Post the sad news: An Fear Rua is gone

HE doesn’t look like An Fear Rua.

Instead, the spherical glasses, the prim shirt, tie and jumper combo, the combed white hair and the cleanly shaven face make him look more like a stern university lecturer plucked straight from the 1960s. But Liam Cahill had the strangest habit. “I used to love Friday nights, around midnight I’d sit down at the computer with a couple of cans of Guinness and it was like a cloak descended on me and I became him.” He now even smiles at the idea he’ll have to keep an eye out for the next set of GDP figures and if there’s any upturn he’ll call it the An Fear Rua effect. After all, the next plan he had for his site was a button that would turn the page black and white, remove the logos and make the computer screen look like a Word document. That way when bosses wandered around offices, they’d never realise what their employees were, and more importantly weren’t, doing.

In fact all this week he’s felt like An Fear Rua because of the reaction. A few months back when he revamped the website, he asked for a facility to be installed where he could freeze it all and bring it to an end. It was a sign of how he was thinking. “On the forum over the last couple of years, maybe it’s a microcosm of Irish society. Everything has gotten angrier. Coarseness is the wrong word, maybe it’s despair.” Then in the first few minutes of Monday morning he used that new facility and after 12 years it was finished in a click. “The easiest decision I’d taken in a long time. I didn’t sleep for much of that night with the amount of adrenaline and joy that was running through my veins.”