A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It takes a bit of adjusting to accept that 1988 – when Ray Houghton, for example, put the ball in the back of the English net – is as far away from today as 1988 was from 1954 then, as the world was still only really getting back on its feet after the Second World War.

In other words, the exploits of Euro ’88 and a great day in Gelsenkirchen, still fresh in the minds of our fifty-plus generation, is as far into the distant past as the Roger Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile is to the twentysomethings of today.

It was also the year that marked the end of McCarthyism in the US, when Senator Joe’s ‘communist’ witch-hunt – destroying the lives of so many high profile public figures who could be described as a little liberal at best – was finally pulled into dry dock.

In fairness, McCarthyism has always seemed like ancient history, and we’ve only ever seen Bannister’s achievement through grainy black and white footage – ignoring the fact that our parents had lived through it.

The juxtaposition of personal experience and third-party history rose its head in a different context recently when the latest – and much-pilloried – series of the Crown hit Netflix.

To describe the makers’ approach to history as loose would be an understatement; fact offers little more than a backdrop to the vivid minds of writers who have come up with nothing more than a Royal version of a soap opera.

They got away with that when they were dealing with the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, but this time they were dealing with a history most of us lived through, most notably the death of Diana in 1997.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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