TWENTY years ago I went to the World Cup.
I went to the World Cup.
It feels great just saying it and I literally do tell everyone I meet at some stage.
Okay it was only the one match and then our money and travel plans went astray and we watched games in bars instead, but still I went to the World Cup. They can’t take that away from me.
I saw Ireland’s first ever game in the World Cup finals. Some commentators called it a terrible game of football but I can tell you that standing in that stadium, in Cagliari, Stadio Sant Elia on June 11, 1990 (I have the ticket here on my wall), watching Ireland play England, with a thunderstorm breaking around the ground, with little trouble between the fans apart from some right-wing loons in a corner above us singing ‘No Surrender to the IRA’, was the best football match I’ve ever been to.
Of course I’d go back to those days if I could. Who wouldn’t want to wander through their youth again?
Yes, I’d love to go back to that match again.
I remember too the day we came back.
We were driving back through England on the day Ireland were playing Holland to get through to the next round.
We got to the pub just before Quinn equalised.
Romania, Italy in the quarter finals, it was all still ahead of us.
Okay, we hadn’t been out there for long and money was as short in those days as it ever was, but we were back now and we had been.
I’d even phoned my mum and dad from halfway up the Eiffel Tower just so they didn’t think we were in a pub in Kilburn.
I remember it all so well.
A family friend was dying at the time and all this emotion was swirling around and we were in the pub in the middle of the week in the middle of the day and our Irishness was exploding through the heady brew of a football tournament in a Britain still harbouring all the bitterness of the 1980s.
Apart from sentimentality and self indulgence and the air of another World Cup reaching us here, even though we’re not in it, the reason why I’m writing this is because of the peculiar feeling I have living here in Ireland and so often missing that Ireland in Britain I come from. I miss my Ireland.
My own Irishness. The one made by British streets and British cities. The one said in a British accent. I miss those redbrick streets and those back street pubs.
I miss those dirty old football grounds that have all been replaced by what look like supermarket extensions.
I miss the pubs on a Friday night in a British city where all the customers spoke with local British accents, had spent the day working in British cities doing the same things as everyone else, but who still congregated together at night in the same places as other people who shared one thing with them that the rest of the city didn’t.
They had been brought up in an Irish family with an Irish mum and dad.
When we were kids growing up and we came back to Ireland for the summer holidays our parents always called it going ‘home’.
Now that in itself has quite a psychological effect on a child.
The idea that somewhere else is home is a pretty profound one. It is no wonder then that there is some kind of conflict at the heart of our Irishness.
Even then we would have known that our cousins in Ireland thought of us as the English cousins and yet our parents said we were going home.
How could we be going home if when we got there we were foreigners?
How could our Irishness define us in Britain and our perceived Englishness define us in Ireland?
So when someone like me, brought up in that Ireland in Britain, that Ireland abroad, comes to live in Ireland, a whole flock of conflicting identities comes too.
And after 11 years, when most have them settled down and there is a kind of psychological peace, the oddest thing starts to happen here amongst the rolling hills and the dreamscapes of rural Ireland.
You find that, more than anything, one quiet Sunday afternoon you want to walk down that redbrick British street in that British city, listening to the traffic and the noises of the place and walk into an old-fashioned, back street city pub and order a pint and listen to the local city accents around you and recognise the Irish faces and take a sip and think, ah, I’m home.