Answering Ireland's call

I flew into Dublin last week. The Ryanair flight was a few minutes early for its landing slot and chose to circle in a leisurely fashion over the gentle, mottled countryside below. It gave me a moment to pause and reflect on a country to which I feel inextricably linked.

My grandfather left Galway City in the 1890's as a nine year old boy who had just lost his father and eldest brother. His mother, a brave and enterprising soul, had gathered together her remaining brood and embarked on a journey of renewal to Cape Town - inevitably via Dublin itself and Liverpool. On the strength of that ancestral connection, I carry an Irish passport - proudly and conveniently.

The very first time I was able to use this invaluable travel document, I was nineteen and determined to visit the land of my forefather. On a bitterly cold, foggy morning disembarking from the ferry at Dun Laoghaire, I was part of a crowd of some two hundred day trippers who were confronted by a lone Irish immigration official sheltered alongside a brazier in a wooden quayside hut warming his hands on a mug. He poked a scarf-embalmed head out of his nest and peered at the advancing horde. It was definitely not a day for stepping outside and checking travel documents one by one. He waved one mittened hand.

'All you's with an Irish passport can carry on straight.'

The surge of freezing bodies hesitated but momentarily and then swept past him towards the promise of on-shore warmth. I was left holding my brand new, green, harp-adorned passport, uninspected and with a sense of betrayal - my moment of triumphal homecoming snatched from me by one man's pragmatic defiance of the elements.

I trod on Irish soil for the first time, unchallenged but also somehow unbaptised.

As I gazed down from my bargain seat on the ordered fields and hedgerows of the Pale, I remembered that first visit some forty years previously and my youthful awe at the power of lore and legend in Ireland. Apart from conferring on me the infinite gift of travel, my Irish passport had, over the years, given me a sense of identity, of connection with a tradition of literary giants - a largely unexplored causeway to world of Celtic faith and fealty.

The airline announcements crackled across my romantic, fanciful reflections. Within moments I was being processed through a modern airport portal, subject to a perfunctory passport check and bundled out into the milky light of a mild Dublin morning. Welcome home.

The world is round

I was on a flight from Manchester, UK to Atlanta on the day that the USA were playing Portugal in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. On the tiny screen jiggling around irritatingly on the seatback in front of me, I was following the game. USA scored and went ahead and all around me the whole plane erupted with cheers. Suddenly I realised that I was surrounded by American ‘soccer’ fans following the game as passionately as any in Manchester itself.

I began to compare notes with my neighbour who turned out to be an ex-US Army colonel who had then embarked on second career with a major oil and gas company. He was clearly a sports nut – it hardly takes one to recognise another.

‘C’mon,’ the colonel muttered to his players from 30 000 feet, ‘stay on offense.’

‘Attack,’ I correctly him mildly, ‘in football we say ‘attack’.’

‘Same difference, buddy, our wide receiver is playing for too deep.’ I peered at my bouncing screen. He had a point. Maybe he didn’t need my help understanding the beautiful game.

By the time Portugal had levelled the game 2-2 and we had both ripped off our headsets in disappointment, we could agree that the game provided us, if not with an exactly common language, then certainly a very useful set of shared metaphors. We quickly got into how the role of a sports coach differs subtly from code to code around the world and yet how fluidly the lessons of any successful coaching seem to apply in running a business.

I told him of a colleague of mine who had once opened a corporate training workshop in Saudi Arabia by asking who supported Manchester United. Half the room cheered wildly and the other half booed equally spontaneously. From there on a potentially tricky workshop simply hummed along. Football had provided us with a sure kick-off in the unlikeliest of arenas.

He told me all about his final football game for the Army and a never to be forgotten touchdown. I got it in a heartbeat. Sport can so easily be the container for our most precious memories.

Throughout the current World Cup I have heard American sports fans using the rich and expressive language of their own embedded sports vocabulary to help analyse their ‘roundball’ team’s strengths and weaknesses. They should be playing ‘man-to-man defense’ not ‘zone’. Their ‘playmaker’ is killing us ‘box-to-box’. Look at that great ‘pick-and-roll’ get right round the ‘perimeter D’. And so on right down to the agonising wire of those last minutes against Belgium – a state about the size of Maryland for crying in a bucket. In all sports there is the exquisite agony of heroic failure.

In the next two weeks this visceral pain will be felt in seven different countries from all around the globe. One winning population will bask gloriously in the fleeting euphoria of victory and then wake to a world that has rapidly moved on. However, what every sports glued to the World Cup will share is a renewed sense that great emotional well spring of globalisation, ‘we are all connected, we are all in this together.’  

The Prince

I met a prince yesterday. Not a royal one as it happens - more self-made. Geoff Prince is his name although it is his will to work rather than his surname that marks him out. 'Will to Work' is the charitable trust that Geoff has built which offers anybody in his town the opportunity to do an afternoon of carpentry, painting, sewing, fiddling with electrics or even just pottering about making tea in his community workshop - on one condition - you need to be 'feeling a bit poorly' as Geoff puts it.

His business model (not a term that Geoff bothers with much) is based on the fact that every day somebody clears out an old draw, cupboard or garage full of useful tools and materials that somebody else no longer needs. Will to Work accepts these items as donations and puts them back to work in Geoff's workshop housed in an old school building right alongside the town's health centre - with its handy rows of disabled parking spaces. Sensible doctors have begun to prescribe an afternoon's occupational therapy for many of their patients with a range of conditions which might be making them 'feel a bit poorly'. And from there good-hearted volunteers, donations, referrals, grants, goodwill and word of mouth does the rest. Oh, and endless shifts of time and love and tea put in by Geoff, his wife and their small core team.

Now I have designed and led and run hundreds of workshops myself. Most of them end up looking like an explosion in a Post-It factory with scribbled flip charts scattered everywhere and a tired facilitator gathering up evaluation forms - or 'happy sheets' as they are known in my trade. The Will to Work workshop doesn't do happy sheets - it just does happiness instead. And proves that every man can be a prince.