Heaney something better than we’ve grown used to
The great man was reading in UCC and I decided to take an evening off from my bar job and take it in, even though the short-term consequences for my personal economic status would be pretty severe.
The reading was terrific and I slipped into the reception afterwards in the staff restaurant on campus, where I cunningly stationed myself next to the free keg of beer the organisers of the reading had secured from a local brewery. By taking over the tap every now and again I was able to keep my drink reasonably healthy-looking, though even as an impoverished student I wouldn’t have risked the bottom two inches of the glass, which, after about half an hour, seemed to have its own flourishing ecosystem.
As I refilled at one point I got a nudge: “Here, you look like a man who knows what he’s doing.”
It was Heaney, offering an empty glass. I obliged and he thanked me, and headed back into the throng.
I note from some of the obituaries that Heaney often envied people who could slip away from functions whenever they liked, while he had to stay on; I hope the fresh pint of stout made the experience a little lighter for him that evening, anyway.
Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe delivered a superb remembrance last week in which he referred to Seamus Heaney’s GAA background.
It wasn’t the usual nonsense about his love of the game of the Gael (though reading the series of interviews he did with the late lamented Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, I was struck by Heaney’s preferred position in Gaelic football. He was a wing-back. It made sense. At wing-back you can see the play and be creative, though you have your own responsibilities as well).
Cullen, however, noted Heaney’s reference, in a conversation the two men had, to Seán Brown, who was killed by loyalist paramilitaries specifically because he was a GAA man.
Specifically, he was a member of Bellaghy GAA club, where Heaney grew up. Brown had organised the welcoming reception after Heaney won the Nobel Prize and had presented him with a painting at the ceremony.
Interestingly, Heaney wasn’t a Bellaghy GAA man. He moved there as a child from Castledawson, and as is the way, he was loyal to his native heath.
He told Dennis O’Driscoll: “I had no affection for the Bellaghy GAA team: I was a natural supporter of Castledawson.”
Typically, the poet used a terrific, sharp phrase when paying tribute to Brown, saying “He represented something better than we have grown used to.”
Kevin Cullen said you could say the same about Seamus Heaney. He was right.
If you are from Cork or Clare then there is no point, really, in talking to you today. You have enough on your plate with accommodation challenges, transport issues, and that’s without even mentioning tickets.
You don’t even know whether to believe the man in the pub who told you the other night that they’re not even printing tickets before Limerick are definitely ruled out, and they’re meeting the DRA this morning . . .
If you’re not from Cork or Clare then you have a different challenge this week.
Who do you shout for? I don’t mean who’s the better bet: that’s a whole other set of criteria because there’s money involved. No, I mean, who appeals to you more as a neutral? Or should that be rephrased: who appeals to you less?
Take Cork. As an outsider you’re probably intrinsically opposed to supporting one of the big three in hurling terms. Cork haven’t exactly been starved of the spotlight: they were in an All-Ireland final only seven years ago and they were in an All-Ireland semi-final last year.
On top of that there were all those strikes, all those guys who annoyed you whenever they popped up on Prime Time when you were looking forward to an uplifting segment on house repossessions.
On the other hand, Clare were your original ‘second’ team. Going back to 1995 and Anthony Daly, Ger Loughnane, The Banner Roar... it was a beautiful summer and they won the All-Ireland, and frankly, you’re prepared to pay that price all over again for the July we had. They’ve usually been underdogs: you’d be happy to see them win.
But it’s not that simple.
Davy Fitzgerald bugs you a bit, you have to admit. All that bouncing on the sideline, finger-pointing at linesmen, the intensity of the interviews after games . . . it grates on your nerves a bit, being honest.
You could do with less to like Clare a bit more.
The Cork manager, on the other hand . . . Jimmy Barry-Murphy is one of these guys who seems to be above county barriers. You’ve always liked him and any stories you hear about him burnish the legend: his honesty after games appeals to you a great deal, and that’s before any discussion of that playing career. Sure didn’t you see his goal against Galway back in ‘83 crowned number one in TG4’s top 50 hurling goals last week?
That’s your dilemma, then. Is there any way you can organise it so that the Clare hurlers and the Cork manager both win?
While we’re in that obituary mood, I just want to mark the passing of Elmore Leonard the week before Seamus Heaney.
Leonard wrote some of the great, great thrillers – if there’s a book with a better opening than Freaky Deaky I have yet to find it – and wove sport, usually baseball, into the fabric of those books in a natural, easy way.
Leonard also wrote a celebrated 10 rules of writing, which are well worth looking up if you have a few minutes to spare (there’s an invention called the internet...)
Among his strictures is a commandment to use “said” when reporting speech rather than “intoned” or “insisted” or any of the other synonyms.
I often try to bear that in mind, and the story that fixes it for me is that of Dan Daniel, a famous baseball writer of the 30’s, who was notorious for using almost any alternative to “said” he could dream up: a player “fulminated” after defeat and sometimes “exuberated” in victory. But Daniel was silenced by a press-box colleague when a rant was met with one of his coinages: “Oh Dan, stop veheming.”
I know nobody believes me, but here I am on the record.
I don’t have any. None. Zero.
I don’t have any spare for the lad you know who’s coming back from the States after 10 years living in a rabbit-hole with a couple of feral gophers.
I don’t have any for the girl you’re trying to impress in work. I don’t have any for the sick child you claim to be collecting money for every Friday before you head to the pub with the cool crowd.
I don’t have any for your family, extended, near or completely imaginary.
I don’t have any for the guy who did that nice job of plastering your new kitchen.
I don’t have any for your pets, goldfish to pythons.
I don’t have any that I don’t have yet but that I’ll get if I go to the Burlington, or any other establishment in Dublin, late or early next Saturday.
I don’t have any to be collected at a petrol station outside Cashel either.
I don’t have any from a remote county or un-thought-of company involved commercially in Croke Park.
I don’t have any from a celebrity, or a priest back from the missions, or from a “connection” unspecified and unnamed.
I don’t have any “really bad ones”. I don’t have any “half-decent” ones. You can put away the map of the seating you downloaded: I don’t have any. I don’t have any. You can ask, and I don’t mind you asking, I know you feel you must . . . but I don’t have any.
