A few good men lifting spirits in an ocean of badness

‘Spitfire Paddy’ kept the flag flying for the human race last week, writes Declan Lynch

MAYBE it was deliberate, probably it was just an accident — but there seemed to be an unusually high number of good men on TV last week. And I’m not even counting the tributes to John Hume. Okay, there were three or four of them, including John Hume, and some of them were good men who had done bad things... but still, it’s better than nothing, which is what we’re accustomed to these days, in terms of goodness and badness.

Bad men have been ruling our screens for a long time now, men who are so bad they can’t even be bothered hiding their badness — and by a terrible accident of history, many of them seem to be the elected or unelected leaders of once-great nations.

But then last week there was Spitfire Paddy, a documentary originally shown in 2017, and shown again last week on RTE1 as if someone, somewhere, decided that we needed just one hour in the company of one hell of a great guy.

Because that is what Brendan Fitzsimons was — this Battle of Britain ace originally from Rathmines, who was ‘Paddy’ to his comrades, and who brought down so many German planes he was the subject of newspaper features specifically about him. Given the amount of Messerschmitts and Fockers that were generally being downed at that time, ‘Paddy’ was clearly some operator.

Naturally when he wasn’t defeating Hitler, he was a modest and likeable individual, and astoundingly was only 21 when he was killed over the English Channel, somewhere off the coast of France.

You could say that ‘Paddy’ was doing this for all of us who go by the name of Paddy, because of course

Ireland was ‘neutral’ in that conflict — though the great Irish airman tried to compensate for this by having a shamrock painted onto the side of his Spitfire.

And indeed, many of us in this country were taught from an early age that this neutrality was inherently a good thing — which is astounding in itself, this theory that the morally correct position towards the Third Reich was to have no position at all.

Still, when there’s a war going on, there are times when nobody knows where they are. Once Upon

A Time In Iraq is an excellent BBC series which uses the stories of individuals to give some sense of the catastrophes visited upon that country, during that time when it was supposedly being transformed into a Saddam-free democracy.

Last week’s episode was partly about lieutenant-colonel Nathan Sassaman, once regarded as a grade-A individual in every way, a man seemingly with the best of intentions — and yet in the chaos of Iraq, his own descent into darkness seemed to reflect the overall trajectory of that whole abysmal project.

Essentially ,in a short space of time, he and his fellow Americans who had arrived as the good guys were regarded as being worse even than the bad guys they had replaced. Sassaman, gifted as he was, turned out to be no better than anyone else in a position of authority, amid the insane stupidity of it all. Maybe this would have happened to ‘Paddy’ too, if he had flown one too many missions. Maybe he’d have turned out like Sassaman, talking mainly about trauma that he suffered and that he inflicted.

But at least such people tried to do the right things, for a while, which these days is a rare enough thing to encounter in a night’s viewing.

Jurgen Klopp has no other mission, it seems, than to do the right thing. And he has won his particular war — at least until the next one starts in a few weeks’ time with the resumption of the Premier League. In Germany’s Greatest Export on Channel 4, it was confirmed that Klopp’s role in our world is not just to manage a football team very well, but to demonstrate that there is actually a kind of leadership which does not embrace evil as its best buddy.

And it confirmed that Germany can indeed produce people who are as good in their own way as Spitfire Paddy himself, once you get to know them.

Perhaps the most striking images were those of Klopp’s early days as a struggling professional footballer with Mainz, when he appeared as a contestant on some ridiculous TV game show; clearly he must have suspected that he had some sort of charisma, but you also got the feeling that he just desperately needed the money. Or needed something at any rate that was much better than what he was doing.

And like ‘Paddy’, the success of Klopp tells us there is wisdom in the old Jewish saying that “greatness can come from anywhere”. It can come from Mainz, it can even come from Rathmines. It can come, and it can go.

‘Many of us were taught the astounding theory that the morally correct position towards the Third Reich was to have no position at all...’