In High Germany

by Dermot Bolger

The Story

In High Germany is a piece, premiered in Dublin in 1990, which is set during the 1988 European Football Championships in Germany.

Eoin is a Dubliner who now lives in Hamburg, but who has played football and followed the fortunes of the Irish team long before it became fashionable in the wave of football-fever caused by the success of "Jack's Army". Dreams came true when the Irish team not only make it to the Finals, but in their first match, Stuttgart, 12 June 1988, beat England 1:0, the first victory over the "motherland of football" since the late forties.

Eoin, Dermot Bolger's expatriate Irish fan, is one of the thousands who have left Ireland in search of work, and have found a new way of living, in Europe. For him the 1988 campaign is something special.
Ireland, "after years of attempting to qualify for a major competition," as Mary Hunt wrote in 1989, was "about to embark on the biggest assignment it ... ever faced". But it is not only this that makes the days of Stuttgart, Hannover and Gelsenkirchen an important period of his life. It is - as with the football team - also an end and a beginning. It is the last time that the lads, Eoin, Mick and Shane, will share their football enthusiasm. It is a farewell to youth, a coming to grips with life in Germany, with the prospect of a family in Hamburg.

What the lads on the pitch have done for him, and for all exiles (as an exiles' team) is to give him, a new sense of dignity, of respect and of self-esteem. Going through the experience of those three matches, Eoin seems able, for the first time in his life, to define his own identity, to redefine and relocate his sense of "Irishness". The scattered Ireland of the diaspora is transformed by the performance of a team they can fully identify with - the Irish diaspora paralleled in an international Irish football team!

It is after Gelsenkirchen, on the platform of Altona railway station in Hamburg, that we encounter Eoin, pausing and summing up a last time, making sense of his experience, before he can step on into a new future.