Poor PJ: In a week when interesting men were busy disappearing, he left in good company. No feeble attempts at spurious claims of being Irish -"And tell me this, I believe Bowie's mother was from Waterford" asked one radio presenter, as if pushing the boundaries of gender politics and identity as well as innovating pop music could only come from one of the Deise.
Mara was 100% Irish and played his role of urbane bon viveur as well as he did that of political operative. My memory is of him the Unicorn Restaruant of the early 1990's, a memory Sam Smyth echoed on the radio this morning. But that world no longer exists.
I wanted to make one small point which frustrated me all day. When in the reports, Scrap Saturday came up for discussion, not one reporter was able to distinguish the fictitious relationship of Mara and Haughey on Scrap with that of the real life relationship of two remarkable men. They failed to understand that the former was not an attempt at faithful depiction of the latter. Though my old man and Gerard Stembridge, also remarkable men, know this far better - and I claim no window into artists' let alone men's souls - yet it would have seemed pretty obvious even for someone with less than an undergraduate education in English, that this was a comic creation, even more so, one created to caricature a persona of Haughey the imperious megalomaniac; a persona the real Mara helped to fashion.
In fact, it was Mara who made a point years ago that the Scrap creation was akin to the work of Gerald Scarfe, rather than anything. Not that becoming a household name is anything to be sniffed at, and he certainly didn't. Even more so, that that fame came from a satirical radio show a quarter of a century ago is in itself worthy of comment.
Not a bad feat. Shame not everyone in Irish public discourse is as perceptive as Mara. He knew, God rest him.
