The Thing is…

My dad worked for the Board of Works in their office on Stephen’s Green for forty-seven years. He was a senior civil servant and he was involved with the preservation of state buildings and monuments around Ireland. Once he had to organise the unveiling of a statue of Thomas Davis, the legendary Irish freedom fighter, at Trinity College. The Irish president was to unveil it and our family joke was that if the president keeled over with a heart attack on the day, it would be Dad whipping the cloth off.

I guess my dad was pretty old school, as you’d expect from a man born at the start of the century. He liked – although he never demanded – his tea on the table every night and he never boiled an egg in his life, but he was so laid-back that you could only have a good relationship with him. We all called him Barney, and his easygoing nature was one reason I was able to live at home for so long.

He had an old white Ford car with Al Capone-style boards at either door. There were many cold mornings that it wouldn’t start and my dad would take the gas heater from the kitchen, stick it by the front grille and try to start the engine by cranking it up with one of those Victorian-looking iron-bar contraptions. As I recall it, he usually gave up and took the 64 or 46A bus into town, then walked through Stephen’s Green.

I don’t remember my dad ever missing a day’s work – a trait I have inherited, as I’ve never had one day sick in my thirty years at RTÉ. Every evening he would bring home reports and memos and read weighty Dáil parliamentary reports as we shared a table. He would help me out as I struggled with my homework. This was a good system, as Maths was his forte and, quite frankly, it never was mine and never will be.

On Sundays my dad would often take me up to Phoenix Park. He knew the caretaker there, a man called Mr Barry, who lived in a gorgeous house that always had a big roaring log fire going. Mr Barry was a happy-go-lucky guy who looked like Santa Claus, and we’d collect chestnuts from the park. They came in handy for conkers at school. Not that I played it much. I always thought it was a daft game and preferred marbles.

Nothing ever fazed my dad and I don’t think I ever argued with him about anything – except for Christmas Day Top of the Pops, but we’ll come to that later. But if he was at heart a quiet and retiring soul, my mum, Annie, was anything but. She was everything in our house, the matriarch and the patriarch, and I can safely say that she was the most inspiring person that I have met in my entire life.

Everything in the house went through my mum. She was just an astonishing woman. She loved being at the heart of the hustle and bustle of a big family and always welcomed any friends we brought round, whatever time of the day or night it was. She was tall and slim and beautiful and somehow always well-turned-out. I’ve no idea how she found the time.

Annie was fun and she was gregarious. She’d have these phone conversations that lasted for hours, and then whenever people called round, she would sit in the kitchen holding court. Locally, she was well known for doing that – and for her homemade biscuits that she dispensed to all-comers. There are probably still people in Dublin who drool like Pavlov’s dogs at the phrase ‘Annie’s cookies’.

For my family, money was fairly tight, but my mum was so skilled at budgeting and making do that I don’t remember ever having to really go without. Annie cut our cloth well and knew how to count pennies without making a meal of it. She would do her weekly grocery shop in one supermarket, then think nothing of crossing a busy road to go to a different store a few hundred yards down the road just because the butter was five pence cheaper there.

My mum was a voracious reader. She belonged to two libraries, the Royal Dublin Society and the Pembroke, and I am certain she was the best customer in both of them. She always had three or four books on the go at once – I can still picture them now, stacked up in a little pile on top of the radiator. Each of them invariably had one page with the top right-hand corner turned down, to remind her how far she’d got.

When she wasn’t reading, Annie was usually writing. She would sit down at her desk, take out her pad of Basildon Bond and compose these twenty-page letters to her friends. She had a lot of correspondents, but top of the list was Mrs Rohan, her lifelong friend who owned a chemist shop in Cork.

A lady called Mrs Mooney, known to me as Moo, came and helped my mum out a few times a week with whatever needed doing around the house. Because I was the youngest, she also looked after me and sometimes took me to her house, a lovely flower-covered cottage straight out of Beatrix Potter, opposite the Terisian school on the Stillorgan Road that is now the site of RTÉ’s admin building.

Moo’s husband, Mick, was the chief groundsman there. RTÉ – there was actually no ‘T’ in it at the time, as Ireland still didn’t have television – was moving from Henry Street in the centre of Dublin to its current location and the masts were going up ready for the launch of TV. It’s ironic that I spent so much time there when I was young, given how interwoven my life has since been with RTÉ.

My mum was a very religious woman. While, like most others, I was a good little Catholic boy, by the time I reached my later teens I had actively decided against the Church, but she never made it an issue between us. She just followed her own lights, which in her case meant walking to Mass every single morning for thirty-seven years. I guess it must have rubbed off on me a little in my impressionable early youth, because I spent a number of years as an altar boy in Mount Merrion Church.

I will never forget the trauma of my first day at school. It was such an intimidating experience. I remember standing inside the door of Mount Merrion National School, holding my mother’s hand, and staring in horror at scenes of bedlam. There were so many kids running around and screaming and throwing things, and I just wanted to turn around and run away back home.

Your first school day is extraordinary. I don’t remember one thing about being in the classroom, but I will never forget the chaos of the playground and cloakroom, with all the coats chucked on top of each other. I grew to not mind the school but it’s all a bit of a blur now, except for a couple of the teachers: Mrs O’Callaghan, who lived on our road, and Mrs Hughes. She was all about joined-up writing and I never took to her: she just seemed so very, very old and, more pertinently, old-fashioned.

I rubbed along OK at Mount Merrion School until the age of seven, then the next year it became girls-only, so I had to move on to Kilmacud National School, which was a mile further down the road. Again, what I remember most was the first day – or rather the first week, which must have been once of the worst weeks of my life.

After Mount Merrion, Kilmacud seemed pretty rough. It also looked it. As we waited for a new school to be built at the corner of the Upper and Lower Kilmacud Roads, the classes were held in makeshift prefabs where the Stillorgan Bowling Alley now stands. Soon after they built a shopping centre across the road from it, the first mall in Ireland, and it was considered such a big deal that we were all given a day off to celebrate.

I had thought break times at Mount Merrion School were mad; at Kilmacud it was Armageddon. At lunch break there would be hundreds of kids charging around the yard playing football, smashing into walls or lamping the ball as hard as they could and not caring who it hit or who they hit. Or there would be piggyback fights where you threw punches and tried to push the other guy off his mate’s back. This all happened on concrete: Health & Safety wasn’t such a major concern in those days.

There would always be two teachers patrolling the ground with their hands behind their backs, talking to each other, and every now and then shouting someone’s surname to make it look as if they were in charge. I don’t think I was a particularly delicate child but I really wasn’t into the massive rough-and-tumble and horseplay, so mainly I just tried to stay out of the way.

After the first week, as I grew used to the daily casual violence of the playground, I did OK at Kilmacud. That was the story of my whole academic career: OK. I wasn’t particularly good, bad or indifferent. The only subject I really did well in was English. A typical exercise came when our English teacher asked us to write a four-page essay and I wrote nine pages, which I ended up reading in front of the class. I was mad for James Bond, so my story was all about me being a spy and escaping the enemy by having a bomb hidden in a button in my coat, and pulling it off and throwing it at them. Stupid stuff, really, but it’s still amazing to me how, two generations on, 9-year-old boys still love James Bond.

In terms of discipline, I was fine in school: I never gave teachers a hard time and I always did my homework. This didn’t always protect you though. There was a definite downside to being in school in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s; while I didn’t suffer anything like the horrors of the poor kids who got abused or beaten in Church and industrial schools, there were some bad moments. Children being hit and caned in class was accepted – that was just how it was back then.

As I said, I was never great at Maths but I always did my best. In one lesson though, I dropped a howler. The teacher – and I don’t think I’ll shame him by saying his name, although it’s a close decision – had given us all a textbook with about a hundred pages in it, and on every page there were ten or twenty mental arithmetic questions. Every day he would give us a page of the book as homework, then the next day we had to tell him the answers we had worked out.

One day in class, the teacher started examining us on the sums we should have done the night before and said, ‘OK, let’s hear your answers to page 78.’ Disaster! I had done page 79. I must have had a brainstorm and written down the wrong page number. I thought I might as well come clean so I put my hand up and said, ‘Sorry, sir, but I did the wrong page.’

The teacher just lost it. He went absolutely mad. He pulled me out of my seat and got physical with me, shoving me around the room and screaming in my face, ‘Fanning! I TOLD you it was page bloody 78!’ Everybody in the class went quiet, because they knew it could just as easily be them the next time – this probably happened about three times per week.

Even today, thinking back, I’m staggered at the madness and inhumanity of it all. This grown man, a trained professional, was belittling and ridiculing me, psychologically and physically bullying me for no reason at all other than I had made an innocent mistake! How could a teacher think it was OK to treat a basically blameless child in this way, and did he really think it was educative?

For weeks afterwards, I relived that scene in my mind and fantasised over what I would have liked to do to him. In my imagination, I answered him with a string of cutting, Oscar Wilde-style bon mots and told him to take out his frustrations on some other poor victim, not on me. I picked up his cane, snapped it over my knee, told him, ‘If you need this to be a teacher, then get another job,’ picked up my bag, and strode manfully out of the classroom. Of course, the reality was I did what any other terrified 10-year-old would have done: cowered, stayed silent and then slunk back to my seat.

Another time, I was caned for mixing up two words when I recited the Catechism – a question-and-answer book with simple illustrations that we had to learn off by heart. There were no ambiguities, no grey areas: you either knew the answers word-perfect or you were in big trouble. The Catechism started off:

Who made the world?God made the world.Who is God?God is our Father in Heaven, the creator of all things.

Then there was some pretty odd stuff about God the Father, God the Son and the third member of the Holy Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, at which point it got really weird. When I accidentally said two words the wrong way round, the meaning of what I had said was 100 per cent the same, yet still I was caned for my mistake.

I never told my mum and dad about incidents like these, and to be honest, although they were loving parents, I think they would have just shrugged if I had. That was how things were back then. You had no choice but to deal with it.

Television had launched in Ireland in the early 1960s and one of the big programmes was Tolka Row, our weekly soap opera. An early series ended with a cliff-hanger as Sean, the decent but rebellious son played by Jim Bartley, crashed his car and sat motionless in the driver’s seat as the credits rolled. They filmed the scene at the top of Foster Avenue, about a hundred yards from my house, and hordes of us excited kids swarmed over the set all day.

On another occasion, they filmed an ad for crisps at the 64A bus stop by our house. A man crunched into a crisp and suddenly a bowler hat-wearing, brolly-carrying businessman who had been walking past him was clinging to the top of the bus stop. The idea was that the crisps were that crispy the noise had frightened the guy and propelled him skywards, but nobody making the ad seemed to be having fun and the actor spat the crisps out as soon as he heard the word ‘Cut!’ I saw the ad on TV months later. It looked really stupid.

When I turned 11, it came time to leave Kilmacud and start secondary school. John, Peter and Dermot had gone to Oatlands School, which was run by the Christian Brothers, but my mum had decided the education there was barbaric so Gerard and I were packed off to Blackrock College, another mile down the road from Kilmacud.

That was typical of Annie. She was absolutely determined that all of her children would get a good education, and it is to her credit that nearly all of us eventually went on to get a college degree. John and Peter were the first to head off to University College Dublin. John later went to London to work in advertising, then came back to McConnell’s, which became Ireland’s largest marketing communications business. In later years, he became chairman of McConnell’s Advertising, adjunct professor of marketing at Trinity College, a non-executive director of the Irish Times and, for a while, a board member of the Abbey Theatre. He’s an expert on branding and in 2006 wrote a very well-received book, The Importance of Being Branded. Having also written a doctoral thesis, he is now Dr Fanning.

Peter and I had occasional rows as boys but mostly got on just fine. He now lives in Canada, where he has taught English in Vancouver for the last twenty-five years. My next brother, Gerard, has always been huge into literature and has published four books of poetry to date. There was sometimes a degree of one-upmanship between him and John. One family Christmas, Gerard proudly produced a not-yet-published anthology of new Seamus Heaney poems – then John trumped him by flourishing a signed version of the same book!

As for me, I have never bought into the cliché that your schooldays are the best days of your life but I had a fantastic time at Blackrock. It is the best-known rugby school in Ireland, with alumni including Brian O’Driscoll, Luke Fitzgerald, Leo Cullen and Bob Casey, but neither Gerard nor I ever played rugby or were put under any pressure to do so, for which I remain hugely grateful.

Gerard was two years ahead of me at Blackrock and spent five years in the same class as a lanky kid called Bob Geldof with a mass of bouffant hair and an intense manner. Geldof always stood out a little: he just looked different from everybody else, and was the first boy around our way to ride a BMX bike. He and Gerard were mates and one year they went off to England together to do a summer holiday job shelling peas at a factory in Peterborough.

Academically, I again did OK at Blackrock while never setting the world alight. There were five graded classes, from A to E, and I was happy to be in B for a few but mostly in C, which was where I felt I belonged. I didn’t struggle but nor was I in the academic A-league.

Actually, this may be just my self-serving twist on things, but I’m glad that I was middling as a student. There are definitely downsides to being an academic over-achiever. Just last year I watched a documentary about prodigies who went on University Challenge years ago, and most of them seem to be fucked-up and crazy nowadays. You wouldn’t want to be one of them: the cleverest of all was drinking nine pints every day. At least that is one life I managed to escape by not being too brainy.

I was even happier in Class C because my two best friends were also there, middle-achievers like me. They were called Jerry Coyle and Mel Reilly, and throughout our teenage years at Blackrock, and beyond, the three of us were inseparable. We hung out together every day, and, remarkable as it may seem, forty years on Jerry and Mel remain my two best friends in the world.

I met Jerry on my very first day in Blackrock. He told me he lived in Mount Merrion at 42 Wilson Road, right round the corner from my house in Foster Avenue. I scornfully took him to task and explained he was mistaken: ‘That’s ridiculous, I know everybody on Wilson Road, and I don’t know you!’ I even reeled off a list of people I knew on the street, but he stuck to his story.

After school we walked home together and I still thought he was having me on. When he walked up the path of No. 42 and rang the bell I expected him to run away, but his mother answered the bell and asked him how his first day had gone. I couldn’t believe I had lived so close to the guy my whole life and never noticed him. We then made up for it by being virtually inseparable for the next twenty years, until he emigrated to America.

Mel Reilly came to Blackrock a year later than Gerry and me when he transferred from the college’s junior school called Willow Park. He lived in a huge house on Cross Avenue and was the oldest of five boys. Mel is now a teacher in Dundrum and even today there is hardly a day goes by that I don’t hook up with him.

Jerry and Mel weren’t much into football yet that was what occupied most of our spare time in a jumpers-for-goalposts kind of way. Sometimes we would play on the hockey pitches at Belfield, over the road from us at University College Dublin, or in the car park of the Stella cinema, despite the fact that it was a steep slope.

Mostly, though, we would play three-and-in on Foster Avenue itself. The gateway of my friend Gary Byrne’s house served as perfect goalposts. For a more elaborate and arguably somewhat grisly ball game called ‘Sick, dying and dead’ we used a wall on Owenstown Park at the entrance to UCD. Nowadays Foster Avenue is one long car park, but back then it saw hardly any traffic. After the game we would sit by Teevan’s newsagent and eat Cowboy bars and drink Kool Pops or, if we had a little more money to spare, lavish 2d on a Trigger, a Flash bar or, the tastiest of them all, a Macaroon bar.

Dermot Morgan would sometimes join in our kick-abouts. He lived five doors down from Jerry on Wilson Road and in later life starred as Father Ted on TV. Dermot was a couple of years older than us and was in my brother Gerard’s class. We used to call him Morgan the Mighty after the character in the comics.

Dermot wasn’t the best footballer in the world and nor was his dad, Darragh, with his massive shock of white hair. Darragh would join us after he had finished work and was a bit of a character. He would charge around like mad kicking the ball for half an hour and then retire, absolutely bollocksed. I never hung around with Dermot, but by the time I went to UCD a few years later he was doing lunchtime sketch shows in the Arts building theatre to over a hundred people and trying to get on to TV. He was very funny; I never knew he had it in him.

In my pre-teen years, various friends came round to my house all the time and my parents always made them welcome. On Wednesday afternoons, when we were off school, we’d pull out both leaves of the dining-room table and play table football: the great Subbuteo.

We would take Subbuteo massively seriously. We had quite a primitive version and the players didn’t have 3D facial features or even arms or legs, they were just lumps of plastic on a round base, but that didn’t bother us. We were very strict on flicking the pieces only, no scooping. If we scored a goal, we’d run around the room: our celebrations were even more pathetic than the Premier League players today.