FUNNY things, national institutions. No matter be they targets of criticism or ridicule, of affection or of toleration, national institutions invariably provide the rest of us with some semblance of security, or at least continuity. For many observers, the long saga which was to become the Irish Press closure seemed more likely to remain a stalemated stay of execution than the extinction of three national newspaper titles.
The Irish Press certainly enjoyed the love of many people in addition to its traditional Fianna Fail support. Most of all, though, the Evening Press had its own national institution in Con Houlihan - sports writer, storyteller and vintage original whose journalism at its best balances observation, anecdote, literary cross reference and memoir with an unpredictability and lightness of tone no other Irish columnist even approaches. The graceful prose is the result of courtly Kerry English well filtered by Irish, the language, he says, he speaks better than English. As for the humour, its surrealism at times nodding towards Flann O'Brien, is entirely his own. Personalised without being confessional, academic without being pedantic, opinionated without dogma, his relaxed, lyric style of atmospheric prose is not all that different from his conversation. Belonging to a dying breed, he is an old school, gentleman journalist.
It is 18 months since the Press closed and Houlihan still mourns its passing. "It was like being part of a village, it was a community, and my colleagues were my society. Its end was like the death of a village. The whole thing makes me feel very sad. I spent 23 years there, it was my home.
Currently writing a sports column for the Sunday World, Houlihan has just published Windfalls, a collection of pieces written mainly for the XPress - the free sheet run by the journalists to assist the Press fund. The selection is largely literary and includes articles on Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, Thomas Hardy and John Clare. Who are his heroes? Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Agee, Wolfe and Van Gogh - the only reproduction hanging on his walls is one of Van Gogh's cornfield pictures. "It's a warm, happy picture. Some of them are sad, but this one is a happy picture."
In an essay entitled "The Once and Future King" he writes of Lester Piggott: "It is hard to imagine him ever playing or having toys; there is a harsh and puritan element in racing and Piggott did not escape it." In the same piece he notes of Muhammad Ali: "He came from a family whose boxing seems to have been confined to the odd domestic squabble but good professional pugilists were as plentiful in Louisville as hurlers."
Large and bear like, with the floppy hair and big features of the former tennis player Ille Nastase, Houlihan also possesses the battle scarred face of an American Indian chief and tends to speak from behind his hand - a self conscious gesture devised to shield his listener from a nose which he has described as "thrice broken". Rugby not war, nor even boxing, is the source of his wounds including a deep groove on his brow. He played at lock, now number eight, for his club, Castle Island RFC, well into his 40s and at times his arthritic knee reminds of the many games it carried him through.
Sport is theatre and its beauty, drama and tragedies are things he appreciates. "I always wonder at those who dismiss sport," he says quietly. He is neither defensive nor aggressive. Aware that other reporters tend to regard sports journalists as if they are on perpetual holiday, he tells a story of former Irish Press managing editor Major Vivion de Valera's visit to a Japanese newspaper. "He was shown around the various newspaper departments and as you would expect of the Japanese everything was perfection - tidy, immaculate, organised. Then he noticed in a corner a group of messy fellows no ties, smoking, reeking of stale beer, unshaven, uncut hair and in their shirt sleeves that's our sports department."
ON the question of style he knows that there are those who think journalism is not journalism unless it is vicious and so many cultivate an aggressive, hard hitting tone in which the sportsmen become victims instead of subjects. Some of his critics feel Houlihan is not critical enough, that he is too celebratory.
"There seems to be this belief now that if you can't be good, be ugly. I have no time for it. Sport is one of life's pleasures. I enjoy it." He has fought causes, the Press closure is no exception, yet he has never been a campaigning journalist. Houlihan has never approached anything with a score to settle. Popular as an individual and admired as a writer, he personifies the idea of the journalists' journalist and places immense value on the word "colleague".
He did not begin his career as a sports writer. He first taught history and football at a prep school in Hastings. He also worked at a local national school in Co Kerry, and later in a secondary school in Bandon, before he became a political journalist for the Kerryman where he worked for 10 years. It was a busy time he was writing book reviews, editorials and covering politics and remembers the night it was decided to run a story about Nixon's impeachment before it actually happened. "The Kerryman appears on Thursday, although it is dated Saturday. Anyhow, we wrote the story and we were fine because Nixon did go.
By the late 1960s, Houlihan was writing literary journalism for the Irish Press. Then sport took over when he first became involved with the Evening Press in early 1971, joining the staff in 1973, although it was not until the 1992 Barcelona Games that he finally found himself at an Olympics - and was, almost certainly, the only journalist in the world producing copy in long hand. The public likes myths and the idea that the dishevelled Con Houlihan was suddenly "discovered" while holding forth in a pub is wrong. Nor is he an engaging primitive. His journalistic career with its many millions of words has been quite deliberate.
Another myth of sorts is that he played rugby in his bare feet. "That one is only a little bit true. On a dry pitch in May, I might play in my socks, or in my father's socks if I didn't have any." The story about the stolen anorak is true. When Houlihan's garment went missing, the paper ran a news story reporting the theft. "There was a collection as well, I ended up with 10 coats."
A scholarship boy who was expelled from his boarding school in the woodlands of east Cork for organising a school newspaper, Con Houlihan later took a first class honours degree in English, history and Latin from University College Cork, completing an MA in English with a thesis discussing the relation between poetry and society in England in the 18th century. "But I just as easily could have done engineering or science. I was always very good at maths abut I had the itch to write and began doing it as a child on the flagstone floor at home." Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel, The First Circle, was the first book he reviewed for David Marcus at the Irish Press - "And I still regard it as one of the great novels of the 20th century".
Walk into Houlihan's sitting room in his small Dublin house in Portobello, and his current reading is arranged on a low table: Blake and Hopkins and a copy of Thomas Pakenham's Meetings With Remarkable Trees. Houlihan says he loves Dublin but he has never forgotten the countryside and says his knowledge of plants and animals remains good.
"Coming from the country but living in a city probably makes you even more aware of the countryside," he says. He loves walking and speaks about going on "huge walks, epic marches in the Dublin mountains". Sport, literature, art and cinema are his passions although he says: "I'm interested in everything. I'm addicted to newspapers, I read them all."
Paintings occupy most of the available wall space and there are other pictures waiting for their turn. He has several works by Arthur Power, as well as Bob Ryan and Tadhg McSweeney and Geraldine Sadleir. "This is the first painting Geraldine ever sold. In fact I bought the first three she ever sold. She lives in France now and is well established. When she painted that she was a young teacher in Dublin."
Tidy and ordered, his house is very neat. Mention a book and if he has it, he will be able to locate it without pause for thought. The sitting room leads into a kitchen. On the stove a vast pot is boiling away. "There's a rabbit down in there, somewhere," he says, identifying all the vegetables, and sympathetically poking down into the depths of the stew in search of the rabbit. "He's a big lad, from Wicklow, I bought him down the road."
He is 71 and remembers his recent birthday on December 6th as "a very sad day", as his best friend's son died in an accident. Houlihan's shyness is almost as famous as his writing and his habits of writing a paragraph per page in long hand and drinking brandy and milk; he is gentle and very polite. And funny in a storyteller's way. Houlihan is a master of both the carefully directed digression and the self contained story begun with mock seriousness: "One night long ago in Spain I had an extraordinary moment of communication with a hen... We met a lorry on its way to Madrid ... it carried a cargo of hens in crates... One hen had her head out through the slats of the crate; our eyes met - two lost souls recognised each other."
Whispering away at pace, dropping one liners with ease, it is often difficult to hear what he is saying. Many foreign journalists seated beside him at international matches have been mystified by his soft, Kerry accented mumble. Houlihan can appear to be in a world of his own except that he is as quick witted as . . . well as quick wilted as a Kerryman; logical, matter of fact and practical. Of the collapse of the Press group he has always maintained: "The tragedy could have been averted: it wasn't caused by an earthquake or a tidal wave - it was due to human error. The root of the problem was simple: there was no communication between the management and the staff: the `them' and `us' syndrome isn't good for any company.
Describing himself as "a fully fledged peasant" - he explains the word peasant as "one who is close to the land". He is a romantic, apparently hopelessly in love with cities and London and Paris have always fared well by him. It is unlikely that he is quite as tough skinned a romantic as he claims. He has no children and has never been married although he has often referred to romances - emotional without being sentimental: "I'm practical, I'm from Kerry,."
He tells a story about the little chestnut mare his father bought when the family couldn't afford her. "She lived to be 38, a great age for a horse." In his essay, "In the World Where Horse is King", he writes of the horse who had lived long into retirement: "One evening when I went to see her, she was running around by the perimeter of the field, sometimes clockwise, sometimes in reverse - I knew that the end was nigh. Next morning she lay dead in the sheltriest corner; we buried her where she lay; my father shed a few tears; I didn't; the little mare had enjoyed a good life - and had departed like a leaf falling from a tree in October."
Curiosity not ambition led him to university after a couple of years spent, mainly labouring, on leaving school. Houlihan's father had worked as a miner in Mountain Ash, north east Wales - "when I was 20 I went on pilgrimage to the mine my father worked in" - and returned to fight in the War of Independence. "That was my father's opinion, I'm not quite sure if that is the reason he really came back." Later Michael Houlihan was to spend 47 years working in the two local creameries: Castle Island in the morning and Currow in the afternoon. He says he was close to his father, "he was very strong, not as big as me, but very strong. He was an ebullient man, opinionated, very funny. He was one of a family of 12 - and his father, my grandfather, upped and went at 40, I think he had enough. My father was 12 and he had to take over the family." Some 20 years later, Houlihan's grandfather returned as if he had just stepped out for milk. "He had gone to the States and had worked on a farm in East Maine and had also worked on the railways." Eileen Cronin, Houlihan's mother, also came from a family of 12, nine went to America. One was killed in a mining accident and another died of TB. "My mother was a great reader - I think it was her who got me interested in books. She had her moods, women in the country often do, it is the isolation.
Of his early life he has good memories. "We had a happy home. There are three of us: my brother, my sister and me. I'm in the middle. The others have done very well, my brother was involved with the North Kerry Co Op from its very beginning, my sister deals in antiques.
Both of this parents lived long: "My mother died when she was 84 - I was 57 - my father died at 91, when I was 63." Of his paternal grandmother who had raised nine children alone, he says: "She was remarkable. A real Mother Courage. She died at 78 when I was 37 - knocked down by a car."
Home was an old county council type cottage with neither running water, nor electricity. "It was small, about the size of these ,two rooms, but we didn't notice. I think you only feel poor when you notice others having more.
Situated in a great saucer surrounded by hill country, Castle Island is 10 miles east of Tralee, not far from the point where Cork, Kerry and Limerick meet. "Our house is about a mile and a half along the main Dublin road going north. There is an extraordinary panorama of the huge range of the Killarney Mountains and if you walk up the road you can see the sea at Tralee and Castlemaine. The Houlihan house is two miles south of the vast moorland area, their side is known locally as Knight's Mountain.
BOOKS and pictures, sport, memories, observations, his friends, the places he has seen, appear to have given him much contentment. For all his lively comments and sense of fun, he is a very serious man and a thinker. One regret was not having taken up an offer to play Rugby League for Huddersfield, one of the North of England clubs.
"I was about 19 or 20 and these scouts were over here. I had great stamina - I still do. Lots of us were approached - anybody who was any good at all." The war had ended, attempts were being made to resurrect English rugby as so many Englishmen had been killed or disabled. "It was tempting. It's a fantasy I like thinking about. No it's not a regret, just a fantasy.
Consider the insights into the world old professional rugby lost through Houlihan declining that invitation. "The real regret is the loss of the Press. I haven't got over it yet and it will be a long time until I do."
