Different strokes

Is it that time already? I hardly noticed. Flares, hot pants, margaritas, a crushing victory for Fianna Fáil, a jubilee across the pond, old farts lining up to do their bit. Sound familiar? It was 25 years ago today, and it’s now. The more things change, the more they remain the same, it seems. Or else I’ve been dreaming.

Things were simpler when the first hotpress hit the stands. Disco on the way out, punk on the way in, and the end of flares was nigh. A mullet was a fish and irony was a cult sport. There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air. Ah, what we’ve all been through!

The world was coming to terms with a new order in 1977. It had begun a few years earlier, after the oil producers of OPEC had responded to the Israeli victory in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 by turning off the oil. The crisis was over, but there were new realities, like inflation, fuel economies, cutbacks and insulation. Top o’ the range hotels and shops got very interested in catering to the interests of men and women in flowing robes...

And America? The USA had been humiliated in Vietnam, and red armies were in control of South East Asia. But you could say the yanks won the long war. They’re back there now, and in control, this time as economic and cultural colonists rather than soldiers.

But that’s a side-show. America’s experience, and also that of much of the world during our first 25 years, is book-ended by the Islamic revolution in Iran and the 11/9 attack on the Twin Towers.

Sure, in between, they priced the Soviet Union out of existence and re-wrote the book on economic growth and technology. But behind every triumph you can hear the mullahs and the mobs ranting hatred and jeering the Great Satan and promising to destroy it and all its pomps and glories.

Scriptwriters have a new stereotype. New demons are born, evil wizards and caliphs straight from the Arabian Nights. Sure, the terrorist genie was already out of the bottle by then. But the relentlessness and ruthlessness of the newer breeds has given America a whole new band of identifiable bad guys. The Soviet Union is dead. Here come the mullahs.

Ronald Reagan put the pride back. He also made the rich a lot richer and let the poor fend for themselves. Quite hated in his time. Remember him? He doesn’t. He has Alzheimer’s now, and has clawed back some sympathy for the openness with which his family said it was so.

Closer to home, Margaret Thatcher matched him note for note. She even went one better, seeing off the Argies in the Malvinas. He had to have a little war himself and beat the shit out of Grenada.

Ah yes, Thatcher and Reagan. They, but especially she, made such great demons, champions as they were of a robust and vicious kind of capitalism and what one Fianna Fáil councillor described as ‘physical rectitude’.

They triggered the ‘80s, for which they can never be forgiven. If the ‘70s was the decade that taste forgot, the ‘80s embodied naffness and narcissism, alienation and corruption, greed, disaffection and dog-eat-dog. Revive with care. It was in love with what it saw in the mirror off which it was snorting a line of coke through a £20 note. This latter habit brought us some deeply unpleasant individuals who made ‘a lotta fockin’ monny’. One felt a shiver of relief as it self-combusted with the stock market crash of 1987.

The ‘80s was also when we began to hear of a big disease with a little name that was killing off gays and then IV drug users. We have come to know AIDS pretty well by now, well enough to have dropped our guard, perhaps. It was something terribly new and frightening. Still is. A retrovirus that attacks the immune system, the very core of our ability to resist.

AIDS seems to have come from Africa, and it’s there that it has had the most devastating impact, with up to a quarter of the population infected in many countries. Of course, it decimated the gay population, and is prevalent among drug users in Ireland and elsewhere. But in some African states, like Zaire, an entire generation of entrepreneurs and technocrats has been obliterated. And just around the corner, it is likely to explode in, and then out of, Russia...

Three other apocalyptic horsemen pillaged Africa through our first 25 years: drought, famine and war. Most of us will remember the impact of film footage from Ethiopia, and the way it galvanised the world, including a rake of mulletted rockstars. But that was only the start. There was Sudan, Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zaire and Rwanda. Now there’s Zimbabwe.

But famine often is a consequence of human activities. War is one, but corruption, ignorance and totalitarianism are others. Robert Mugabe may wish to blame the West for his problems, but the truth is, it’s himself.

In this bleak scenario, there were few enough bright shining moments. One of these was the gradual wearing down of the apartheid regime in South Africa, leading to the eventual release of Nelson Mandela, then and now one of the great icons of hope in a world on the verge.

But even as we speak, Israel is still allowing the construction of settlements in Palestinian territories, and wages war apparently indiscriminately. Throughout the 25 years of Hogs, there has been a constant and consistent line on this. Although it should not have been established, Israel has every right to exist at this point. But it doesn’t have the right to practice apartheid. And it doesn’t have the right to steal land, demolish the houses of the innocent like Herod, or execute without trial, which its operatives have almost certainly done.

And you can’t just leave them at it (as many have) because there is always the risk of conflagration and descent into all-out war, ending with nukes. The hatreds and belief in war heroism and martyrdom is such that the protagonists know no reason.

There you are. We thought that when George Dubbya Bush and Vladimir Putin signed a treaty limiting their nuclear weapons, we might be pulling back from global catastrophe. But with Al-Qaeda crashing their planes into the World Trade Centre and planning dirty bombs and India and Pakistan at each other’s throats, it’s all turned to dust, as we too might.

As for Ireland, some things never change. But a lot has happened, and there’s no way we’re going back. You could say we found our freedom. We did so from, and in, so many things.

Sexuality is one. The ‘liberal agenda’ has now been achieved. What once was now seems unimaginable. Yes, of course, we’re still hypocrites on abortion, but the ‘Irish solutions to Irish problems’ approach to contraception, divorce and cohabitation has been routed. Homosexuality has been legalised. Everyone’s doing it, as Jimmy Crowley was wont to sing, and whatever way takes your fancy. And they’ll talk about it too.

The unravelling of all the authority figures of the past, and their exposure as hypocrites, cheats, liars, bullies and sexual predators is central.

In some cases, the focus was individual, as with Bishop Eamon Casey, who flew with his girlfriend Annie Murphy on gossamer wings - her words - and Michael Cleary. It also included appalling monsters like Fathers Brendan Smyth and Sean Fortune among many more. In other cases, it was institutional and systematic, as with the Magdalen laundries, the industrial schools, and the like.

That said, it wasn’t just in the world of sexual exploitation. There’s the planning enquiries, the Ansbacher accounts, the Donegal police inquiry... Not an icon left standing! Other criminals did not escape the chase either. Over the years we grew to know a whole gallery of rogues, some of them very unpleasant indeed, and one of whom initiated the murder of the campaigning journalist Veronica Guerin.

Indeed, the media in general can take a great deal of credit for the light that flooded through darkened rooms and corridors, partly for going where nobody could go before, but also for being open to those voices that had the courage to speak out. However, the media is an increasingly pervasive and invasive force, and now mimics the role played by the church in 1977 in very many ways. By way of example, instead of being expected to observe and copy the lives of the saints, as we might once have been, we are now invited to observe and copy the lives of celebrities.

It’s a change, but hardly an improvement.

Ah, but what ‘celebrities’!! Music, technology, business, sport. Oh, the glamour of it all!! And yet, these have been the engine of change in this country. The unexpected rollercoaster that began in Germany in 1988 and continued in Italia 90 and USA 94 gave us a whole new understanding of ourselves. We learned to walk tall. Throw in Lizzy, U2, the Undertones, the Cranberries, the Corrs and Riverdance, and we found ourselves punching way above our weight.

Maybe it was just one of those pivotal and climactic times when everything (and everyone) came together. But don’t underestimate the effects. Like a rush, the soccer and the music sucked and inhaled right through the economy. As an Irish Times headline put it when Ireland beat Italy in 1994, ‘Triers No More’.

And it was true - the old image of the worthy but exploited and ineffective Oirishman, and what Eamon Dunphy called ‘decent skinmanship’, was put to pasture. Of course, good long-term planning, high education levels and a natural adaptability and pragmatism gave us an added edge. It hadn’t been easy going through the 1980s - there were no jobs, layoffs and mass emigration. But when the good times came, phew!

In particular, we grabbed the new technologies and the internet. We had a lot of dot.com millionaires, and a rake of work making computers and all their bits and bobs, as well as one of the highest penetrations of mobile phones in the world. Something new? Let’s try it!! Thus the Celtic Tiger.

Some of these changes come down to demography. As we keep telling ourselves, we have the highest youth population in Europe. They’re now in their 20s and 30s, and they’re increasingly urbanised and open to the influences of the world.

Wealth and population growth have also given us headaches, from traffic to tourism, drunkenness in Temple Bar, heroin abuse, homelessness and... angst. Our structural shortcomings have been cruelly exposed, in childcare and public transport.

On another note, we are coming to terms with developments in genetics and the discovery of the human genome in particular. Genetic engineering is a genie, which could yield wondrous health care. But it also poses the nightmare of cloning and genetically modified food. Okay, Dolly the sheep aged rapidly, catching up with the cloned cells from which she was made. But what of the foods? Yet it’s agreed that these will almost certainly destroy the possibility of organic food production.

And if that wasn’t bad enough news, there’s always the melting polar icecaps...

When hotpress was launched, Northern Ireland was a quagmire. And over the years we had many terrible dark times, times when you would never conceive that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel. Murders, massacres, bombs, and thousands killed and tens of thousands injured. And it was so much worse for those who lived with it.

That’s changed. Sure, there is still sectarian hatred, and yes, people still get murdered. But there is a peace process, and it’s working so far. Long may that continue, so that 25 years from now we can envisage both Ireland and Northern Ireland as peaceful, prosperous and tolerant.

But not dull, or silent. Let’s agree that we just don’t do those, that we’ll try to keep on dancing and singing and talking, that we’ll play as hard as we work.

That we’ll remain ourselves, in other words.

The Hog