When 18 former students from University College Dublin (UCD) arrive in Beijing on Wednesday, it will for most of them be their first visit to China for half a century.
The last time was in September 1976 when they came as members of a 24-strong UCD Soccer Club squad, the first Western football team to play there since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
They arrived in China at the tail end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, before Deng Xiaoping’s economic and political reforms that set the country on an unprecedented path of urbanisation and development. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had already initiated the West’s opening to Beijing, which was by then represented at the United Nations but it was still a highly unusual destination for Irish people.
Paddy Dwyer was an 18-year-old commerce student when he captained the team in China on an expedition that seemed too outlandish when their coach Tony O’Neill proposed it. A medical student known as the Doc, O’Neill worked out the plan, found contacts in China and secured sponsors to help pay for the trip.
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“He was an amazing man in many ways, and it was his brainchild. He masterminded it, he organised it,” Dwyer said.
“Certainly, my parents were in disbelief initially. I don’t think anybody believed that it was going to materialise.”
David Andrews, who was the club’s president and already a Fianna Fáil TD, described the idea of playing in China as like going on a trip to the moon. But while their parents organised fundraising coffee mornings and bake sales, the players went for more innovative methods.
“We made a record and we made an ad, would you believe, for Cadbury’s – ‘Cadbury’s Eclairs 11 in a pack’. Swissair sponsored the flights and O’Neill’s sponsored the gear,” recalled John McGrath, one of the team’s goalkeepers who was studying history and politics.
They flew from Dublin to Zurich and on to Bombay, where they played a match before flying to Beijing. Their first match was in Shanghai, where they played in front of 40,000 people.
“We were wearing green Irish jerseys. And I think in retrospect, the Chinese soccer people believed that this was an Irish team. But this was an under-19 UCD team,” Dwyer said.
“For me, the team that we played against, it was like a provincial team. It would be the equivalent of a Leinster team or a Munster team now in rugby terms. It wasn’t a university side. I think they hammered us 4-1.”
The UCD players were surprised at how big the Chinese players were and how good they were at football. But they were enjoying the hospitality of their hosts as they observed the curiosities of life in China at the time, when people dressed in a uniform style and the streets were filled with black bicycles and only a handful of cars were to be seen.
A few days after the match in Shanghai, they walked up a hillside to a tea house where they were drinking “a cup of hot water with some tea leaves in it”, when Andrews appeared.
“He came in and said ‘Tá an Cathaoirleach marbh’. And that’s how we found out that Chairman Mao was dead,” McGrath said.
“You could see a change in people’s demeanour. When we were walking around the park near that tea room, the Internationale was playing out of the sound boxes in the trees and there were a lot of people crying, older people crying on the benches. The mood obviously changed then. And it was also a geopolitical issue for them. Even I noticed that as a first-year student. They were wondering about Russia, they were wondering about their relationship with the West.”
China went into a week of national mourning and the UCD team’s fixtures were cancelled, including a match planned for the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing that had been expected to attract about 100,000 spectators. Instead, they went on trips to various places, among them Mao’s birthplace in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province.
O’Neill, who died in 1999, wrote a diary about the trip for The Irish Press, an exemplary piece of journalism in which he described what he saw and reported on the details of everyday life in China. He described the daily routine of factory workers, explained the country’s medical system, and reported on tensions within the Communist Party between the Gang of Four, including Mao’s wife, and the reformers around Deng.
At a reception for the former UCD footballers in advance of their trip next week, China’s ambassador to Ireland Zhao Xiyuan said O’Neill’s articles resonated deeply.
“To be frank, the China of 1976 was not an easy place to visit; we were a poor nation, and the gap between our reality and the rest of the world was vast. Yet, in O’Neill’s reporting for the Irish Press, I found not a trace of prejudice or judgment. What I found instead was curiosity, warmth, and a genuine delight in everything that was different and new. Such openheartedness was admirable then, and in today’s world, it has become exceptionally rare,” he said.
The ambassador noted that, along with a shared history of national liberation, an economic transformation within the past 40 years and fondness for a good drink, Ireland and China had something else in common.
“Since the summer of 2002, when we both last appeared on the World Cup final stage, China and Ireland have shown an incredible level of selflessness and solidarity. Together, we have maintained a consistent policy for 24 years: gracefully allowing other teams to compete for the trophy while we watch from the sidelines,” he said.
After he graduated from UCD, Dwyer went home to Drogheda where he ran a sportswear store until he retired a few months ago. McGrath worked in export marketing, first with Córas Trachtála and later with Bord Bia before becoming head of sales and marketing with Dawn Farm Foods.
The 18 former members of the UCD soccer team will spend a week in China as guests of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (although they are paying their own way to Beijing). Ireland’s ambassador to China Nicholas O’Brien will host a reception for them in Beijing before they travel to Shanghai and Changsha and return to Mao’s birthplace in Shaoshan.
“I’m a bit tentative about it. It’s a bit of a compare and contrast kind of exercise, and I’m wondering if I will be able to contrast it because, you know, will I recognise any of the places we went to? There’s been so much change,” McGrath said.
“But I’m excited by it because, you know, I’ve been reading up about the development of Beijing and Shanghai and Changsha. And they’ve been transformed. So from a societal perspective and from a business perspective and from an infrastructure and visual perspective, I’m excited to see that.”
Dwyer has been trying for years to persuade his wife to come with him for a return visit to China but she doesn’t enjoy long-haul flights and he was unable to wear her down.
“For me, it’s a golden opportunity to see the new China, to see the China of the 21st century. But they’ve afforded me and the rest of these UCD young lads 50 years ago to go back, and doing it with 17 or 18 of your mates,” he said.
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