Something long neglected in the Irish spirit found an outlet this week as towns across the country welcomed athletes here for the Special Olympics World Games 2003, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Plans were never laid as lovingly, carefully or elaborately across an entire country. There were cruises, carnivals, parades, street parties, fireworks, artworks, discos, races, elephants, seaside train rides . . .
Yet the image scorched into the memory is of a shabby special needs school in Castlebar on Tuesday morning.
A roar erupts from the Irish children as the Venezuelan visitors enter the room. There is no hanging back, no sizing up, no language barrier; just an instant, magical, spontaneous connection between kindred spirits unburdened with "normal" inhibitions.
Within minutes, the euphoric gathering is belting out a song, arms around each other, swaying, clapping, dancing and giggling fit to burst amid the flags, bunting, balloons and camera flashes, while Sister Mary pounds out an accompaniment on an ancient keyboard.
"Share the feeling, happy feeling, share the feeling, amigo mor, my friend" goes the rip-roaring chorus as Sister Mary makes that old keyboard dance.
The 50-student special school, St Anthony's, has been under the stewardship of the inspirational Hilda Kavanagh for 36 years. She says a few words, mock-seriously warning the Venezuelans about the competition they can expect "from a girl from this school called Aoife, who's on Team Ireland . . . But may the best one win in the end - with good fun". Then the visitors are introduced individually.
Here comes table tennis player Gernel Blanco (24), sporting a bunch of buttercups behind one ear. And this is swimmer Alberto Stoppa (26), arms aloft, Ali-style: "I am the greatest athlete in the world!"
The applause is ear-splitting. As they leave, the chant "Ven-ez-ue-LA!" rocks the old pre-fab. Standing aside, wet-eyed and beaming, are the people who between them have conjured up these moments of magic: the teachers, care assistants, coaches, parents, host town committee members and volunteers. With them in spirit are the ordinary, impoverished people of benighted Venezuela, who in one state alone managed to raise $130,000 to send their participants to the games. They did it with negligible official assistance, holding out enormous collection bottles at crossroads, organising fundraising parties and raffles and begging for corporate donations.
The closer you look, the more ingenious the Special Olympics concept becomes. The numbers involved in getting this team alone to the games are countless, the awareness raised in the process incalculable.
The memories of a phenomenon that swept across the country this week, storming Irish hearts and minds, North and South, will linger for many a year.
It began with the emotion-charged scenes as the Torch of Hope was carried through packed streets across Ireland; the bunting and flag-bedecked cars, the Garda jeeps and fire engines, sirens blaring, horns hooting, heading out to meet the team buses and escort them into town; exuberant scenes like those at St Anthony's replicated in special needs schools and centres all over Ireland; the coachload of Derry tourists who disembarked to talk to, and take pictures of, the visitors in Castlebar; the teenagers stopping to chat amiably to a Team Ireland group in the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre; the Kazakhstan delegation joining in an Irish jig on Miltown Malbay's main street; the people of Virginia - host town to Nepal - sporting red dots on their foreheads after a Hindu blessing ceremony; the Iraqi team beating war and isolation to arrive in Larne; the Portuguese team crossing to Inis Mór at 3 a.m. to roars of applause from wide-awake islanders gathered on the quay; the Algerian team being greeted with bonfires on the approach to Ballinrobe and Clonbur; the Belarussians shouting with joy, whipping off shoes and socks on Bandon's Garretstown beach as they saw the sea for the first time.
For one example of the Special Olympic spirit, look no further than Kilcock, host town to Team Ireland. A sudden change of plan meant that 500 lunches - 1,000 sandwiches, 1,500 pieces of fruit, drinks, ice-cream, cakes, and more - had to be funded and assembled in under two days. With a few phone calls and within 24 hours, local businesses around Maynooth and surrounding areas, had come up with the lot.
A massive cross-section of Irish people found itself with an unquenchable, idiotic smile on its face this week. It seemed as though something long neglected in the Irish spirit had found an outlet, had been honoured and fulfilled. Years from now, sociologists may pinpoint this as the time when a country recovered its soul.
It was a week when clichés seemed newly minted; when hyperbole was impossible; when hard-bitten men and women turned up for a look and found themselves felled by emotions so raw that their lives may never be the same.
Take one curious observer hanging around for a delayed delegation to travel the few miles from Dublin airport.
She's of a type clearly not disposed to sharing the feeling. The buses finally arrive and the visitors slowly descend the steps. Most manage a smile and a polite handshake despite their exhaustion; some leap down to the ground, punching the air like champions. Others look bewildered, a few try to wander off, several are grinning beatifically, arms out for a hug. As the scene unfolds, the woman goes eerily silent, then crumples into tears, pole-axed by emotions she cannot begin to guess at.
Sharing the feeling, it turns out, is no copywriter's contrivance. Go to meet it and it strikes with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. A journey that began with full hearts, welling eyes and a large dose of ignorance turns into a wide-eyed, exhausting, soul-stirring, often hilarious voyage of recognition and self-discovery.
These special people, it turns out, are not so different: they can be jealous and bloody-minded, generous and loving, physically plain and very beautiful, just like everyone else.
"These people are all very, very healthy," says Castlebar GP Dr Paul Carney of his 150 temporary Venezuelan charges. There are just a couple of cases of diabetes and epilepsy and only one wheelchair user.
"They are referred to as disabled but they're not . . . They're the healthiest people around. All they have are learning difficulties. As for the volunteers, there are so many of them that it's one of them that'll end up breaking an ankle."
The rule is, never assume. Vulnerable they may be, but they still want what most of us want: access to the Internet, international phone cards, somewhere to change their money, to devour Big Macs and full Irish breakfasts, to drink two bottles of Coke at a time if they can get away with it, and dance like dervishes. The overriding lesson is not to patronise, or canonise.
"I'm at home enough during the year," snaps one woman, resisting the efforts of her exhausted chaperone to coax her out of a disco a few minutes early.
"That fat cow pushed me out of the way," complains an indignant 30-year-old to his giggling dancing partner.
"I look 19 but I'm 39 - will my mother be at the airport?" chants a woman about 100 times an hour.
"Host town," murmurs a young man repeatedly to his host family, savouring the term over and over, hour after hour.
"Disciplina," tut-tuts a beautiful, 12-year-old Venezuelan back in Castlebar, as her compatriots attempt to speed up the pace, while leaving the first morning's briefing.
In fact, their discipline is magnificent. In a feat unimaginable in the general population, all 150 of them, 30 of them aged under 16, manage to sit politely through the lengthy assembly, their new Foxford scarves (one component of a substantial goodie-bag for each) proving highly practical in the cool, misty air.
The formidable Maribel Slevin, a native Venezuelan living near Westport with her Irish husband, is an interpreter and all-round ambassador. She is smitten.
"For me, this is magic," she says. "To be with those children for a day. They want to hug and kiss and touch you, and you don't feel like you're hugging a stranger. I think Ireland has a good and generous heart."
She introduces Manuel Fidalgo (22), a handsome swimmer. He is one of two children of the Fidalgo family; both have special needs. Back home, Manuel spends his mornings at a private school at enormous expense, his afternoons working in a Venezuelan McDonalds. He rates the job as "excellente", and wants to do it forever. Then his mind wanders elsewhere for a while, to "poor street children" that he feels sorry for, and finally back again: "I must learn to live my own life when my parents are gone."
Over in Ballinrobe, Anthony McCormack is out in his back garden at 8.30 a.m., kicking a football around with his four Algerian guests.
"It's like a dream," he says, in that shiny-eyed way that was the national norm this week. "For two years, I dreamt about the Olympic flame swinging around that corner and the streets packed with people . . . And this week, 33 American policemen came running up High Street with that torch, flanked by 200 runners from various sporting clubs and the kids from 27 schools. It was the most emotional time ever. Monsignor Shannon told the children to be sure to look at it, to savour it, to never forget the moment that the Olympic torch came to Ballinrobe."
Ballinrobe and Clonbur are joint hosts for this adventure and one of the treats is lunch at Ashford Castle and a cruise in its majestic shadow. The delegation climb- ing happily onto the quay includes two coaches, Yacine Bourouila and Wahiba Belhaoua. Bourouila, a sports journalist who speaks three languages, is not usually emotional, "but now? Yes. Oh yes".
The most emotional moment, he says, was when they got off the plane and before they saw anyone at all, they heard music.
"Then all the people, all clapped. Then there was the dancing and more music . . . This is paradise", he says emphatically.
"When we arrived in Ballinrobe and Clonbur, the people here said they hoped their dream would become a reality for us. I hope all the Irish people know that when our delegation leaves Ireland, the dream will have happened, that it will remain with us all our lives."
Bourouila, a well-travelled man from a country where the average wage is about €250 a month, knows well that this expansive welcome for his compatriots is light years from the norm. It undoubtedly accounts for much of his gratitude.
"We know when we meet other European people that they look at us differently, thinking we are bad; we can read this in their eyes," he says. "But we live history; we did not choose it. We are trying to learn, slowly. It is hard for us, we have no means."
Belhaoua, a television reporter, has her special charge in hand, table tennis player Halina Meftah (30). Tiny and exquisitely polite, Meftah is dressed in modest Muslim layers, a headscarf covering her hair. For her, the most startling thing about Ireland is the greenery - hardly surprising as she lives in the Sahara. Meftah can hardly articulate her emotions about the host towns.
"We feel we are in our town. The families are so beautiful, so generous," she says. "We can see that you have the same traditions, the same reserve in clothes and behaviour as our country."
It is only as the shiny-eyed host town committees unveil the long-gestating plans, the extraordinary detail, the fruits of the fundraising efforts, the wildly enthusiastic volunteers, the bursting activities programmes, that one gets a context for the heartbreak that ensues when plans go awry for other towns.
When the Swinford representatives left Dublin Airport on Tuesday, after a 10-hour wait and no word of the Chad delegation, the devastation was palpable. After all that time, the team was still in Chad, trying to negotiate French visas for their Paris touchdown.
On the flag-bedecked streets with their welcoming banners, drivers spotted the chairman of the committee, Seamus O'Hara, and pulled in to find out the latest. It was almost like intruding on private family sorrow.
Ironically, Swinford was a finalist in the Host Town of the Year awards, the town's long tradition of integration with the residents of Áras Attracta, a special needs centre nearby, being a major point in its favour. Now the same residents would be the people most devastated, says Ann Burns, its programme director. Festooned with paintings, maps, flags and bunting, the disco music ready for the off, Swinford was in suspense, waiting for this long-anticipated blaze of excitement.
But local pride is also at stake. To his credit, O'Hara manages a weak grin while describing the roasting he got that morning in Kiltimagh, home of the town's fiercest football rivals, smaller than Swinford, yet proud and busy hosts to the substantial Puerto Rico team.
"So have they arrived yet?", they queried in mock innocence. "And you the ones that won the prize . . . Hmmm."
Nothing has galvanised local pride more than the Special Olympics. In Ballinrobe for instance, the long-defunct Tidy Towns Committee suddenly regrouped and launched a massive, seven-week clean-up. Spades, shovels, sweeping brushes and paintbrushes were wielded at all hours; derelict buildings were cleaned up and flower-pots placed where they had never been seen before. Older locals compare it to the spring-cleans seen before Stations long ago. The same story is replicated all over the country.
So what about the legacy?
"Are we a bit like Diana's funeral here?" asked one woman. This was the week, after all, when Breda O'Gorman, the mother of an eight-year-old needing 24-hour care, addressed Kerry County Council, speaking of "drastically" cut services and stating that while the Special Olympics teams were very welcome in Ireland, "we should start with our own".
So once we've shared the feeling, will it be a 10-day wonder, as Louis Walsh controversially suggested? The jury is out, but something appears to have shifted in the Irish psyche. Communities galvanised by a common endeavour, first-time volunteers chancing upon a rare kind of fulfilment, are a part of it. But towering above all are the countless human contacts generated between the special needs and mainstream communities as a result of the Special Olympics.
"It's not a hidden thing any more," says Paddy Molloy in Swinford, as two 18-year-olds from Kiltimagh, national volleyball player Padraic Ivers and his friend, Mark Jennings, help coach the Puerto Rican volleyball team.
Like millions of others, they shared the feeling. It will be hard to let it go.