One of the earliest memories I have is of being allowed to sit up with my Da one night in 1982 to watch Alex “The Hurricane” Higgins win his second and unbelievably his last World Snooker Title. I clearly recall my Da and I sitting on the edge of my bed rooted to the screen as the, even then, sleight figure of Higgins twitched and bewildered his way to glory.

Higgins was my hero on the green baize in the same way George Best was mine on the green turf. I’d spend hours on both playing their finest moments over and over, a running commentary in my mind for company. Studies suffered but the imagination (and for a while, my talents) prospered.

Both men came from a different religious tradition to my own. Both were products of the city, I of the rolling country around. Both were flamboyant and self assured, I was shy and uncertain. Both had an eye for a good time and a beautiful woman, I lived in hope.

I saw both play in the flesh strangely. Best in 1983, in a “pay to play” game for Tobermore United vs Ballymena United in the Irish Cup. They lost 8-1. Best was incongruous (tanned, shaggy haired, unmuddied) and anonymous throughout. It was exciting but it was never the same again for me. Higgins I saw in an exhibition series in Belfast when his decline had also already taken hold. The sparks were there but the fire had long gone out.

As someone once wrote: “Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth”.

While it is hard for us to watch our heroes unravel before our eyes, it must have been harder still for them. Both achieved so much, they each changed their sports and how we understood them to be played. Yet they must have known that they could have achieved so much more.

The long decline is something we must all come to terms with. But for some, there is much further to fall. To live out a life once the talent that defined it entirely has begun to fade must be a cruel thing. The subsequent frustrations of that decay and the ill health brought on by the addictions of high celebrity (and no doubt a particularly N Irish penchant for excessive indulgence) an added ignominy to be played out in the public domain. This is not to excuse the worst of their behaviour – Higgins in particular left his hero status at the door when the cue was set down as far as I was concerned.

Bust still, it is with a real sadness, and a certain relief, that yesterday Alex Higgins packed his cue for the green baize of the next life. The very real emotional and physical damage he had suffered of late had left him a mere shadow of the twinkle eyed genius who’d kept so many of us entertained for so long. It was hard to see that play out, to see a hero reduced by the confines of mere mortality. However, if accounts of his final days are to be believed then it may be a merciful conclusion.

Like Best, Alex Higgins was a NI working class hero. He upset a few, was reviled by some but loved and cherished by so many many more for what he did for his sport. For anyone who was alive to see Higgins in his pomp you will understand what I mean when I say that sport lost one of it’s true, unabated, unbowed and unabashed genius’ yesterday.

Higgins is once quoted as saying after one of his many career knock-backs: “I’m a realist. And me being a realist…I’ll be back”. Not this time Alex. But you’ll be missed. And never forgotten by many, not least by the young man who sat sleepy eyed with his father on the edge of his bed 28 years ago and knew he’d seen something very special, something untamed, something true, something fleeting, something flawed.

A bit like life itself.

Oíche mhaith, codladh sámh. Síochán leat.

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Posted in response to Eamonn Mallie’s piece on www.sluggerotoole.com re David Cameron’s comments on the size of NI’s Public Sector last Friday.

Eammon has this spot on. The analysis was right, the language and timing were naive and amateurish at best.

 I’ll never vote Tory but Cameron is absolutely right in his ultimate assessment that NI must grow it’s Private Sector and reduce our over reliance on the Public Sector. We have an unhealthy imbalance and without a stimulus in the private sector – particularly in attracting a range of jobs which pay in line with and above average Public Sector jobs we are incredibly vulnerable and have been for some time to Public Sector cuts and also any increase in interest rates (likely in the next parliament) which will hit many of our overstretched “property boom” keyholders. I wonder how many interest only mortgages there are in NI held by people borrowing multiples greater than 3 against public sector wages likely to be capped/frozen in the next parliament? 

All our politicians know this is a fact. Many are on record re this in the past. The executive is on record as agreeing with Camerons sentiments on Private Sector growth – the 2009 IREP report recognised it. Many commentators and the occasional blogger like myself have been suggesting for some time that this was the real elephant in the room (http://www.shanepcarmichael.com/2010/01/a-new-vanguard/) while the Executive stalled and bickered over scraps from the sectarian table. An inclusive, burgeoning private sector economy supplementing our proud Public Sector makes sense not just economically but socially and politically – any post conflict society analysis tells us that employment and it’s associated benefits has one of the biggest impacts on the process of “normalisation”. University of Ulster recently published a report telling us we probably already knew – that young people with limited job or development opportunities are more likely to engage in anti social behaviour (including political and racial violence). 

And yet our representatives on the hill have spent the last few years doing exactly what about this? Think of the time wasted while Stormont has been suspended or in sectarian stand off mode when they could have been addressing this issue given anyone with any secular political nous knew it was coming. And maybe that lack of secular nous is at the heart of this. 

 In spite of a rational if poorly executed SDLP call for a revised NI budget last year to reflect the realities of an economy in freefall nothing happened and an opportunity to stimulate a flagging economy was lost. 

More alarmingly, at a public event in Westminster before Xmas i asked a senior political NI figure (vying now for a Westminster seat and to whose political views I am broadly aligned) what he thought of IREP and his views on developing our private sector given the chances of public sector cuts in the next parliament. His response not only suggested he had barely read IREP but he actually went on to say that he “had no time for these multi national corporations coming in for a few years and then swanning off to Singapore or wherever they get a better deal. The future of our economy has to be the 1-2 person family business…”!! Seriously – you couldn’t make it up, particularly as it came 2 weeks after the great news of NYSEs support centre investment and the audience that night contained at least one potential investor from a financial MNC. It’s just an isolated example but part of a larger failure –  Politicians like that should be vilified far more than Cameron on this issue. This problem has not been addressed on their watch.

But here’s the immediate and rather sad reality for Cameron and the Tory/UU alliance. In spite of the fact all other parties agree in principle with what Cameron says, in spite of the fact they are responsible for allowing the situation to develop, all of them have the good sense to know the timing and turn of phrase he used was an act of political naivety at best and suicide at worst. It not only brings into question the nature of the Tory/UU partnership but also his own political judgement.

The scent of blood (and cuts) is in the air. In a more mature political society Cameron may have been lauded for his honesty and it might even have triggered the long overdue advent of a more secular political debate on the issue at hand. It is badly needed –  anyone who thinks a simple cut in corporation tax is the answer to our problems is surely mistaken. It’s a much more complex consideration and needs early attention. But that’s a separate debate.    

Unfortunately it won’t happen now in the mouth of an election – as Cameron should have known. And it might turn out to be a debate shaped by others than the Tory/DUP alliance, for in politics, perhaps more than anywhere else, “to the victor the spoils” and as Helmut Kohl once said: “You don’t win elections by putting the weapons of torture on display”.    

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Beautiful images of another Ireland. Hard to believe how relatively recently some of these images were captured and a timely reminder of the many changes – some good, some not so good – that we have witnessed on our island in the last 30 years.

The book is sensational.

I meant to comment on this last month but travel kept me away from the PC:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article7026852.ece

This was a fascinating article on February’s Sutton Trust Report and I was actually genuinely delighted to see an echo of a  few of my suggestions made back in October 2009 in a article on the long running post Primary School selection process in Northern Ireland:

http://www.shanepcarmichael.com/2009/11/selection-its-only-natural/   

(check under “some humble suggestions”)

More and more we are coming to understand that education is a sophisticated and much more social process than any narrow debate in NI about post primary education selection or means of selection would have us believe. Consistently on this blog I have maintained that while some form of streaming or selection is a must in any mature and inclusive education system, our real focus should be on primary education; on ensuring our administration of that education is innovative and inclusive enough to support pupils from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and encouraging an ethos of and commitment to  ”concerted cultivation” of our young children among parents and local communities.  We are currently failing our young people during their most formative years.

NI has wasted over a year wrangling on the narrow issue of post primary selection. It’s time someone started to address the more fundamental – and root cause – issues associated with Primary Education,othewse the means of post Primary selection will be entirely a moot point.  There are some easy ‘quick win’ fixes to this challenge as I and the Sutton Report suggest while we understand how to cultivate that wider community and parental ability to cntribute to the life-long success of our most precious resources 

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