02 September 1996

Wexford Hurling:
An Irishman’s Diary

Patrick Comerford

AS A BOY growing up in the 1950s, I was in awe of the Wexford hurlers, the Rackard brothers, and those epic teams in what Nicky Furlong describes as “the Greatest Hurling Decade”.

Those memories have been hallowed in Billy Roche’s play, Poor Beast in the Rain, and were brought to life again with yesterday’s All Ireland Hurling Final against Limerick.

There is nothing to stir Wexford pride like watching the men in Purple and Gold or hearing the band strike up The Boys of Wexford and Boolavogue, and it is no coincidence that the associations between Wexford’s sporting achievements and the memories of 1798 should be recorded by the same local historian.

Nicky Furlong is the author of The Greatest Hurling Decade. But it is in his biography of Father John Murphy that he recalls the origins of a persistent tradition invoked by Wexford supporters against Kilkenny in inter-county hurling matches.

A dejected Father Murphy and his exhausted supporters had trekked as far as north Kilkenny, and were betrayed as they slept on the hills of Kilcumney, duped into believing that they were being protected by the local colliers.

Watery Kilkenny Men

During the night, the colliers deserted the Wexford rebels, every man of them from the “camp”. According to Nicky Furlong, the colliers took every gun and pike with all the gunpowder they could carry away with them from the camp. “What gunpowder they could not take with them, they pissed on”.

In all, Wexford have played 26 Leinster hurling finals against Kilkenny. And yet, the greatest abuse was reserved not for the Kilkenny supporters, but for Cork. And this was so because the memory of “Tom the Devil” was alive in Wexford a century after the rising.

Thomas Honam, a sergeant with the North Cork militia earned his reputation as “Tom the Devil” for his expertise in torture and his perfection of the pitchcap. Old men who had their heads sheared and had been pitch capped as croppies were still to be seen in Co Wexford in the 1860s, and respect for them and the memory of “Tom the Devil” fired Wexford people in, the decade leading up to the first centenary of the rising.

In 1890, Castlebridge won the county hurling championship and so became the first Wexford team to play in an All Ireland Hurling Final. The 1890 final was played at Clonturk on November 16th, and Cork was represented by Augabullogue. Wexford were behind in the match but looked like drawing level with the prowess of two of their fiercest players, Tom Murphy and Will Neville. The Wexford supporters were emphatic when they accused the Cork supporters of being descendants of the North Cork Militia. As a ballad of the time puts it:

Tom Murphy and Will Neville
Began to lay them level,
When they thought of Tom the Devil,
With his pitch cap and his shears.


The Cork team were forced off the pitch by the Wexford jeers. But at that stage the scoreline stood at 1-6 to 2-2 against Wexford, and the unfinished match was awarded to Cork.

Wexford returned to Clonturk again for the 1891 final, played on February 28th, 1892. This time Crossabeg represented the county, and the team included Tom Murphy and Will Neville once again. But Kerry’s Ballyduff won 2-3 to 1-5 after a half hour’s extra play.

Wexford’s first All Ireland Hurling title was not won until 1910, when Castlebridge beat Limerick’s Castleconnel at Jones’s Road 7-0 to 6-2. Once again, the memory of 1798 must have been high in the minds of the Wexford supporters. Big Jem Mythen of Monawilling, who scored the winning goal against Limerick that year, has a special place in ’98 lore according to local historian Brian Cleary. And that place is recorded in Brian Cleary's account of the Battle of Oulart in The Past, the journal of the Ui Cinsealaigh Historical Society.

Where Murphy Stood

As part of the 1948 commemorations for the 150th anniversary of the 1798 Rising, Jim Mythen, along with Paddy Sutton, Phil Quirke, Bud Farl and Ned Ryan, erected a monument in a corner of a field between Monawilling and Oulart, close to the place where tradition says Father John Murphy stood during the Battle of Oulart on Sunday, May 27th, 1798.

The monument stands close to Father Murphy’s Well, and, according to Brian Cleary, the monument, the well and the entire battle area at Oulart are being included in the Sli Charman, the long walk planned across Co Wexford.

After their 1910 victory over Limerick, the Wexford hurlers had to wait until 1918 to return to an All-Ireland hurling final.

Once again, they faced Limerick, but the Wexford selection was trounced 9-5 to 1-3 by Newcastle West.

Defeat was sweetened that year by Wexford’s sixth successive appearance in an All-Ireland Senior Football final and the fourth successive football title won for the county by the Blues and Whites of Wexford town: having been defeated by Kerry in 1913 and 1914, Wexford won four times in a row from 1915.

With these record-breaking exploits, hurling took second place to football throughout the 1920s, the 1930s and well into the 1940s. In 1948, the Wexford final with a team that included Nicky Rackard. But Wexford’s greatest triumph that year was to see a football tournament organised to coincide with the 150th anniversary commemorations of 1798. By coincidence, Wexford reached the final, which was not played until 1949, when the team, with Martin Comerford in goal, was defeated in front of 36,000 by three points by mighty Meath.

Few could have foreseen the great revival in Wexford hurling that year too. The dual football and hurling heroes of the county included Nicky Rackard, Mick Hanlon, Padge Kehoe, Bobby Donovan, and Sam “Wilkie” Thorpe from Vinegar Hill.

The Three Rackards

The hurlers of the 1950s reached the All Ireland final in 1951, 1954, 1955, 1956, with three Rackard brothers playing on each occasion and Wexford returning victorious in 1955, when Galway were defeated, and in 1956, when Cork were the losers. And there were Leinster senior titles too in 1951, 1954, 1955, and 1956.

Hurling fever swept the whole county in the early 1950s. Even Wexford town, until then a football stronghold, saw the founding of its first hurling team at Faythe Harriers. Nicky Furlong recalls how he even togged out as centre forward in the blue and black of Wexford Wanderers Rugby Football Club for an unofficial match against Young Irelands at Park Lane.

There were All Ireland hurling victories again in 1960 and 1968 against Tipperary. But there was no glory for the county like the stunning records of the 1910s and the 1950s.

Now, wouldn’t another Wexford victory in 1998 be a good way to mark the 200th anniversary of 1798?

This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Monday 2 September 1996

20 July 1996

An Irishman’s Diary: CP Cavafy

An Irishman’s Diary
Patrick Comerford


CP Cavafy ... a portrait by David Hockney

IT IS HARD to imagine that modern Egypt dates from 1799, when Napoleon drove out the Turks. It is even harder to imagine that until this century, the port city of Alexandria was one of the major centres of Greek culture and civilisation.

In a heated conversation late one night or early some morning in a taverna in Crete, I was told pointedly by a Greek whose grandparents came from the city that “there were Greeks living in Alexandria when Moses was a boy.”

The city, of course, takes its name from Alexander the Great. But it is well to remember that Cleopatra was not an Egyptian but a Greek, and that in classical times Alexandria was as purely Hellenic as Ptolemy, the founder of the dynasty of Greek monarchs which ruled the city for generations. This first Ptolemy was determined to make his capital the world centre of culture, the “Glory of the Ptolemies”:

The mentor city, the Hel-
lenic world’s acme, wisest in all the arts, in all:
philosophy.


In the mid 19th century, Greeks controlled the commercial life of Cairo, Khartoum and Alexandria, and in 1900, there were still 20,000 Greeks in Alexandria.

It is no accident, therefore, that Constantine Cavafy, hailed by Kimon Friar as “the undisputed founder of modern Greek poetry”, was born in Alexandria in 1863 and lived there for most for of his life, living in declining grandeur as a civil servant until his death in 1933. When his relatives, scandalised by the neighbourhood, implored him to leave his flat at 19 Rue Lepius, he went to the window drew back the curtain and asked. Where else could I be better situated than here, amidst these three centres of existence, a brothel, a church which forgives, and a hospital where you?

Craved recognition

During his life, Cavafy craved public recognition. He was introduced to English readers early in the century by F.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and Arnold Toynbee, and he is the genius loci in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. But his own sister forbade her daughter to read, her Uncle Constantine's, disreputable verses, scandalised by his homosexuality, decadence and rejection of the Orthodox Church.

Cavafy went unrecognised and without appreciation from the Athenian literati until some time after the publication of his first collected edition in 1935, two years after his death.

Today, he is read in every Greek school, and schoolchildren easily recite poems such as Ithaka, Waiting for the Barbarians, The City, and The god abandons Anthony. He has been popularised among English language readers with translations by Peter Bien, Kimon Friar, John Mavrogordato, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, among others, and major studies by Friar, Sherrard, Christopher Robinson of Christ Church, Oxford, and Peter Bien of Dartmouth. His popularity was confirmed when poems by Cavafy were read at the funeral of Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

Yet little attention has been given to a translation of 33 of Cavafy’s poems by the Irish poet, Desmond O’Grady. O’Grady, who was born in Ireland in 1935, later travelled as a student and teacher throughout Europe, America and Egypt, where he taught at the American, University of Cairo and the University of Alexandria.

In recent years, with a grant from the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs, he was able to accept an invitation from the Greek poet Kostis Moskof to go back to Alexandria.

Through the tireless efforts of Moskof, the Hellenic Foundation and other admirers of Cavafy’s poetry, and his cultural legacy, Cavafy’s house at 10 Rue Lepsius (now Sharm elSheykli) has been restored to what it looked like when the poet lived there and has been turned into a museum and library in his memory.

Returning to Egypt and the English Department of the American University in Cairo, O’Grady completed his translation of a selection of Cavafy’s poems, and Alternative Manners, his version of 33 Cavafy poems, was published in 1993 by the Hellenic Society, Athens Alexandria. Unfortunately, much to his regret, the proofs were never properly corrected. And so the book was never put on the market commercially and has never been reviewed in newspapers.

Readers, forgive

He feels Alternative Manners “reads like Greek ruins” and asks readers now to “please forgive, and overlook, and correct.” But, he concedes modestly, the collection has its admirers. “Greek people who know their Cavafy and who have read it found my Hiberno English very suited to Cavafy’s Alexandrian Greek, and closer to the text of Cavafy’s language than standard British and American translations.”

A reading of two of Cavafy’s best known poems illustrates the particular insights and turn of phrase which an Irish translator can bring to his work.

His translation of Ithaka loses the references by Friar and Keeley and Sherrard to Laistrygonians and Cyclops; instead, they become “cannibal bogeymen met in half light” and “those with one eye, open for their main chance.” The “Phoenician trading stations” or “market places” of the other translators become “ports you’ve not dreamed of” and “every city”.

In Waiting for the Barbarians, Sherrard and Keeley have the city fathers “assembled in the forum” and Friar has them mustered in the forum but O’Grady has them “waiting, here in the square.” Instead of the barbarians being dazzled, they are not impressed by “bamboozle”. And, instead of rhetoric and public speaking or “eloquence and public speeches”, O’Grady speaks of boring baloney.

Secretary to Pound

For some years, Desmond O’Grady was secretary to the American poet Ezra Pound in his exile in Italy. Now he lives in Kinsale, but regards Greece as his second home. His work as a poet has, of course, been recognised at home, where he is a member of Aosdana, and where he has been back for the opening of “Waves of the Sea”, the new writers’ and translators’ centre.

His earlier frustration with the printers handling of Alternative Manners could be rectified if an Irish publisher found an interest in the book. But in the meantime, he can take comfort from the theme in Cavafy’s Ithaka: the journey, not the destination, is what constitutes our true reward.

This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 20 July 1996

24 June 1996

Strongman of the left
who returned from
exile to recast
Greek democracy

Greece’s most colourful politician since the second World War, Andreas George Papandreou, was born on the Greek island of Chios

By Patrick Comerford

Greece’s most colourful politician since the second World War, Andreas George Papandreou, was born on the Greek island of Chios – the birthplace of Homer – on February 5th, 1919. His father, George Papandreou, became prime minister in the 1960s.

As a law student at Athens University, the young Andreas Papandreou became involved in radical, left wing politics, and was jailed and tortured under the pre war Metaxas dictatorship. He left for the US in 1940, and completed a PhD at Harvard before joining the US navy and becoming a US citizen. After the war, he taught economics at Harvard, became a professor at Minnesota and later at the University of California, Berkeley.

In the US, he came under the influence of John Kenneth Galbraith and was closely associated with Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and the Democratic Party, and there he met and married Margaret Chant. Their four children include the present Education Minister, George Papandreou.

After almost 20 years in exile he returned to Greece on a Fulbright scholarship in 1959 and in 1961 became director of the newly founded Centre for Economic Research and an adviser to the Bank of Greece.

He was first elected as a deputy for his father's Centre Union in February, 1964, and was appointed Minister to the Prime Minister. But he was soon accused of plotting a coup with left wing army officers. The allegations coincided with the withdrawal of the future conservative prime minister, Constantine Mitsotakis, and others from Centre Union – Papandreou later described Mitsotakis as ‘my own arch enemy, the tall, ruthless Cretan who had sown the seeds of our destruction.’

The crisis brought the colonels to power in 1967, and Papandreou was jailed from April to December 1967. Mitsotakis was released after promising to quit politics for life, but Papandreou was detained and tortured until influential Democrats persuaded Lyndon Johnson to intervene. Johnson told a White House reception: ‘I just told those Greek bastards to lay off that commie son of a bitch, whatever his name is.’

He went into exile in Sweden, where he briefly held a professor ship at Stockholm University before moving to Canada, and for five years he was Professor of Economics at York University. In exile he founded the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (PAK), later the nucleus for his Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok).

With the fall of the colonels he returned to Greece in 1974 and founded Pasok. In the first election, the new party garnered only 12 per cent of the vote and 12 seats, but Papandreou set to work on building a web of party activists in every town, village and island. In 1977, Pasok doubled its vote, and Papandreou became official leader of the opposition. In 1981, campaigning on the slogan Allaghi (Change), it was swept to power. Papandreou became the country's first socialist prime minister, breaking the right's post war grip on power and becoming an enduring hero to the left. Four years later, Papandreou and Pasok comfortably won a second term.

Between 1981 and 1989, he embraced Third World radicals such as Libya's Col Gadafy, antagonised the US and castigated his EU partners. His radical domestic reforms included civil marriage, a lower voting age, greater rights for women and the abolition of the death penalty. And yet he was strongly nationalist at all times, taking tough stands on Macedonia, Cyprus, and Turkish claims in the Aegean, and demanding the removal of US military bases. However, the government was marred by allegations of scandals corruption, and financial embezzlements, revelations about his private life, and his ill health. Papandreou was absent for two months in 1988 when he went to London for triple bypass open heart surgery performed by Sir Magdi Yacoub. In London as he fought for his life, an Olympic Airways hostess half his age, Dimitri Liani, kept vigil by his hospital bedside.

The pair shocked the nation when they publicly flaunted their affair. Shortly after his election defeat at the hands of Constantine Mitsotakis and his New Democracy in June 1989, Mr Papandreou divorced Margaret, his American wife of 38 years, and married Ms Liani, by then popularly known as Mimi and deeply unpopular within the ranks of Pasok and throughout Greece.

But even in his worst days in opposition, during three election defeats in 1989 and 1990, he could still pull 40 per cent of the popular vote. In 1992 he was cleared of charges relating to a $200 million bank embezzlement and at the same time, Ms Liani (temporarily) gave up her flashy clothes and carefree ways. But it seemed a career that began with promise and privilege had come to an end.

And yet he defied all the pundits when returned to power in 1993 with a landslide victory over his old rival Mitsotakis - the two had been lampooned in the Greek press as battling septuagenarian dinosaurs. But he was frail and unable to put in a full day's work. He antagonised many long-time supporters and soon found himself under fire from dissenters within Pasok when he appointed his wife as chief of staff, his son as junior foreign minister, his wife's cousin as junior culture minister and his personal physician, Dimitris Kremastinos, as health minister.

The Greek presidency of the EU at the beginning of 1994 should have been a personal triumph, but late that year the charismatic former European Affairs Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, resigned from the cabinet, and within weeks Pasok fared badly in local elections. However, the greatest personal setback may have been the death of the former culture minister, Ms Melina Mercouri.

By now he seldom chaired cabinet meetings, and was hardly ever seen in parliament. All access to the prime minister, even for cabinet ministers was controlled by Mimi and trusted members of her entourage, including her mother, her brother, an Orthodox priest, and her personal astrologer.

The astrologer predicted that the last 10 days of November would be crucial for Mr Papandreou's health, and at the end of November he was rushed to the top Athens Onassis Heart Centre; with pneumonia. For weeks he was kept alive on a respirator and a dialysis machine, and hundreds of supporters camped outside the hospital for days. He survived Christmas and into the New Year, but their best wishes were to no avail.

He resigned on January 15th and was replaced as prime minister by Mr Costas Simitis, although he retained the title of party president. Eventually he left hospital after four months, only four days before Greece's national day.

As he left, he told boisterous supporters: ‘With love, I'm leaving from this.’ He was escorted by Ms Liani, who smiled and said he was unable to say more. He waved feebly from the back seat, where he sat expressionless as he was driven away.

Ms Liani, who has accused her husband's children and ex-wife of orchestrating attacks against her, is expected to be exiled at the luxury pink villa she built for herself in the posh Athens suburb of Ekali at astronomical cost.

History may not judge Mr Papandreou on his last term in office. Certainly, he has transformed Greek politics radically and to the core.

Pasok, with 170 of the 300 seats in parliament, has a secure majority that will ensure it survives until, next year, when Mr Papandreou’s term was due to end. But Mr Papandreou leaves deep divisions within Pasok, and Mr Simitis has an uphill battle to take control of the party leadership over the next few weeks. The party faithful only hope that he can get party affairs back into shape in time to win the next election.

This obituary was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 24 June 1996

13 April 1996

An Israeli warrior for peace

Book Review:

Yitzak Rabin: Soldier of Peace, The Jerusalem Report Staff, ed David Horovitz


Patrick Comerford

On the morning of Saturday, November 4th last, the Torah or scripture reading in synagogues was the portion preceding the episode in which God orders his servant Abraham to prove his faith by sacrificing his beloved son Isaac (in Hebrew, Yitzhak), the father of Jacob, who grows up to become Israel.

In a small Yemenite synagogue near Tel Aviv, those listening intently included a young man who believed he too had a command from God to kill another Isaac Yitzhak Rabin.

This book gives a chilling account of the rise of the ultra-right in Israel and the climate that bred an assassin like Yigael Amir. According to one of the contributors, Rabin was “a lion slaughtered like a sheep”, because he refused to take his marching orders from “those who worship land more than they worship life”. He bitterly castigated the Likud opposition leader Bibi Netanyahu, for failing to take a stand against right wing extremism, but continued to insist: “I don’t believe a Jew will kill a Jew.”

How wrong he was.

Yitzhak Rabin was the very antithesis of the right-wing Israeli settlers on the West Bank who combine political and religious zealotry without care or consideration for the views and beliefs of their neighbours. He was a Zionist and idealist from a previous generation, the son of refugees from the former Russian empire who had been imbued with socialism and secular values. His early life is also the story of those early socialist and secular Zionists, the Palmah and the Haganah, fighters like Yigael Allon and Moshe Dayan, and the early conflicts of a left wing activist with David Ben Gurion.

At the height of the Israeli political crisis in 1974 that brought about Golda Meir's resignation, Rabin half joked: “All my life I have been collecting ex’s. I am ex-Chief of Staff, ex-ambassador to the United States, and now an ex-potential Defence Minister.”

And he soon became the ex-Prime Minister when he was forced to resign over his wife’s American bank account in 1977. But while defeated in political battle, he had not yet lost the political war. He returned to government in 1984, and immediately presented proposals for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.

Rabin underestimated his achievements. Although Dayan stole most of the credit, it was Rabin who drew up the battle plans for the Six Day War, who took the Sinai, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and who trebled the territory controlled by Israel. He democratised his own party. With his election victory in 1992 he won the support of his political colleagues and most Israelis for his plans for peace with the Palestinians in 1993 he shook hands, albeit reluctantly, with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, agreeing to autonomy for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And he worked until the end in the hope of reaching peace with Syria.

He was a soldier who despised war. As far back as 1967 he was ready to trade the newly conquered territory for peace. And when the Hebrew University of Jerusalem honoured him with a doctorate in 1967, he spoke with pathos of the enemy’s anguish and the terrible price of victory: “War is intrinsically harsh and cruel, bloody and tear stained.”

This book profiles Rabin in all his strengths, and in all his weaknesses too. He was the calm, calculated, proud voice of Israel, “a son of Israel and the father of its future”. But he was also harsh to the point of contemptuous rudeness, he held politicians and politics in disdain, he was painfully inept at small talk, an ambassador who was uncertain on the party circuit and the dance floor.

He could make bad political decisions in anger and in fury, such as the alleged order to troops in 1988 to break the bones of Palestinians in an effort to crush the intifada, or the expulsion of over 490 activists to the cold mountains of Lebanon in December 1992. He was cautious, pedantic and analytical, and only with great difficulty did he find the strength on his last night at a rally in Tel Aviv to join in singing a popular peace song:

So sing only a song for peace,
Do not whisper a prayer,
Better sing a song for peace
With a great shout.


But as Yigael Amir has shown, Israel does not need men with manners who regard themselves as saints. It has too many of them. It needs politicians and statesmen with the wisdom of a man like Rabin.

Had Rabin survived there is little doubt he would have led his Labour Party to victory in the current election campaign. His opponents in Likud still have to answer for their part in right wing rallies and protests that heard calls for Rabin’s death, at which Rabin was branded a traitor, and at which placards and posters regularly portrayed him in a Nazi uniform or with his features overlaid with the cross hairs of a rifle sight. Outside the Rabin apartment, demonstrators shouted at his wife Leah: “Next year we will string you up.”

Rabin had few friends. Ezer Weizman begrudged him his successes and achievements ever after the Six Day War, and made a dark promise to do everything to end his political career. The bitter personal enmity Rabin shared with Shimon Peres, lasting for three decades or more, was resolved only in the past few years. But his friends included one of the contributors to this book, Hirch Goodman of the Jerusalem Report, who knew Rabin for 28 years, having been assigned to him as a bodyguard during the Six Day War. In his prologue, Goodman admits Rabin “became my instant hero. He was Israel, that new generation of Jew, all that I aspired to be.”

Too many books suffer from being the collective work of too many writers. But this book is enriched by the experiences of its contributors, Israel’s leading journalists who have followed the career of a true “Soldier for Peace.” David Horovitz has done his colleagues on the Jerusalem Report – and the memory of Yitzhak Rabin – a service in the way this book has been edited.

This book review was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 13 April 1996.