I’m sitting at a student intern desk in the Mayo County Council offices in Castlebar.  It’s August 1985, outside it’s cold, wet and windy; an alleged sighting of the sun down in Achill was investigated, and categorically disproven.  I’m keeping myself busy reading the newspaper, the headlines of which are frighteningly repetitive: Irish Steel and CIE (Irish Rail,) are yet again on the brink of bankruptcy; the IRA are threatening to kill someone, then before the newspaper ink is dry, the radio’s announced they’ve already done it; South Africa, under the apartheid government, is delving deeper into mayhem and violence; the Mayo football team – God help us! – have drawn an All Ireland semifinal, and there’s a photograph of fan holding banner that says; “Sam to Land at Knock” – even though that airport is months away from opening.  The only relief from this repetitiveness is a story questioning how two boys from Dublin, aged ten and thirteen, “could possibly have stowed away” on an Air India flight from London to New York, but writing off as the Irish-being-Irish, the fact that the same two young fellas waltzed onto the Aer Lingus, Dublin to London flight.  The importance to the County Council, the regional governmental body, of my consuming all this news is primarily in preventing me, a Civil Engineering student with modest (to be kind) exam results, from wreaking havoc on the vital infrastructure – roads, sewers, drains – of the great county of Mayo. 

I’d been at not-work now for a couple of weeks now.  The first day was by far the toughest, as I didn’t yet know the “System.”  Thus I sat at my desk, with a map book of the town-lands of Mayo – all three thousand, four hundred of these few hundred acre sized, geographical land divisions, peculiar to Ireland – the only thing for me to peruse.   Finally, around mid-afternoon, one of my office mates took pity on me, and let me read his, by then, thoroughly handled, crossword completed newspaper.  The next day, with concern for my mental health at the forefront, on the way to work I bought an Irish Times.  

Now, there’s a funny way we humans have of bunching together, no doubt a hangover from our tribal, if not herding, roots, based upon some distinguishing factor, but mostly upon our beliefs – be they real or imagined.  Ireland at this time was generally a homogenous, Catholic country, with a five percent Protestant minority, and virtually no immigrant population: Mayo, in this same timeframe, was overwhelmingly homogenous, with an even smaller Protestant minority.  The only break in our relentless homogeneity being three Indian fellas that showed up every Friday morning, selling shirts down in the Market Square – the “cheap shirt Pakis” as they were, confusingly, known.  In this environment of bleak homogeneity, in order to separate ourselves into manageable herds, we broke down along the lines of what newspaper we read.

My family was an Irish Press family, probably flowing off my maternal grandfather, who as a good Gael, cycled, every spring, through the obligatory wind and rain, from Leitrim to Dublin for the annual Congress of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), and took his daily dose of nationalism by reading De Valera’s newspaper.  Eamonn De Valera was the Irish nationalist leader of the early twentieth century with the keenest instincts for survival.  Using innovative financial maneuverings (that would make Wall Street smile today) he redeployed money that he had raised in 1920 to drive the mighty British Empire out of Ireland, to, a decade later, establish his own newspaper.  To give the Irish Press the unmistakable imprimatur as the dominant organ of Irish nationalism, De Valera had Margaret Pearse – the mother of Padraig Pearse; Ireland’s most famous nationalist hero, who had been summarily executed for his part in leading the 1916 Easter Rising – flip the switch, on September 5th, 1931, to start the first printing of the Irish Press.  By the 1980s the Press was maintaining a tersely informational tone on “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and otherwise reporting with great volubility on all things Irish; GAA sports, ploughing contests, Catholic pilgrimages.  

Competition for the Irish Press, came in the form of the Irish Independent.  This was a slightly older publication, that had, in its early days, taken some … let’s say … hard to back out of stances; such as throwing vehement support behind the Independent’s owner, as well as all business owners, in the infamous 1913 Dublin Lock Out which saw workers striking for such unreasonable demands as a twelve hour workday, down from the, then normal, seventeen hour work days; as well as the removal of paid workplace informants, who reported small, but finable transgressions by other employees.  Just a few years later, in 1916, the Independent bayed for the execution of the Easter Rising leaders, including Padraig Pearse … and De Valera, who narrowly escaped the firing squad.  Anyone picking up on the trend here?  

By the 1980s, the Independent had well established itself as the voice of the wealthy farming community – not a small constituency then – and the middle-classes repulsed by the excesses of violence in Northern Ireland.  It regularly tried to outgun (sorry, sorry, unfortunate metaphor, given the time period) the Press in the volubility of its coverage of all things Irish.

Somewhere else in the hazy political landscape of this era lay the Irish Times, a decidedly Anglo-Irish, pro-British, publication read primarily in the cities of Ireland by people who either were pro-British or fancied themselves well educated enough to be above the sniping (sorry, sorry!) with which the Press and Independent readers regularly engaged one another.  The problem for an entirely pissed-off-with-the-world, young man like myself was that the Times had clearly better journalism, with a broader world view (as in correspondents in locations other than London, Belfast, and the Vatican) and, more importantly, covered my favored sport, rugby, in depth.  

Many years before my brief stint with the County Council, I had one morning been sent down to a local newsagent to buy the Irish Times; which was publishing a series of exposés on the Gards’, the Irish police force, heavy handed tactics to combat IRA activity south of the border.  The newsagent – a woman who kept her finger on the pulse of everything happening in our town through her curt, but incisive, interrogations of every customer – looked aghast as I approached the counter with one of her only five Irish Times in my hand.

“The O’Farrells don’t read the Times,” she snapped.  “Run back there, and get yourself a Press.”

“No, today it’s the Times,” I counter-snapped.

“No, you can’t, there won’t be enough, there’s two doctors, two solicitors, and a dentist coming in for their Times, as they do every day.  There’ll be hell to pay if it’s not here for them!”

“I was told to buy this,” I dug in, with adolescent stubbornness.  “Are you refusing to sell it to me?”

“You can have it, ya brat, but I’m telling you, you won’t understand the half of it!”

With the newsprint-ice broken, procuring a copy of this fifty-percent inscrutable newspaper became increasingly less difficult: “The O’Farrells,” and eventually many other families, got added to the ever expanding list for whom the Irish Times was available for ready purchase.  By 1985, I could understand all of the news in the Times, and it was all, unfortunately, bad.

From about day three on of my non-work, I sat at my County Council desk, with the town-land map book covered first by the Irish Times, then by the Irish Press, then the Irish Independent.  As office mates, we had decided that little lasting harm could be done by our privately sharing with one another our newspapers – and thus our worlds.  Over that time, while carefully avoiding the wreaking of havoc on Mayo’s civil infrastructure, I read how Dire Straits had sold a million copies of their new LP in something called CD format?  The new American President, Reagan, and the new Soviet leader, Gorbachev, were planning another, time wasting, summit.  A few British scientists had discovered a hole in something called the ozone layer – so what?  Meanwhile, back in Ireland, there were statues moving in Ballinspittle, County Cork, with thousands coming to kneel pray-fully before them; Bob Geldof was still basking, languidly, in the success of Live Aid; traditionally vicious rioting occurring before, during and after the Orangemen’s parades all across Northern Ireland; where there were more bombings, more killings, more threats from everyone against everyone for everything – so, business as usual.  Thusly, we passed the wet, windy August days, with the afternoon’s closed out by each newspaper’s respective purchaser, scalp-scratchingly completing their paper’s crossword puzzle.

At some point the bureaucratic beast that was the Mayo County Council of the 1980s eventually woke to the fact that perhaps a strapping young fella should be doing more than getting paid to read three newspapers a day, and spend a few hours, generally unsuccessfully, completing the Time’s crossword.  For context, it’s worth noting that in this same timeframe Bord Na Mona (the Irish Peat Board: a semi-state company, charged with extracting value from Ireland’s peat bogs) took a group of its managers on a tour of the Soviet peat harvesting industry; upon which tour, they no doubt exchanged best business practices and drank excessive quantities of vodka.  Upon their return to the Emerald, Boggy, Isle, one member of the Irish team, responded to the question as to just how the Soviet Union functioned, with a snippy: “Well, it’s basically the Mayo County Council on a fucking enormous scale.”

In any case, the Politburo of this mini-Soviet Union saw fit to relocate me from my original non-work placement over to an office where there was actually some work to be done.  There I flourished, or at least was kept busy enough that the purchase of the daily newspaper was no longer necessary.  It turned out that I liked working, it was oddly rewarding to feel like one had accomplished something, no matter how small.  

One of my tasks at this new office was to create on a graphic map of Mayo’s roads that, by dint of the thickness of the line outlining the road, displayed how much traffic that road carried.  On this graphic, a less busy road, let’s say Geesala to Bunnahowen, would be a thickness of perhaps one or two millimeters; while a busier road, Westport to Castlebar, would be maybe fifteen millimeters.  The raw data for exactly how many millimeters to make each road was traffic counts completed a few months previously by paid contract workers.  These workers sat by the side of the road ticking off boxes on a form that denoted a vehicle travelling in either direction.  The only reason they didn’t use a tablet computer to do this, was that such devices were a couple of decades away from even getting invented.  Thus, clip-boarded forms, with tea copiously spilt from thermoses all over them, would do the job fine.

All was going well until I got to the traffic counts for what should have been one of the busiest roads in the county – the Castlebar to Dublin road.  There the contract employee had noted a staggeringly low count of ten cars across the whole day.  I checked with my supervisor, who just rolled his eyes and muttered something along the lines of; “thanks be to God, fellas like that usually feck off to England.”  

Lacking any further direction, I faithfully completed my task, with this one significant aberration on the graphic; where apparently many cars poured into Castlebar, but only a paltry few, ten to be exact, departed.  I left the graphic for my supervisor’s boss’ boss to comment on, if and when, he so chose.  We were, after all, big on bureaucracy.

Thereafter, things slowed down in the new office, and once again, I had to resort to bringing the Times to help pass the day.  Everyone seemed fine with that.  I’d read the paper, put it down when asked to do anything, and return to it when things slowed down again.  Others would occasionally bring their own paper or ask for a read of mine.  Then it got slower and I had days where I once again progressed all the way to crossword.  

One day, I’m sitting at my desk, scratching my scalp, working on the crossword, when my supervisor walks into the large shared office.

“Jaysus, you can’t be doing that!” he rushes over, a look of genuine concern on his face.

I scan for the room for what I shouldn’t be doing.

“That,” his index finger touches the black and white squares of the crossword, “is a recipe for disaster.  Come here, let me show you.  Bring that newspaper with you.”

We walk over to the photocopier.  He folds the Times such that the crossword fits on a letter sized page; hits the button; a prolonged flash of bright white moves along the folded newspaper.

“Now,” he says, a smile tugging his lips.  “Grab that sheet, and follow me.”

We return to my desk.  He carefully folds the newspaper, and puts it on the edge of the desk.

“You see,” he points his hands, palms up, toward the newspaper. “Ready for borrowing, if and when an otherwise overworked county council worker requires a quick catch-up of the day’s news.”

Then he carefully pushes aside the traffic-count paperwork mess still strewn across my desk, and places the photocopied crossword on the clear desktop in the middle of the mess.

“There you go now,” he nods sagaciously.  “They’ll all think you’re working, and if anyone approaches, you just slip it in under them traffic counts.”

I was in: I had the System fully decoded.

All progressed fine for a few days, with me working, reading, crosswording as dictated by the level of busyness in the office.  

Then one Wednesday, around three-ish, my supervisor sidles up to my desk; a distinctly uncomfortable look on his face; his eyes darting around the office.

“Eh, you’re eh, … wanted … eh, on the phone,” he nods toward the only phone in room; a massive, black, rotary dial device, with a handset so heavy, you could do curls with it.

“Me?” I start to get alarmed.  

It’s the subject for a whole other day, but in 1985 Ireland, phones were, due to the exorbitant costs charged to breath a word down a phone line, neither ubiquitous nor broadly used.  Thus someone actually knowing you were close enough to a phone, and then having the audacity to contact you on it, was a small bit scary.

“Yeah, it’s eh, … it’s the boss,” he raises his shoulders and eyebrows high.  “The big boss.”

He aims his index finger upward.

“Oh Jesus, is everything all right?”

“I dunno, you better answer him; he’s not a man that ever got used to waiting.”

“Yes sir, can I help you sir?” I start breathlessly into the phone, presuming obsequiousness was the best option in such a situation.

“So listen here, you’re the student fella right?” a cranky voice at the other end says.

“Yes sir.”

“Well, first of all, I saw that traffic volume graphic you did.  It’s not bad, fine, nearly good, except for the Castlebar Dublin Road.  For God’s sake man it’s illogical that a few hundred cars pour into the county town and never leave?  I mean, how could that happen?  Are they all above in Hoban’s carpark?”

“Eh, eh, … no sir, we just don’t have a good count for the … .”

“Well then just inter…pol…late young man.  Interpolate, I’m telling you.  That’s what this job is all about.  We get bad information piled upon bad information, and we have to somehow make it work.  Just thicken up the line so it looks sensible, and pay no heed to that bad traffic count.  The lad that done count that will head off to America someday, with nothing but a hole in his arse, and he’ll be back here twenty years later a millionaire, driving a bleddy Cadillac Corvette, and the rain pouring in on top of him.  But do you think our millionaire will put the roof down?  No way, because then we wouldn’t see his big stupid grin!  Anyways listen to me.”

He stops to take a breath.

I hold my breath, completely unsure of where this is going.

“While I have you on this instrument for converting acoustic energy into electric energy, let me ask you about a small unrelated matter.  In today’s Times’ crossword, twelve across is an annoyingly hard one.  The clue is: ‘The ‘something’ doctor, and it’s a seven letter word, is something, something, a three letter word and a four letter word, unable to complete the operation because … two letter word, five letter word.’  Now, what could that be at all, at all, at all?  ‘Tis a very strange clue.”

“Oh,” I finally take a breath, but now I’m unsure of whether this might be a trick to end my non-work career.   

“Well, I haven’t seen that,” I lie outrageously, having had a much smarter friend unravel that one for me at lunch.  “But just hearing it there for the first time, like, … well, I’m wondering if maybe it could be …, you know, just a wild guess like, but maybe the word is; notable.  You know n…o…t…a…b…l…e.”

“Let me see now,” the voice breathes out heavily into my ear.  “The ‘notable doctor was not … able to complete the operation because he had no …, good man, good man.  All right, that’ll be all now, get back to work.  And remember, interpolate!”