THE death of Micheal O'Hehir last week was one of those events that represent not so much the end of an era as a belated reminder that one had ended without us noticing. As a child I disliked both football and hurling with equal intensity, but that makes no difference. Although I never played Gaelic football, Micheal O'Hehir is as much a part of my life as if I had.
My lack of interest in the annual contests that so preoccupied the rest of the nation was nothing ideological, simply an aversion to mud. I came to accept that I was on my own, because for more than half the year every other male between six and the grave talked of little else. The only man I ever met with less interest in Gaelic games was my father, who took us for walks whenever there was a football match on.
As a child I remember a good few All Ireland afternoons when we would have the town to ourselves as Mieheal's voice boomed from every window. Even then I thought it surreal. We could twice walk the length of the town and back without meeting another soul, and all the while be accompanied by this voice.
There was something both warm and lonesome about that voice, for while it left us in no doubt as to our isolation and alienation, there was nothing hostile, phoney or triumphalist about it. It reassured even those of us who excluded ourselves from its embrace.
Today, Micheal O'Hehir and my father, both now dead, inhabit the same spiritual and cultural space in my life and memory. This is because, I believe, of the extent to which Michael's voice was emblematic of the wider culture from which it spoke, and not simply in the obvious nostalgic context.
My own indifference to Gaelic games may have made me feel an outsider back then, but it was an experience many of my generation would emphatically recall in the coming decades. Alienation from Gaelic sport, the Irish language, Irish music, Irish nationalism, were common symptoms of a generation squeezed between the certitudes of post independent reconstruction and the pick and mix post modern world.
It strikes me that it is only in the decade since Micheal's voice was stilled by illness that the rest of the country caught up on the sense of alienation I felt back in the 1960s. Although Gaelic football retains a huge following, its place at the centre of the national imagination has been usurped by a dreaded foreign game.
Now only soccer internationals can empty the streets as All Irelands once did. Moreover, the wider essence of Ireland which Gaelic games epitomised, of traditional and cultural particularity, has been under attack for some time, and has shown more than fleeting signs of yielding to what we like to call "modern Ireland".
IN retrospect, then, the years of Micheal O'Hehirs working life are recognisable as the period of what might be called pre modernisation. He began his commentating life before the Emergency and ended it a year before the first divorce referendum.
In the dominant discourse of modern Ireland, those are the most scapegoated years in our entire history, even more so than 1916 or the period of the Civil War. Those are the years from which we pluck almost all our modern demons - de Valera, McQuaid et al.
Those were the years before prosperity, enlightenment, modernisation, Europeanisation and civilisation, when we beat our children, looked into our own hearts and ate our dinners in the afternoon. Only a fool would see any good in them.
It is axiomatic in modern Ireland that, every day in every way, things are getting better and better. In the final years of Micheal O'Hehir's rule of the airwaves, Irish society's sense of itself increasingly came to depend on the idea of escape from a revolting past, into a new liberal and enlightened age.
The social memory is a strange mechanism, which retrospectively creates devices by which to recall what was significant about particular periods. Thus, we talk about the Emergency, the Lemass era or the FitzGerald years, when we wish to evoke some sense of what those times may have meant.
The trouble is that, once labelled in this fashion, the period in question begins to acquire a patina of significance which is utterly unfaithful to the reality of the lives people led at the time. The Emergency is recalled as a black and white existence in which the generality of people were lorded over by political and religious leaders much taller than themselves, the Lemass era as a time of prosperity and abandon and the FitzGerald years as more enlightened than those that followed.
All this may have a certain academic truth but will be unconnected to the meaning of such times for mere citizens, for whom the truth is vested in things like family, relationships, a stretch of road or street, a football pitch, a chip shop, a dancehall, a pub.
MICHEAL O'Hehir's voice is perhaps the last evocation truly capable of protecting those "pre modern" decades from the strange false memory syndrome afflicting social and political analysis in, Ireland. His voice transcended history, fiction and propaganda, because it was full of life.
We are blessed that it remains on tape for us to hear again, a truth capsule to use as an antidote to the cultural disinformation with which we are besieged. It is not what he said that matters, but the way he said it, which evokes in us all a truthful memory of what it was really like at the time.
That voice may remain the most useful commentary on those years because it is not possible to hear it and remember those times for anything other than what they were less prosperous, certainly, less enlightened, possibly, but kinder, more ethical and far less brutalising than the age in which we now live.
Already the cultural revisionists have set to work on Micheal. In the week since his death there has been pointed mention of his allegedly conservative personal views, his tendency towards euphemism and his willingness to turn a blind eye to incidents off the ball. The inference is that such characteristics represented failings inherent also in the times. If these were faults, they were small ones.
Of course, the tendency to slip such caveats on to the record is a form of insurance against the possibility that in being allowed to freely remember the Ireland in which Micheal's voice echoed, people might recall that those days, for all their faults, bore no resemblance to the caricatured; version with which we are now presented.
It is a paradox of living that all of us are products even of those experiences which we rejected; as not reflecting us. The voice of Micheal O'Hehir should remind us that there is nothing to be gained from pathological repudiation of such formative experiences, and everything to be learned from understanding what it is within ourselves; that caused us to reject them.