49 Thierry Henry

For nearly a thousand years, the English did their utmost to grind the Irish into the dust. For the best part of a century in the wake of independence, the Irish seemed to be attempting to complete that project. But then, one night in November 2009, a dark-skinned Frenchman, employing to deadly effect his left hand, finally landed the killer blow.

After fifteen months of unremitting misery, in which the Irish people had observed their hopes of material well-being melt before their eyes, there had been just the slimmest possibility of a place in the World Cup Finals. This would have been much more than a sporting achievement. We Irish were not exactly accustomed to winning things, but we had some good memories of coming third or fourth. Moreover such sporting adventures always seemed, when seen in retrospect anyway, to awaken in the Irish psyche something deeper and more resilient. The idea that the seeds of the Celtic Tiger germinated during Italia 90, when Ireland almost made it to the semi-finals, is impossible to shift from the Irish orbitofrontal cortex. All this rendered that night in November 2009 an episode beyond tragedy and pathos.

When Thierry Henry brought that ball under control with his hand and slyly knocked it over for William Eric Gallas to slap it into the Irish net, he was bringing to an end not just the hopes of a team and its followers, but the hopes of an entire nation who saw this as a final sign from the gods.

Sometimes, when you have overcome a deep resistance to optimism and found your fortunes improving, you begin to imagine that perhaps the psychobabblers are right when they say that failure and success are all in the mind. In the early years of the Celtic Tiger, people who retained memories of previous false dawns followed by renewed misfortune had held their optimism in check. By the early years of the new millennium, most of us were beginning to let out hair down, overcoming our pessimism to embrace this new and, we were persuaded, permanent sunshine. No sooner had we done so, however, than the clouds started to gather again, and we found this as hard to credit as we had the idea that hardship and want had been consigned to the past. We hadn’t rushed into things, but when we did embrace the new dispensation, we did so wholeheartedly and with abandon, and now we were having to face the possibility that our pessimism had offered the best counsel after all.

Many still harboured hopes that the whole thing had been a mistake, that one day soon we would all wake up and find that we were still on the pig’s back. But Gallas’s goal, achieved on the back of Henry’s handball, put an end to all that – more because of its unfairness than the effect it had on the score line. Afterwards, Henry was a little sheepish but still clearly uncomprehending of the incoherent rage directed at him by the Irish. He was not to know that he had just confirmed for many Irish people that the hind tit was our only reliable and consistent recourse. Life was not fair, at least not to us. We might have cheated the facts for a while, but it had all been a mistake. The good fortune had been, as our deepest intuition had always whispered, intended for a different address. This was more like the normal run of events.

The desire for justice is instilled in every human heart, giving birth to an expectation of being treated fairly, which is to say ‘the same as anyone else’, or ‘according to the rules’, or by whatever other criteria this craving may be measured. But in the Irish personality, this natural desire for justice had long since been suppressed by a violent and abusive history in which fairness was to be found only in the colouring of my true love’s hair. The Irish weather, too, has always exhibited a vengeful caprice that has instilled in the Irish soul a modest level of expectation of what tomorrow may bring.

As a result if these pre-conditions, it had taken a lot for us to trust history again, and now we were being shown the folly of this grudging and cautious faith. Our natural sense of justice having been restored by a decade of good fortune, we were as ill-equipped for Thierry Henry’s handball as we were for a return of Oliver Cromwell.

And when an injustice occurs which inflicts on the human being’s constitutive sense of justice a blow that seems to be both arbitrary and unfair, the resulting sense of metaphysical outrage breaks free of all language and becomes a kind of deep, inner scream. This, in slow motion, is what happened in the days following the Henry outrage.

For more than an hour on that Wednesday night it had looked like Ireland was in with a chance of playing in the World Cup in South Africa. In the depths of recession, this prospect carried with it an enhanced significance, having the potential to lift the spirit of the nation out of the fatalism that had dogged it for eighteen months. The dashing of these hopes, by something widely acknowledged to be unfair, had therefore the potential to provoke in the Irish psyche a twist that threatened permanent damage.

It was made worse by the fact that nobody, not even the French, disputed the unfairness of it all. Thus, at an emotional level, the handball issue offered a simplified version of the infinitely more complicated equation to be observed in the economic context. If everyone could see it was a handball; if the French press and public overwhelmingly thought the French team stole the game, then the solution seemed obvious and simple. But then we noticed that, although everyone was paying lip-service to Irish grief, nobody was actually suggesting that anything be done to put the matter to rights.

This resonated deeply with feelings surfacing in the economic arena. France’s qualification on the back of Henry’s cynical opportunism provoked the same intensity of rage as government bail-outs for bankers who had created massive inflation in house prices, ultimately provoking the crash. In both instances, the beneficiaries of cheating were seen to sail onwards, immune from consequences, while the punters were blithely told that, yes, it’s unfair, but there is nothing to be done. Rules is rules, you know. The winners shook their heads and said how sheepish they felt, but still booked their trips to the sun. Just as FIFA officials intoned that the referee is the final arbiter, those in charge of the economy insisted that, notwithstanding the clear ethical and regulatory breaches at the heart of the banking crisis, there was no possibility of moral redress.

It seemed that, sometime about eighteen months before, the gods changed their mind about us. Before that, we had soaked in a veritable Jacuzzi of good fortune, experiencing a rising tide of prosperity, optimism and occasional sporting success. But then, practically overnight, without any announcement being made, a shift had occurred. Already, it was clear, the plug had been pulled on the economy. Now, it seemed, the sporting successes were suspended until further notice.

If you hadn’t lived through the Celtic Tiger, you might not have understood the mood of the previous eighteen months. And if you hadn’t shared in the hope of those two hours on that night in November, you might have had difficulty in understanding the ructions that followed. When you put the two phenomena together, you were forced to the conclusion that fate had again taken to dealing us the same unkind hand in everything. Ireland going out of the World Cup after a brief resurgence of hope could, in this light, be seen not just as an ordinary misfortune, but as a second bereavement following hard on one we had not yet come to terms with.

The Irish wept and gnashed their teeth, but it was the French who were going to South Africa. And as they wept and wailed, the Irish people began to enter into a sense of themselves and their historical condition that many of them had imagined had been left behind forever. Something about the experience of this unfairness was familiar. It was as if there were songs about it already, but we had forgotten the words.