‘When you read Con, you get to know what he has distilled from life’

Funny that the man who told me that irreverence was a good foundation for journalism is now accorded the sort of reverence more in keeping with pop stars and the Pope than pensmiths.

When Con Houlihan was last at home in Castle Island (that’s his spelling), a broken hip and an orderly queue of well-wishers pinned him up against the bar in a local hostelry, fittingly named Con’s Bar (though not after him).

“I was very embarrassed,” said Con, and he was. In a scene that was more Cagliari than Castle Island, he sat on a high stool listening and greeting old family friends, young family friends, and others who wanted to ask him about the time he mentioned a cousin in an Evening Press column in 1978.