Frank McNally on samba football, Joycean art, and the last great Irish harper

I was delighted to see my old pal Coolio Antonio feature in our “New to the Parish” series on Wednesday, although it also made me feel old. For several years in the noughties, I used to play a weekly indoor football game with him and other Portuguese-speaking recent arrivals in Ireland.

Our game had a history stretching back to antiquity (the mid-1980s), although all founder members had by then retired. As their successors, we were often short of numbers. On such occasions, we would go upstairs to the gym and recruit volunteers from a group of friends who hung out there.

The gym lads were always ready to play. And not only did they lend numbers, they also lent a new glamour to our increasingly decrepit kick-around. Suddenly, those of us who had grown up admiring samba football were playing alongside actual Brazilians and other lusophone nationalities (Coolio was from Angola).

They were also good, of course. Some had so much skill to spare, they made us look better too.

The chimes they are a-changing – Frank McNally on the joys of listening to church bells at night

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Jumping off the page – Lara Marlowe at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair

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Egg on face – Alison Healy on the Warwick Egg Incident

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Murder Most Confusing – Frank McNally on Flann O’Brien’s murder weapon, Henry Marsh’s finger, and a relocated Joycean plaque

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As older players dropped off, the lads from the gym gradually became the game’s regulars. Soon, even the rows were in Portuguese. The rest of us now struggled to understand them, although we learned a few new swear-words while trying.

The row that did for our ancient fixture eventually, however, was one with the venue over closing time. After decades of playing at 6pm on Thursdays, we had lost this coveted slot to a samba dance class (the irony), after which we were relegated to the outer darkness of a 9pm start.

Then we fell foul of a clock-watching caretaker, who liked to be finished by 10pm and found our habit of having a post-match shower unacceptable (even though we were contractually entitled to 30 minutes for same).

One night when I wasn’t there, he turned the pitch lights off at 9.50pm, whereupon an argument – verbal but impassioned – ensued. During subsequent peace talks with management, we learned that two of our gym lads were now banned. The rest of us were welcome to continue playing.

But even the banned players had been provoked. And we also had reason to believe there was a racist element to the abuse levelled at them. So on the principle of “um por todos e todos por um”, we all refused to return. The game went into exile in Ringsend, where it continues to this day. Without me, alas: I quit football soon afterwards, on a free transfer to middle age.

Anyway, I’m delighted to see that Coolio is now a poster boy for the imminent Dublin Learning City Festival, where he’ll be sharing his experiences of returning to school in adulthood. The festival runs from April 3rd to 5th and the bewildering range of events includes even a class in “Dublin slang for beginners”. It’ll be deadly, I’m sure.

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Speaking of deadly, at a party a while back, I met the artist Penny Stuart, who mentioned her forthcoming exhibition, inspired in part by James Joyce’s The Dead.

Having promised solemnly to attend, I later received a formal invitation to the launch: the date of which I entered in my diary, also solemnly. Then, as often happens, I forgot to look at the diary. And only when I passed the venue last Saturday, did I remember the launch had been Friday night.

My next step in such circumstances, usually, is to pretend I was there, chatting somewhere at the back. Unfortunately, the venue was Sweny’s Pharmacy, one of Dublin’s more intimate exhibition spaces, where the back and the front overlap to the exclusion of a middle.

So instead I dropped by the show mid-week to see Stuart’s extraordinary pictures, reminiscent of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud (as I’m told Eamon Ryan noted at the launch), but all her own. And as usual when in Sweny’s, I also bought lemon soap. Between that and me pointing out that the exhibition runs only until Friday, my conscience is now clean.

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Some years ago, the diarist was surprised to learn that his hometown, Carrickmacross, was the birthplace of a man widely described as “the last of the great Irish harpers”.

A celebrity in his time, Blind Patrick Byrne (1794-1863) had since been forgotten in Carrick, which seemed a bit negligent on the town’s part. Imagine the diarist’s astonishment, therefore, when a year or two later, researchers from the local Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann branch informed him that Byrne was his great-great-granduncle.

The collective amnesia is now being redressed by an annual Féile Patrick Byrne, the latest instalment of which begins on Thursday (30th). This year’s opening address is by somebody called Frank McNally, under the title “The Harper that Once”. The event is at 8pm, in the Shirley Arms Hotel, and admission is free.