to a say in the future direction of the country. In Ireland, the moment the latest generation is herded onto the plane, they will be disenfranchised, conveniently removing the most ambitious and angriest sections of society from the electoral register. In some cases forever. The best and the brightest, gone and soon forgotten.

“Irishmen want their country,” bellowed Eamon de Valera, then priomh-aire of the First Dail, from a stage in Madison Square Garden, New York in the summer of 1920, as the War of Independence raged back home. “It is rightfully and lawfully theirs. Irishmen want their freedom: freedom to live their own lives in their own way: freedom to develop along their own lines: freedom to express their own national individuality in government, trade, art and literature: freedom to raise their own institutions in accord with their own genius: freedom to come out once more into the big world to share its activities, to act and to be acted upon, and to contribute their quota to human achievement.”

De Valera brought the house down with that one but ninety years on, it seems the theory proved much more impressive than the reality.

 

(first published in the Daily Mail in 2010)

What kind of a nation are we anyway?

When we first heard reports about a small, proud, independent nation on the western fringes of Europe weeping and gnashing its teeth at the loss of its sovereignty to foreign financial institutions, we had to do a double-take. Was this Ireland they were talking about, a people so proud of their heritage that an entire generation from Dublin 4 to Dingle have grown up speaking in a curious, bastardised and absolutely un-Irish accent born somewhere between the mid-Atlantic and the hills of Los Angeles?

Surely they didn’t mean the island where large swathes of the population spend inordinate amounts of their time obsessing over England’s lowest-rent reality television shows, the same place where every Sunday afternoon pubs fill up with men who use the first person plural when referring to Premier League teams in British cities they’ve never visited? How quaint that these very people are suddenly worried about ceding control of a country where the main shopping thoroughfares have long since become cardboard cut-outs of high streets in provincial towns all over Yorkshire.

The most unintentionally hilarious thing about the sorry events of the past month has been the way the word sovereignty has so quickly entered the lexicon. The same people currently hand-wringing about our perceived loss of independence are the very ones who a few weeks back would have reckoned sovereignty to be some sort of gaudy gold ring worn by men of a certain class. Against that unpromising background, the silver lining to this cloud is it might force us all to consider exactly what kind of a nation we are and, more importantly, what kind of nation do we want to be. The results of any such introspection might not be pretty.

Every dictionary definition of nationhood describes a people sharing a common language, history, culture, and religion. How many of those criteria apply to Ireland in the 21^st century. Well, there is a common language alright but it’s not our own. The dysfunctional relationship too many of us have with our native tongue, a consequence of decades of poorly-conceived educational policy, is perhaps best illustrated by events in Croke Park on a September Sunday five years ago.

That was the day Sean Og O hAilpin, a man who spent the first 11 years of his life in Fiji and Australia, delivered a magnificent speech as Gaeilge when accepting the Liam McCarthy cup at the conclusion of the All-Ireland hurling final. Most of those listening in the stadium and watching on television couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying. More pertinent yet, many of them then had the gall to complain about this fact like it was O hAilpin’s fault vast numbers of Irish people don’t know enough of their own language to comprehend a few basic phrases at a sporting event.

But the language was taken from us by the English, they argue. Well, what excuse do we have for our strange attitude to our own history? Most nations born out of a military and political struggle (not to mention one that endured for centuries) take immense pride in this fact and go to great lengths to commemorate the various landmarks on the journey to independence. In Ireland, many are so afraid of embracing our (admittedly bloody) history that the most they will do is cock a post-modern snook at it, belting out “rebel” songs once they are drunk enough or once they see the IMF coming over the horizon.

Of course, they only sing ironically because it wouldn’t do to have any actual passion for the story of how the nation came into being. Celebrating (or even acknowledging) the events (some good, some bad, as is always the case) that led to Irish independence is perversely regarded as embarrassing and old-fashioned. Over time, it has become largely the preserve of whichever political party lays claim to the person involved in the particular cameo being remembered. Worse again, the fear of being associated with Sinn Fein and the IRA ensures majority stay away from these occasions lest they be branded fellow-travellers.

In most post-colonial countries, the biggest national holiday of the year is held on the date traditionally associated with shaking off the shackles of the larger power. In Ireland, we prefer to celebrate St. Patrick bringing Christianity into the country. All those people currently moaning and groaning about future decisions being made for us by faceless bureaucrats in foreign cities were probably too busy getting drunk on March 17^th to ever wonder why, in allegedly post-Catholic Ireland, we never got around to cherishing our independence enough to actually properly celebrate it.

Any country which reveres its nationhood would have a better relationship with its own flag too. Somehow, somewhere along the line during the decades of violence in Northern Ireland, the tricolour was hijacked by the Provos. Beyond soccer internationals and World Cups, when do Irish people ever wave the flag? Upon moving to America, I saw more green, white and orange fluttering from residential homes in New York every March than I ever saw waving anywhere during a childhood in Cork. How many of those so concerned about sovereignty even have an Irish flag in their houses?

In every public school in America, the day begins with students placing their hands over their hearts and pledging allegiance to “the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Every single day for 14 years in the education system, every kid does this. Irish people deride this carry-on as jingoistic but it does explain why the average American loves the flag and honours it every chance they get. Do Irish children even learn the story behind the tricolour?

Of course, America is also a place where every year more and more movies dealing with the country’s struggle for nationhood go into production. If Ireland had any respect for its own evolution, surely the canon of films about the period between the Easter Rising and the Civil War would extend beyond two serious movies in quarter of a century, “Michael Collins” and “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”. If culture is an integral part of nationhood, what does it say about us that we can’t even attempt to revisit our past through the cinema, like any proper, mature country should?

The gaps in our culture extend farther than that. In Gaelic football and hurling, we have two of the last vestiges of our own uniqueness, ancient games which remind us we have a heritage all of our own, distinct from the American sitcoms and the English soap operas in which we find nightly solace. Yet, you can thumb through the entire body of Irish literature without finding either of those sports or the GAA (the largest organisation in the country) as the subject of a serious novel. Similarly, not a single movie has yet been made in which the games feature and are celebrated in the manner of say, baseball is in Bull Durham, or English rugby in This Sporting Life.

For all the liquored-up braggadocio and bravado of the Celtic Tiger years, the available evidence suggests we actually lack the self-confidence to celebrate the few remaining facets of our society that separate us from the rest of the world. We would prefer to try to fit into the pan-British and pan-American cultures with which we are so obsessed. This tendency fits the profile of an immature nation. Exactly how immature will be proven again in the coming weeks and months.

Some day soon, most likely during the forthcoming general election a politician in search of a headline and a campaign issue will announce the intention to demand more visas for the Irish from the American government. Everybody will cluck approvingly while conveniently forgetting the fact that during the brief window of our own prosperity, we were about as inhospitable as a country could be to those less well-off than ourselves. We took in those we were forced to by EU law and, ignoring our own tragic history of emigration, treated most others like dirt on our shoes. We even coined our own n-word to describe them.

Aside from evincing a worrying ignorance about karma, our over-reaction to people wanting to come and work in Ireland showed the national self-awareness deficit. Having traded for decades on the slogan “Ireland of the Welcomes”, we were the exact opposite and, here’s the best bit, we saw no contradiction in that behaviour. The same way we’ll see nothing wrong with putting out our hands out now and expecting Australia, England and America to take those we can no longer afford to keep. Just as they did so often throughout our history. Just as we might have done for others if we’d have realised being a nation requires responsibilities and sometimes doing difficult things for the good of the less fortunate.

The manner in which we treat the tens of thousands currently departing our shores is telling too. Every American citizen is entitled to cast a postal vote in every American election. No matter where in the world they are, no matter how long has lapsed since they left their native land, they are entitled to a say in the future direction of the country. In Ireland, the moment the latest generation is herded onto the plane, they will be disenfranchised, conveniently removing the most ambitious and angriest sections of society from the electoral register. In some cases forever. The best and the brightest, gone and soon forgotten.

“Irishmen want their country,” bellowed Eamon de Valera, then priomh-aire of the First Dail, from a stage in Madison Square Garden, New York in the summer of 1920, as the War of Independence raged back home. “It is rightfully and lawfully theirs. Irishmen want their freedom: freedom to live their own lives in their own way: freedom to develop along their own lines: freedom to express their own national individuality in government, trade, art and literature: freedom to raise their own institutions in accord with their own genius: freedom to come out once more into the big world to share its activities, to act and to be acted upon, and to contribute their quota to human achievement.”

De Valera brought the house down with that one but ninety years on, it seems the theory proved much more impressive than the reality.

 

(first published in the Daily Mail in 2010)

Irish sport has a drinking problem

In the course of an interview with Roisin Ingle in The Irish Times the other week, the horse trainer Aidan O’Brien described alcohol as something that, in his words, has “most of Ireland destroyed”. For a man not noted for being loquacious, that was a perfect turn of phrase to use. And he went a little further too. “Young people should be in control of their own destiny, alcohol takes away that control.” O’Brien is a pioneer who also happens to be the most successful trainer of his generation and somebody destined to become perhaps the most successful Irish sportsman ever by the time he’s done.

Elsewhere that week, Elaine Carey of  3 Mobile, the phone company, gave a speech at the FAI’s AGM in Letterkenny, County Donegal. At the very beginning, she mentioned how she knew there were “a few sore heads” in the audience and then she offered a prize as an incentive to get the hungover people to listen.  In contrast to Aidan O’Brien, the FAI is, as the writer Declan Lynch once put it, “the dysfunctional football association that other dysfunctional football associations regard as the galacticos”. What a contrast then in the attitudes of the elite performer in one sport towards drink compared to the leaders of another sport.

Before the recent British Open began, Darren Clarke handed back the Claret Jug to the Royal and Ancient, made a big spiel about not having put any drink in it and then apologised for all the dints and dents the trophy had incurred while in his hard-partying possession. The state of the cup reminded us of how Clarke had behaved in the aftermath of his improbable victory last year. Remember the tired and emotional interviews he gave the morning after that triumph, slurring his words, still very obviously under the influence. Funny thing is I didn’t notice Ernie Els doing anything like that following his win this year.

Does anybody notice a pattern here? The Irish tolerance for drunken carry-on from the famous and in the FAI’s case, the infamous, is ridiculous. It’s such an accepted part of our culture that it can be jokingly referred to from the top table at a meeting that should have been addressing the crisis in Irish football. And everybody thinks Clarke is hilarious for his carry-on but too many fail to point out a more abstemious approach to his golf over the years might have yielded more than one major for somebody with his talent.

There seems an unwillingness to engage with the extent of the national drink problem, even when it spills over into the world of sport. For all the justified praise our fans received for their behaviour in Poland during the European Championships, there was far too little discussion of why absolutely pathetic states of drunkenness seemed to be de rigeur for so many of the supporters. Can we not go to a foreign country to support our team without getting absolutely blotto at every opportunity? Just because we usually don’t attack foreigners like the English used to do doesn’t make our drunken carry-on any less boorish.

This is not just a soccer thing either. There were Dublin fans who could barely walk on their way into Hill 16 before their heroes took on Meath.  There were plenty from all four counties barely able to see in front of them when they stumbled into Semple Stadium on Sunday for the All-Ireland hurling quarter-finals last Sunday. Great crack altogether especially for the young children forced to sit and watch their fathers tearing into pints at a furious pace right up until the throw-in. And we wonder why each subsequent generation appears to have a worse attitude to drink than its predecessors.

Of course, the rugby crowd disgraced themselves in New Zealand earlier in the summer when over 90 per cent of those arrested or not allowed in to one of the tests (rugby speak for friendlies) were Irish supporters. When this fact was pointed out by the local constabulary, some of the diaspora complained about unfair stereotyping. Yeah, rather than face up to our own idiotic attitude to getting wasted at sports events, we accuse our hosts of stereotyping us. Guess what, stereotypes are, usually, there for good reason. We are notorious for loving to get drunk at matches and that’s nobody’s fault but our own.

Taken in tandem with the constant drip feed of stories from Australia about the drink-related antics of the new Irish arrivals down there, all of the above would seem to indicate Roisin Shortall’s decision to try to bring in a total ban on alcohol companies sponsoring sport and cultural events is to be welcomed. We don’t think this is the cure for all the ills that afflict Irish society but as a sign that somebody in government recognises the damage drink is doing, it is a progressive step.

Aidan O’Brien is one of the most famous Irish people in the world right now and last week he came out and said drink is destroying Ireland. Yet, his comments barely made a headline, never mind prompted a national debate. They were hidden away down a feature article and nobody saw fit to make more of this. Roy Keane’s career was nearly derailed by drink many times. George Best’s career was ruined by it. In every county in Ireland there are prodigies whose promising hurling and football careers ended at the bottom of a pint glass. And those are only the sporting examples of the problems caused.

Every weekend, a new drunken atrocity occurs on the streets of our cities. There is some brief hand-wringing and caterwauling, then we go on about our lives. The drink culture is pervasive and pernicious and needs to be attacked and destroyed. It need not be part of who we are. It need not be an accepted element of our so-called culture. It need not be funny to see a sportsman celebrate a great achievement by getting wasted. The sooner more people realise that the better for the country at large, the better for Ireland’s future.

(this article first appeared in the Evening Echo, July 27, 2012)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Irish sport has a drinking problem

In the course of an interview with Roisin Ingle in The Irish Times the other week, the horse trainer Aidan O’Brien described alcohol as something that, in his words, has “most of Ireland destroyed”. For a man not noted for being loquacious, that was a perfect turn of phrase to use. And he went a little further too. “Young people should be in control of their own destiny, alcohol takes away that control.” O’Brien is a pioneer who also happens to be the most successful trainer of his generation and somebody destined to become perhaps the most successful Irish sportsman ever by the time he’s done.

Elsewhere that week, Elaine Carey of  3 Mobile, the phone company, gave a speech at the FAI’s AGM in Letterkenny, County Donegal. At the very beginning, she mentioned how she knew there were “a few sore heads” in the audience and then she offered a prize as an incentive to get the hungover people to listen.  In contrast to Aidan O’Brien, the FAI is, as the writer Declan Lynch once put it, “the dysfunctional football association that other dysfunctional football associations regard as the galacticos”. What a contrast then in the attitudes of the elite performer in one sport towards drink compared to the leaders of another sport.

Before the recent British Open began, Darren Clarke handed back the Claret Jug to the Royal and Ancient, made a big spiel about not having put any drink in it and then apologised for all the dints and dents the trophy had incurred while in his hard-partying possession. The state of the cup reminded us of how Clarke had behaved in the aftermath of his improbable victory last year. Remember the tired and emotional interviews he gave the morning after that triumph, slurring his words, still very obviously under the influence. Funny thing is I didn’t notice Ernie Els doing anything like that following his win this year.

Does anybody notice a pattern here? The Irish tolerance for drunken carry-on from the famous and in the FAI’s case, the infamous, is ridiculous. It’s such an accepted part of our culture that it can be jokingly referred to from the top table at a meeting that should have been addressing the crisis in Irish football. And everybody thinks Clarke is hilarious for his carry-on but too many fail to point out a more abstemious approach to his golf over the years might have yielded more than one major for somebody with his talent.

There seems an unwillingness to engage with the extent of the national drink problem, even when it spills over into the world of sport. For all the justified praise our fans received for their behaviour in Poland during the European Championships, there was far too little discussion of why absolutely pathetic states of drunkenness seemed to be de rigeur for so many of the supporters. Can we not go to a foreign country to support our team without getting absolutely blotto at every opportunity? Just because we usually don’t attack foreigners like the English used to do doesn’t make our drunken carry-on any less boorish.

This is not just a soccer thing either. There were Dublin fans who could barely walk on their way into Hill 16 before their heroes took on Meath.  There were plenty from all four counties barely able to see in front of them when they stumbled into Semple Stadium on Sunday for the All-Ireland hurling quarter-finals last Sunday. Great crack altogether especially for the young children forced to sit and watch their fathers tearing into pints at a furious pace right up until the throw-in. And we wonder why each subsequent generation appears to have a worse attitude to drink than its predecessors.

Of course, the rugby crowd disgraced themselves in New Zealand earlier in the summer when over 90 per cent of those arrested or not allowed in to one of the tests (rugby speak for friendlies) were Irish supporters. When this fact was pointed out by the local constabulary, some of the diaspora complained about unfair stereotyping. Yeah, rather than face up to our own idiotic attitude to getting wasted at sports events, we accuse our hosts of stereotyping us. Guess what, stereotypes are, usually, there for good reason. We are notorious for loving to get drunk at matches and that’s nobody’s fault but our own.

Taken in tandem with the constant drip feed of stories from Australia about the drink-related antics of the new Irish arrivals down there, all of the above would seem to indicate Roisin Shortall’s decision to try to bring in a total ban on alcohol companies sponsoring sport and cultural events is to be welcomed. We don’t think this is the cure for all the ills that afflict Irish society but as a sign that somebody in government recognises the damage drink is doing, it is a progressive step.

Aidan O’Brien is one of the most famous Irish people in the world right now and last week he came out and said drink is destroying Ireland. Yet, his comments barely made a headline, never mind prompted a national debate. They were hidden away down a feature article and nobody saw fit to make more of this. Roy Keane’s career was nearly derailed by drink many times. George Best’s career was ruined by it. In every county in Ireland there are prodigies whose promising hurling and football careers ended at the bottom of a pint glass. And those are only the sporting examples of the problems caused.

Every weekend, a new drunken atrocity occurs on the streets of our cities. There is some brief hand-wringing and caterwauling, then we go on about our lives. The drink culture is pervasive and pernicious and needs to be attacked and destroyed. It need not be part of who we are. It need not be an accepted element of our so-called culture. It need not be funny to see a sportsman celebrate a great achievement by getting wasted. The sooner more people realise that the better for the country at large, the better for Ireland’s future.

(this article first appeared in the Evening Echo, July 27, 2012)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ballad of James Brendan Connolly

Halfway through a chilly, grey afternoon in April 1896, the opening day of the inaugural modern Olympic Games in Athens arrived at its first dramatic turn. As he readied himself to go, the last competitor in the hop, step and jump, an Irish-American called James Brendan Connolly, made his way to the landing pit.

Confused by the measurement system in use and baffled by the language of the judges, Connolly wanted to see the exact point which the leader, Alexandre Tuff’eri, had reached. Establishing the mark that his French rival had set, he flung his cap down a yard past it, a makeshift target at which he would aim.

Connolly walked back up the runway with the 50,000 Greeks who had been shoehorned into the Panathenian Stadium jeering his bravado. A headwind blowing in his face, he stood at the top of the track and muttered a prayer to himself, before spitting on his hands in the manner of a horse trader making a deal at market, and announcing to the bemused gallery of European royalty: "Here’s one for the honor of the County Galway." And then, he set off, hopping, stepping and jumping 44 feet, 11 3/4 inches, staying airborne long enough to sail past his own headgear and become the first Olympic champion in over 1,500 years.

"It’s a miracle," the crowd cried. "It’s a miracle," their disposition changing in an instant to acknowledge the feat of athleticism they had just witnessed. As the band struck up the first notes of the "Star Spangled Banner," Connolly was already getting dressed, only realizing the anthem was in his honor when he saw the American flag being raised. On his way from the field, he was engulfed by smitten locals, and even in the bathhouse afterward, the attendants dried him off while repeatedly chorusing "Nike, Nike," the Greek word for victory.

Three decades before their son made his entry in the record books and secured Galway’s unique place in Olympian folklore, Sean Connolly and Aine O’Donnell departed Inis Mor in the Aran Islands for a life in the New World. Fetching up in Boston, they settled in the Irish enclave south of the city, and Sean found work in that bustling port’s fishing fleet. James Brendan was born in 1868, Nov. 25, to be precise. From an early age, he was taken out in boats by his father and his Uncle Jim O’Donnell, the experience nurturing a love of the high seas that was to become perhaps the defining relationship of his life.

Connolly left school at 15. His mother implored him to find work away from the water, and he went through a succession of jobs over the next decade. In a remarkable achievement for any Catholic of that era, especially the son of Irish immigrants, he was accepted into Harvard University’s School of Engineering in 1895. He found the academic going tough during his freshman year, his focus not helped that first winter by constant talk in the local papers about the forthcoming Olympic Games in Greece. National champion in the hop, step and jump, he was an obvious candidate for the revived competition.

"Life in Harvard was alright, but not exactly thrilling," Connolly wrote later in his autobiography, "whereas a sailing across the wide Atlantic through the Gibraltar Straits and so to the port of Pir’us where Homer must have landed on his way to Athens was certainly a better way of passing what should be pleasant afternoons than trying to chamfer a block of cold steel with a chisel."

Athens bound

When the university authorities refused to grant him two months leave to pursue his athletic ambition, he resigned his place. The official archive at Harvard records his departure thus: "Withdrew March 19, 1896. Reason: To Visit Europe." Connolly’s own account is slightly more theatrical, claiming that he ended a meeting with the dean by saying: "I’m going to the Olympics and I’m through with Harvard, now good day to you, sir." More than half a century later, he was invited back on campus to receive an honorary degree.

His passage on the Fulda, the tramp steamer carrying the other 10 American athletes from New York to Naples, was financed by his club, Suffolk Athletic, and denizens of his parish in South Boston. His compatriots passed the time aboard working out to keep in shape, but a back injury meant Connolly spent much of the two-week journey across the Atlantic sitting in a deck chair until proclaiming on sight of Gibraltar "that every pain and ache is gone and I feel as loose as ashes."

More than once, the Americans’ 5,000-mile expedition almost came unstuck. In Naples, Connolly’s wallet was stolen, and a protracted police investigation nearly caused him to miss the next leg of their odyssey. With the Neapolitan constabulary wanting him to stay and testify in court against the thief, he had to literally outrun the officers in order to catch the train carrying his teammates onward to Brindisi. Even when they subsequently arrived in Athens, there was to be one more twist of fate.

In recognition of the distance the Americans had traveled, the Greeks laid on a feast to welcome them. Though battling exhaustion, the squad embraced the festive mood and partied into the small hours. It was only when they were woken next morning to the sound of passing parades that Connolly and the rest realized that the games were beginning that very afternoon. Their failure to properly grasp the 12 days difference between the Julian (Greek) and the Gregorian (Western) calendars meant there would be no time for them to acclimatize or recover from their voyage.

Under those circumstances, Connolly’s prodigious performance in the discipline that would later become known as the triple jump was all the more notable. The following afternoon, he finished a credible third in the long jump, and completed the full set of honors with a second place in the high jump on the final day of competition. He surrendered his Olympic title when finishing second at the Paris games in 1900, but by then his life away from sport was beginning to take on a particularly epic tinge.

Just two years after Athens, he fought in the Spanish-American War with the Irish 9th Infantry of Massachusetts, his dispatches from the conflict published in the Boston Globe as "Letters from the Front in Cuba." Having forged an excellent reputation as a journalist, he wrote more than 25 novels, mostly to do with seafaring, while still finding time to run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress in 1912 and to serve as an American emissary in Ireland for a turbulent spell in the 1920s. A close personal friend of Teddy Roosevelt, the former president once said of him: "If I were to pick one man for my sons to pattern their lives after, I would choose Jim Connolly."

In 1983, 26 years after his death, a bronze sculpture was erected in Connolly’s memory at Columbus Park, near the Southie neighborhood in Boston where he grew up. The monument shows him, arms extended, legs bent beneath, and face contorted with effort. His life remembered at its zenith, the perfect study of a man leaping into history.

The Ballad of James Brendan Connolly

Halfway through a chilly, grey afternoon in April 1896, the opening day of the inaugural modern Olympic Games in Athens arrived at its first dramatic turn. As he readied himself to go, the last competitor in the hop, step and jump, an Irish-American called James Brendan Connolly, made his way to the landing pit.

Confused by the measurement system in use and baffled by the language of the judges, Connolly wanted to see the exact point which the leader, Alexandre Tuff’eri, had reached. Establishing the mark that his French rival had set, he flung his cap down a yard past it, a makeshift target at which he would aim.

Connolly walked back up the runway with the 50,000 Greeks who had been shoehorned into the Panathenian Stadium jeering his bravado. A headwind blowing in his face, he stood at the top of the track and muttered a prayer to himself, before spitting on his hands in the manner of a horse trader making a deal at market, and announcing to the bemused gallery of European royalty: "Here’s one for the honor of the County Galway." And then, he set off, hopping, stepping and jumping 44 feet, 11 3/4 inches, staying airborne long enough to sail past his own headgear and become the first Olympic champion in over 1,500 years.

"It’s a miracle," the crowd cried. "It’s a miracle," their disposition changing in an instant to acknowledge the feat of athleticism they had just witnessed. As the band struck up the first notes of the "Star Spangled Banner," Connolly was already getting dressed, only realizing the anthem was in his honor when he saw the American flag being raised. On his way from the field, he was engulfed by smitten locals, and even in the bathhouse afterward, the attendants dried him off while repeatedly chorusing "Nike, Nike," the Greek word for victory.

Three decades before their son made his entry in the record books and secured Galway’s unique place in Olympian folklore, Sean Connolly and Aine O’Donnell departed Inis Mor in the Aran Islands for a life in the New World. Fetching up in Boston, they settled in the Irish enclave south of the city, and Sean found work in that bustling port’s fishing fleet. James Brendan was born in 1868, Nov. 25, to be precise. From an early age, he was taken out in boats by his father and his Uncle Jim O’Donnell, the experience nurturing a love of the high seas that was to become perhaps the defining relationship of his life.

Connolly left school at 15. His mother implored him to find work away from the water, and he went through a succession of jobs over the next decade. In a remarkable achievement for any Catholic of that era, especially the son of Irish immigrants, he was accepted into Harvard University’s School of Engineering in 1895. He found the academic going tough during his freshman year, his focus not helped that first winter by constant talk in the local papers about the forthcoming Olympic Games in Greece. National champion in the hop, step and jump, he was an obvious candidate for the revived competition.

"Life in Harvard was alright, but not exactly thrilling," Connolly wrote later in his autobiography, "whereas a sailing across the wide Atlantic through the Gibraltar Straits and so to the port of Pir’us where Homer must have landed on his way to Athens was certainly a better way of passing what should be pleasant afternoons than trying to chamfer a block of cold steel with a chisel."

Athens bound

When the university authorities refused to grant him two months leave to pursue his athletic ambition, he resigned his place. The official archive at Harvard records his departure thus: "Withdrew March 19, 1896. Reason: To Visit Europe." Connolly’s own account is slightly more theatrical, claiming that he ended a meeting with the dean by saying: "I’m going to the Olympics and I’m through with Harvard, now good day to you, sir." More than half a century later, he was invited back on campus to receive an honorary degree.

His passage on the Fulda, the tramp steamer carrying the other 10 American athletes from New York to Naples, was financed by his club, Suffolk Athletic, and denizens of his parish in South Boston. His compatriots passed the time aboard working out to keep in shape, but a back injury meant Connolly spent much of the two-week journey across the Atlantic sitting in a deck chair until proclaiming on sight of Gibraltar "that every pain and ache is gone and I feel as loose as ashes."

More than once, the Americans’ 5,000-mile expedition almost came unstuck. In Naples, Connolly’s wallet was stolen, and a protracted police investigation nearly caused him to miss the next leg of their odyssey. With the Neapolitan constabulary wanting him to stay and testify in court against the thief, he had to literally outrun the officers in order to catch the train carrying his teammates onward to Brindisi. Even when they subsequently arrived in Athens, there was to be one more twist of fate.

In recognition of the distance the Americans had traveled, the Greeks laid on a feast to welcome them. Though battling exhaustion, the squad embraced the festive mood and partied into the small hours. It was only when they were woken next morning to the sound of passing parades that Connolly and the rest realized that the games were beginning that very afternoon. Their failure to properly grasp the 12 days difference between the Julian (Greek) and the Gregorian (Western) calendars meant there would be no time for them to acclimatize or recover from their voyage.

Under those circumstances, Connolly’s prodigious performance in the discipline that would later become known as the triple jump was all the more notable. The following afternoon, he finished a credible third in the long jump, and completed the full set of honors with a second place in the high jump on the final day of competition. He surrendered his Olympic title when finishing second at the Paris games in 1900, but by then his life away from sport was beginning to take on a particularly epic tinge.

Just two years after Athens, he fought in the Spanish-American War with the Irish 9th Infantry of Massachusetts, his dispatches from the conflict published in the Boston Globe as "Letters from the Front in Cuba." Having forged an excellent reputation as a journalist, he wrote more than 25 novels, mostly to do with seafaring, while still finding time to run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress in 1912 and to serve as an American emissary in Ireland for a turbulent spell in the 1920s. A close personal friend of Teddy Roosevelt, the former president once said of him: "If I were to pick one man for my sons to pattern their lives after, I would choose Jim Connolly."

In 1983, 26 years after his death, a bronze sculpture was erected in Connolly’s memory at Columbus Park, near the Southie neighborhood in Boston where he grew up. The monument shows him, arms extended, legs bent beneath, and face contorted with effort. His life remembered at its zenith, the perfect study of a man leaping into history.

The strange case of Jim Larkin, J. Edgar Hoover and Charlie Chaplin

To carry on his fiery cross mission among labouring men, who, as everybody knows, are shockingly abused in this country, and underpaid, is the idea of Mr. Larkin…James is unique in his line, the most conspicuous and noisiest disturber of the public peace. He is no imitator. He is an original

– New York Times’ editorial reacting to news of Larkin’s proposed trip to America,

 December 26, 1913

 

On May 21^st, 1916, Jim Larkin, by then resident in Chicago, organised a rally at George M. Cohan’s Grand Opera House on Clark Street to commemorate those who had died in the Easter Rising the previous month. Several guest speakers were invited along, representing the various radical, nationalist and socialist groups from around the city.  Dr. K.A. Zurawski came to the podium, wearing the colours of the Polish Federation, a group whose aspirations for independence were in tune with Ireland’s own.

“The English certainly murdered the Irish in true Russian style,” said Zurawski. The crowd of nearly 1500 erupted with applause at the line, one put-upon ethnicity empathizing with another. As the clapping and the cheering died down, Matthew Thomas Newman, described by journalists present as “a dapper young men with a broad English accent”, stood up in his seat and began to speak.

“I am as good an Irishman as any here today,” said Newman. “I have lived in Ireland and my mother is from a long line of Ireland’s best. But such ballybunk makes me ill. I say, why do you put over such ridiculous drivel?”

Larkin was seated at the back of the stage but he was near enough to hear every word. He stood up out of his chair with rage, sprinted towards the footlights, hurdled the orchestra pit and jumped another brass railing before landing in the aisle. As he closed on Newman, Elisabeth Larkin shrieked at the back of the auditorium and started to walk down toward her husband. By then, he had reached his quarry and she beseeched him to see sense through the red mist descending.

“Be careful what you do to him!” shouted Elizabeth. “Jim, Jim! Think!”

He wasn’t thinking. He was too busy attacking the heckler. He had his hands gripped around Newman’s throat and seemed bent on choking him to death. Perhaps finally affected by his wife’s intervention, he stopped the attempted asphyxiation but he wasn’t letting Newman off lightly. He pulled him from the row of seats and shook him with such ferocity that he ended up tearing his collar away. Then, he dragged Newman up the aisle and through the doors before depositing him in the lobby.

The show over, his face flushed with rage, his blood boiling and sweat forming on his brow, Larkin made his way back to the stage. He still had a job to do. In his mind, that job was to educate those present about the complexity of the rebellion in which his friends and colleagues had died. When he came to the microphone himself later in the evening, Larkin informed the crowd, amongst other things, that the Rising had been aided by English people. To hammer home this particular point, he picked up one of three rifles which had been placed on the stage, and held it above his head.

“Perhaps you don’t know who brought this kind of rifle into Ireland,” he said. “Of course you don’t because the press has never told you. Well, it was Angela Spring-Rice, sister of Ambassador Spring-Rice (London’s man in Washington). It was she who smuggled them to us.”

That cameo in Chicago came 18 months after Liverpool-born Larkin had left Ireland for New York with the fall-out from the 1913 Lock-out still resounding. The impact of the Dublin agitation and the coverage of it in American papers meant he arrived in the United States already a well-known name. Indeed, the New York Times had first talked about him coming to the city 11 months before he actually landed. Originally intending to stay for a few months, he remained for eight and a half years, during which time he became more infamous than famous after his involvement in a succession of high-profile controversies, court cases, and a stint in Sing Sing Prison.

Just three days after he walked off the St Louis in New York Harbour in November, 1914, Larkin spoke before a crowd of 15,000 at a rally in Madison Square Garden, an honored guest at a celebration of the election of Meyer London, a socialist, to US Congress. Quite a debut.

“If it’s men you are fighting for, your movement is damned,” said Larkin that night, “but if it’s a great principle, you will triumph. The task before you is great. You must realise the great responsibility that faces you. It takes great men and women to stand up and say ‘We’re Socialists’. You are fighting to abolish this system of exploitation.”

He went down a storm with that sympathetic audience, most of whom knew his reputation and regarded him as a hero from what they’d read about him in the left-wing press. The rest of New York and America came to know the name pretty quickly too due to Larkin throwing himself into various socialist and radical causes, from workers’ rights to the anti-war movement. The Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the modern FBI) file on Larkin would eventually run to nearly 500 pages as the government struggled to keep up with his every move, crisscrossing the continent.

One minute he was headlining an Irish Independence rally, flanked by Irish Volunteers on one side of the stage and German Uhlans on the other, the next he was chairing a meeting where 500 Americans pledged themselves to communism as a police stenographer sat in the crowd taking copious notes. He lived in great poverty for much of the time, almost dying from a leaky gas cooker in his Greenwich Village apartment, Yet, when he went down to Mexico to meet with German spies anxious to get him to try to create havoc on the American docks and to hamper the war effort, he was travelling by power boat and staying in the best hotels.

“There are 20m German-Americans and 13m Irish-Americans in the United States,” roared Larkin at an event in Philadelphia where the Irish and German diasporas shared common cause. “And if you act together, you can make the United States and the newspapers do as you like. I am not a citizen of the United States and if they want to deport me tomorrow they can do it.”

This type of stuff ensured he was avidly watched throughout his stay and, inevitably, he fell foul of the authorities. As might be expected from an outsized character loose in America at a tumultuous time in that nation’s history, there was espionage and intrigue (he was assiduously courted by both the Germans and the Russians), double-dealing, assassination attempts, courtroom drama and prison stays. 

At various times, he plotted with the Germans in San Francisco, urged anarchists to throw bombs in New York, attracted death threats for organising miners in Butte, Montana, and published a socialist newspaper out of Chicago. In a seminal moment in American trade union history, he delivered one of the orations at the funeral of the trade union martyr Joe Hill (immortalised in song by, amongst others, The Dubliners). His high-profile role that day, coupled with his clandestine associations with everyone from Russian revolutionaries to Italian anarchists meant he was all over the American government’s radar.

When they responded to the growing “red scare” in November, 1919 by arresting 2000 dissidents over the course of one day, Larkin was among them. He was charged with “criminal anarchy”, his crime being involvement in the Socialist Party of America’s newspaper “The Revolutionary Age”. Released on bail, he didn’t temper his words any and the government didn’t ease off on the surveillance either.

 “I take pleasure in enclosing herewith a memorandum prepared by me upon a speech made by Jim Larkin at Yorkville Casino, New York, April 6^th, 1920 which contains certain statements pertinent to his activities,” wrote J Edgar Hoover in a memo to the Department of Labor, as he sought to bring deportation pressure on Larkin.

Over time, Hoover, then in charge of the Bureau’s Intelligence Division, became a little obsessed with Larkin. Even after his trial culminated in him being sentenced to “five to ten” in Sing Sing prison, the future director of the FBI was trying to manufacture fresh charges against him.

“I have just come across the enclosed clipping dealing with James Larkin whose pernicious influences you so successfully curbed,” wrote Hoover to the state prosecutor. “However, he seems to be engaging again from behind prison walls in his usual propaganda. I thought the same might be of special interest to you.”

The Hoover correspondence is contained in the FBI file. It shows how some in power regarded him as a serious threat. Indeed, the chief magistrate at his trial in New York described him as a “positively dangerous” man. It says much for his celebrity too that Sean O’Casey headed up one of the committees established to get him released, the Soviet Union offered to do a prisoner swap of Americans in return for Larkin, and Charlie Chaplin was among those who visited him in prison.

The best-known actor of the age was so moved by his plight he sent on a package to Larkin’s wife Elisabeth, including a gift of some slippers. Truth be told though, the marriage had become more and more estranged even after his wife had joined him in New York. This wasn’t the least of his problems either. At one point, Irish Republicans were planning to poison him because they feared what effect he might have on the situation back home should he return to Dublin. Their bizarre plot included a lookalike they had ready to send to Ireland in his stead.

Then there’s the court case. With his usual obstinacy, Larkin opted to defend himself and used the opportunity to deliver his manifesto to an even wider audience.

“Gentlemen, some day you in America will be told the truth,” he lectured the court. “In the meantime, we who have been on the housetops telling the truth have to suffer. We have to go down the dark days and the dark nights but we go there with the truth in our eyes and our hearts, and no lie upon our lips.”

Even after his eventual release from jail in 1923, pardoned by Governor Al Smith, Hoover remained on his trail.

“You will have noted the report that Jim Larkin has been released from prison in New York by Governor Smith,” wrote Hoover in a letter to his superior William J Burns on February 7^th, 1923. “It is very likely that a deportation case could be made upon Larkin and I am calling it to your attention in order that you may indicate if it is your wish to proceed with the preparation of this case and present the same to the Department of Labor. I understand there was a warrant issued for Larkin when he was convicted under the New York State laws, and this warrant of course will still hold good.”

Within two months, Hoover got his wish. Larkin was deported aboard the White Star Line’s Majestic back to England, telling one of the agents asking after his luggage as they sent him on his way, “Everything I own is on my back.”