The last time I was on the Late Late(before my current flirtation with an icy demise) was six months ago, that early summer night when Eoghan Harris, Eamon Dunphy and myself fought over the mind and meaning of Bertie, and Harris nudged history a little off course, writes John Waters
Sinead O'Connor sang I Don't Know How to Love Himas only she can sing. Dunphy and I had a bet on air that Harris helped me win, and Katy French flirted for charity with a python, some maggots and miscellaneous unthinkables as only Katy could flirt.
I was drawn to her afterwards. We shook hands, said hello and she was gone. It was to be the only time we would meet but it got her into my head. God, she was beautiful. I don't mean just physically.
She had a beauty that suggested itself as emanating from an infinity within. She seemed to believe anything was possible and her smile convinced you, for an instant, that she was right. I wanted her dreams to come true.
She was a child. She was my daughter and Eoghan's daughter and Eamon's daughter and Pat's daughter and Bertie's daughter. She was your daughter, your little sister. She was a child of Ireland in the time of its rebirth.
I am crying, writing this. How can you cry for someone you've only once said hello to? Katy was the daughter of our dreams, in the sense that it was the dreams of her people that gave birth to what is tritely called her celebrity. We have these words to box off the lucky/unlucky ones who act out our fantasies, while we stick safely to the grandstand. We refer to them as celebs, implying a different species. But they are human beings, filled like the rest of us with desire, distinguished only by willingness/ opportunity to rush in where others fear to tread.
The old saw has it wrong: those who volunteer to act out our fantasies in public are both fools and angels. Driven by longing beyond knowing, their folly arises from a failure of awareness, experience, wisdom.
Driven by angelic recall, they plod on clay feet into the mire of three-dimensional reality. They do not know, are not conscious, that their appetites are infinitely greater than the world's capacity to satisfy them.
Katy French was a personification of our fantasies, of our sense of what we were becoming, of how we might unfold ourselves. She was not the only one, but in the immediate past was perhaps the most spectacular light on the skyline, a meteorite of desire plummeting through the Irish zeitgeist. You may dismiss it as frivolity but only, with respect, if you think in cliches and fixate on the superficial. For most of us, it is not wisdom that keeps us from danger, but lack of opportunity, or fear, or a deadly piety posing as virtue. Katy had found a way of being that promised her it could slake all her human cravings. She had manoeuvred herself into a position where everything humanly desirable seemed to be within reach, and was careering forward on the path opening up in front of her.
She did not, other than literally, die of whatever it will say on her death certificate. She died of desire, of being utterly human.
What can I say? The dream is over.
As for lessons, I don't know. In the past decade, we have, most of us, conducted searches for meaning in places previously inaccessible to us. We acquired means and freedom beyond our wildest.
We knew that money couldn't buy us love, but still gave it a shot. We sensed that freedom is a complicated word, but tried to keep it simple. Be, for tomorrow we die.
As Pope Benedict reminds us in his new encyclical, we have no idea what we would really like. "We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us." All we know is that it is not what we have.
God is a concept by which we measure our longings.
I'll say it again.
God is a concept by which we measure our longings.
As Katy did not comprehend the limits of her human capacity to pursue her angelic yearnings, neither, anymore, do the rest of us. If we did, she might be alive. Our culture left her struggling for life, because we have neglected to keep it alive with the knowledge of what it means to be human.
Katy's death was the result not just of her foolishness, but of our collective helplessness. We do not know what to say to our children as we kiss their brows before allowing them into a world utterly, terribly changed, because that is what we desired. We do not understand the meaning of freedom.
And so, dear friends, we'll just have to think it up all over again. The dream is over. Our daughter Katy is dead. And so too, and not by the way, are our sons Kevin Doyle and John Grey. The dream is over.