The Thing is…. Bono
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which was run by the Christian Brothers, but my mum had decided the education there was barbaric so Gerard and I were packed off to Blackrock College, another mile down the road from Kilmacud.
That was typical of Annie. She was absolutely determined that all of her children would get a good education, and it is to her credit that nearly all of us eventually went on to get a college degree. John and Peter were the first to head off to University College Dublin. John later went to London to work in advertising, then came back to McConnell’s, which became Ireland’s largest marketing communications business. In later years, he became chairman of McConnell’s Advertising, adjunct professor of marketing at Trinity College, a non-executive director of the Irish Times and, for a while, a board member of the Abbey Theatre. He’s an expert on branding and in 2006 wrote a very well-received book, The Importance of Being Branded. Having also written a doctoral thesis, he is now Dr Fanning.
Peter and I had occasional rows as boys but mostly got on just fine. He now lives in Canada, where he has taught English in Vancouver for the last twenty-five years. My next brother, Gerard, has always been huge into literature and has published four books of poetry to date. There was sometimes a degree of one-upmanship between him and John. One family Christmas, Gerard proudly produced a not-yet-published anthology of new Seamus Heaney poems – then John trumped him by flourishing a signed version of the same book!
As for me, I have never bought into the cliché that your schooldays are the best days of your life but I had a fantastic time at Blackrock. It is the best-known rugby school in Ireland, with alumni including Brian O’Driscoll, Luke Fitzgerald, Leo Cullen and Bob Casey, but neither Gerard nor I ever played rugby or were put under any pressure to do so, for which I remain hugely grateful.
Gerard was two years ahead of me at Blackrock and spent five years in the same class as a lanky kid called Bob Geldof with a mass of bouffant hair and an intense manner. Geldof always stood out a little: he just looked different from everybody else, and was the first boy around our way to ride a BMX bike. He and Gerard were mates and one year they went off to England together to do a summer holiday job shelling peas at a factory in Peterborough.
Academically, I again did OK at Blackrock while never setting the world alight. There were five graded classes, from A to E, and I was happy to be in B for a few but mostly in C, which was where I felt I belonged. I didn’t struggle but nor was I in the academic A-league.
Actually, this may be just my self-serving twist on things, but I’m glad that I was middling as a student. There are definitely downsides to being an academic over-achiever. Just last year I watched a documentary about prodigies who went on University Challenge years ago, and most of them seem to be fucked-up and crazy nowadays. You wouldn’t want to be one of them: the cleverest of all was drinking nine pints every day. At least that is one life I managed to escape by not being too brainy.
I was even happier in Class C because my two best friends were also there, middle-achievers like me. They were called Jerry Coyle and Mel Reilly, and throughout our teenage years at Blackrock, and beyond, the three of us were inseparable. We hung out together every day, and, remarkable as it may seem, forty years on Jerry and Mel remain my two best friends in the world.
I met Jerry on my very first day in Blackrock. He told me he lived in Mount Merrion at 42 Wilson Road, right round the corner from my house in Foster Avenue. I scornfully took him to task and explained he was mistaken: ‘That’s ridiculous, I know everybody on Wilson Road, and I don’t know you!’ I even reeled off a list of people I knew on the street, but he stuck to his story.
After school we walked home together and I still thought he was having me on. When he walked up the path of No. 42 and rang the bell I expected him to run away, but his mother answered the bell and asked him how his first day had gone. I couldn’t believe I had lived so close to the guy my whole life and never noticed him. We then made up for it by being virtually inseparable for the next twenty years, until he emigrated to America.
Mel Reilly came to Blackrock a year later than Gerry and me when he transferred from the college’s junior school called Willow Park. He lived in a huge house on Cross Avenue and was the oldest of five boys. Mel is now a teacher in Dundrum and even today there is hardly a day goes by that I don’t hook up with him.
Jerry and Mel weren’t much into football yet that was what occupied most of our spare time in a jumpers-for-goalposts kind of way. Sometimes we would play on the hockey pitches at Belfield, over the road from us at University College Dublin, or in the car park of the Stella cinema, despite the fact that it was a steep slope.
Mostly, though, we would play three-and-in on Foster Avenue itself. The gateway of my friend Gary Byrne’s house served as perfect goalposts. For a more elaborate and arguably somewhat grisly ball game called ‘Sick, dying and dead’ we used a wall on Owenstown Park at the entrance to UCD. Nowadays Foster Avenue is one long car park, but back then it saw hardly any traffic. After the game we would sit by Teevan’s newsagent and eat Cowboy bars and drink Kool Pops or, if we had a little more money to spare, lavish 2d on a Trigger, a Flash bar or, the tastiest of them all, a Macaroon bar.
Dermot Morgan would sometimes join in our kick-abouts. He lived five doors down from Jerry on Wilson Road and in later life starred as Father Ted on TV. Dermot was a couple of years older than us and was in my brother Gerard’s class. We used to call him Morgan the Mighty after the character in the comics.
Dermot wasn’t the best footballer in the world and nor was his dad, Darragh, with his massive shock of white hair. Darragh would join us after he had finished work and was a bit of a character. He would charge around like mad kicking the ball for half an hour and then retire, absolutely bollocksed. I never hung around with Dermot, but by the time I went to UCD a few years later he was doing lunchtime sketch shows in the Arts building theatre to over a hundred people and trying to get on to TV. He was very funny; I never knew he had it in him.
In my pre-teen years, various friends came round to my house all the time and my parents always made them welcome. On Wednesday afternoons, when we were off school, we’d pull out both leaves of the dining-room table and play table football: the great Subbuteo.
We would take Subbuteo massively seriously. We had quite a primitive version and the players didn’t have 3D facial features or even arms or legs, they were just lumps of plastic on a round base, but that didn’t bother us. We were very strict on flicking the pieces only, no scooping. If we scored a goal, we’d run around the room: our celebrations were even more pathetic than the Premier League players today.
My dad sat in his chair, smoked his pipe and read the paper while we played. On the table next to him was a peculiar contraption: a crude, slightly rusty guillotine that he used to cut thin slices of plug tobacco. Barney would ground the slices with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into the palm of his left, scoop them into the pipe and puff away happily. The whole process used to fascinate Jerry and Mel.
My father loved horse racing and would spend his Saturdays in front of the telly egging on every Irish horse, Irish-owned horse, Irish-trained horse or Irish jockey. I had no interest at all in this, although it didn’t stop me jumping out of my skin when my dad suddenly started shouting as they headed into the home straight.
My dad was very much a homebody. He never really went out, except on Friday nights for a pint with his friend Jack Walsh in Byrne’s of Galloping Green in Leopardstown. Other than that, he didn’t really drink, and I remember when President Kennedy came to Ireland, a few months before he was assassinated in Dallas, my dad was invited to the big reception in Dublin Castle and took some persuading to go and take my mother. It was certainly the only time I ever saw him in a tuxedo.
Of my brothers and sister, I hung out the most with Gerard, who was the nearest to me in age. We shared a bedroom and plenty of adventures and we remain close to this day. I was close to Miriam as well but how many boys hang out with their four-year-older sister? She was also heavily into ballet: she’d come pirouetting into the room on tiptoes, and I’d raise my eyes to heaven and go back to whatever I was doing.
John and Peter had both left home by the time I hit my teens. They had moved to London, which seemed impossibly glamorous to me. In fact, whenever I