That Saturday afternoon of emotion will help lay the past to rest

IN order to prevent Napoleon landing in Dun Laoghaire, the Fortieth Regiment of Foot was sent by the British Army to build fortifications to the north and south of the town — and they built strong and lasting defences.

The Martello Tower in Sandycove stands proudly over the little inlet that now bears the name of the regiment that built it, and the Forty Foot remains a legendary and fabled part of the town.

For decades in the past century, men swam naked there, and there are still signs that describe it as a “gentleman’s bathing place”. Napoleon never invaded, but women did, in the name of liberation, and swimmers of both genders are welcome there now — or tolerated, at least.

Because of its natural beauty, its ruggedness and its proximity to Dublin, the Forty Foot has been mentioned again and again in great books and by great writers.

It features in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, and, of course, James Joyce lived briefly in tower which is now a Joyce museum. It was from the tower that Joyce gazed out at what he called the “scrotum-tightening sea”.

Those of us who normally walk dogs around the Forty Foot were all much too polite to ask what effect the sea had on a unique band of swimmers last Sunday morning. Paul O’Connell, Gordon D’Arcy, Shane Horgan and the rest of the Irish team all arrived in the team coach and, to the astonishment of the locals, most of them disrobed and dived in. One minute we were watching them play the match of their lives in Croke Park, and before we had even recovered from the sheer drama of it all, there they were, leaping into the coldest water in the western world like excited schoolboys.

Will you ever forget it? Grown men — huge men — crying on the pitch at the playing of the national anthem. Thousands more of us crying in the stands. Two songs leading to all that emotion. It was certainly the first sporting event I’ve ever seen where there was more emotion at the start of the event than there was at the end.

That’s not to say it wasn’t an exciting match. Of course it was, one of the most exciting of all time. As a contest it may have been over at half-time, but there was still no possibility of relaxing and enjoying the moment until that wonderful flighted ball from Ronan O’Gara was plucked out of the air by Shane Horgan. Then, and only then, could you be certain there was no possibility of an English resurrection.

And yet, even after the memory of the match has faded, some of the earlier moments of the day will remain. I know there was a lot of talk after the game about rubicons and watersheds, but it did honestly feel like that at the time. More than a match, it felt like a moment in history.

The two songs that started the afternoon are not designed as unifiers. I wrote here last week about the militaristic and jingoistic overtones of both of them — and if anything, Amhrán na bhFiann is more aggressive than God Save the Queen. So why, for once, did the singing of both songs seem to bring a great crowd together?

Could it have been memory? Could that moment, at least for those who were there and those involved through television, have been the moment when a host of memories flared up to a point of healing? Half-remembered, half-forgotten slights, offences, injustices. Half-remembered prejudices all somehow disappearing. Are they gone forever? Have we really buried history in an afternoon of emotion? Of course not. And yet, for me, a lot of the memories that did well up contributed to an unforgettable day.

I remembered the Brighton bombing, that moment when the IRA approached the height of its power. An underground terrorist organisation, dedicated to guerrilla warfare methods and indifferent to the lives of innocent bystanders, almost succeeded in wiping out most, if not all, of the British Cabinet.

IN two world wars and countless others, against enemies great and small, no member of Her Majesty’s government had ever been placed in such mortal danger before, let alone the entire government. It would have been an unimaginable atrocity if it had succeeded. As it was, five people were killed, dozens were maimed, and the entire British establishment was shaken to its foundations.

And I remembered Colin and Wendy Parry. Their son Tim, together with another boy, Jonathan Bell, were blown apart in the Warrington bombs in 1993. There were two explosions that day, and both were bombs that had been hidden in steel litter bins, designed to cause maximum devastation.

Colin and Wendy Parry set about mourning their son the only way they knew how — by building a peace centre in their town, and naming it after the two boys.

I remembered the Parrys and Warrington in particular because my introduction to the Anglo-Irish peace process happened within days of that bomb.

Over the years I was involved in that process, there were extraordinary moments of elation and despair. The Enniskillen, Shankhill and Greysteel massacres, the Downing Street Declaration, the first IRA ceasefire, the collapse of that ceasefire. There were moments when politics seemed to be able to provide answers, and moments when it seemed politics could deliver nothing.

I’ve written here before, for example, about Julie Statham. I never met her, but her death has always seemed to be one of the most poignant of that whole era of hatred. Pat and Diarmuid Shields, father and son, were killed by loyalist terrorists.

Julie was Diarmuid’s girlfriend, and for a month after his murder she lived a tortured life. At Diarmuid’s memorial mass she did a reading, and then went home and took her own life.

She left behind a letter to her parents that said, “When they killed my darling, they killed me too. I have tried to cope for an entire month. Despite my outward appearance I am dead. I may be breathing and moving but what use is that when I don’t have any emotions left inside of me?”

Since Julie Statham took her own life, in February 1993, we’ve come a long way. We’ve got a lot of the language right, in groundbreaking texts negotiated by our two governments.

We’ve got a lot of the structures right, in agreements negotiated by governments and political parties.

We’ve persuaded some of those parties to change their positions on key issues, and to begin the process of inching closer together. We’ve shown how new beginnings can create a dynamism of their own.

Throughout all that though, I’ve often wondered, when will hearts and minds begin to change? Language, structures, formalities — they all matter. But only hearts and minds can sustain the peace and build the lasting reconciliation that makes the process worthwhile.

That’s why last Saturday meant a lot. Something happened. Maybe not the end of all division and bitterness, but a huge step towards self-confidence.

Whatever it was, it was more than a game.