I came upon this about Con Houlihan. It dates from 1994
Kerry confessions
By Tony Leen
FUNNY that the man who told me that irreverence was a good foundation for journalism is now accorded the sort of reverence more in keeping with pop stars and the pope than pensmiths.
When Con Houlihan was last at home in Castle Island (that's his spelling), a broken hip and an orderly queue of well-wishers pinned him up against the bar in a local hostelry, fittingly named Con's Bar (though not after him).
"I was very embarrassed," said Con, and he was. In a scene that was more Cagliari than Castle Island, he sat on a high stool listening and greeting old family friends, young family friends and others who wanted to ask him about the time he mentioned a cousin in an Evening Press column in 1978.
For each, a witticism from behind the most famous cupped hand in Irish newspaper writing.
The following morning as he sat alongside his soul-mates in the River Maine waiting for filming to recommence on a documentary about the life and times of the country's sporting laureate, the thought struck that Castle Island finally had a mayor. Or better still, a Godfather.
"That's me, Don Houlihan," he responded.
The 78-year-old always thought quickly on the riverbank as a fisherman, one of the five chosen professions on his curriculum vitae turf-cutter, rugby player, lover and fighter being the others.
"Danny Horan, the greatest trout angler Ireland ever produced, said that you have to know what the fish are thinking. You go from the spiritual to the technical to the philosophical on a river bank. It gives you a great instinct for learning."
The results of Maurice Healy's one-hour documentary on Houlihan will air on RTE1 next Tuesday night, but for the natives of Latin Quarter and Glounsharoon, Con's favoured local constituencies, there's a special charity screening in the River Island Hotel on Friday.
Though they share letters, Con and convention aren't even on speaking terms. Never were. So anyone presuming Con will arrive by chariot for this crowning moment, should have second or third thoughts. Then again he may.
"It's shite," he reckons of the TV production. "Very sketchy. I haven't seen the finished product, but I've seen enough of it," he suggests. "It's 52 minutes and it should be an hour and a half. It does no justice to Castleisland."
Though the makers of the programme may be aghast at being trashed by the documentary's subject in a manner that Colin Farrell would be proud of, they recognise that Con is never happy with one of his works.
"I'm a perfectionist. There was never a piece I wrote that I couldn't improve, given the opportunity. That's why I always hated deadlines."
However, wherever he has been, Con Houlihan has always done deadline's bidding, be it Guadalajara or Gortakeegan.
He can't recall the column he filed once from the 1986 World Cup in Mexico which employed the fictional travails of a local match programme printer with a weakness for tequila to explain the post-earthquake crisis in the country. It was classic Con.
"I loved that country, and its people. I still do. When we arrived in the Aztec Stadium for the first game, they were still putting in the desks and the phones. They had suffered two major earthquakes but remained defiant," he recalls.
In journalism school, they taught you to be dispassionate. Con told you to be passionate. Dress to impress, say the gurus.
"f**king irrelevant, boy", says Con. He subscribes to the theory that a journalist must never get too close to his subject, but the painfully shy giant from Castle Island became a close confidante of Paul McGrath and Liam Brady, sharing their private pain as much as their public fame.
"If some player talks to the press, he's fine. That's why Lee Carsley seldom gets good press. He doesn't give many interviews, and he knows that's why he rarely gets the credit for the unseen work he does. But that is not the way it should be."
There is an understandable contradiction between his contemporary attitudes and his hankering for older values especially in his professional field. "There was far more integrity in newspapers and among writers twenty or thirty years ago.
"Most reporters in the '70's and '80's had served their time in a local newspaper, which conditioned them to be honest and fair. You couldn't turn someone over in a small town because you would be ostracised.
"Nowadays in Dublin, as soon as a young pup sees his name in print, he reckons he's made it. There's a few dirt-birds out there, maybe more so in the Sunday newspapers. Some have little talent but an awful lot of neck. 30 years ago, they wouldn't last a week.
"I think daily newspaper journalism is a more honest pursuit. The best writers work on the daily beat. That's why I'm with the Sunday World."
Con holds John O'Sullivan and Ian O'Riordan (both of the Irish Times) in considerable regard because "they're not fashionable".
Twenty years ago, in an interview with Magill magazine, he tipped three up and comers for greatness David Walsh, Karl MacGinty and a young Kerry dish-washer who had written asking his advice on journalistic landmines.
To this day, I still have most of my limbs, and Con's valediction got me my first job in Killarney with The Kingdom. Thought editor Harry MacMonagle: 'if Con Houlihan says it, it must be true'.
Though Con was a proud Kerry man in Dublin for years, Mick O'Dwyer often said that the final imprimatur on an All-Ireland title was reading the back page of Monday's Evening Press on the journey home to Killarney, Farranfore and Tralee.
Most newspaper writers can only daydream about that kind of street cred, but Con Houlihan never let it seep into his scrawls.
If he was on that team, he'd have been John Egan, who once said the longer he was retired, the better he got: "Egan was under-rated by stealth. He is a genius for not being famous, but he can't hide anymore. I'll out him as one of the greatest."
Mikey Sheehy may have become the prince of thieves with that notorious goal in the 1978 All-Ireland final against Dublin, but the coronation came down a three-column strip the following evening in the Evening Press: "and while all this was going on, Mikey Sheehy was running up to take the kick and suddenly Paddy (Cullen) dashed back towards his goal like a woman who smells a cake burning.
"The ball won the race and it curled inside the near post as Paddy crashed into the outside of the net and lay against it like a fireman who had returned to find his station ablaze."
In truth it was one of Con's ordinary pieces the incident gave it a historic resonance. In his latest collection of works ('More than a game', published by Liberties Press), the writer selects a piece he sketched on Brown Lad's Irish Grand National victory in 1978 (see panel below) as one of his favourites. Now that's writing.
His return to Castle Island on the week leading up to the 2002 All-Ireland final might have been embarrassing for the reason that it bestowed a status he is patently uncomfortable with, but it was poignant nonetheless.
He hasn't been at home since, and with his mobility somewhat impaired by that fall ("it was in Cheltenham, not at Cheltenham"), he may only see the fountain on Main Street in his mind's eye in the future.
"I don't miss Kerry as much as I used to," he indicates. "Being from Kerry does not mean as much as it did some time ago. Any constituency that can elect Martin Ferris to the Dáil must look at itself. I'm an old Republican, but that man does not represent me. He's a fascist, a dangerous man."
Con Houlihan comes from socialist stock and was an avowed supporter of Dick Spring's father, Dan, canvassing and sharing the blows, literal and metaphorical, with the Strand Street icon.
After writing and publishing The Taxpayers News for Kerry's blue collar constituency, the writer felt his stomach heave when Dick Spring was turfed out of politics by the voters of Tralee.
"There are other practical reasons why I don't go to Kerry now. Most of my rugby colleagues have gone upstairs Sean Casey, Sonny O'Connell, and two men who died lately, Liam O'Connor and Michael McGillicuddy, with whom I solved the problems of the world in Monny Macs pub in the Latin Quarter.
In Castle Island, I'd like to be remembered as a rugby player, if I'm remembered at all."
The foreword to 'More than a game' is penned by the outstanding sportswriter of this time, Tom Humphries, who scarcely knows Con, but puts his impact in perspective. "His was the word we waited for before we formed an opinion.
"His were the eyes we saw things through, and from him we borrowed ears to listen. He was the last of a great generation of newspaper writers who could beckon an entire city over and bid them sit down while they told a story.
"Con Houlihan seldom told you anything you didn't know already. Sportswriters don't generally do that. But Con told it better than anyone else. Still does."
His longevity may be down to a wholesome existence, but I doubt it. His dishevelled state is less a fashion statement than a healthy disregard for himself and decorum.
All his precise moments are with a pencil in hand to this day, he has never submitted a typed essay, still preferring to phone, ad lib or scrawl his work on voluminous sheets of blotting paper. "I'm unpleasable, implacable and always imperfect. A savage self-critic."
And yet he was an easy-going teacher in his younger years, sharing a bottle of stout with the neighbours at lunch-time, or filling his imagination and his bucket at the local fountain in the evening. Imparting his genius via kids not columns was always going to be a means to an end.
"I eventually decided to move to Dublin in the '70's for practical and financial reasons. I was spending a lot of my time giving grinds, but too little money and too much awkwardness meant that I seldom got paid for them. I had no time at home. I was like a public ombudsman in Castle Island."
Con's love affair with Dublin was instant. "Kerry was my wife, but Dublin is my mistress," he was wont to say, though roles may have reversed now.
His arrival coincided with the rebirth of Dublin football in 1974, and when the features editor of the Evening Press, Sean McCann, provided his first weekly wage, it was immediately lodged with the proprietor behind the counter of Mulligan's of Poolbeg Street.
Though the Conny and Tommy Cusack's 'Bank of Cavan' never charged interest, the fame it garnered subsequently in print provided ample compensation. One suspects the account will always remain open, despite the sad closure of the august publication around the corner.
"I dried my eyes a lot of times after that," he reflects. For a time, Con wrote and distributed (for sale) copies of the Xpress, a small-sheet publication produced for a fighting fund to keep the Burgh Quay operation going. Some say Con produced many of his finest pieces in those seldom seen gazettes.
With Magill now also defunct, he shares life's experiences with the readers of the Sunday World, and occasionally for the eircom's in-house magazine.
His sore hip (more legicap than handicap, according to himself) doesn't prevent him from attending games as much as the fact that as a Sunday writer, there is not the same necessity for immediacy.
"Sometimes you can write your best stuff under pressure from some European city, whereas I have a whole week to compose a Sunday World piece. That brings its own problems.
"My dilemma is that when I was writing for the Evening Press, I knew the blackguards and the drunks I was writing for, because I was used to being abused by them in the pub. Then I knew my audience now I'm writing for a mass circulation tabloid who have a lot of young readers. Do they read Con Houlihan?"
When he does attend, it's always in isolation, because the thoughts he filters are his own and not those of the buffoon beside him in the press box.
Says Humphries: "That sense of aloneness about him, even when in company, is what has made him such a great observer not just of the simple choreography of sport but of life. When you read Con, you get to know what he has distilled from life".
* 'More than a game' is published by Liberties and available at €14.95