What Richard Did – Lenny Abrahamson

What Richard Did (Lenny Abrahamson – Ireland) 88 minutes

Tone and register. Those are the two things that most bedevil Irish films and the things that ultimately determine their credibility. Too often, an Irish (fiction) film can fail because it just doesn’t sound, feel or look right. There are various reasons for this – a directorial sensibility that doesn’t always manage to free itself from the influence of television, a relatively small pool of actors (no matter how good many of them are), sometimes having to rely for commercial reasons on imported actors who struggle with the accent, not to mention the various constraints of budget and production values. Even the best filmmakers can find it difficult to maintain consistency in the way they portray Ireland on screen – a director as adept as John Boorman went from getting Ireland exactly right in The General to the rather more jarring A Tiger’s Tail. This is what makes Lenny Abrahamson particularly impressive; as well as being an excellent filmmaker in his own right, his films have consistently rung true, in wildly different social settings – working class Dublin junkies in Adam & Paul; the rural midlands in Garage; and now, in his third film, What Richard Did, the South County Dublin bourgeoisie.

The film is loosely based, by way of Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day at Blackrock, on the Annabel’s manslaughter case in 2000, in which 18-year-old Brian Murphy died from his injuries after a night-club brawl with rugby players from a rival private school. (This is not giving too much away, as it is implicit in the title.) The hero of the film is Richard Karlsen (Jack Reynor), a popular, successful jock with an eye on medical school, who has it all – he is the darling only son of his parents (Lorraine Pilkington and Lars – brother of Mads – Mikkelsen) and manages to prise away Lara (Róisín Murphy), the girlfriend of one of his friends Conor (Sam Keeley). At first there appears to be no fall-out but that does not last long, and the inevitable breaking point arrives.

The ‘SoCo’ milieu Abrahamson portrays is one many in Ireland love to hate but he and screenwriter Malcolm Campbell wisely avoid casting them in an egregiously unsympathetic light – the odd social snobbery aside, the kids are not particularly unpleasant (Richard, in fact, is the very opposite, being exceptionally generous to younger kids in his wider social circle). It casts the drama in greater relief when the upheaval comes and it also perfectly captures the sense of the gilded cocoon the kids inhabit. When four youngsters were convicted in connection with the killing of Brian Murphy (convictions that were later overturned on appeal), the prosecuting counsel remarked that not one but five lives were ruined by the killing. It was, as many pointed out at the time, a sympathetic encomium rarely extended to less well-off perpetrators of violent crime. What Richard Did doesn’t tackle the subject matter with the same attitude, but it does shape the drama’s contours, suggesting how high the stakes are for the teenagers involved.

Like Abrahamson’s previous films, the central character (or characters, in the case of Adam & Paul) is, despite his manifold social relationships and apparent contentedness, ultimately a solitary figure. Jack Reynor is excellent as Richard – a beaming, boyish ox of a teen, with a facility for charm and who always has the right word for the smallest of social interactions. The smaller roles are all deftly peopled too – there is just enough information sprinkled about to bring them to life, a tribute to the work of both Abrahamson and Campbell and also Nathan Nugent’s splendidly economic editing. The moral quandary at the centre of the film reminds one of the early Michael Haneke film Benny’s Video, while the low-key aesthetic (with a preference for natural lighting) is similar to recent German social dramas, by the likes of Henning Winckler, Christoph Hochhäusler or Hans-Christian Schmid. At a time when Irish filmmaking is beginning to bristle with a confidence and assuredness it has had only intermittently in the past, Abrahamson is the best of a talented bunch of young-ish directors. His reputation is also beginning to spread beyond Ireland, suggesting he has many good years ahead of him.

Better Luck?

There's an air of the consolation prize about Ireland's Group B draw for the Euro 2012 qualifiers; perhaps this is what Sepp Blatter meant by the 'moral recompense' that was due us for suffering Thierry Henry's creative machinations last November. It's probably the best possible draw we could have expected as a third seed. Russia are most definitely the least fearsome of the top seeds and they have been unable to build on the promise of their Euro 2008 performance. True, Moscow in winter and the Luzhniki plastic pitch will present problems but if Guus Hiddink departs, as expected in July, I expect the Russians to revert to their usual febrile selves. Taking four points off them is well possible.

Slovakia took full advantage of a winnable, evenly-matched group to qualify for South Africa, their first ever finals as an independent country. How good they are is hard to gauge. Even under Stephen Staunton's shambolic reign Ireland were good enough to beat them in Dublin and almost repeat the trick in Bratislava. It probably would be a good idea to get the away game out of the way early in the campaign. Macedonia will send shivers up the spine of us all after the 3-2 defeat in 2007 and the last-minute goal two years later that cost us our place at Euro 2000. Avoiding the sweltering autumn and summer temperatures in Skopje will be paramount, even if we should fancy our chances. We will play Armenia for the first time, and Andorra for the second. At the risk of sounding cocky you would be expected to have twelve points there. It's not a terribly glamorous draw and the FAI won't be too enamoured of the task of putting bums on seats to watch Ireland play Armenia or Slovakia. But it gives us our best chance in years of winning a group.

Those Oscar Nominations

A rare plug here for the Hollywood self-congratulation fest, the Oscars, only really because of the unprecedented presence of three Irish films among the nominations, Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty in the Best Animated Short category and The Door for Best Short. And there was also a welcome surprise, Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells. I saw the film last year here in Paris, where it did reasonable enough business during the Easter holidays. Unfortunately I saw it in a dubbed version (it's a Franco-Belgo-Irish coproduction) so I missed having the pleasure of hearing Mick Lally and Brendan Gleeson voicing cartoons. It's a superbly animated and thoroughly enjoyable film that fully deserves a big audience; it doesn't go on release in the States until April. It's unlikely that it will be able to see off the big guns such as Up, Fantastic Mister Fox or Coraline but Gunn and Kilkenny's Cartoon Saloon should get well established as a result of the publicity.

There were also Irish success stories within the machine with Ballyfermot alumnus Richard Beneham up for Best Visual Effects for Avatar and Peter Devlin for his sound work on Star Trek. This year the Academy has reverted to his original format of selecting ten films for best picture, presumably to allow five extra middle-brow movies with fine notions to claim some dubious prestige. The result is rather lopsided but it does at least allow some consolation to the scandalously overlooked A Serious Man, which garnered only one other nomination. It's probably a better film than either Fargo or No Country for Old Men, hitherto the Coens' most successful at the Oscars. But then again, what does the Academy know? (The nominations also remind me to finally watch The Hurt Locker; critically acclaimed though a friend of mine who has worked as a journalist in Iraq says it's rather risible, comparing it unfavourably to Generation Kill.)

Here's the trailer for The Secret of Kells:

Un petit tricheur...

There's been an unusual silence from me in the seven days since the match last week largely because I have followed Virginia Woolf's
injunctive never to write when one is angry. While that anger has only subsided a little, there's little point in poring over the ashes of the
game, to glean either good or bad points - in any case, the whole match is by now, dominated by one bad point of monumental size. FIFA, though
they may be an organ of such corruption and rancidness capable of being matched only by a planeload of Third World kleptocrats touching down at Geneva International Airport, are correct not to order the match to be replayed. As egregious a wrong as Henry's handball was, FIFA cannot overrule referees, even if sometimes they wish they could have.

The French Football Federation though, had it in their gift to offer a
replay, and they might have felt it incumbent on them to do so, seeing
as so many of their countrymen were mortified at the way they qualified
for South Africa. It appears however Raymond Domenech put a spanner in
the works by refusing a rematch. To be honest, I think Jean-Pierre
Escalettes, the President of the FFF, is every bit as lacking in
backbone as his manager and nobody at 87, boulevard de Grenelle gave
serious thought to killing the golden goose they had almost given up for
dead. It's an ignoble dereliction of fair play but let's not be too
pious about it. France will trot out at the next World Cup in imposture
in the eyes of the world and many of their own supporters. And given
their usual form in tournaments this decade they will hardly do better
than Ally McLeod's Scotland who deprived Wales of a World Cup finals
spot in 1978 thanks to a Joe Jordan handball. The cosmic retribution
will be swift, just and probably underwhelming. A passionless French
team will limp from one uninspired draw to another before being soundly
beaten by a modest enough opponent - Denmark, Slovakia or Cameroon
perhaps. And Raymond Domenech will refuse to take any blame...

But what of the villain of the piece, a man who has, in the past week,
revealed himself to be of less than monumental proportions? Not so much
in the act of cheating he committed, though it was clearly an
intentional double-handball; any schoolboy who has ever juggled soccer
and Gaelic football over a season can train their instinct to wrap their
hand around the ball when playing the foreign game - highly-paid
footballers can do the same, without any excuses.

Since he handled the ball not once but twice before setting up William Gallas to score the goal that put Ireland out of the World Cup, Thierry Henry has done a lot of pleading. It started at the final whistle. By now settled down from his exuberent celebration of Gallas' goal, Henry consoled Richard Dunne and said 'it was handball but I'm not the ref'. One has to admire Richard Dunne's magnanimity that he didn't, as Eric Cantona suggested he should have, socked Henry one there and then. It continued the following day, with Henry sheepishly apologising via his Twitter feed, then he said he was not a cheat and called for the match to be replayed, after FIFA had already put his foot down. It was a communiqué delivered, crucially in English rather than French, aimed at touching up his tarnished image. Henry doesn't want to go down in history as a cheat - though there will be many who have followed his progress over the years who will say his cheating started neither last Wednesday nor the day before - so you have to question his motivation in blatantly cheating last week. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Then Henry said he felt all alone and considered quitting the French team, because the FFF, rather ungratefully did not give him more wholehearted support for his cheating.

Once again, I'm not going to be too pious about cheating. Everyone does it at some point in the game. And most of them are never noticed. Some do it in minor instances, and others, like Henry do it in, ahem, grander ones. Diego Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal is one of those grander instances. But where Diego differs from Thierry is not in the fact that El píbe scored a fantastic goal within moments of his moment of treachery, but because Maradona has never shirked the fact he cheated. From the very moment he coined the immortal phrase to his more recent likening it to 'pick-pocketing Prince Charles', Maradona has brazenly embraced his cheating. He knows it was important enough, and he, unlike Henry is not going to hide behind a referee's call. England fans may not take much comfort from that but Maradona is, in Graham Greene's words 'man enough to be damned'. Thierry Henry, fretful of his reputation having crossed over to the dark side, is not. He is milksop Jonathan Harker to Diego's Count Dracula. And it is this cravenness that makes Henry's behaviour all the more repulsive.

Anyway speaking of 'hiding behind a referee's call', here's the exemplary Thierry Henry in a 2006 Nike ad. Is he still talking to Cantona, I wonder? Or did he bottle out of talking to him that day, too?

The Day of Reckoning

A quick note before I head off to the Stade de France for the second leg of the World Cup final play-off. I have to admit I'm being realistic about the chances for the Boys in Green. France are 65% there. If we play the same way we did in the second half on Saturday we can wave goodbye any chances of going to South Africa. The fact we haven't beaten a major nation away from home in competitive football in so long is also an ill boding. But on the upside, we have nothing to lose and a 1-0 lead is not impossible to overturn if we apply ourselves well.

France were not much better than us on Saturday and, for all their second-half possession, rarely troubled us. There is probably no home ground in international football with such a negligible determination on home advantage as the Stade de France - there are no visiting teams overawed by it and France regularly lose at home. There is also a huge over-confidence in the French public at the moment - former manager Michel Hidalgo told L'Équipe yesterday that he "wouldn't bet sixpence on Ireland". Such an attitude may not reign among the squad, but if the ugly behaviour of Lassana Diarra is anything to go by, there may be a hint of it. The French have a ridiculous sense that playing at the World Cup finals is their birthright. This despite the fact that they have failed to qualify for six finals in the past, as recently as 1994. And also despite the fact that, other than the Zidane-led revolt of 2006, they have brought nothing to any major finals since they won Euro 2000. It is this sense of complacency that could well undo France. And, of course, under Trapattoni, our best performances have been away from home.

But back to reality. There is a huge task ahead and conceding a goal first will probably finish us off. I have a worry that our lack of strength in depth (poor old Leon Best) and overly-negative tactics from the Italian will hamper us. We might have to settle for a valiant 0-0, that will put us out. But we'll still roar on the boys. It should be a great night, if not a great game.

Raymond Domenech and the Irish

Reading in France Football today, I learned that French manager Raymond Domenech made his debut as a player for the national side against none other than Ireland. It was a World Cup qualifier at the Parc des Princes on 19th of May 1973. The match ended 1-1 and both sides failed to qualify for West Germany, the Soviet Union going through. The 21-year-old Domenech was given a torrid time by Miah Dennehy, of all people, though Raymond did get one strike on target late in the game. Ireland manager of the day Liam Tuohy wasn't too impressed, asking L'Équipe, 'was your number 2 picked just to give his best?' What are the chances of Raymond ending his international career against the same opposition he started it against?

French Acting a Bit Irish

The estimable French football magazine So Foot tells me that the French Football Federation, sore at their Irish counterpart doing their own deal with M6, a French TV chain not partnered with the FFF, for the Dublin play-off game, are getting their revenge. They are demanding a minimum €1.5million for the rights from RTÉ (and I presume, TV3, if they're up for it) for the rights to broadcast the second-leg on November 18th. The offer tabled from the Irish side runs to only €600,000. I expect a deal will be hammered out in some fashion in the next couple of weeks but the behaviour of the French is shabby, to say the least. The amount offered by RTÉ is a little more than 10% of that demanded of M6 (the same amount, incidentally, that French broadcaster TF1 pays the FFF for every home match), perfectly fair considering the Irish TV market is approximately 5.5% that of the French one. I can understand how the French Federation were keen to avoid too many Irish fans seeing the match in the flesh on the 18th of November, but are they really determined to prevent them watching it back home too? Here's hoping they get their comeuppance and they'll be forced to undertake sponsorship tours to China next June to drum up revenue.

Tickets, please...

The first 49,000 tickets for the Ireland-France playoff second leg in the Stade de France sold out in hours last week, quicker than I expected. French football fans may have been heeding Raymond Domenech's call not to allow Irish fans to pack out the Stade de France, as they did five years ago (though the number then was no way 45,000, as L'Équipe and some other French media have reported). But it may well be possible that the tickets were being snapped up by opportunists to ultimately pass on to Irish fans for a handsome profit. Almost every Irish person (or even internationals supporting Ireland) I know bought the maximum four tickets. Whether this translates into a heavy Irish presence is unclear, as the French Football Federation appears resolute that the FAI's official allocation will remain at the minimum 8,500. There are 20,000 others reserved for football bodies within France and commercial partners - I noticed tickets being offered though my own place of work - and it's safe to say that some of these will end up in Irish hands too.

Speaking of opportunists one chap who arrived at Leclerc (a supermarket) in Val-de-Marne on his day off from said shop and produced a list of 80 'friends' whom he bought tickets for, ahead of everyone else in the queue. A disgruntled punter caught it on film (though it has since been taken down) and the french blogosphere is indignant. One wonders where his friends are going to be on the night of the 18th of November.

As for myself, what I previously thought was a non-negotiable work day turned out to be more flexible so I will be in the stands on the night, accompanied by a recalitrant Canadian who is insisting on supporting France. I'll get my revenge during the ice hockey at next year's Winter Olympics.

The Death of Gearóid Walsh

Sad news yesterday on the death of Irish backpacker Gearóid Walsh in Sydney following a late-night fight. But this report from the Sydney Morning Herald is humbling in how it shows the forgiveness and complete lack of bitterness of Gearóid's mother Tressa, who says she doesn't want her son's killer to go to prison. While it was clearly not an attack of such viciousness as often makes the news, the calm of Tressa Walsh in reacting to such a tragedy is admirable. The SMH reports a man has turned himself into police; I don't know if Australian law takes into account pleas for clemency but it would be best for all if Tressa Walsh's words were heeded.

Irish backpacker bashed in Coogee dies | Gearoid Walsh | I don't want my son's attacker to go to jail, says mother of dead backpacker

So It's France...

I had a premonition we were going to end up playing France in the play-off for a World Cup final spot. I can't say I'm too disappointed with it either, even though an open draw for the play-offs would have been infinitely fairer, but FIFA just couldn't countenance big names (and big TV audiences) missing out on the finals. To expect fairness from the corrupt suits in Zurich would be akin to expecting a Catholic Church float at Gay Pride so we'll just have to live with that. By most reckoning Russia would have been far worse what with playing in Moscow in November, on a plastic pitch, against a side that is significantly fitter and more motivated than most others in Europe right now. I think Portugal and Greece would have been well within our reach but I could see the latter being the sort of team capable of bogging us down and taking the sharpness off the big-game appetite. A needle match with France is all the better.

And if France, their current disarray notwithstanding, might be a formidable opponent for us, they didn't want to get us either. They have unbeaten records against Ukraine, Slovenia and Bosnia and would have preferred either of them. Of those three only Ukraine would be a real threat, and even then they are temperamental in the extreme. Bosnia are an exciting up-and-coming team but the fact they could only take one point off Spain and Turkey, the two big teams in their group, shows they are not really up to this level just yet. Before the draw was made L'Équipe said Ireland was the team to avoid, above all with a return leg in Dublin. Well, they got the consolation prize of the second leg in the Stade de France. Irish fans who have watched the mind-numbingly poor performances of Trap's boys in green so far will be bewildered at this wariness. But France have been equally poor in a group that was arguably worse than ours. Only recently, with the supposed mutiny led by Thierry Henry have they gelled and begun to play with something approaching a team spirit. That said one can only describe their draw away to Serbia as an impressive performance. That Karim Benzema could say he wasn't trying his hardest in the home draw against Romania suggests there's a long way to go to building a talented bunch in players into a footballing machine to be really feared. And most French football commentators and fans were not exposed to our performances in a mediocre group where we failed to beat anyone but Georgia and Cyprus. They just see the two draws with Italy, two games in which we acquitted ourselves well but could also have done better in. They are also fully aware that in Trapattoni, we are blessed with a manager who towers above their own hapless steward Raymond Domenech.

That said, it would be a silly fantasy to think that France are quaking in their boots at the prospect of a two-legged tie against Ireland. Overall they have the better players, and if Yohann Gourcuff and Jérémie Toulalan are both fit, a central midfield that could put worrying pressure on our own central formation. Much will depend on whether Thierry Henry goes into hiding for a big game (as he did in the Stade de France in October 2004) or delivers the goods (as he did a year later at Lansdowne). André-Pierre Gignac has scored four goals in his first eight internationals but three of those were against the Faroe Islands; there's no guarantee yet he won't turn out to be another Stéphane Guivarc'h, handy in Ligue 1 but out of his depth elsewhere. At the back France are not as solid as they were when they beat us four years ago (the real matchwinner that night was Lilian Thuram whose superb second-half performance calmed nerves after a first period when it looked the game was going Ireland's way) and they have an alarming tendency to concede goals from dead-ball situations. Which suits us fine, as we find it hard to score any other way. Richard Dunne's recent proflicness from corners and free kicks in particular has already been mentioned by the French press. In between the posts, Hugo Lloris and Steve Mandanda have been far from reassuring in recent matches for the national team or Lyon and Marseille respectively, and we can definitely put pressure on them.

The two ties are unlikely to yield many goals and Ireland's prospects rest on our level of organisation. After the catastrophic Staunton era, many gaps have been plugged but we still have a tendency to lapses in concentration at the wrong time. Far too many of the eight goals we conceded in the group matches came from unforced errors. Likewise, the two Italy games aside, there was little imagination in our forward play. We have to accept that, in the absence of Steve Finnan, we have no fullback really capable of outstripping on the flanks, and the centre of the field lacks an industrial pivot such as Steven Reid or the assertiveness of Stephen Ireland. At this point of the tournament, Trap's sidelining of Andy Reid, who had a fine game in our last meeting with France, looks ever more foolish. What goals we do score are likely to come from set-plays and if we do manage to put France on the back-foot it will probably be while chasing a lead.

Raymond Domenech, one of the least popular men in France these days, has riled the Irish by allegedly calling Ireland "a sort of England B-team", or so the Examiner reports. I've read the original French interview though and he said Ireland are 'Angleterre bis' which means rather a fascimile or replica of England; if anything it's a compliment more than anything else. But Domenech showed in the run-up to the Lansdowne match four years ago that he was a man of little or no class, and he will undoubtedly intentionally provoke the Irish before the 14th of November. Which is of course all the better for us. He is also worried that Ireland will hog the tickets at the Stade de France and make it effectively a home game for the Irish and he called on French supporters to snap them up quick. Thankfully French football fans are not too keen on indulging Mr Domenech. Irish fans should have no problem getting their hands on tickets when they come free, either via the French Football Federation or FNAC. Unfortunately non-negotiable work commitments mean I can't make the Paris game but I will thankfully be able to keep a close eye on it.

Domenech also has some previous with Marco Tardelli. Both men faced off as managers of Italy and France in an under-21 match in 1999 that was also a qualifier for the Sydney Olympics. It was a bad-tempered return leg, won by the Italians, and Domenech has since claimed that the Italians bought the referee, for which he was admonished by FIFA in 2007. Tardelli was asked in today's L'Équipe if he would shake Domenech's Hand; he replied coyly, 'he's not my opposite number, it's Trapattoni that shakes the hand of the opposing manager.' And there's me worried about FIFA encouraging a referee in the second leg to ease France's passage to South Africa.

Working Class Heroes on Film

In an era where any old fool can film something and post it on YouTube, it's a real pleasure to discover this week two hidden pearls from a time when home movies weren't quite so ubiquitous and which, even better, show us glimpses of people from before they became world famous. The short bit of film below shows us Phil Lynott and Brian Downey, later the rhythm section of Thin Lizzy, wandering the streets of Crumlin in 1969, with their band of the time, The Black Eagles. The quality of the film isn't great and neither is the framing and, not surprisingly there's no audio (The Yardbirds' 'Heartful of Soul' provides the soundtrack) but the film is mesmerisingly candid for all the selfconscious posing of the budding rock stars. There's a thrill to seeing any footage of the past in which you recognise things and the old 1940s council houses that flicker into view in the background are familiar to people all over Ireland, we can still see their likes in Limerick, Cork, Sligo, Athlone, Dundalk today, many of them now gentrified out of the price range of the working class that originally inhabited them. But most of all this is about Lynott and his stardom that was to come, the youngster who was to become Dublin's first ever rock star and the first black Irishman of world renown; as Conor McCabe put it in a fine post on Lizzy on Dublin Opinion last year, Lynott

is Dublin. The city seeped from him, from everything he did, from the way he moved and talked and looked. It’s hard to think of Phil Lynott coming from anywhere else but Dublin, and even at that, from anywhere else but a Dublin corporation estate. The city was such a part of him, and him of it.

And this gem of a clip is a great counterpart to the video for 'Old Town' that Philo recorded later in life, before his tragically early death in January 1986. Both remind me of the eerie thrill that befalls the sailor in Kipling's great short story 'Mrs. Bathurst' on his first encounter with the new-fangled thing called the cinematograph.

And the YouTube user MsRiposte, who it seems was a family friend of Phil, has also provided us with footage of Philo playing with Skid Row, including Brush Shiels and Gary Moore, the same year.

A huge thank you to Ms Riposte for sharing these with the world. They are absolute gold. And thanks to Philo's fellow Crumlin man and another great musician, Richie Egan of Jape for spreading word of them on his Twitter feed.

"They are just writers, no matter how great."

A quote, unsourced alas, from the great Liam O'Flaherty I read last night:

There are some writers whom one immediately recognises, bookish fellows whose drawing-room civilisation obtrudes unpleasantly on the senses. They are just writers, no matter how great. But there are others who are great men, because they are men and who write because chance turns their energies towards writing as a means of creation. These are the men I love. Out of their speech, out of their eyes, out of the movements of their bodies, joyousness and exuberance flow and they make you feel it is good to be alive.

I'm sure O'Flaherty, a progressive fellow, would have intended women writers to be included in that equation too. That oversight aside, it's as good an observation on the whole writing thing as one could wish.

Statistical Break

An Argentinian friend remarked to me a couple of months ago that European qualification for the World Cup is pretty damn easy. He didn't say this out of sour grapes at his country's current dismal run in qualifiers, which sees them at risk of missing the finals for the first time since 1950*. The albiceleste's absence from that tournament in Brazil was the doing of Juan Perón, who was afraid of the prospect of a failure troubling his populist regime's handling of football as a propaganda tool. And I can't say he's wrong. The strongest teams in the world might be largely concentrated in Europe but there are a fair few duffers in there. The South American qualifiers, which pitches every one against one another home and away in an 18-match league that lasts almost two years, are a stiffer challenge. Though South American teams are not always too hot when they compete in the World Cup finals, they do provide good competition among themselves with the gaps in class between some elided by hostile crowds and games at altitude (as Argentina's successive defeats in La Paz and Quito earlier this year show).

In Europe this time around, the lack of competition in most groups has been palpable. Three teams, Spain, the Netherlands and England have already qualified, with 100% records after eight games (no prizes for guessing which of those three will be reading far too much into those wins against mostly flimsy opposition). Even a modest but well-drilled side like Slovakia tops its group with six wins out of eight. Other teams such as Ireland are likely to reach the play-offs having played at most one or two games of decent football in qualifying so far.

Those play-offs will feature only eight of the nine second-place teams and results against the bottom-place team in the six-team groups are discounted in ranking them, to bring them in line with group 9, which has only five. At the moment the rankings are:

1. Russia Played 7 Points 18
2. France Played 7 Points 12
3. Greece Played 6 Points 11
4. Slovenia Played 7 Points 11
5. Croatia Played 7 Points 11
6. Bosnia-Herzegovina Played 6 Points 10
7. Norway Played 8 Played Points 10
8. Ireland Played 6 Points 10
9. Sweden Played 6 Points 9

That line-up is likely to change with Russia possibly qualifying automatically if they beat Germany in Moscow next month (meaning the Germans will take their place at the top of these rankings) and Sweden will have their work cut out to finish ahead of a Portugal side that has two very winnable home games remaining. Meanwhile the Czech Republic could edge out Slovenia. Ireland, should they win one of their remaining two home games are probably there too. Norway, who have no games left, are likely to be the odd one out.

According to L'Équipe today, FIFA will decide at its next meeting on the 29th of September in Rio if it will use the same seeding system based on FIFA rankings it used in qualifying for the 2006 World Cup.

A look at the rankings for those teams in the running for the play-offs:

4. Germany
6. Russia
9. Croatia
10. France
12. Greece
17. Portugal
18. Czech Republic
25. Ukraine
27. Turkey
38. Ireland
41. Sweden
45. Slovakia
46. Bosnia-Herzegovina
54. Slovenia
58. Latvia

That makes sobering reading for Irish football fans, as most permutations will put us in the bottom four of the play-off teams (only a combination of heroics from Sweden, Slovenia and Latvia will edge us into the top four). So we are left with the possibility of games against Germany or Russia, or the resurgent France and Portugal, or Croatia or Greece, whom we would be a great deal more the measure of. Who said those FIFA rankings are good for nothing?

*Erratum:

How incorrect of me. They last failed to reach the finals in 1970, when South America was represented by Brazil, Peru and Uruguay. Argentina's failure to qualify back then was as unexpected as it would be today, as Argentine clubs had a total dominance of the Copa Libertadores at the time. They also declined to enter the 1954 World Cup.

Here's what happened last time we relied on an unlikely outcome elsewhere to help us on our way:

Cyprus 1 Ireland 2

Watching last night's game, a friend argued that Irish supporters have unrealistically high expectations for a bunch of players that aren't really that great. Mother Teresa himself, Niall Quinn expressed a similar sentiment a few years back, and the chasm between his Ireland-team-as-a-holiday-camp mentality and Roy Keane's was laid bare in that match in Amsterdam nine years ago where Ireland let a two-goal lead slip in the last twenty minutes. Niall was upbeat after, delighted with a result that many Irish would have been happy to take at kick-off. Keano was more damning, lambasting the lack of professionalism in failing to secure what would have been a famous win and also the culture surrounding the Irish team that always settled for second best. Two years later in Saipan, the Irish team and Keane parted ways (for two years) due to irreconcilable differences.

The holiday-camp culture nurtured under Jack Charlton and later Mick McCarthy faded away under Brian Kerr, only to enjoy a brief revival under Steven Staunton's inexplicable and indefensible stewardship of the national team. Under Giovanni Trapattoni, we imagine it has been banished entirely, not least as his sidelining of Andy Reid seems to stem from a late-night sing-song the tubby winger gave in Mainz last year ahead of the Georgia match. The set-up might be more professional now but we still have an annoying tendency to settle for second best.

That said, one is not going to refuse three points garnered away from home, which maintains our unbeaten record and leaves us with a great chance to secure at least a play-off place. Nor is one going to persist with the fantasy that whatever central midfield formation we cobble together from the troika of Glenn Whelan, Keith Andrews and Darron Gibson can provide the bedrock of a successful team. But is it really so outlandish that we expect our players to handle modest opposition like Cyprus with more capability than we did last night?

We got off to a great start, getting bodies forward and harrying the hosts and it paid off within minutes, with Kevin Doyle stabbing home his first international goal in a year. It was remarkably similar to Robbie Keane's early goal in the same stadium four years ago and my prediction yesterday that that match would loom far larger than the 2006 debacle proved correct. Within a minute, Ireland were on the back-foot, Shay Given rescuing us, as ever, with a fantastic save. The attacks continued, with Ioannis Okkas running Seán St-Ledger ragged. Both full-backs were in question when a break by Okkas caused havoc in the box and an unmarked Marios Elia pounced to equalise. By my count this now leaves us down three goals in this campaign - all conceded when in the lead - because of Kevin Kilbane's lapses in concentration. Like most Irish fans I have great admiration for this workaday player who has never shown anything but 100% commitment when wearing the green but we really should be looking for someone else to plug that gap at left-back.

After an unspeakably appalling first half, which saw us desperately short of even elementary ideas in midfield and up front, we were fortunate to be still level (one must repeat, it was Cyprus we were playing and not Spain or Brazil). The second half produced more industry if not much more initiative. Keith Andrews went close with a superb half-volley and Steven Hunt headed wide from an acute angle. Things looked increasingly desperate until Damien Duff landed an inch-perfect cross on Robbie Keane's head and we took a lead we barely deserved. As he often does with Ireland, Keane redeemed a dreadful performance with a vital goal; he now has five in this campaign and 41 in total for Ireland, which is a record unparalleled by more gifted Irish strikers of bygone days.

So the three points are there and we are still in with a shout for South Africa. But we have yet to run up a string of convincing performances. Away from home we have been efficient, turning in fine displays in all the matches bar last night's one. At Croke Park it's been a different matter, which leaves me apprehensive ahead of next month's double-header against Italy and Montenegro. Trapattoni is by no means stupid and he will be as disappointed as anyone else with the lack of organisation last night. But he is ultimately responsible for that. The lack of direction and urgency in the Irish midfield cannot be explained by the technical shortcomings of Andrews and Whelan alone. There's a strong sense that there's very little guidance coming from the highly-paid Italian staff above.

When one seeks guidance, Dunphy and Giles are always the ones to turn to in times like these, and last night, along with the dispassionate Graeme Souness, they formed a sage conclave, an uncharacteristically calm and resigned committee of elders. Dunphy, who was an early critic of Trapattoni, slammed Ireland's game as 'bankrupt football'. He also correctly noted that John O'Shea would not dare hoof the ball up the field like he did last night while playing in a Manchester United shirt. Dunphy and Giles, whom nobody can accuse of harbouring delusions as to Irish players' technical abilities, nonetheless realise that modest players, with good coaching and decent morale, can produce impressive results. One need only look at the superb performances of Northern Ireland for proof of this.

We really should be making light work of Cyprus, which we did often enough until only five years ago. The Cypriots deserve everyone's respect, they've made enormous strides in recent years, achieved some great results and, amazingly for a country of less than 2 million people, have got two different sides into the Champions' League group stages. Their players were also markedly more skillful than the Irish last night. But they are still a side that veers from punching above its weight to calamitous results against the likes of Albania and Slovakia. A well-drilled Ireland team would have taken a two-goal lead in at the break last night. But we let the Cypriots pin us down.

It's not too much to expect that Ireland get results when it matters, and, even if we've done mostly well in that respect in this group (only the home draw against Bulgaria should reasonably have yielded more) there is still a frustrating culture of inferiority surrounding the team. Our gaping hole in the middle of the field is likely to be ruthlessly exposed by stronger teams but we have to learn to get on without the help of Steven Reid and Stephen Ireland. Our cause is helped by our facing a poor Italy team next month. The Italians dispatched a hapless Georgian side only with the help of two Kaka Kaladze own-goals and they are certainly beatable in Croker. But it remains to be seen if anyone in the Irish camp knows how to go about doing that.

Cyprus v Ireland

An hour to kick off in Nicosia. A lot has been said about Ireland's last trip to Cyprus, that notorious 5-2 defeat three years ago but that result is not going to be replicated tonight, it was, as Marco Tardelli said this week, a freak. The real frame of reference, and hardly any more reassuring is the match that took place twelve months earlier, where we went needing a win, went 1-0 up within five minutes and then proceeded to be pummeled by a Cyprus team we had torn apart a year earlier at Lansdowne. We came away with the requisite points but few people were convinced. The seams were already coming loose on Brian Kerr's management and the vital must-win match against Switzerland the following Wednesday already seemed insurmountable. And so it proved to be. The memory of that painful win was such that I avoided watching the match a year later, sensing something bad was going to happen, and so I watched Scotland beat France instead. Ireland should win tonight, Cyprus are missing some vital players including Michael Konstantinou, who bagged two goals three years ago, but the manner of their win in Croker last October was not too convincing either. The Cypriots were hammered 6-1 by Albania in their last international. Just before the match in October 2006 they suffered a similar reversal against Slovakia. I'll be happy with 1-0.

At Sink or Swim...

An indication of the parallel universe I inhabit is the fact that today's big news was the word from Venice of Brendan Gleeson's directorial debut. Old Ginger Chops is no shrinking violet given that his choice of material is going to be none other than At Swim-Two-Birds, a choice one would like to admire for its audacity but instead one imagines a car-crash of embarrassing extent. We are told that Gabriel Byrne, Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy are being lined up to star, which should pay for the posters at least (and it also reminds us that the Irish film-acting world is as curiously male-dominated as Flann O'Brien's novels themselves). The budget will be $11million, a fair whack for an Irish film, if not much by Hollywood standards.

Much as I admire Brendan Gleeson as an actor, I really can't get motivated about this one (and I won't pretend to be apprehensive - At Swim... is such a sturdy work of genius it will long outlast any film version, no matter how brilliant or inept). I've already seen one adaptation of the novel, over ten years ago, by the Austrian director Kurt Palm (as unknown internationally then as he is now but who surfed a brief wave of fame for long enough to stage a production of Die Flädermaus in Dublin shortly after the film's release). Palm's adaptation had the unique attribute of looking thoroughly Irish (and cheap) while everyone sounded lugubriously Germanic. It was a plodding trip through the novel's Russian-doll structure, reeling off the gags and situations in a cursory fashion devoid of any (non-Germanic) humour. I remember watching it on its brief run in the IFI and turning round to an over-enthusiastic Flannophile behind me who was polluting the half-empty cinema with his chortles at inconsequent jokes, I said to him 'it's not that funny'.

Well at least there's something for Gleeson to better. But the problem with the adaptation is not the towering influence of Flann - it's a select group indeed that have any real attachment to him - but the fact that the book is a thing of words, not of images. It's nigh impossible to render visually in a substantial way. While the meta-textual nature of the narrative - and the novel's surrealism - has been co-opted in a certain strand of cinema, such as Buñuel, Fellini, early Woody Allen, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman - none of these started from a base as ineffably literary as Flann's work was. Palm's film just looked like a cheap charting of the book's narrative and it will be a big challenge for Gleeson, as director and screenwriter to avoid this pitfall. A good start might be to update the novel's setting, and thus avoid the distraction of period details of the early Free State, and a similarly liberal approach to the sub-tales of Sweeney and the Pooka McPhellimy would be no harm either. Recovering Toasted Heretic Julian Gough put it best in his exceptionally active Twitter feed this afternoon:

Buying film rights to a Flann O'Brien must be like buying a sports car made of diamond-encrusted meringue. "OK! Now what?"

I can imagine Flann stirring momentarily from his stout-sodden slumber in the Palace to nod his appreciation at that.

A Family History Gleaned from the 1911 Census

Like many others, I've been having some fun searching the 1911 census, which the National Archives in Dublin have just put online. I've done a bit of detective work seeking out the Becketts of Foxrock (or Ballybrack, as the census has it - the four-year-old Sam, it seems, was as of yet unlettered); what remained of the Joyces living out an impecunious existence at 20 Gardiner's Place; Eamonn Ceannt, one of the more easily traceable of the signatories to the Proclamation, at that time living in the shadow of the prison where he would be executed five years later; a young Christy Ring; An Craoibhín Aoibheann, and future President Douglas Hyde, and an infant Francis Bacon. A lot more work is needed to dredge up some of the other luminaries of the day or the future, given the commonness of surnames and, especially, Christian names, not to mention the difficulty of determining people's movements on the night of the 2nd of April of that year.

But often the more interesting stories are closer to home, and I had little difficulty finding my paternal family, seeing as they remained in the same house for another half-century and the family name is not terribly common (finding my mother's family, Gallaghers from Donegal, was a good deal more onerous). There were nine people present in the house that night, six members of the family and three lodgers. The head of the family was Maggie Farry, widowed at the age of 45. She had five children, aged from 5 to 16, all but the youngest were literate. She held the family pub and shop, which my grandfather Bernard (Bertie) would later run until his death in 1956. Maggie managed to combine intense Catholic bigotry (her sons once played a trick on her by pretending a church they had stopped into on a journey home one day was a Protestant one, causing her no end of pain) with a loyalty to the British crown (the second son was named John Albert after the late Prince Consort). Though, according to my father, later in life she developed a hostility towards the crown, which allowed her to turn a blind eye when her sons Albert and Bertie joined the Irish Volunteers. Maggie was also a bit of a snob, naming her children Bernard Agustine, Leo Tynation and Thomas Alphonsas (though Alphonsas was not unknown in the devout Ireland of the day and my own uncle was later named Alphonso).

The family, like most Irish, went their separate ways - Alphonsas (Al) went to New York and later Chicago. Albert lingered in Ballymote for a couple of decades after losing his job at the local creamery for backing the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War (like the rest of the family). His vaguely leftwing views later mutated into admiration for the Nazis (my father claims Albert had official Nazi party literature in his bedroom during the war) though this was driven more by an intense Anglophobia than out of any real ideological persuasion. He was probably naive and ignorant due to his isolation in the inter-war period; he spent the last two decades of his life in England, of all places, dying just as the outbreak of the Troubles may have landed the ageing Republican in prison for recrudescent activity. My grandfather took on the family pub and shop and was a founder member of Fianna Fáil and was elected county councillor in 1944. In 1938 he went bankrupt as his toeing the party line forced him to extend ruinous credit to farmers and party supporters at the height of the Economic War.

I never met any of the nine people listed as being in the house that night. All family members (bar Al) were dead by the time I was born. I was struck by the name of one of the three lodgers. I knew that the family took on lodgers and many of them were RIC men, which provided convenient cover for the house to be used as a safe house during the War of Independence.* But one of the lodgers that night was a Jewish Russian emigré by the same of Solomon Malamed who had the vague profession of 'wholesale marine dealer'. I had never known the family housed a lodger of such exotic provenance, though there's really no reason why I should as he may have stayed as little as a week or two. I'm not sure if my great-grandmother's strident Catholicism allowed her to look kindly on a member of the tribe of Israel, especially given the anti-semitism of the Church at the time, though business was probably looked on as business. Mr Malamed, two years later welcomed into the world a daughter, Yetta, who would later grow up to be a thorn in the side of the Apartheid regime as a prominent South African Communist, being charged with treason in December 1956, the same week my grandfather, young as the century, died at the age of 56. Yetta Barenblatt lived to see the fall of apartheid and died ten years ago in Johannesberg. It would have been nice had she met Albert, whom she might have managed to make see reason.

*Or rather it served as a clearing house, to temporarily shelter Volunteers after guerrilla attacks in the village. The lodgers, including the RIC men, stayed in a smaller annexe next door, so people could pass through the house without much notice.

The Farry family declaration for the 1911 census

Technorati Tags: ireland, history, Sligo

The Unluckiest Writer of the Twentieth Century?

I meant to post a couple of weeks back on a review by Fintan O'Toole on Flann O'Brien's Collected Novels (Everyman edition) that appeared in the New York Review of Books recently but I was stymied by the NYRB's limited online access (even to those of us that fork out for a print subscription). Now I seem to have mislaid the copy amid the piles of books, magazines, periodicals and manuscript papers with the words 'red rum' scrawled all over them that litter my flat. It was an interesting piece (if untimely, as the Everyman edition, to the best of my knowledge has been out for a long time), and on first reading I was most interested in the parallels O'Toole makes between Flanno and Beckett, a pair rarely thought of in the same moment yet who shared a similar knack for stepping outside the constraints of language (and their own language) and they also both shared a significant love for Ivan Gonchurov's Oblomov. The NYRB has now posted a podcast interview with O'Toole where he summarises his arguments in the essay. It's well worth a listen.

O'Toole comments on Flanno/Myles' writing in English as if he were writing it as a dead language, or one translated from another. It's a part fanciful, part persuasive idea but I was definitely taken by O'Toole's diagnosis of sexual repression in Flann's work, where he sees writing as taking the place of sex, scored out of the literature of official Ireland; I had never noticed before that much of the writing in At Swim-Two-Birds take place in bed (though that might have something to do with the fact that I read it as a student). I think that O'Toole (and others) are a little hard on the Ireland of O'Brien's time; while it was, of course a grey, priest-ridden, poverty-stricken place, it nonetheless managed to provide some unlikely cultural resistance. I also think that O'Brien, rather than being frustrated at being stuck in Ireland, stayed in the country out of a clear love for the newly-independent nation, you have to remember he was only 11 - and a fluent Irish speaker - at the establishment of the Free State. No matter how maddening he found the place, he was not necessarily given to flee it, especially as an (initially) idealistic and brilliant member of its fledgling Civil Service.

O'Toole is correct in saying that Flann was one of the unluckiest writers in 20th-century history, seeing At Swim-Two-Birds sink into obscurity shortly after its publication on the eve of World War II and then, of course, The Third Policeman was inexplicably rejected by his publisher. Even today Flann is criminally neglected with few people knowing his much funnier journalistic work (most of which is still in print) and even his name itself is little known outside cult literary circles, even within Ireland. Do yourself a favour this week and go out and read some Flann O'Brien, especially if you haven't already.

There's also a fine review of Flann's Collected Novels by Joseph O'Neill here.

Ireland's Athletes

Well done to Ireland's athletes who performed well in the World Championships in Berlin, only one year after being tarred as failures at the Beijing Olympics by the media. A silver medal for Olive Loughnane in the 20km race walk, and superb performances in sprints by Derval O'Rourke (4th and a new Irish record in the 100m hurdles) and David Gillick (6th in the 400m). These performances are phenomenal from athletes that often labour alone with little official support and are forever dependent on the benevolence of sponsors willing to invest money in unfashionable non-stars. They deserve better than the pillorying they've been getting in recent years by armchair critics and deserve better than the outrageous snubbing delivered them by RTÉ in its decision not to cover the Championships.

My Funny Valentine

Keith Ridgway has an amusing anecdote on his blog about an encounter years ago with someone who answered his ad in Hot Press looking for a guitarist. The guitarist, a young lad named Kev, turned out to be intimidatingly better than Keith and his maladroit band-partner. The encounter ended there. Kev went on to form My Bloody Valentine, one of the half-dozen great rock bands Ireland has produced.

MBV have been in the news a lot lately, having reformed last year; one imagines Kev et al have cottoned on to the fact that there's money to be made being My Bloody Valentine. A friend of mine went to see them at the Route du Rock festival in Brittany at the weekend. Apparently it was the loudest gig he's ever been at but great nonetheless. Libération carried a brief review of the concert, which it said could be heard some ten kilometres away in Saint-Malo. There was a curious interview with one Christophe Brault, musicologist and friend of the band who has seen the Valentines live twenty times. Brault bemoans the fact that he couldn't hear the voices on the tracks. 'It's a real waste. I couldn't even make out some of the songs. It something they should look at.' To which one can only respond that, having seen the band twenty times, it's a bit late in the day to be finding that out. Maybe he was listening more to the -ology than to the music.

I have to say I'm finding MBV's newfound popularity a bit of overkill. I should be delighted that they're touring again (and about to record a third LP) but I'm feeling a bit nostalgic for the days when the couple of dozen songs and memories of teenage days were enough to sustain oneself, along with the opportunity to see Kevin Shields line up with Primal Scream on tour. Now I find it all a bit too much. Not that I find the music intolerable though:

My Bloody Valentine - When You SleepTechnorati Tags: music, ireland