For those of us who once toiled in the lower decks of the good ship Evening Press on the dockside at Burgh Quay, there was one voice missing from those two days that rocked Irish football in mid-November.
A voice that would have made sense of it all in a totally original and grammatically correct way.
Perhaps kicking off with a story from The Iliad (Troy etc) or a short discourse on the first parrot to ever appear in Castle Island (his spelling); how Ferenc Puskas escaped death in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising; and a few sentences about the Five Lamps and Kellie Harrington, before serving up the main course with the words: “And now read on”.
Con Houlihan would have been three weeks short of his 100th birthday – which was on Saturday (December 6th) – if he had been spotted on the terraces of Budapest when Troy Parrott restored our faith in the gods of football with a hat-trick, or hat-treat as Con might have put it.
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“The mind is composing and the body is decomposing,” he used to say.
The Kerry colossus never used a typewriter. One can only imagine what flights of fancy would have guided his pen across those sheets of copy paper in the early hours of the following morning having digested it all over a few bottles of wine in a bar on a Budapest back street, far from the madding crowd until he was inevitably spotted by a few St Patrick’s Athletic fans.
His account might have yielded a crop of metaphors to rival those he deployed to describe the racehorse Dawn Run driven by the “deep engine room of her heart” moving up the field “like a greyhound through tired dogs” to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1986.
Or how he imagined Hill 16 “as lively as the Main Street of Knocknagoshel on Good Friday” when Dublin fell to Kerry in the 1978 All-Ireland final.
He had the metaphorical measure too of Shamrock Rovers as they tested his favourite side, St Pat’s, with high balls that were “as useful as throwing eggs at the Eiffel Tower”.
“I’m getting to the hurling. But you can’t understand Galway’s suffering unless you’ve read Homer,” was his response once to an editor’s query about the copy he was phoning in from a pub somewhere between Croke Park and Burgh Quay on All-Ireland day in 1980.
Waiting for Houlihan to reach his destination was part of the pleasure of reading the Castle Island native, whose outlook on life was formed by experiences such as catching his first trout in the River Maine; playing second row for the local rugby team; cutting turf on the bog with his father, and teaching in the local schools.
Charlie Lenihan, the local butcher, impressed by Con’s honours degree in English and his ability to make black pudding, put him in charge of his monthly Taxpayers’ News.
He oversaw an impactful inquiry into the running of the County Mental Hospital and published John B Keane for the first time. Con also offered culinary advice to readers: “To avoid fragmentation, roll in flour – the trout, not yourself."
The Taxpayers’ News fell foul of the libel laws and Con’s talents were redeployed as a features writer for the Kerryman in Tralee.
His writing about the IRA bombing of the Old Bailey in 1973 led to a Garda presence for a while at the Kerryman offices. He vowed never to set foot in Kerry again when Dick Spring lost his Dáil seat to the convicted IRA gunrunner Martin Ferris in 2002.
Fortunately, it was a promise he could not keep, Castle Island being as sacred to him as Ayers Rock to the Aborigines of Australia.
[ Con Houlihan: prolific writer who plied trade with learning and witOpens in new window ]
After some wooing by the editor, Sean Ward, Con finally arrived on the back page of the Evening Press at the grand old age of 47 in September, 1973. He wasted no time in establishing himself as a peerless sportswriter with an unlikely personality cult given his shy nature.
One day, he returned to the newsroom looking the worse for wear. “I was mugged,” he said. “I was mugged, but I did it myself.” In 1994, he fell again and broke his hip, but this time in Cheltenham – not at Cheltenham, as he made clear – and the following year he was left bereft at the closure of the Irish Press.
Though he soldiered on elsewhere in print, he never fully got over his “feelings of loneliness and desolation when I pass by that great stranded ship between Burgh Quay and Poolbeg Street”.
He died in St James Hospital on August 4th, 2012, and his last article, wishing Katie Taylor well, appeared the next day.
On his centenary at the weekend, he was fondly remembered in the many hostelries he graced with his anoraked presence, from his adopted home in Portobello to Castle Island, his final resting place beside his parents, Michael and Ellen. Happy birthday, Con.
