Sport the vehicle for unique social commentary

Con Houlihan was a philosopher who masqueraded as a sports journalist.

Sure, sport was his chosen métier and he was passionate about it. But he bent it to his purpose by using it as a vehicle for a form of social commentary uniquely his.

In its richness of insight, metaphor and respect for the common man (and woman), it is not an exaggerated claim to say that Con’s brand of social commentary was unmatched in the annals of Irish journalism.

Like the American writer Gore Vidal — who predeceased him by a few days — Con was a born and gifted essayist. What set him apart from Vidal was that while the latter went to the slopes of Mount Olympus for inspiration, Con’s came from the streets, farms, pubs, playing fields, and people of his native Kerry.

When he moved to Dublin to ply his trade on Burgh Quay with the Evening Press (at the invitation of its long-serving and shrewd editor Sean Ward), he ploughed different but equally rewarding furrows.

It broke his heart when the Irish Press group collapsed in the mid-1990s, though no doubt the legion of fans continued to swoop on the pearls of his home spun wisdom strewn throughout his columns in The Star and then The Evening Herald.

Shy, modest, and totally without pretension, he nevertheless knew he was the guardian of a great talent and he nurtured it with unstinting care and much effort. In his days in the Evening Press, he wrote his columns in longhand on sheets of copy paper, sometimes in the back room of Mulligan’s pub in Poolbeg St, just a stone’s throw from the back door of the Press.

These would be ferried in bundles by a copyboy back to the sub-editor’s desk, but not a single comma was ever altered.

When we met in Croke Park at a camogie final after a gap of several years, I asked him how he was finding things on the Sunday World. He responded with sly humour: “I’m working for a comic, Tom.” Unlike a coterie of journalists operating today who delight in being nasty about people, Con always looked for what was good and life-enhancing.

When Olympic Press in Dublin published the first collection of Con’s columns, he opened his foreword with a quotation from one of his great literary heroes, William Hazlitt (1778-1830). “I cannot help,” said Hazlitt, “receiving certain impressions from things — and I have sufficient courage to declare what they are.”

The “sufficient courage” to which Hazlitt referred was never better displayed by Con Houlihan than in his searing critiques of the Provos and their deadly creed, first in the pages of The Kerryman and latterly in the Evening Press.

I bumped into him once after a big game in Dublin, and we went to the nearest pub for a quick libation. Con wanted a brandy, but the barman had no brandy glasses. I brought it back in a straight glass and started to apologise.

“It doesn’t matter, Tom — sure you can’t drink the glass,” was Con’s reply.

One of my abiding memories of him was the morning after the All-Ireland final in which the Kerry four-in-a-row team had triumphed again. Con was in a crowded Mulligan’s waltzing with Jack O’Shea while Sam Maguire looked on from the countertop.

Always kind to colleagues, he treated me gently when he was asked to review my biography of Jack Lynch.

I ended that book with a quotation from Con himself: “Jack Lynch was a man who never lost the run of himself.” It is equally true of Con Houlihan.

To adapt something written by Friedrich Engels when his great friend Karl Marx died in London in 1883 — it can be said that, with the death of Con Houlihan, Irish journalism is now “shorter by one head — but what a head!”