In a second-hand bookshop recently, for a tenner, I picked up a copy of Maureen Cairnduff’s Who’s Who in Ireland – the Influential 1,000, published just over 40 years ago for Christmas 1984.
I bought it partly from nostalgia for a time I remember (all too) well.
But I also had a sneaky suspicion there would be glaring omissions I could now write about smugly with the wisdom of hindsight.
And sure enough, there in the middle of page one – between Bertie Ahern and (Irish Times music critic) Charles Acton – was the very striking absence of Gerry Adams.
Last Poll and Chorus – Frank McNally on the end of 400 years of Trinity College elections
Hit (and miss) parade – Frank McNally on the mixed fortunes of a who’s who list from 40 years ago
Glad rags – Colm Keena on clothes and society
Nato and Irish neutrality – John Mulqueen on a vexed political issue
Then I referred to the cover-blurb and saw its disclaimer: “The book does not include the Six Counties and the Irish abroad; that would necessitate another publication.”
So there was no John Hume, Martin McGuinness, or Ian Paisley either, even though their influence on Ireland as a whole, then and later, was greater than most of those named.
On the other hand, confusingly, Bishop (and later Cardinal) Cahal Daly did make it in, as did Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiach, both Northern clerics.
And all right, I suppose the two main churches in Ireland have never recognised partition.
But neither did the State back then, quite, when Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution were still unamended.
Oh well, these lists always give hostages to fortune, especially when placed between hardback covers that ensure a long shelf-life.
In fact, poignantly, the “influential 1,000″ were already reduced to 997 by the time the book came out. As a sad erratum slip notes, the text had gone to print before three featured journalists, Kevin Marron, John Feeney, and Niall Hanley, died in a plane crash. They were among a group taking part in the “Beaujolais Nouveau wine race”, a then annual promotion for the grape harvest in France, when the plane went down in Southern England on November 13th, 1984.
Among sports stars, elsewhere in the book, the cyclist Sean Kelly made Cairnduff’s cut.
Conspicuously missing, however, is Stephen Roche, who two years later would be only the second man in history to complete cycling’s triple crown – Giro d’Italia, Tour de France, World Championships – with Charlie Haughey all but cadging a lift on his crossbar up the Champs-Elysées.
Along with Cairnduff’s main list, which came with pen pictures, there was a separate one of 300 young people – names and professions only – who were forecast to do great things.
That’s an eclectic list. The job “plasterer” features at least once, although the person named is not Paddy of that profession, later to achieve national fame as one of Bertie Ahern’s “12 apostles”. Alas, with a few exceptions (including “O’Toole, Fintan, art critic”), those included have not gone on to great fame.
No doubt a few are now running the country, quietly. And a chastening antidote to the general obscurity is Brendan Mullin, a then young rugby star whose subsequent rise was to be followed, much more recently, by a fall from grace.
But as exciting as it must be to get named in a “ones to watch” list, it must also often be a curse, especially during a time of deep recession, like the one in which this book appeared.
Cairnduff’s survey of those with promise is prefaced by a quotation then used in promotions by the Industrial Development Authority: “What champagne is to France, youth is to Ireland.”
Unfortunately for the 1984/5 youth vintage, there was a hard frost coming.
In the meantime, a candidate for most influential Irish person of the past 40 years somehow eluded attention. He was newly out of college then and I think about to set up a pair of newsagent shops in Dublin. But there was no room in either the main list, or the ones to watch, for Michael O’Leary.
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Another person who didn’t make it into that “influential 1,000″ was Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, although 40 years ago she founded the homelessness agency Focus Ireland, which is still with us today, as needed as ever.
But her work will be recognised next month in a series of lectures at Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, under the title “No Homes to Go to: Dublin Charities & Homelessness, 1790-2025.”
The lectures take their keynote from a sculpture that, as the press release rightly says, “challenges visitors to the cathedral every day”. I know what this means: I’ve been challenged by it myself.
One night in March 2018, during the “Beast from the East” snow storm, I was one of many passers-by at Christ Church troubled by what looked like a homeless person asleep on a bench inside the locked gates, his bare feet obtruding from under a blanket.
Only when trying to find a phone number to alert somebody did I realise that the snow-covered figure was bronze, sculpted by Timothy Schmaltz and installed two or three years earlier.
The Christ Church lectures will run every Tuesday in February at 1.10pm. The Focus Ireland talk, by the agency’s CEO Pat Dennigan, is on the 18th.
But the series starts next Tuesday (February 4th) when Felix M Larkin will discuss that doyen of Dublin homelessness charities: The Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers Society.
