An Irishman's Diary

I SEE that our friends across the water (the water to your right as you look north, that is) are having a first-ever National Heroes Day today. Which sounds like something we should do too. Although, come to think of it, what else is the presidential election campaign only a search for a hero? And God knows, it hasn’t been going very well so far.

The risk is that, like the presidential campaign, an Irish heroes day would be quickly politicised. Indeed, the UK version already is, to some extent. It grew out of commemorations for a soldier who was killed in Afghanistan, and its first instalment coincides – happily, if not deliberately, from the organisers’ point of view – with Trafalgar Day.

So importing such an event whole would automatically cause complications this side of the water, where the hero of Trafalgar was also once elevated in stone above the streets of the capital, but then elevated even further, before crashing down onto those same streets, in pieces, to be replaced eventually by an abstract needle-shaped thing pointing in the general direction of the sky.

There you have some of the difficulties of achieving consensus about heroes illustrated. Just as well, then, that the British event appears, essentially, to be a fancy dress party. People are encouraged to wear the costumes of their heroes. And although any money raised goes to army charities, the organisers’ list of suggested hero role models – “mother, father, Buzz Lightyear, George Best, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus, Yuri Gagarin, [your] class teacher” – is admirably broad. Admirable too is one of the organisers’ stated aims: to educate people, especially young people, on the “the difference between heroes and celebrities”. I suppose that’s what the presidential election campaign is about too, in its own way. Mind you, I can’t help noticing that, with the possible exception of Buzz Lightyear, all the named suggestions in the British heroes’ day list are dead.

Which hints, as the presidential campaign has done daily, at the challenges involved in being simultaneously (1) a hero and (2) alive. As a father – one of the generic categories in the list – I know how it’s done. But it costs a fortune in pocket money, I can tell you. And even then, you live in dread that any day now you’ll be knocked off your pedestal, like poor Nelson, and that whatever’s left of you will be put in a museum.

ONE OF my own heroes is the late (of course) Brian O’Nolan. But in maintaining him as such, I have to ignore many of the stories told to me by people who met him when he was extant. Stories like the one I heard the other day from a man who remembered eavesdropping on a row in Neary’s Pub – off Grafton Street in Dublin – once, during which O’Nolan underlined whatever point he was making to the barman by smashing a pint glass against the wall.

After delivering which point/pint, apparently, my hero was frog-marched off the premises, although not before the parting sally: “And furthermore, the jacks here is a disgrace!”

There are no such challenges, however, for admirers of another great man whose centenary falls this month and has so far gone largely unnoticed in the general media. His name was John De Courcy Ireland and he had little else in common with Brian O’Nolan, although both were also very fond of the Vico Road in Dalkey. In any case, De Courcy Ireland would have been 100 years old this week, if he hadn’t been bowled out in 2006, a few runs short of his century.

Born in India, the son of a Kildare-born British soldier, his greatest passion in life is suggested by an early decision he made when, having won a scholarship to Oxford at age 17, he “ran away on a Dutch cargo ship bound for Argentina”. It’s not easy to sum up all the things he became thereafter, including, belatedly, a university student. So instead I’ll quote the plaque that was erected to him in Dalkey after his death.

It reads: “To the memory of Dr John De Courcy Ireland 1911-2006. Maritime Historian, Radical Politician, Humanist, Teacher, and Linguist. Founder Member of CND in Ireland. Honours received from Argentina, Britain, China, France, Portugal, Spain, Yugoslavia, [and the] RNLI. A true friend of seafarers.” I met him only once, briefly, and he seemed like a gentleman. But more impressively, that was how people who had known him for many years found him too. People like Rory Clarke, who in an appreciation in 2006 wrote that, in his very long life, De Courcy Ireland had “inspired almost everyone he met”.

As the list of honours on his plaque hints, he was celebrated more beyond these shores than on them. Fortunately, there are many former friends and students still around to propagate his memory. One of the small tributes paid to him this week involved Clarke “fixing” De Courcy Ireland’s Wikipedia page, which the former likens to “tending a grave” (and right enough, those Wikipedia entries can get very overgrown). In another tribute, aptly, RTÉ’s Seascapes programme will tonight mark the centenary, with a contribution by this newspaper’s own Lorna Siggins. It goes out on Radio One at 10.30pm.