My mid-life crisis is in crisis, thanks to Michael Collins and the Pope

COINCIDENCE is God’s way of remaining anonymous. Still, I had an intriguing experience last week. I went with my nieces and nephews to see Riverdance at the Gaiety Theatre. We sat in a box (of which more later) and enjoyed the show. That night when I got home, I continued reading the book I had started a few days before: Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan, a dog-eared and frankly yellowing copy, previously owned by my late father that I found in some of his stuff I kept.

As I got to page 159 of Chapter 6 titled The Sky Darkens, it was the night of November 20, 1920 and Michael Collins himself — prior to the assassination of the so-called Cairo Gang, a group of British intelligence agents sent by the Empire to Dublin during the Irish War of Independence — had pitched up at “the Gaiety Theatre with a group which included David Neligan”.

Collins “happened to speculate as to what sort of men they were whom he had consigned to doom the next day”.

With that, Neligan, Collins’s self-proclaimed Spy in the Castle, told him to look into the next box at the Gaiety where he could see some of them for himself.

Thinking back on my own happy experience in the box at the Gaiety, I had some interesting dreams that night, I can tell you. I was haunted, too, by the way Tim Pat described some of Collins’s killers as “generally of religious sensibility”, indeed even quoting Charlie Dalton after “three or four men were lined up against a wall in the hall, some of our offers facing them.

“Knowing their fate, I felt great pity for them. It was plain they knew it too. As I crossed the threshold the volley was fired... the sights and sounds of that morning were to be with me for many days and nights... I remembered I had not been to Mass. I slipped out, and in the silence before the altar, I thought over our morning’s work and offered up a prayer for the dying.”

As a kid, I used to go to Confession in Milltown Church on Saturday evenings. To go into a darkened space and tell a complete stranger my innermost thoughts not only pre-dated my knowledge of Freud but also helped me with my guilt over breaking my little sister’s dolls. These days I don’t go to Confession any more when I want to assuage my guilt. I go to the pub instead and have a chat with myself over a pint.

I’m Catholic, so I don’t generally need a reason to feel guilty. It is just there sometimes, usually in the evening. Other good angstrelieving Catholic strategies include going into a church and lighting a candle. I usually go into the church off Grafton Street. Lighting a candle for someone who is no longer with us, or is ill, can be soothing for the head on occasion. It takes you out of yourself in a way that a pint of Guinness on your own may not, but both experiences can be just as spiritual.

I think my mid-life crisis is in crisis. Or maybe it’s the fact the summer seems to ending without the promise of an Indian summer. We were probably spoiled by the heatwave — lulled as a nation into a false belief that we are living in southern Spain and not a little island in the North Atlantic.

Still, for six weeks of summer we did have, everyone except me got a tan. I got sunburn and looked like a lobster in shorts.

At least, unlike other men in existential crisis, I have not tied my hair up in a bun, got a tattoo on my back, bought a sports car, or started to skateboard to work. The money I would save on public transport by skate-boarding to Talbot Street in Dublin’s inner city — I would fit right in on a skateboard next to all the hipsters and the heroin addicts — I could put towards getting my entire body tattooed. Until it comes to that, I can only hope to suck up the existential dread and come out the other side like all good Irish Catholics terrified of living but frightened to die.

Controversial American feminist and academic Camille Paglia recalls her first experience of Irish Catholicism as a teenager in Syracuse, New York State, with what she called “its tendency toward brooding guilt and ranting fanaticism”.

Paglia suspected that the nun who finally alienated her from the Catholic Church must have been Irish. She related the story of being in religious education class when she raised her hand with a question: If God is all-forgiving, will he ever forgive Satan?

The nun “turned beet red and began screaming at me in front of everyone. That was when I concluded there was no room in the Catholic Church of that time for an inquiring mind”.

Be that as it may, you might pose a follow-up question ahead of Pope Francis’s visit to Ireland next week: will the victims of clerical abuse — of which of there are so many examples and stories — ever forgive?

Maybe Francis might find it in his heart — even in his speech at Croke Park — to apologise. That would be a start.

But for whom?