Gavin Cooney

WHY ARE WE all so deliriously happy today?

Maybe it’s just because we might yet qualify for the World Cup, but maybe it’s something deeper. 

For in the space of four days, Troy Parrott and his generation of Irish players have renewed the social contract between the team and the public: the agreement that states that the team will have raucous support forever and to the fringes of the continent in return for the promise that the players will, at some point in the future, deliver to that support what George Hamilton has patented as One of Those Nights.  

All Irish teams before this one were of varying quality and ability but they all, at some point, delivered on exactly this, and bloodied the nose of some aristocrat or other who had probably described as British the day before.

But we all feared that this would be the Irish squad that would finally break this unspoken covenant. 

We worried that this would be the millennial and Gen Z generation of players who would learn the hard way that the brighter future promised to them by their parents was not going to materialise; that this would be the batch of players with whom Ireland’s shoddy development structures would finally catch up. 

We were becoming resigned to this being a callow group of players who were definitively conditioned by the miseries and ignominies of losing to Luxembourg and Armenia; of never even contending for a place at a major tournament. 

But all of these fears have now melted away, because players and supporters have renewed their treaty.

Existing contractual obligations mean we are not in a position to give up on this whole mad enterprise just yet.

We didn’t really need the affair to be rekindled in as laughably an emphatic fashion as Ireland have done so, but sure there’s no harm in burning the flame more brightly. It makes it easier for the next generation to see it through the mists of time. 

Beating Hungary in the manner Ireland did was either one of the greatest results in Irish football history or merely the greatest result in four days, depending on your point of view.

Either way, Ireland have managed to relegate the global humiliation of Cristiano Ronaldo to an And, finally  in the telling of their absurd week. 

The country has lost itself in that deliciously silly way we meet total joy. 

The fella gripping his suitcase for dear life as he bucklepped around Dublin airport. Brian Kerr’s wise and wintry grin in Virgin Media studios. Dublin Zoo giving the name Troy to a rare parrot. Dublin Airport giving the name Troy to itself. The Late Late Troy Show. Troy, Troy, Troy Again. Troy Wonder. Troy of the Rovers. 

You’d roll your eyes if you weren’t so busy dabbing away their tears. 

Nothing moves the country like its men’s football team, a fact some people like to use as a battering ram against the GAA’s sedimentary segregationists and the Rugby Country PR campaign. 

Socio-economics and participation rates do play a role in the emotional primacy afforded the football team, and there might be a bit of post-colonial feeling mixed in there too. 

Put ‘Em Under Pressure is really a theatrical rendering of Hiberno-English: while it may not be purely and utterly Irish, it’s our own unique and unruly spin on what we have been left with all the same. 

But ultimately what you’re feeling today all goes back to the social contract, because among the facts of our national identity taught by one generation to the next is the agreement that we must all go berserk whenever the football team does well. 

A country, we are told, is an imagined community, which only works if everyone agrees to share certain aspects of their own identity with thousands upon thousands of other people who they will never meet. And one of the characteristics around which we all corall is that, if the football lads do well, then you will bloody well go out there and be giddily happy, because everyone else will be. 

Hence why the football team stands alone in the nation’s affections. It’s a joy not merely horizontal across society but one that’s vertical too, spanning generations. 

Heimir Hallgrimsson said after the defeat to Armenia that Ireland would need a miracle to qualify for the World Cup, but it seems that miracle is now at hand.

Of course, on the broadest possible level, Irish football is its own miracle. Here is a sport that endured a State fatwa for the guts of 50 years and has laboured under the governance of the FAI for twice that. And it’s still here! 

Despite everyone else and despite itself, Irish football has endured because of its capacity to deliver a joy that’s mad, raving, and stark. 

The nationalist lens through which the State views sport is largely gone now, replaced instead by the capitalist one, with our elected technocrats now unable to fund and value sport without first being able to slap a monetary worth on the thing. The government’s latest creed is the Economic Impact Report, from which all sports funding must flow. Irish football has been the laggard in putting its best foot forward in this regard, though it is catching up now. 

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The bigger failing has been on the State, however, for failing to understand the sport’s true value cannot be indexed.

Our government, like all others, are wrestling with the political implications of the mediating and distortion of our reality by the politicised social media monarchs, whose business model is to isolate and atomise; to fracture and split; to breed fear and division and rancour. 

The football team remains Ireland’s single most powerful reproach to this cynical bullshit. It offers an identity that is encompassing, happy, silly and absolute. 

It is, in other words, the best way to build a nation.