Keith Duggan talks to the living legend that is Con Houlihan, thecelebrated chronicler, for more than a generation, of sport, culture and muchbesides

"Everybody is born too late."

- Con Houlihan, October 2003.

Nothing tests journalism like time. Most pieces of journalism have the life span of a butterfly and in many instances, that is a blessing. Few are remembered for more than a week. Only the rarest are resurrected years and decades after the words were newly minted and fresh as the wet ink that formed them.

Books of yellowed journalism are, for that reason, rare. The very fact that someone has been willing to scroll through the blinding proofs on microfiche and blow cobwebs from dusty library manuscripts just to cobble together a hunk of old journalism is in itself a tribute to that author.

All that trouble for long entombed thoughts on forgotten issues or ancient ballgames. This is not the first time that Con Houlihan's work with the dead Irish Press Group and, of late, the Sunday World has been gathered and parcelled between a bright shiny book cover but for some reason the latest revival feels perfectly weighted.

More Than A Game: Selected Sporting Essays is being stacked on the bookshelves even as its author is convalescing from what would be best described as a sporting injury ignored for too long. The many shortcomings of hospitals include their stubborn refusal to go in for pubs. Their unbeatable consolation, according to Harriet Duffin, Con's companion and like-minded lover of sports, books and good living, is that patients get to fall in love five times a day.

"And that," concedes Houlihan sheepishly, "is a conservative estimation."

The Con Houlihan name and legend has become as vast and reckless as the imagination that informed his most celebrated work. At 77, he still moves through the crowds at many of Dublin's sporting occasions, slower now but with a familiar brightness to the keen eyes that have seen it all. Sporting history. The real-life reek and bluster of the fabled literary set that stormed Dublin's pub culture back when Dublin had a pub culture.

He saw Daniel Corkery at the blackboard from his seat, he saw and felt the venom of Kavanagh at full rage, he saw Liam Brady when he was a god. He stood close enough to Ali to smell the sadness. He must have been one of the first Irish people to read the dean of sportswriters Grantland Rice, whose 1930s reports found their way to Castleisland from brothers and sisters who posted home the newspapers from the American cities where they forged a life. From his mother, Helen Cronin - "an incorrigible reader" - he inherited a fierce love of books and in his teens he would breakaway from the chores and games of life in rural Kerry to consume Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant.

"I was a crazy young fella, I admit."

On scholarship in UCC in the 1940s, he picked up a book thrown in a sale basket in a Cork bookshop. It was Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson and along with The Great Gatsby it is the work that continues to haunt Houlihan most. Later on, he would develop a similar love for films, always searching for the same elusive quality.

"For something," he says, "that smites me."

And although Con remains a working journalist, still fussily honing his material and ever, he admits, as vain as a powdered Broadway goddess, his name is wrapped up in the sinking of the first great institution of the Free State. No author has ever smote Con as much as the Irish Press and the hubbub of life on Burgh Quay in the 1970s.

"It was a village, full of shops and cafes," he explains.

"Now, it didn't have an official brothel so it wouldn't qualify as a village in France but we didn't mind that. And geographically, Burgh Quay was the focal point of Dublin. It was an intimate community with certain pubs for certain people.

"I suppose the Dublin I knew was bound by Mulligan's pub and you had perhaps 10 more around it. All great meeting places. First and foremost, you had The White Horse, it would open around half six in the morning if you wanted an early drink. It was unique in that (Brendan) Behan could drink there as long as he stayed in a certain corner and not go around bothering people too much. And you found all kinds of humanity there. Bowes on Fleet Street was another.

"The Swan on Burgh Quay, or the Mucky Duck as we called it, was a journalists' pub but the Butterlys sold the licence after the Stardust Fire in 1981. And The Pearl Bar was frequented by a coterie from The Irish Times, all good people but a niche group. You had Kennedys, a very respectable pub. It was like a village and I loved it. You felt safe at night. Change can come like a dam and in Dublin it burst overnight. And there is a great sense of loss about that now."

In that landscape, Houlihan kept days that would have broken the heart of any pocket watch. Mondays filtered seamlessly into Tuesdays and so on. Sleep was a nuisance that crept up on him in bars and bookies for a half hour here and there. Falling moons were marked by the submission of his column for publication in the Evening Press.

"Then I might have a few drinks waiting for the corrections to come up at morning. I took my time coming home and maybe watched the racing or went to a match in the afternoon and would then have a few more drinks in the evening. It often meant going to bed very late and getting up early. But the brain would be working all day so that when I would sit down at five in the morning to write a column, the thread was already there and you would just have to put in the twists and turns."

And so he would set off again from Portobello with the birds whistling again, a lion of that urban prairie. A gargantuan figure of a man; unkempt, haphazardly handsome, charming and sociable and too shy to drop the habit of speaking to strangers with a hand cloaking his mouth, a habit he keeps today. Books and the visual aesthetics of sport nurtured his mind; pub life kept his soul together. Con's barstool was his sanctuary.

"Whenever I am asked about that, I think of my late friend Brendan Behan who said 'it is because I am a lonely, poor bastard.' And that is true. I love people around me. I could go a long time now without touching an alcoholic drink but not without going into a pub."

It was the perfect life for a person of Houlihan's disposition; a lover of life but essentially an observer and chronicler. He avoided the McDaids set- the celebrated gang of intellectuals and bohemians that included Tony Cronin and Flann O'Brien and Kavanagh. In his literary reviews, he feted them and adored their work. In life, it was different.

"Flann O'Brien, I admired his work enormously but he was no company. And it wasn't drink, he was as bad sober. Kavanagh used call me the biggest pygmy in Ireland. That gang when together would compete to see who could be the cleverest. It was holding court. I wouldn't have been comfortable there."

It was Houlihan's unabashed love of high literature and the earthier pleasures of sport that made his columns unique. To him, each was just an interpretation of life. And alone, he managed to marry them in a way that seemed natural.

Hence, a rumination on Mick O'Dwyer will contain the sentence, "Thomas Wolfe, the half-forgotten novelist said that the most evocative of American sounds was the whistle of a distant train." Or an essay on Jack Dempsey will wander into an appraisal of William Hazlitt, "my hero of heroes".

There was a time, shortly before television took a grip on all our souls, when Houlihan's column was as highly regarded in the city and across the country as Jimmy Cannon's was in New York of the 1950s. The column was his staff.

Interviews he avoided like the plague.

"Once ever. It was a disaster. Pure disaster."

Seán Doherty of Dublin was the victim, The Blue Haven pub the venue on a Friday night before the 1978 All-Ireland.

"The place was full of boys down from the mountains smelling of sheep. Inside five minutes my friend Dave Fitzgerald, his wife and my then girlfriend were busy talking toSeán. I interviewed the shepherds. I asked Seán two questions. One was 'where did you meet your wife?' And it was at a bus stop when it was raining. Pure romance. That was my only interview, ever, ever."

The readers didn't mind and the editors at the Press indulged him. Better to let him loose. It was perhaps Houlihan's fortune to come of age when the newspaper industry in Ireland flourished. It is hard to believe now that one house could boast a daily, an evening and a Sunday publication.

"The golden age for the Press was whenever the circulation was high," he smiles. "Journalists always say they don't care about figures. I did. It was good to know, when the circulation was at 150,000, that you weren't like a poet singing in the wilderness. And it was good to hear from the editor that you had reached the magic figure and to get thanks for it."

Vanity, he insists, is at the heart of it; the need to be read and, better still, to be loved. At this stage, Houlihan must have gathered more fan mail than Elvis but even now, he says, he would walk to Donegal or Wexford if he got so much as a sniff of a flattering word written about him in a local newspaper. He would walk on crutches.

"I am a vain man," he says. "Not afraid to admit it. Show me the man who doesn't like a bit of praise and I will show you a liar."

The Press was good to Con Houlihan and for an age, he was its prince.

After its demise, he stood on the streets near Burgh Quay dispensing the free sheet he and other workers attempted to publish to keep their ailing trade alive. But for him, the closure of the newspaper was as inconceivable as the GPO being suddenly erased or O'Connell Bridge being turned into a tunnel. It did not make sense. It does not still.

In recent years, his face has been the one most associated with the elegiac passing of de Valera's own paper, and television documentaries have shown Con standing outside the mausoleum on Burgh Quay. He has not watched them.

"I worked in several schools in my time as a roving teacher and although I left in a haze of goodwill, I still feel a stab of loneliness whenever I pass by. It is the same with the old Irish Press building in Burgh Quay - only more so," he writes in a piece (about Roy Keane) included in the new collection.

The one regret he has about the Press days is that he became so absorbed in his work that he did not allow time to put his own skills to creative writing.

"Except for football on a Monday," he smiles.

Perhaps that lack of exploration is a source of regret?

"It will be. It will be. I have intentions yet. Perhaps that is a crazy concept to be holding at the age of 77, I don't know. But I became enveloped in the Press. And not in trivia, I think. Creative, it's a lovely word but I think that there are passages in that book that are creative. Maybe not technically but still creative."

So what is the purpose of a Con Houlihan collection presenting itself to Ireland of 2004? His pieces in the Sunday World mingle smoothly with the older work and he believes he is still trying to write better, always searching for the cleanest sentence.

But he is the first to say his era, his understanding of what print journalism was - the hot breath of the printing press, smoke clogged and curse-ridden newsrooms and always, always the next drink - is over.

Perhaps that is why this October Houlihan revival is so appropriate. It reminds us that not so long ago Dublin, and the country in general, was a place of narrower horizons and of much more generous spirit.

Houlihan, apart from his sports trips abroad and trips home to Castleisland, rarely strolled beyond the Burgh Quay triangle but his imagination covered centuries and entire civilisations.

"I'd love to have been a painter in the 18th century except I wasn't much good at painting," he jokes. "Or a philosopher in Greece but I probably would have got myself killed. Or to have been in London at the turn of the century when the bare-knuckle boxing was popular. Or a sports journalist in the America of the 30s covering boxing except I probably would have been rubbish. But you cannot be in two places at once. To me though, age is the biggest con job of all time. Sure I don't feel one bit old."

And that is the magical thing: nor do his words.

On Patrick Kavanagh

"Kavanagh was the best company ever born for the first three drinks and then he would just turn. He could be very nasty then. Once I wrote about him in glowing terms in The Irish Press morning paper. He came up to me on the street and said 'you were just f****** patronising me'. He knew I was genuine but that was Kavanagh, just the way he was. But his influence on me was enormous. He made you see your own fields, your own little rivers and cows, as important. TS Eliot said in a moment of enlightenment - and he hadn't many of those - that art was about taking the here and the now and making it rich and strange. Kavanagh practised that. He didn't preach it."

On writers

"I keep away from big writers. Most are egocentric. You should know a writer by his book, not by the number of girls he has or how much he can drink. Many writers who boast of drink can't drink at all. Pete Hamill wrote a book, A Drinking Life, and if he drank four pints, he would fall off his stool. There are three fields where writers' imaginations run riot. One is sexual exploits, which you can divide by 10, the second is gambling, which you can divide by 20, and then drinking, which you can probably divide by 40."

On Daniel Corkery

"One time long ago Daniel Corkery taught me and he asked us, 'when man goes to the moon, how will people react?' And we all gave stupid answers, I can't remember what. And he said, 'They will think more and more about their own little parish'."

On Muhammad Ali v Joe Frazier

(The Evening Press)

"It was fitting that Frank Sinatra should this morning precede Muhammad Ali on our television screens - one of the great egotists of our day was precursor to one even greater. Both are quintessentially American products; each in his way pursues Gatsby's dream. You might say that both have long since overtaken that dream and passed it out - but in that territory there are no Everests."

On Alex Ferguson and Manchester United

(The Sunday World)

"I was in Rotterdam when United won the European Cup Winners Cup and I rejoiced as much as any Mancunian or perhaps as any Manchurian; there is a story implicit in the alternative name. It goes back to a Friday evening long ago when I was in Mulligan's in Dublin's Poolbeg Street with my dear departed friend Jimmy O'Connor, the blacksmith in Burgh Quay. It was the eve of the Cup final between United and Everton and we were getting up a head of steam for the journey. Not all our friends were for United and we were getting a share of flak. At last Jimmy said, 'Con, us Manchurians must stick together'."