Back Home to Sligo

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

(L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between)

I had occasion recently to visit a part of my past, a period immensely important and formative for me, a place which was, for seven years, both focus and circumference of my whole world, the centrality of which was so self-evident to me that I could not then imagine that it would ever be otherwise in my life.

I was seventeen years old when I left Sligo. The leaving was a wrench, soul-tearing, ambiguous; on the one hand I was taking a self-chosen step into a different world, a new life, for I had decided to join the Dominican Order, on the other hand I was leaving nearly everything and everyone I knew behind me. The parting was all the more radical, for at the same time, my father was transferred and our whole family moved to the other end of the country. Although I was to return there frequently in the years that followed, the basic bond was broken; the continuous connection formed by the unity of family and place was gone. It meant that the inevitable decay of most youthful friendships was greatly accelerated in my case, for home had been sundered and the most basic part of it had moved elsewhere.

It hurt, that sundering. I remember feeling very aggrieved, with the unthinking, naïve selfishness of youth, that my parents had moved away from Sligo while at the same time being perfectly self-righteous about my own move into a new life, which also took me to other places. But I recovered. After all, in the following years, I still went back there, even if not as frequently or for as long as I might have wished, and I still retained my basic feeling of identity with and love for the place. Given my peripatetic history, the simple question “Where are you from?” has always been a little problematic for me, but Sligo still remains one of the default answers.

After I was ordained a Catholic priest, therefore, in 1985, it was completely clear to me that Sligo would be one of the places where I would celebrate a formal “First Mass.” And if someone had told me that day that it would be twenty eight years before I would return, I would have laughed in disbelief.

But that is what happened. In the following year, primed by the potent fuse of love, my life exploded into scintillating chunks and shards of new directions, possibilities, preoccupations and priorities. I found myself in a different country, living a very different life, with a wife and baby daughter, and practical decisions concerning job and career to be made and carried through. While I continued to visit Ireland throughout the following nearly three decades, limitations of time and practical considerations somehow never made the journey to the north-west of the country possible.

Another in my family had made a very different choice; my sister, Máire, had found her way back to Sligo and has lived in the coastal village of Strandhill, six miles from the main town, for many years now. So when she invited the whole family to join her in celebrating her fiftieth birthday this month I finally found myself on my way back to the town of my youth, on a journey into the world of my own memories and the contrast between their local background and the reality of the present.

Ireland has changed enormously since the mid-1980s. The country I left was still, for the most part, traditional and conservative. It was poor, in recession, unable to provide attractive prospects for many of my generation, who were leaving to find decent, interesting jobs and adventure in a world of much wider horizons. But then the Celtic Tiger came, nurtured in its infancy by a massive transfer of structural funds from Europe. It grew up, roared mightily for around ten years before becoming so bloated on a diet of hubris, fantasy and speculative funny games with international capital that it crawled into a corner and died – of a strange combination of economic gluttony and malnutrition.

The traces of all this were clear to be seen on my journey, from the new motorway leading out of Dublin to the empty property developments in towns like Carrick-on-Shannon along the way. Even the approach to Sligo was completely different to that of my memories; the towns of Collooney and Ballysadare bypassed, a new road to the town itself, leading to a new bridge across the Garavogue river.

The following morning, Saturday, I spent a couple of hours walking around town. It was very strange. The basic geographical skeleton remained as I remembered it but much of the flesh on the bones had changed; new buildings, new shops and businesses in old buildings. Deeper, stranger changes too; children of African and Asian backgrounds speaking with the distinctive Sligo accent, a Polish butcher’s shop – signs of the internationalisation of Ireland through immigrants, drawn by the boom of the Tiger years, something unimaginable in the mono-cultural world of my youth in the seventies when Ireland was a country which exported rather than imported people. In the past five years the export has begun once more.

I knew, of course, that things would not be as I remembered them; I had no expectations that the place would spontaneously open its arms to me, recognising and welcoming the long lost son. It was curiosity which led my steps, a desire to see just what had changed. But as my feet led me along the streets I had walked so often as a teenager, I found myself becoming more detached. The time elapsed was just too great, the changes – perhaps, most of all, the changes in myself – too profound. Though I had already intellectually known that there is no such thing as time travel, that the past is irrevocably gone, it was something more to really practically experience it in this fashion. “Something’s lost and something’s gained,” Joni Mitchell sings, “in living every day.” Over ten thousand days had past since I last set foot in Sligo, so much lost and so much gained in all that time that it had, I thought, become impossible to regain any sort of deep contemporary contact.

And so my urge to walk further waned. There was a Sligo which was real for me, that town which had been the stage for my life during those oh so intense years of the ending of childhood and the unbearably exciting and frightening growth into increasing adulthood, but it had little to do with the town in which I now found myself. Looking at my watch, I realised that I still had an hour before the next bus would leave for Strandhill where I was saying. Finding myself at the junction of Wine Street and Quay Street, I noticed that Lyons’ Café was still there and decided to spend the time I had to wait with a cappuccino.

Climbing the stairs to the hundred and fifty year old café, I discovered that here at least much remained as I remembered it. Oh, the menu is more extensive, sophisticated and cosmopolitan but someone has been careful to preserve the basic character of the place and the small tables and wooden chairs are still the same as they were in the seventies when this was one of the favourite haunts of the teenagers of the town. There weren’t all that many places where the boys from Summerhill College and the girls from the two nuns’ schools could meet on common ground and do all those things which are so important for teenagers; preening, flirting, talking, teasing, laughing, showing off, making dates and plans … just hanging out and wasting time. Lyons’ was one of the few establishments back then which tolerated us, though we were all experts in making a Coke or a coffee last for a whole afternoon, far more interested in each other than in giving custom to the café. Today the coffee was good and the place, I was glad to see, was doing a brisk business.

As I drank a second cappuccino, I tried to understand what I was doing; what I had expected of my perambulation and what exactly I had experienced. Perhaps some part of me had been hoping for the kind of epiphany described by Proust in his famous madeleine episode in À la recherche du temps perdu, where a particular taste throws his protagonist completely into a memory of the past. If so, it didn’t happen for me; sitting there in the café, many recollections of my youthful years did come to mind, but still far away and detached from me, the teenagers of the mid-seventies populating the room around me like barely perceived, transparent ghosts. Reality, I thought, was more like L.P. Hartley described it, the past is a foreign country.

And then, that evening at my sister’s party, I had an encounter which changed everything. One of the guests was someone I had known back in the time, the memories of which I had been attempting to recall with my walkabout through town. She was another member of that clique to which I had belonged as a teenager – to be honest, I’d had quite a crush on her when I was sixteen, but had been too uncertain and insecure to ever mention it to her then, or to attempt to move it beyond the confused desires of my youthful wishes into the realm of practical action. Now we were meeting again after more than thirty five years of life and all that it had done with us during that time. I had gone away and never returned; she had left for a number of years but had come back, and married another of my friends from that time. Our children are now older than we were back then.

And as we talked, I suddenly I realised that I had somehow come to the place I had been looking for that morning. Having exchanged the broad outlines of our stories of the long interim, we started reminiscing together about that faraway world of our youth. I discovered myself (and so, in a real sense, rediscovered my earlier self) asking about people I hadn’t thought of for decades and she (who had remained in – or, rather, returned to – Sligo) knew a lot of the answers. We found ourselves sharing memories of things that we had done together, of events commonly experienced. The past, which had seemed so irretrievably far away to me just a few hours earlier, was suddenly just around the last corner we had turned, the years between not negated but somehow bridged. It occurred to me later that I’d had this kind of experience on a number of occasions over the past decade or so, a period where I have had the great good fortune to reconnect with quite a few friends with whom I had lost contact. It’s what happens when you meet old friends and discover that you can, amazingly, just pick up where you left off.

And I realised a truth – at least something that is true for me. While place is important (and one would suffer from some kind of serious deficiency not to cherish the beauty of Sligo, magnificently set as it is on an Atlantic bay to the west, framed by the mountains of Benbulben to the north and Knocknarea to the south), in the end it is people and not place which are more central to a feeling of belonging, of home. And though in memory we organise things by assigning them a location, this is only background, the setting of the stage of life on which we perform the stories of our lives in interaction with others. In my case, I would wager (and I suspect that my mistake is not uncommon) that I had tended to confuse the importance of people in my life, and the stories we created together, with the place in which these stories took place. Setting is of course important – context is everything, as Derrida once remarked – but people, not place, are the most significant component of context.

It is a realisation with which I, for one, am quite content.

"Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15378#sthash.gzT4zz0E.dpuf

Pictures retrieved from:

http://www.blogspot.com/_paRKpxGMuCE/Sttfal6-u6I/AAAAAAAABpw/2MOzvtaXyz8/s400/0909_HSligoTown.jpg 

http://www.askaboutireland.ie/_internal/gxml!0/2ocqn930ubywvi8z0wl9dhefnm6z926$eb12sbh0qz22rny8m0x0tay0mjelewi 

http://www.menupages.ie/images/550x344/6585_lyons_cafe.jpg 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS4YZ-2TRtqmongpHxTWThgHFp9c3xj2-ezJRsBiT7Agi0aITmvudIS-JCqh56juTDpOJ1Y2G9799QhwQOzRT-LNpAcSZf7Mfsz3Ft48xaJaIMJk8WS2t7DxBGYKHZbSRzeMTwBtZrgmM/s1600-h/0909_FBenbulben.jpg

Aspie

They are there in every school, I suppose, a couple of kids who are so weird that they are way out there in the perimeter. But generally, unlike those of a rock poet’s shamanistic vision, the only stoning they get is not the immaculate one of enlightenment and hallucinogens, but rather the sharp-cornered rocks lobbed by their peers. For there are none as conservative, as intolerant, as teenagers when it comes to those who are beyond the perimeters of what is in, and the instinct of the herd to mob the one who is different (particularly when that one is weaker) is very strong. What I learned from Brendan’s story is that this instinct remains just as active even when those teenagers have reached what is supposed to be (young) adulthood.

The family came to Sligo from America, where the children had been born, when Brendan was ten or eleven. That alone would have made them exotic in a small western Irish town, but it was an exoticism which the kids could have mined positively if they had the basic social smarts to realise it. Brendan didn’t. Clumsy, lanky, pale, wearing glasses with thick lenses and thicker black plastic frames and strange, very unhip American clothes (you could see his mother had chosen them for him) – loud check pants and windbreakers – he came as an outsider and remained one.

His accent proclaimed his American background, his opinions reinforced it; he aggressively trumpeted the superiority of the land of his birth. He was, in today’s language, in many ways a typical nerd, though his interests weren’t in the technical area. What precisely his interests were, I no longer know – and probably didn’t know then. They certainly had little in common with those of the rest of us at the all-boy secondary school we attended; football, pop and rock music, girls. Girls? The idea of the shambling Brendan – his loud honking voice, his strange conversational obsessions, his runny nose, his unconscious frequent scratching of his crotch – with a girl was simply laughable. He was never present at any of the discos where we met with the girls from the convent schools, was never involved in any of the groups of teenagers who met after school in various locations in town – strutting and flirting, smoking and preening, yakking and courting, all the rituals of puberty

And he was the butt of all the careless, brutal cruelty to which teenage boys are prone. We’re in the study-hall; a place where different classes were compulsorily shoved together when teachers called in sick. Brendan is bent over some schoolwork, trying to ignore the world around him, scratching his crotch.

“Hey, Brendan! Hey, Todd! D’ya hear the one about the Bates family?

… Well, there’s Mister Bates. And Missus Bates. And their son …little MasterBates!”

“Yuck yuck yuck … Haw haw haw … Har har har!”

“Hey, Todd! You like pulling your wire?”

I would like to say that I defended him, stood up to the crowd, befriended him. It’s not true – I was far removed from the necessary self-assurance to do that kind of thing, to take a public stance against the mob and its leaders. I didn’t like him either, found him just as weird as all the others. The most I can say is that I didn’t take part; I found the cruelty somehow shameful and kept out of it. And for this reason, I was one of the few he interacted with at all.

But our interactions were seldom. I did not seek him out, and he wasn’t in my class anyway – apart from one or two subjects in the senior cycle. He was sickly and missed an awful lot of school. I’m sure he was subject to a lot more intensive bullying and brutality, particularly on the way home from school, but we had different routes home so I didn’t witness anything. To be honest, he just didn’t figure on my radar screen most of the time. I had other, more interesting, more important interests and concerns.

With the knowledge I have now, and the generally increased consciousness of psychology and various personality differences which is far more widespread today than it was thirty five years ago, I have no trouble putting a label on the young Brendan Todd – as I believe most of my readers will have done as well by now. Brendan was a textbook example of somebody with a fully-fledged Asperger Syndrome. But for us teenagers in Sligo back then, the term Asperger had as much meaning as an artichoke.

At any rate, I left Sligo in 1977 to join the Dominican Order, and left Brendan behind too. He (and his family) had decided – largely because of his sickly nature, it was said (though I believe that the worries of his parents concerning his ability to live an autonomous life as a student away from home also played a large role) – that he would study by correspondence at the British Open University. I was sure I’d seen the last of him and forgot him pretty quickly.

* * * * *

Two years later the Order sent me to UCD (University College Dublin), Ireland’s largest university, recently moved to a modern, US-style campus in Belfield, a former estate in one of the prosperous suburbs of Ireland’s upper-middle and middle-class elite on Dublin’s south side. I was to study history and philosophy.

The first couple of weeks were pleasantly chaotic, getting ourselves organised, getting to know people, finding our way around, making first friendships. One of the organisational things which had to be done was the election of representatives of First Arts to the Students Union. There was some kind of address from the Union people in Theatre L, the largest of the lecture theatres, after a history lecture, and people interested in being candidates were invited to speak to the gathered multitude. Nobody was taking the whole affair all that seriously and there was a considerable buzz of conversation among the couple of hundred students assembled. Suddenly a strange, freakish figure gambolled up to the microphone and announced excitedly,

“My name is Brendan Todd, and I’M A REVOLUTIONARY MARXIST!!!”

He then proceeded to harangue us for a couple of minutes, honking and gesticulating like Grover from Sesame Street. The crowd loved him and cheered him on. This was entertainment pure, the weirdo was absolutely hilarious and apparently believed all the bullshit he was spouting. He apparently also believed that all the applause and acclamation was for him and his message. I was aghast.

“They can’t be taking him seriously!”

“Of course not. But he’s going to be elected all the same,” Peter, one of my newly made friends, commented.

“But they can’t, he’s … he’s not all there. I know him. He has a major screw loose. He actually believes they support him and his arguments!”

“That doesn’t matter. I know some of those guys down there who are egging him on. They don’t give a fuck, but they’ll do anything for a joke. And that Todd fellow is a great joke. He’s like John Cleese in Fawlty Towers! How do you know him, anyway?”

And so I renewed my acquaintance with Brendan Todd. Apart from his conversion from a USA fanatic to revolutionary Marxism, he hadn’t really changed. In the course of time, I discovered that his Open University correspondence studies had fallen victim to an epic post office strike which had lasted over four months and that this had resulted in his decision to begin his studies once more at UCD.

He tried to get me to endorse his candidature. I refused. It didn’t matter, he was elected anyway, as Peter had predicted. In the following years he became something of a legend in College, making regular speeches and harangues and was re-elected to Union positions regularly. I have no idea how the various other people involved in the union managed him.

I honestly believe that he spent those years as a self-proclaimed political activist without ever realising that hardly anyone took him seriously and that those whom he regarded as his friends and supporters were actually taking the piss out of him. For Brendan’s social skills were as non-existent as ever. He stumbled around college like a clumsy crow, dressed usually in a baggy anorak and ill-fitting, often dirty clothes. His sense of personal hygiene was somewhat underdeveloped, which meant that he often smelled … ripe.

I mention this because it was difficult to completely ignore. Brendan was one of those people with no sense of that private space, that bubble with a radius of around two to three feet (depending on the situation) we all carry around with us, and therefore invaded it continuously. He was, as the Americans put it, continually “in your face,” with his pale face, greasy black hair and interminable loud declamations. He was always telling you about what he thought and what he was doing – he never showed the slightest interest in what others thought or were doing, unless these were directly related to what was occupying him at the time. But this difficulty in relating to others, achieving empathy, is a typical symptom of people with Asperger’s Syndrome.

He developed a strong crush on a girl I knew quite well. Anna was a well-mannered, gentle soul, who would never have been capable of telling him to simply fuck off. It is questionable as to whether this would have worked anyway; he seemed to be completely impervious to signals, hints and even insults, though he could react verbally aggressively if he felt threatened. If you were sitting in a group which included Anna in the college restaurant or bar, you could be sure that he would join it. She put up with him, pleasantly and patiently, as he sat too near to her, noisily breathing through his nose.

* * * * *

On the last weekend in January 1982, the annual Irish History Students Conference took place in the holiday town of Bundoran in the north west of Ireland, not far from Brendan’s home town of Sligo. Even thirty years later I am still certain of the date, for there was a young American guest lecturer at UCD who was with us and spent the Sunday searching frantically for a possibility of hearing the Super Bowl on radio, or at least getting the results (the San Francisco 49ers beat the Cincinnati Bengals).

It was basically an opportunity to stay in a hotel, party and drink a lot for the weekend. I was one of the few students present who was actually providing the alibi function of delivering a paper (it meant I got my costs paid for). And party we did. My hotel room-mate, who was part of the organising committee seemed to have invited around fifty people back to our room after the formal Saturday evening dinner – at about four in the morning, I evicted two people who were getting to know each other very well from my bed and went to sleep while the party roared on around me.

But Brendan was no longer there, though he was booked in for the weekend. On Saturday afternoon a couple of his “friends” had decided to have a bit of fun. The details of what happened I don’t know. What I do know is that around five o’clock Anna, uncharacteristically spitting fury, found me and asked for my help.

“Those stupid bastards! Brendan doesn’t drink, I think it interferes with medication he’s taking, or something. Anyway, they’ve been spiking his lemonade with vodka all afternoon. They thought it was funny! He’s puked on himself, and had a fall and cut himself …”

“Christ! Does he need a doctor?”

“I don’t think so, but we’ve called one anyway. Geraldine and some of the other girls have put him to bed. But I don’t know if he should stay here. Somebody said you knew his family …?”

“Well, not really, but I think I can find out his parents’ telephone number and ask them to come. It wouldn’t take them much more than half an hour.”

“You’re a dear! Would you ever?”

I phoned his father and explained the situation. He knew who I was; his family and my father’s family originally came from the same corner of north Roscommon and there may even have been some distant marital connection a couple of generations back. He grasped the situation quickly without me having to go into many details and less than an hour later he and his wife turned up at the hotel.

As his wife accompanied their shambling son to the car he thanked me for my concern. I said it was nothing and felt I should apologise for my fellows.

“Some people think that cruelty’s funny,” I said. “Brendan sometimes doesn’t realise …”

“Brendan hasn’t had it easy. There are still things that are more … difficult for him.”

His eyes said far more than his words. They showed love, and concern, and not a small amount of helplessness. We nodded farewell to each other, he got into the car and they drove away.

* * * * *

We graduated that autumn and I haven’t seen or heard of Brendan Todd since. An internet search before writing this turned up nothing. I sometimes wonder what became of him.

(Note: “Brendan Todd” is, of course, a pseudonym [as is “Anna”]. However, I think anyone who was at UCD between 1979 and 1982 will recognise him immediately.)

Pictures retrieved from:

http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu/bullying/images/bullying-research-image.jpg

http://marxistleninist.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/revolution2.gif

The Happiest Days of our Lives?

When I was ten years old we moved from Wicklow, on the east coast of Ireland, to Sligo on the north-west coast. It was quite a long distance, which meant for us children leaving friends and familiar places definitively behind us. It also meant going to a new school – and that shortly before the end of a school year.

There is a strong tradition of segregated education in Ireland, and so my brother and I landed in St. Antony’s National School for boys, run by a congregation of Catholic teaching brothers. Boys arrived in St. Antony’s in Second or Third Class and it was traditional that classes generally remained with the same teacher until the boys had completed Sixth Class and moved on to Secondary School. My younger brother was lucky enough to be put in the Third Class of a brother who was a born teacher and became something of a beloved legend in the town. In his late eighties, half blind and deaf, he amazingly turned up at my brother’s funeral three months ago, over thirty-eight years after their ways had parted.

I was placed in the class of Thomas Mooney, joining around fifty other ten-year-old boys in our own peculiar blackboard jungle. We were a mixed bunch, mirroring the town in which we lived; one or two kids from wealthier families, a spread of middle and working class youngsters and around seven or eight representatives of what would be called “poor white trash” in parts of the USA. These were children who were more or less disengaged from the whole educational process, missing frequently, mostly not having schoolbooks or anything else with them. The requirement to do or present homework seemed generally foreign to them and they exuded a general atmosphere of resigned untouchability, occasionally tempered with an undertone of dangerous, unpredictable violence, something reinforced by the fact that most of them were up to three years older than the rest of us, having frequently repeated classes. They were just hanging around at school, barely literate, waiting to achieve the age of fourteen, when they could legally get out of a system with which they had no identification and – if they were lucky – find occasional work as labourers somewhere.

A group of over fifty ten-year-old boys is a pretty unruly, often savage mob. A teacher in control of such a group needs an unconscious, all-encompassing, completely confident sense of his own authority, otherwise he is lost before he begins. And Thomas Mooney did not have that authority.

He may have had it previously and he may have achieved it subsequently, but my classmates and I encountered him at a particularly vulnerable stage in his life. When I met him he was around forty years old and had come to St. Antony’s only recently, after the small country school in which he had worked had been closed, a victim of rationalisation. The contrast between dealing with a small number of country children of both sexes, spread over a number of classes all taught by the same teacher in the same room, and a large class of harder, more sophisticated town boys must have been considerable for him. But there were deeper reasons for his debilitating lack of confidence than just this.

Thomas Mooney was married to a woman he loved deeply. They had no children and his wife was seriously ill, suffering (as I am now fairly certain) from chronic deep depression. How do I know this? Because, in his despair, Mr. Mooney told us of it, frequently, at some length.

Was he trying to win our sympathy? At the time I thought so and – along with my classmates, with the callous cruelty of ten-year-olds in a mob – I despised him for it. With the infinite wisdom accrued through a whole decade of life, I judged that he had realised that he lacked that control which was the basic prerequisite for his job and was trying to substitute it by appealing to our better natures. If such was the case, he had miscalculated very badly.

It is not that ten-year-olds don’t have better natures; they do, but they are also in the process of moral development and are subject to many other powerful motivations, one of the strongest being peer pressure. Add to this the fact that children from a very young age have a finely developed sense of the security with which adults perceive their own authority and you can understand why Thomas Mooney never had a chance with us.

He was, at the time, a deeply unhappy man, a subtle, sensitive person questioning many of the fundamental certainties on which his life had been based, and this had fatal consequences for his control over the mob we were. He was the teacher, the enemy, and we sensed his weakness, judged him accordingly, and there was little he could do to reverse this instinctive implacable judgement of failure. He was like a poker player holding a pair of deuces whose opponents were well aware of what he held in his hand – bluffing was useless.

There was an alternative available to him, one hallowed by tradition, and in general accepted use in the school; that of violence and pain. Corporal punishment was, at that time, still legally permitted in Irish schools and most teachers still used a bamboo cane as a disciplinary and pedagogical instrument. At the end of every pause and lunch break a queue of boys could be seen waiting apprehensively before the principal’s office; waiting for the cold, impersonal administration of “six of the best,” to be endured as a consequence for misbehaviour. You presented the flat of the palm of each hand alternatively, open at arms length, anticipating the whish, the crack, and the burning pain. We did not question this – it was an inherent component of the general culture of school – but it reinforced our general feeling of education as a state of low-level warfare between pupils and teachers, a fundamental division between us and them, where they had nearly all the power.

Thomas Mooney refused to use the cane in his classroom. Instead of respecting him for this, we judged it as a further sign of weakness and despised him all the more for it. As a result, his class was generally unruly, undisciplined and loud. He frequently left us for long periods to our own devices, setting us work to do while he sat at his desk, doing I no longer remember what. Maybe nothing at all. It didn’t really concern me.

Though the work he set us to do was sometimes interesting. In Fifth Class, he told us we should begin a project of writing our own books and occasionally showed interest in what we were producing. Most of my classmates took these long periods for personal creativity as an opportunity for goofing off, but I became involved in a complex Buck Rogers-type science fiction epic, heavily influenced by the style of Leslie Charteris’ Saint series (I had discovered the books around that time and they served to increase my admiration for Simon Templar, initially awakened by Roger Moore’s TV depiction of him). However, at a certain stage he lost interest in it and my masterpiece was never finished.

When he applied himself to it, he could be an excellent teacher. He encouraged my interest in history and tried to instil in us a sense of the importance of politics and debate. It was a classroom in which debate was frequent; given his lack of fundamental authority, those of us with rhetorical ability could engage him in endless discussions, or encourage him to hold forth on themes which interested him. But, more often than not, he was listless and unmotivated and frequently avoided teaching subjects, like the Irish which (following the official national ethos of independent Ireland should one day resume its long-lost position as first language of the country) was compulsory and generally hated by a majority of the pupils. Thomas Mooney spoke fluent Irish himself, but seemed to find the effort of pounding it into our thick reluctant skulls too much. Our lack of progress here would cause a number of my fellow pupils serious problems later on (Irish remained compulsory as a major subject right up to the end of secondary school), but, fortunately for me, my parents spotted my deficits pretty quickly and arranged for me to get extra tuition outside school.

When we left him at the end of Sixth Class to move on to secondary education, he took over another group of eight-year-olds in Third Class, but a number of years later I heard he subsequently left to take over a position in a rural school. I suspect that he was very glad of the change and hope that things worked out better for him away from St. Antony’s.

For there was something fundamentally very evil going on in that school, though my brothers and I were fortunately, miraculously untouched by it. During the years I was there, five of the ten teachers (three brothers and two laymen) were sexually abusing many of the boys entrusted to their care. One of them was the tall young brother teaching the class parallel to ours, a class in which I was often a guest on the (not infrequent) occasions when Mr. Mooney called in sick. His ready use of the cane ensured that he had no discipline problems. He also had the custom of having boys sit on his lap for long periods of time – fortunately, he had his particular pets and we guests were not selected for this “special” treatment.

In the many court cases which have taken place since the whistle was finally blown a little more than a decade ago, a number of other teachers gave testimony that they were unaware of what was going on. As far as I can ascertain, Thomas Mooney was not called to testify. Even if he had been, given his detachment and preoccupation with his own problems, I would guess that he would also say that he didn’t know anything. And yet, that visceral part of me which does not always comply with my rational world-view wonders whether the underlying miasma of evil and misery in the school didn’t contribute somehow to his obvious unhappiness.

Those of us who were pupils there – apart from the unfortunates who were the victims of abuse – didn’t realise that there was something fundamentally wrong, but then, of course, kids usually don’t have the comparative apparatus to judge such things. We knew that it was a cold, hard, unloving sort of place, but it was school and we didn’t expect anything else. One of the effects it did have on me was that casual brutalisation which led to my harsh boyish judgement of Mr. Mooney. Under different circumstances I might have learned much more from him and today I regret that I didn’t. If he is still alive today and, by some remote chance, happens to read this, I would like to say to him that I now cherish him retrospectively much more than I did at the time.

(“St. Antony’s” and “Thomas Mooney” are pseudonyms. For those whose stomachs can take it, this link leads to an account of the abuse cases in the school and contains a laudation of the exceptional brother I mentioned in this piece who was my brother’s teacher)

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Summer of '81

1981 was a year in which open season seemed to have been declared on celebrities. It had, in fact, started on December 8 of the previous year when Mark David Chapman decided for some mad reasons, logical only to himself, that he had to kill John Lennon. In January Protestant gunmen serious injured Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, the fiery Catholic Northern Ireland politician who, as the youngest ever Westminster MP (elected at the age of twenty-one), had livened up the British parliamentary scene by turning up in a miniskirt, punching Reginald Maudling, the Conservative Home Secretary, in the mouth and giving birth to a child without bothering to get married.

In March John Hinckley Jr. shot the newly elected U.S. President Reagan and two months later Mehmet Ali Ağca had a go at the pope. At the end of May, the Bangladeshi president Ziaur Rahman was assassinated and October, dissident Egyptian army members killed president Anwar Sadat.

Although I registered all of these events at the time, the one that had the biggest significance for me was, of course, the death of Lennon, closely followed by another death in May, that of Bob Marley. When I think back now on that year, and particularly that summer, the strains of No Woman, No Cry are always there in the background.

The summer of 1981 was one of adventure for me, one I’ve described to myself in retrospect as The Great European Tour. I’d been in the Dominican Order for four years and had spent the last two years at University studying history and philosophy. I was twenty one years old and deeply uncertain about my future within the Church. So I decided, with the agreement of my student master at the time, to take an informal summer off to see if I could find some clarity.

It started with a month doing a volunteer work camp in Amsterdam. The basic idea of the work camp movement in Europe involved spending a couple of weeks working on some kind of social project for your board and keep. The project I’d found in Amsterdam was a pretty left-wing one, involving the renovation of a social centre for Moroccan guest workers and asylum seekers, which had been trashed a few months earlier by agents of the Moroccan secret police. We were housed in a building which belonged to some student organisation beside the Vondelpark.

The organisers of the whole thing were a very earnest, politically engaged Dutch couple who were, I think, somewhat disappointed at the level of commitment of the participants. We were around twenty young people from eleven different countries and most of us regarded the whole thing primarily as an excellent opportunity to spend a month in summer in Amsterdam with other young people who were also interested in spending a month in summer in Amsterdam. We had nothing against doing a bit of work every day (from Monday to Friday) but our enthusiasm for things like workshops to raise our political consciousness and discuss the exploitation of the working class by international capitalism and fascist police states was, to say the least, lukewarm. Our lack of enthusiasm was abetted by some of the Moroccans we were working with, who were more than ready to show us the town and help us have a good time. After the first few workshops had been basically sabotaged by people passing around joints and turning the music up louder, the idea was quietly abandoned.

There were some exceptions. A German medical student who was both pretty but also pretty idealistically intense. Then there were the two Czech girls, who kept very much to themselves and didn’t speak much of anybody else’s language anyway. In the course of the month we discovered that they were actually both married factory workers and stalwart party members who had been given the trip to the west – along with international student cards – as some kind of reward for party fidelity and being heroes of production or something like that. Their conversation was generally limited to phrases like, “You must come to visit socialistic countries,” and I think they were actually scared of and shocked by the laid-back attitudes of the majority.

Vondelpark

That laid-back attitude manifested itself within a couple of days in a dispute about our working times. There was a minority who wanted to start early and finish early. Then there was the majority who wanted to start much later and finish early. We solved that by compromising on a two-shift solution – I was a firm member of the group which tended to turn up for work around eleven in the morning.

We’d found other avenues of interest, a major one being the legendary Melkweg [Milky Way] beside the Leidseplein. It was a pretty relaxed place; live music, a market, a hash shop, a theatre, a tea-room, a cinema. It was there, one evening a couple of weeks after I’d arrived in Amsterdam, that I realised that you couldn’t always easily get away from the wider world. I was waiting for the Cocteau Twins to perform when a couple sat down beside me and I heard the harsh twang of Northern Ireland accents. It wasn’t that I felt at all homesick; still I was happy to hear voices from home. The guy went off to get drinks and I engaged the girl in conversation. Her boyfriend soon returned.

“Hey, Johnny, this fella here’s from Dublin!”

He looked at me disapprovingly, his mouth forming a thin line. He reached out his hand to his girlfriend and nodded sharply.

“C’mon,” he said, pulling her to her feet. She looked back to me apologetically as they disappeared into the crowd.

Northern Ireland was very tense that summer; it was the height of the H-block hunger strikes. The IRA prisoner, Bobby Sands had died in May, five more were already dead at this stage, but compromise wasn’t part of Margaret Thatcher’s vocabulary. Johnny and his girlfriend were obviously Protestants and he wanted nothing to do with anyone from the Republic of Ireland.

The work-camp finished at the end of July but my tour was only starting. I had an InterRail ticket, valid for the month of August, which gave me unlimited rail travel throughout the continent and so I joined that great horde of young people with backpacks from all over the world who were exploring Europe. I’d planned it so that I had a number of destinations which I could aim for where there were people I knew where I could spend a day or two, have a shower and sleep in a bed before moving on to the next destination.

The Lofotens

I visited Denmark. There was a girl there I’d got to know on the work-camp. We’d had a holiday affair in Amsterdam which had been very pleasant, but both of us had had our reasons for not taking it too seriously. There was an Irish Dominican priest doing summer work in a parish in Bodø, in the north of Norway and so I took the long train journey to cross the Arctic Circle, just too late for the complete midnight sun (though it never got dark). The two of us visited the Lofoten islands for a few days, where all the young Catholics – not very many! – in Northern Norway were gathered. Years later, I heard that he was under investigation in a child-abuse case; he disappeared, his clothes were found later on a beach.

And I visited my cousins in Brussels. My uncle had moved there as a civil servant, nearly ten years earlier when Ireland had joined the European Community and I hadn’t seen any of them since we were all children. My cousin Gerry took me under his wing, showing me the city. We took to each other immediately and it was a marvellous weekend.

But that connection to reality, to the wider world, was there all the time, though I didn’t realise it. On June 5 1981, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that five homosexual men in Los Angeles had a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, the first reported cases of AIDS. Gerry was gay – as he told me during that visit – and had, that summer, just returned from a couple of years in New York, where he had been studying. In all likelihood he had contracted the virus there which would kill him little more than a decade later.

I was in France when I finally ran out of money. I hadn’t had much to begin with, but I hadn’t needed that much; my concept to save costs by taking long train-journeys at night, arriving at a different destination every day had been working fairly well. Frequently the carriages seemed full of young travellers; contacts and conversations were easily made. Sometimes I spent a day or two with a number of others, travelling together, exploring a town or city before going our separate ways. Occasionally I played guitar on the street to earn my lunch – I remember Oslo was very good in that regard. But the competition among buskers on the Paris metro was tough and my InterRail ticket was only valid for a few more days anyway. I spent my last night in France sleeping rough in the Gare Saint Lazare before taking a train to the Normandy coast to get the boat back to Ireland.

I still have many wonderful memories of that summer. Picnics and kisses and dope and live music in the Vondelpark. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Sitting in the wild beauty of the Lofoten islands, watching the sun just dip under the Northern horizon for half an hour around midnight. Discussing philosophy with Gerry in a Brussels bar. The great Gothic cathedral in Rouen. James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I read on dozens of trains.

As to whether I should leave the Dominican Order; that was a decision I deferred. I was still unsure. I had another year to go to my degree and my final vows were not yet due, I told myself. There was still enough time to go on thinking about it. Everything’s gonna be all right, everything’s gonna be all right. Bob Marley’s words were ubiquitous that summer and, with the invulnerability of youth, I still believed them. That the man singing them was dead at the age of thirty six wasn’t relevant.

“In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means.

…

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

                                               Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill (1946)

 

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