Our sports heroes cheered us up before – they need to do it again

IN the last recession during the 1980s the cream of a generation were forced to emigrate. It was an eminently forgettable period, except in the area of sport.

It was the era of the great Kerry team that won seven all-Ireland football finals from 1978 to 1987. The team came within minutes of an unprecedented five-in-row in 1982.

Many people actually arrived home in Kerry thinking the team had won. They had left Croke Park to get the early train with a few minutes to go when Kerry went four points up.

Sport lifted the spirit of the nation in those years. In 1982 Ireland won rugby’s Triple Crown for the first time since 1949, and won it again in 1985. Eamonn Coughlin won Ireland’s first gold medal ever in the World Athletics Championships in Helsinki in 1983.

The following year Seán Kelly was ranked No 1 in the world in cycling when the rankings were first introduced. He remained at No 1 for an unprecedented six years.

But it was probably the exploits of Stephen Roche in 1987 that were best remembered. He won the Giro d’Italia and then went on to win the Tour de France, and crowned it all by winning the World Championship. At the time it was widely seen as the greatest achievement by any Irish sportsman.

In 1987 the Republic of Ireland qualified for a major soccer finals for the first time ever, and the exploits in the European Championship in Germany the following year gave a lift to the whole nation. The team came within minutes of qualifying for the semi-final and knocking out the eventual winner Holland, only to lose out to a freak goal.

Some 200,000 people welcomed the team back to Dublin. The Irish supporters projected a new image for this country abroad. All too often the only time that people on the continent heard of the Irish was when some demented lunatics went on a murderous rampage with car bombs or pub bombs.

This was something new – good-natured supporters celebrating in victory and defeat. They were the best ambassadors this country ever sent abroad. After Ireland beat England in the first match, the Germans took the Irish supporters to their hearts, and the offshoot here was a great influx of German visitors. They provided a real boost for tourism.

Suddenly people wanted to be Irish. They were looking for Irish roots, trying to trace an Irish grandparent, which would entitle them to an Irish passport and thus eligibility to play for Ireland. The Irish team went on to qualify for the World Cup finals in Italy in 1990, and made it through to the quarter-final against Italy at the Olympic Stadium in Rome, where the final was played exactly a week later. It was almost like reaching the final.

The team played so well that night that the players were devastated at having lost. “We had done better than anybody could reasonably have expected,” the manager Jack Charlton later explained. “Yet the thought persisted that it could have been even better.”

Some months earlier Charlie Haughey had said in an RTÉ interview that he had never been to Lansdowne Road and had never been to a soccer international, but he went to the game in Rome that night. Afterwards he went into the dressing room to congratulate the team on a magnificent performance. Some were not impressed.

“Oo the f*** is he?” Tony Cascarino asked Niall Quinn.

“For God’s sake,” Quinn replied. “That’s the Taoiseach.”

“Oo is it, Cas?” asked Andy Townsend.

“I dunno,” Cascarino replied. “Quinny says he owns a tea shop!”

Haughey then went out to wave to the Irish crowd, which was being held in the stadium until the Italians had left. The sight of the Little Fellow drove the crowd spare. Politicians weren’t seen in any better light during that recession.

The crowd booed Haughey loudly, but then someone in the FAI had the presence of mind to get Charlton to come to the Little Fellow’s rescue. When Jack appeared the crowd forgot about Haughey and roared their approval of Charlton, who was once again stunned by the attitude of the Irish supporters.

There was a massive welcome home in Dublin. “Half a million people turned out to welcome us,” Charlton recalled. “I’d never seen anything like it. I must confess that I was both embarrassed and frightened,” he added. “Embarrassed that so many people had turned out when we hadn’t won anything, frightened that some of the children along the way would fall under the wheels of the coach. England would go on to the semi-final and lose only a penalty shoot-out. But in their case, they came home to nothing.”

It was not so much the exploits of the team as the behaviour of the Irish supporters that captivated the imagination of the Italians. For the first time ever a significant number of Italian tourists began arriving in Ireland. That, of course, was when we were trying to build up a tourist trade.

During the Celtic Tiger years we lost the run of ourselves by almost pricing the country out of the tourist market. Suddenly it became cheaper for Irish people to fly to Spain, Portugal, the Canaries and even Turkey for a couple of weeks than to spend a week in a hotel here.

We had the pathetic situation this week of the Irish Hotels Federation arguing that a quarter of all hotel rooms need to be closed. In the midst of the property boom people paid too much for property and now they must charge too much to cover their costs. The whole country is suffering as a result.

WHAT we need is all the hotels to be opened at attractive rates that will provide employment and stimulate the economy. NAMA should be charged with finding some way to ensure these hotels can be viable.

Sport can play an enormous role in bringing us back to our senses. For me the most memorable sporting occasion ever was that day in 2007 when Croke Park hosted the Ireland-England rugby international.

It must have been a real an eye-opener for the unionist and loyalist people of Northern Ireland when the Garda and Army No. 1 Bands played God Save The Queen without a boo, a catcall or a derisory whistle from a crowd of more than 80,000 people.

One sensed that the Irish people in the crowd were never more proud of being Irish during their ensuing rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann.

It brought tears to the eyes of many of the players, who went on to crown those pre-match ceremonies with an awesome display of rugby, demolishing England, the reigning world champions.

Business people in Dublin may well enjoy a major boost this weekend as a result of the World Cup soccer game against France and the rugby international against Australia. It could be a welcome reminder of how sport helped to lift the gloom of the 1980s.

Already this year Ireland has won the Grand Slam in rugby for only the second time ever, and the first time in more than 60 years. Sport has a real role to play in the midst of such depression.