Tuesday, 26 June 2012 14:54
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ball 4THE recent appearance of the Republic of Ireland soccer team in the European championships in Poland and Ukraine sent many of us back down memory lane to those great weeks in June 1988 when the Boys In Green took part in their only other European championship.
It was a glorious time in more ways than the football. The sun shone for a couple of weeks as if summer would never end. I was a curate in the Aran Island of Inis Meain at the time and the only bailout in sight was the water you would bail out of the bottom of a currach when fishing for mackeral.
A West German film crew stayed three weeks on the island making a documentary on the European periphery. Note that I wrote ‘West’ Germany. The Iron Curtain still stood, or hung, as the case may be, and Angela Merkel was only a slip of a girl.
The relative disappointment at Ireland’s performance in a very difficult group this time masks the fact that The Republic did not get out of their group that other time either.
"Take me anywhere except to the seaside," a colleague based on an offshore island used to joke many years ago. I thought of that line as I was arranging annual holidays, almost a year since returning to be close to the sea in Carna.
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