Campaigning Journalist | Literary Dissident
It has been a difficult few months for any of us who follow the boys in green.
If the punch in the gut equaliser from Italy in Croke Park was the injury then the Henry handball in Paris was the insult.
For those of you who follow the Republic of Ireland then you’ll know about that sense of injustice.
It’s still there.
It just is.
So it was that last night that we started to move on.
Time to begin again.
As with any look back over a year one’s view is always an entanglement of the global the national and the personal.
From my vantage point here on Ireland’s western seaboard much is changed and much remains the same.
Respect for the dead is a basic concept among humans.
It was once thought to be unique to humans-something that sets us apart from animals. Recent discoveries by scientists have found that, for example, African elephants memorialise their dead. They all pass by in line the dead member of the heard and they touch the body of their relative with their trunks.
In this part of the world a minute’s silence is the culturally accepted standard by which someone shows their respect for the dead.
This weekend across the island of Ireland there will be commemorations of those Irishmen who died in the service of the British Crown in many conflicts.
Most of those remembered died in the “Great war”, but Irishmen continue to serve in the British armed forces and they continue to die for Britain.
In the Republic people have developed a sophisticated analysis and are able to differentiate between the individual heroism of our own and the cause for which they were led to their death.
This book does exactly what it says on its brightly designed cover.
The 1970s was the decade wherein I was a teenage Celtic supporter in Glasgow.
The book brought back memories of the great Celtic players I watched and the terrible clothes that I was proud to wear!
