Recruited as teenage spy by the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association
As always, accordingly, November has been a sobering month, and I now have yet another startling and shocking confession to make to you all in this space.
Reading all the shocking reports of young people being brainwashed and radicalised by powerful spiritual movements, and looking back across all the Novembers to my own teenage long ago, I am shuddering at the realisation that I also was radicalised and brainwashed by a powerful religious force in my teens.
I did not know at the time what I was doing.
Thankfully, I did not wear suicide vests or plant bombs, but, in the Irish context, I was worse than that.
I was at the bottom of the gutter.
I was an informer. I was a spy amongst my own people.
And that. the Lord between us and all harm, is the totally impure truth.
You see, what happened in my boggy Ulster parish, at a time when the Catholic Church was in its full pomp and power, is that the Cleenish Parish chapter of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association was established by the parish priest.
All we young lads and lassies joined up, of course, and, because I was allegedly handier than most with the pen, I was officially appointed secretary.
And unofficially, I was the club’s spy and informer.
I do not know how the PTAA operates today but, back then, you served for about a year as a Probationer, wearing a lapel pin, before you qualified as a full-blown Pioneer.
There was also another special pin for those poor divils who wanted to take a pledge for a short period, to wean themselves off the demon booze.
I recall it was a green pin bearing a gold cross of hope. I wonder does it still exist.
The truth is that the country was full of Pioneers back then, but they seem to be scarcer in the New Ireland.
Anyway, on my mission to abstain myself from booze, and in this way to make reparation for the sins of intemperance in others, I was a bloody spy and informer, especially against the poor divils wearing the Green Pins.
I would slink into the two local pubs, and into pubs in Enniskillen frequented by our people.
I was checking out that none of our Green Pins were falling from grace.
I was like a bloody zealot behind my new Pioneer pin, eyes hawk-sharp at all times.
And I reported back to the next meeting about any misdeeds I observed.
Once, I recall, I walked into a pub in town, and there was one of our Green Pins ripping into a pint of porter.
He was a lovely decent man who, I now know, simply could not hold his drink as well as others.
When he saw me, with a sad face on him, he reached into his jacket pocket and flung his pin at me.
I picked it up and went away, and did what all bloody informers have done since the dawn of Irish history, within two hours.
Yes, brainwashed I surely was.
The Pioneers then were truly a powerful national movement. I recall one occasion when there was a Dublin national rally.
We travelled in packed coaches and trains from all parts of the island to cram the metropolis with what, in effect, was the first real watery rally.
Our diocesan group were massed, on a very hot day, in a street off O’Connell Street, and the lovely old Dublin housewives kept us plied with glasses of water, as we waited to bleed ourselves into the parade down O’Connell Street to Croke Park.
We filled Croke Park with our pins and fervour, no points or pints downed at all, and headed home that night like tens of thousands of saints, having vanquished the demon booze on all sides.
The underlying truth, too, is that one of our Green Pins (four of them travelled) went astray in Cavan town on the way home and, of course, the informer duly did his duty.
I am shuddering again.
Can I add that I proudly wore my Pioneer pin until I was well down my twenties. It adorned all my lapels.
It was a badge that revealed that I would be at least sober of a Monday morning and, sadly, an informer too.
My Pioneer pin, however, finished up in the silted bed of the Foyle in Derry, during the troubled times there.
I had been covering the riots and baton charges, and got caught up in a major riot late one Saturday night.
I got a baton behind the ear. In order to keep working,
I attacked my first glasses of brandy, and the pin went flying into the Foyle.
I am sure the local informer reported me to the PTAA before the weekend was over.
I deserved that.
November is over now but, because of my 48-hour dispensation, I will do the first couple of December days as well before having my first winter pints in Killaloe.
Sláinte to all of you in the meantime, from a reformed informer.
