CON HOULIHAN:IN A week when Ireland celebrated rare heights of sporting success, it was impossible not to feel sadness that the greatest sportswriter of recent decades was not around to tell us what he thought of it all.
Con Houlihan undoubtedly earned that accolade, but as the writer Dermot Bolger noted at his funeral on Wednesday, the term “sportswriter” could not do justice to the scope and range of his passions.
“A scholar and quintessential Kerryman, he possessed an infinite curiosity and infinite knowledge about the vast range of subjects that he knitted into his singular vision of the world,” he said.
Houlihan, who died last weekend in St James’s Hospital in Dublin aged 86, wrote for numerous publications, but was best known for his thrice-weekly sports column that appeared on the back page of the Evening Press over three decades.
He had a highly individual style, writing in short, often single-sentence paragraphs, frequently employing metaphors and literary references to illuminate his point. Humour was a key ingredient.
He was incredibly prolific, and in addition to his articles on sport he wrote about literature and the wider arts in his weekly “Tributaries” column. In this he frequently wrote about favourite writers such as Thomas Hardy, Dylan Thomas, John Clare and Sherwood Anderson.
He once received a letter from a reader of the Evening Press who told him: “you gave me my third-level education”. That tribute, Houlihan wrote in an introduction to his 1996 collection Windfalls, “meant more to me than any public prize”.
Con Houlihan was the youngest of three children, born to Michael and Ellen Houlihan of Reineen, Castleisland, Co Kerry. His siblings were Diarmuid (known as Gerry) and Marie. The family holding was small and his father worked at the local creamery and for a time in the Welsh mines, and was involved in founding a branch of the Labour Party in Kerry.
Con’s legendary shyness – he always spoke with one hand half-covering his face – was manifest from an early age. In a eulogy at the funeral, his friend Ray Hennessy recalled that whenever Con was asked as a child to perform a recitation for visitors to the family home, he would do so with a bucket placed over his head.
All three children attended UCC, where Con studied English and the classics, and from where he graduated with a first-class BA in Latin and history, followed by a first-class master’s. He worked as a “roving teacher”, learning more from the primary school pupils than he taught them, he once said.
As a child he had had articles published in a weekly magazine, the Champion. But his journalism career began when he edited the Taxpayers’ News, “published in my local town, Castle Island , in the Kingdom of Kerry”.
Houlihan described it in later years as “an eccentric publication” which was the first to publish work by John B Keane. It also carried stories from such writers as Maupassant and Daudet. “We had two excellent reasons for this excursion into the classics: the stories were good – and because the authors were safely dead, we didn’t have to pay them,” he wrote in an article in 1995.
The paper was closed as a result of a libel action but Houlihan stayed in journalism, writing for The Kerryman. His work appeared in a national newspaper for the first time when David Marcus, literary editor of the Irish Press, commissioned him to write a review of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle.
“When the review appeared, I couldn’t have been more excited if I had just won the Nobel Prize or been voted captain of Castle Island RFC,” he wrote later.
He finally made the move to Dublin to write for the Evening Press in the early 1970s – when already well into his 40s – after an encounter with the paper’s editor, Seán Ward, and pictures editor Liam Flynn in the Silver Swan pub, a favoured hang-out of journalists who worked “a cliche-throw” away in the Irish Press building on Burgh Quay.
He quickly became established as the Press group’s best-loved and most recognisable journalist, mostly because of the excellence of his writing but also because of his physical appearance: large in stature, his long hair and unkempt aspect made him impossible to miss in watering holes and sporting venues around the city.
His gentle manner, generosity of spirit and quick wit – though one had to listen closely to decipher his distinctive Kerry accent – made him genuinely loved by his colleagues.
Though never malicious, he could deliver a masterful put-down or retort when the occasion demanded. Dick O’Riordan, who succeeded Ward as editor of the Evening Press, recalled that when a theatre company complained about him snoring while reviewing a play, he replied that it was a shame the audience was required to stay awake for it.
He was heartbroken by the closure of the Press group in May 1995, which he regarded as a “tragedy”. Some, however, would say he did some of his best work for the XPress, the single-sheet newspaper produced by the Press journalists to raise funds in the aftermath of the closure.
On those warm summer days his friend and colleague Liam Mackey would collect the articles for the XPress from Houlihan in Mulligan’s pub on Poolbeg St before taking them to Liberty Hall, where the unemployed journalists had a temporary office.
“Our meetings quickly developed all the ritual formality of a Japanese tea ceremony,” Mackey wrote in a foreword to Windfalls, “albeit that Con favoured a glass of lager with a Guinness head. “Once the bulky weight of the manuscript was handed over, I would read aloud from the hand-written copy, while Con interjected with additional remarks of an approving, enlightening and sometimes deliciously libellous kind.”
In his articles for the XPress, Houlihan in effect wrote his autobiography, recalling the major episodes of his life with a typical mixture of fondness and good humour. Describing an occasion when he left home for London – a city he loved and wrote about with great affection – he recalled that his mother was too busy minding hens to take much notice. “The Ma came to the hedge as I walked down the road and said: ‘I suppose we’ll see you at Christmas.
“If you understand the peasants’ culture, you will realise that this was an extraordinary gesture of affection on her part.”
He continued to write for newspapers after the Press closed, and had weekly columns in the Sunday World and the Evening Herald.
His health declined markedly in recent years and his death followed a prolonged period of hospitalisation in St James’s, Dublin, but he continued to file his columns – which he dictated to his friend Feidhlim Kelly – right up to the week of his death. In his final column for the Sunday World, published the day after he died, he wished Katie Taylor well in her boxing matches this week.
It is a mark of the affection in which he was held that he lived to see several monuments erected in his honour, including a bronze bust in Castleisland – the unveiling of which he attended in 2004 – and statues or plaques in several Dublin pubs. Even when he campaigned against a bypass of Castleisland, local councillors couldn’t resist naming it after him. Houlihan was bemused: “I don’t even drive, I wouldn’t mind it if it was a bike pass,” he told Mackey.
He is survived by his “friend girl” of many years, Harriet Duffin, his sister-in-law Kathleen, nieces Sandra, Ann and Patricia, nephew Michael and cousin Bobby.
Con Houlihan: born December 6th, 1925; died August 4th, 2012