From here. . . to there

EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Günter Grass and Giovanni Trapattoni

HE HAS HIS critics and he too has made mistakes, most notably not admitting to his wartime membership of the Waffen SS. Yet novelist, artist and commentator, 1999 Nobel Literature Laureate Günter Grass, who reached 85 earlier this week, has always taken both the history and the future of his country most seriously. His vision has been denounced as pessimistic and he was wary of German reunification which angered many of his countrymen who saw it as a new beginning.

Famously gruff and outspoken, Grass looks to history as a way of both understanding and explaining the present. He described himself as a reluctant diarist although it now transpires that he did keep a diary from New Year’s Day 1990 until early 1991 during which he travelled in the east and the west of his divided country. From Germany to Germany: Diary 1990 will be published in Britain next month. Grass the man can irritate but his singular approach to novels from The Tin Drum (1959) to Too Far Afield (2000) with their frequent hints of the Brothers Grimm meets Disney, Otto Dix and George Grosz remains unique.

It would take Grass, with his satirical feel for the grotesque, to make sense of the drama surrounding Ireland’s football squad. Here are professional, presumably well-paid players contracted to UK club teams who are also eligible to represent Ireland in international matches.

They are currently at the mercy of a manager who favours long-distance coaching methods. Instead of bulling and cajoling at close quarters, Giovanni Trapattoni studies DVDs of the players while back home in Milan. For all of this arduous TV watching as well as the occasional in person appearance he is paid an estimated €1.2 million a year – reduced from his original pay of about €1.8 million. The fact that he was born on St Patrick’s Day in 1939 may have been a factor in the FAI appointing Trapattoni who played for Milan, was an international defender and featured on the 1962 Italian World Cup squad. Grass as a fabulist storyteller would grasp that Trapattoni, known for scintillating observations such as “Don’t say cat until you’ve got it in the bag” (why would anyone want to put a cat in a bag?), was recruited in 2008 as a grandiose dying gesture of the Celtic Tiger abetted by Denis O’Brien.

Trapattoni’s status as one of Europe’s great managers having served Milan, Juventus, Bayer Munich and Benifica, no doubt appealed to the madness that was rife in Fianna Fáil’s era of excess. Just as he refused to learn German, Trap declines to bother with English suggesting that Ireland’s manager is interpreter Manuela Spinelli.

Aspiring smart alec Enda Kenny and his righteous labour partners must be so grateful that the Napoleonic Trapattoni is there to distract some of the population from a more pressing national mess, the economy.

Meanwhile, the FAI’s simpering statement this week conceding “the frustration of our supporters” is an outrageous variation of Irish parents currently apologising for not being able to afford food, never mind textbooks.