Sir, - I spent the first two weeks of the World Cup in Italy andfully enjoyed Ireland's displays on the field. The Italians, being avidfootball fans, really loved the whole thing. They sat around inhundreds at cafés and bars and cheered, blew horns, and groaned, livingall the ups and downs. They drank coffee, ate ice cream and just a fewdrank a glass of beer. But they were able to have fun - without alcohol.
The day after they were beaten by Croatia there were no brokenbottles on the street; no one had driven across the flower beds atroundabouts; there were no burnt-out cars; the bus driver could stilldrive along with his wallet full of money on a ledge beside thesteering wheel without being surrounded by Plexiglass; there were noknife cuts in the bus upholstery, or graffiti; there were no youngtrees broken in half or uprooted.
None of these things struck me forcibly at the time, but as I walkedthrough Terenure village on the evening of June 16th and encounteredthe "fans" spilling out of pubs with a macho bleariness that almostforced one off the footpath, I thought: "Surely people can have funwithout this." This idea that there was barely concealed violence wasmore or less confirmed during the following week when I learned therewere nearly a hundred ambulance calls in the Kildare area that sameSunday night, where people were, reputedly, "killing one another".
Can we change by 2006? - Yours, etc.,
Dublin 24.