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Ireland, show them what we’ve got
    Ireland, Ireland we can beat this lot
    Ireland, Ireland we can celebrate
    Ireland, Ireland in Euro 88
    ——
    We should pause here and try to imagine an English football journalist contributing to the England cause in this fashion, and try though we might, we just can’t see
it.
    His song was produced on that Sunday afternoon in Windmill Lane by Paul Brady and featured many of the Boys themselves, who sang heartily all the way through, observed by other gentlemen of the
press including myself, Mr George Byrne and Mr Eamon Carr.
    I recall talking at length to Chris Hughton, about how he, a black man, had always regarded himself as Irish. He seemed patently sincere and he had nothing to prove in that regard anyway, since
he had been a black man playing for Ireland back in the days when we only had about five black men in the entire country — and by 1988 that number hadn’t increased to any noticeable
extent.
    Indeed George Byrne happened to be on a trip to Detroit around that time, with friends, and the taxi-driver, learning they were from Ireland, asked them how many of ‘the brothers’
were in Ireland. And they started going through them ... ‘there’s Paul McGrath ... and Philo, of course, but he’s dead now ... and Kevin Sharkey ... and Dave Murphy ... and ...
and that guy who plays the guitar outside Bewleys ...’
    The taxi-driver interjected. ‘That many, huh?’
    But one of them was Paul McGrath, after all, who contained multitudes.
    When the recording party repaired to the Dockers pub next door to Windmill, Eamon Carr and George Byrne and I found ourselves in the corner of the lounge, drinking with Paul and his companion,
John Anderson, of Newcastle Utd and Ireland. It was Eamon that Paul really wanted to talk to, Eamon being a bona fide Irish rock legend from his time with Horslips. I myself probably would
not have been sitting there if it wasn’t for the same Horslips and the life-changing effect that they had had on me and on a fair few others like me in ‘rural Ireland’, lonely
boys, out on the weekend.
    We lived only for their all-too-infrequent visits. They were magical, extraordinary, these five men, who were able to demonstrate that you could be playing the dancehalls like a thousand other
Irish bands and yet somehow not be bad.
    That you could write your own songs, and they would not be bad.
    That you could put on a show and it would not be bad, but would have wondrous things like a proper PA system and a mixing desk and actual roadies darting around the
stage, plugging in guitars which, when played, would not be bad.
    Eamon was one of my heroes, too.
    And as the talk inevitably turned to Ireland and the state that she was in, Paul was getting stuck in to his own upbringing, how Ireland had treated him, and soon there was a fine and righteous
anger around that table.
    I had only encountered Paul once before that, when I had been coming out of the International Bar and had almost run into him and a woman with whom he seemed to be arguing. You’d never
hear him giving interviews.
    So this was the first time I realised what an articulate fellow he was, how well he seemed to understand the things that he had seen. And as the pint pots stacked up in the Dockers, he said that
he wanted to put all this stuff in a book, all this shocking stuff.
    Thus, for a couple of hours one night long ago in the Dockers pub, I became Paul McGrath’s official biographer.
    He meant it, and I meant it.
    We meant it with all our hearts.
    Our agreement was witnessed by a distinguished if controversial rock journalist and a genuine Irish rock legend, so it was sound.
    On the way out the door, in a state of high excitement, Paul gave me his telephone number in Manchester, written on a scrap of paper.
    I said I would make that call.
    Of course I would make that call.
    I never made that call. For days, for weeks afterwards, I would look at that number and know deep down that