In High Germany

by Dermot Bolger

About the Play

&

The Author about the Play

Soccer played an important and defining part of my childhood in Dublin. We played it in between the parked cars on the street and police cars would come to send us running for cover. We played it at break time in the school yard and teachers would stop the game and insist we play Gaelic football instead.

Gaelic football is a superb sport, but it is not a game of the streets, with its high balls and points scored over the crossbar. It is not a game for coats piled to make goal posts and for balls to be kept out of gardens. And more importantly, because we were ordered to play it, because certain teachers went into fits of rage to see a football headed, it could never have the mystique which soccer built up in our minds.

Soccer was our game, our secret language, played with one eye perpetually on the look-out for a figure of authority to come running. These days it is hard to reconcile that street world of twenty years ago with a country where every young child is togged out in the latest ever changing football strip which their parents have been ripped off into being forced to buy, where one cannot switch on a radio without hearing Big Jack or one of his squad plugging some new product. Soccer today in Ireland is big b usiness, employers bend their working hours around international matches, players are rushed from one function to the next.

And today people get touchy to be reminded that twenty years ago a young schoolboy called Liam Brady, who was shortly to become Ireland's greatest ever footballer, was expelled from school for playing an international soccer match for the Irish Schoolboy team instead of a routine Gaelic game for his school.

It seems a long way from the Tramway End of Dalymount Park where I stood as a youth and then a young(er) man to shout and scream at successive Irish football teams who came so close but never succeeded in qualifying for anything; from those days when victory in an international friendly was something to be celebrated for months; when the banjo playing of that midfield tiger, Ray Tracy, was the highlight of the dressing room celebrations after any game; and on away trips one was quite likely to meet a f ew of the players on the skite through some red light district later that night.

And soccer was still largely our game, the young trinity of Brady, O'Leary and Stapleton, who held that team together were working class Northside Dubliners, as was the player and manager who did most to shape Ireland into a professional team, John Giles. We understood Ray Tracy and Paddy Mulligan and Don Givens, the Eamon Dunphys and Terry Conroys, knew the paths their lives had taken, could identify with them and see part of our own lives being played out under those floodlights.

And as we finished school and found our first jobs, emigration was a word from the past, dusty black and white postcards of aunts and uncles whose children had foreign accents and whom we regarded as foreign. It was a shock to our cosy world when Steve Highway declared for Ireland, and then that Cockney Terry Mancini, odd accents shouting among the familiar ones that had grown up on the streets around us.

The genesis of In High Germany (apart from, quite obviously, my experience in Germany during 1988) was standing outside a stadium in Denmark in 1984 talking to three Kerrymen with accents so thick I could hardly understand what they were saying and gradually understanding that the bus they kept referring to having been arriving on had come, not from Tralee but from Munich; of seeing at first hand a new Ireland in exile forming, emigration ceasing to be a word from the past and becoming instead a sudden mundane and expected part of Irish life again; of realising it had not stopped with my generation, that we had just been a brief stutter in the system which has since exploded again over the past decade.

Euro 88 in Germany was the start of the years of glory for Irish soccer, but it was also the end for players like Stapleton who were suddenly old and made us old with them. There was a new guard coming on, a new mirage of voices on the pitch, Scottish, London and Liverpool mixed among those of from Dublin and Cork. This mixture of accents echoed the accents of the followers on the terraces and the accents that their children and grandchildren would speak with.

The Irish nation today has overspilled its borders, the Irish experience today is as much of life in Boston and London as Limerick and Kerry. And perhaps that is why the Irish soccer team has proved such a central and unifying force, perhaps it is the only body which (inadvertently and while simply getting on with playing a game) has come to represent the full diversity of what we are today.

In High Germany was written about and for a new generation of Irish people living abroad. That is why it gives me such enormous pleasure to see this new production opening in Tyneside and then having its first ever production in Germany itself. I owe a great debt to everyone involved, and wish them every success.