The Much-Vexed Question
The subject of patriotism and national character is one that I have discussed at great length (or perhaps tedious length) on this blog. I had a long discussion about it with another Catholic blogger, Young Ireland, starting here. I've also had many other posts about it.
Indeed, it's a subject that I've been discussing all my life, since my family (going back several generations) is steeped in the Irish republican tradition. I can't remember a time when I wasn't aware of debates and discussions about republicanism, Ireland, patriotism, nationalism and so forth-- debates that went back many generations. Over my own life, my attitude to the subject has gone all around the houses, from the most ardent romantic nationalism imaginable (at one point, in my teens, it seriously bothered me that foreign embassies were not technically Irish territory), to a predictable reactionary phase where I became positively anti-Irish. I've also become utterly bored by the subject for years at a time.
More recently, I've come to the point of view that I expressed in this post. Basically, that view is that I wish Ireland (and every other country) had a vibrant national identity, but I don't believe that it does, and I don't expect that it will regain one. I fully expect the process of cultural globalization to continue and accelerate. I don't think there's any point grieving over this.
After all, what do we have in Ireland that makes us so different from the rest of the world? Our national sports, hurling and Gaelic football, are more popular than they've ever been, that's true. Traditional Irish music seems (from what I can see) to be in fairly robust health. But the Irish language has been on life support for almost a hundred years now. We don't really have a national cuisine or a national dress. We mostly shop in multinational chain stores, we mostly watch American TV and movies, we mostly read non-Irish books, and so on.
So, not so long ago, I decided I would stop fretting about this-- it hurts too much-- and just resign myself to living in the global village.
And yet, and yet...
Surprised by Patriotism
Sometimes, the pangs of patriotic feeling take me by surprise. Yesterday, I was sitting watching television with my father, and he was (as usual) flicking from channel to channel.
He flicked onto the Rose of Tralee, and instantly I was back on my aunt and uncle's farm in Limerick, sitting with my mother and aunt in the front parlour, with buttered scones and strong tea and the Rose of Tralee on the television.
Most of my readers are not Irish, and may not know about The Rose of Tralee. I suppose you could call it a beauty contest, but it's a world away from Miss Universe (though I've never seen Miss Universe). The organizers always stress that the winner is chosen on personality as much as looks. It's very much family viewing, and about as erotic as wellies. Young women from all over Ireland and across the world come to Tralee in County Kerry, stand on stage to be asked a variety of innocuous questions, and then recite a poem or sing a song or do some performance of some kind. The most insipid girl wins.
I sat on the couch, feeling I had been transported back to my aunt's parlour, with my uncle's glass and porcelain fish decorations standing on the cabinet, and my aunt's country-wife accent breaking the silence every few moments. (My aunt's naive style of television commentary lingers in my mind. Once, when she was watching Roots, she said: "I hope he doesn't try to escape again for he will be severely reprimanded." That was probably more than twenty years ago and I can still hear her exact tones. God rest her soul.)
"You can see that girl couldn't be anything other than Irish", my father said. He often makes this observation, both about Irish people and people he suspects of having Irish blood. I don't know if he's right of if he's imagining it.
But if he's imagining it, I'm imagining it, too, because I looked at the girl on the screen and I also thought that she looked utterly Irish. He said it was in the eyes. Personally, I think it's in the lips. I think Irish people tend to have rather thin, mobile lips that protrude a little in the centre of the mouth. Maybe I'm seeing something that's not there.
Elusive Irishness
And at that moment, as I sat watching The Rose of Tralee, the most delicious sensation of being an Irish person, comfortably ensconced in Ireland, washed over me. I didn't care about globalization. I didn't care about the past or the future. I didn't care about itemizing a check-list of genuinely indigenous elements of our culture. I felt that Irishness was something too elusive to be analysed like that. It was something as diffuse and yet as penetrating as a scent, or an atmosphere, or a mood. It was in a tone of voice, a quirk of expression, in the vaguest acquaintance with the history of the Cromwellian plantations or the Brehon Law, in childhood memories of watching The Late Late Show and the Rose of Tralee. All the Starbucks and multiculturalism and podcasting in the world hardly made a dent in it. There was no need to worry about it, or assert it. It was just there.
Normally, this is the kind of vague claim that makes me want to throw things at the one making it. But in that moment it seemed as indisputable as gravity.
Having an American wife has often made me think similar thoughts. When I first went to America, I was so geared up at the thought of seeing The New World that, when I got there, I felt a bitter disappointment. Nothing looked all that different. When I got home, I wrote a post listing the differences I'd noticed between America and Ireland. (I was pleased when a student left a comment telling me it had helped her do an assignment.) But the differences seemed rather trivial to me, and not worth making a fuss over.
Stepping into a Sauna
But then, on another occasion when I flew into America-- when I wasn't thinking about American national character at all, or the difference between Ireland and America, or anything like that, and my mind was absorbed on a completely different subject-- I stepped from the plane into Philadelphia airport and the sheer American-ness of my surroundings struck me like the heat of a sauna. I don't think it was something I could have noticed the first time I visited America. It needed time to get under my skin. Nor can I even begin to analyse it.
I find the same thing in my interactions with Michelle. Time and time again, during a conversation, we have found ourselves baffled by mutual incomprehension, until-- after much unspooling-- we realise that we have been using exactly the same word or phrase, but understanding completely different things by it. (For instance, "anti-social" means "unsociable" in America. Michelle was greatly amused to see a notice on an Irish train urging passengers to report anti-social behaviour.)
This is the least satisfactory of conclusions to me. It niggles. A phenomenon that is barely visible when you are looking for it, but which grabs you from behind and even knocks you over when you are intent upon other things, seems like the worst of both worlds. I still think that national identity is more meaningful and secure when it is based upon definite practices and institutions, things you can point to and photograph. But this nebulous kind of national spirit is, I suppose, better than nothing.
Showing posts with label Irishness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irishness. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Friday, August 10, 2012
A Thirty-Two County Republic
Look at the phrase I used to head this post. The chances are, if you're Irish, you will have imagined a Northern Irish accent pronouncing those words as soon as you read them. Because nobody South of the Irish border ever seems to talk about a united Ireland. Ever. And yet it is supposedly a national aspiration.
We hear lots of complaints that the Irish only pay lip service to the revival of the Irish language. But we do at least pay it lip service. Ordinary people talk about it in the course of ordinary life. Sometimes, at least.
But, when it comes to the reunification of Ireland, this is simply not the case.
I'm no different. I never think about the North. I think a lot about the preservation of Ireland's nationhood and distinctive culture. I might think about that twenty times a day-- whether it's because I hear someone use a distinctively Irish turn of phrase, or because I notice a a Bed and Breakfast has a name like Iona or Errigal, or because I hear an Irish folk song being played in a newsagent's, or because I find myself looking at a Dublin street sign and comparing the anglicised name to the Gaelic name written underneath, or through a hundred other prompts.
But as for regaining the "national territory" (and even that phrase sounds antiquated)-- never.
Not only do I not feel a burning zeal for a united Ireland, but I sometimes wonder about the thought processes of those who do. If they live south of the border, they are nearly always either liberal-left (Sinn Féin) or even radical left (apparently the Communist Party of Ireland is intensely nationalistic-- and I once worked with a woman who was an ardent republican, an ardent communist, and a strident atheist).
These are the kind of people who take a withering view of sentimental nationalism, who would be first to laugh at the "plastic Paddy" conceptions of Ireland often attributed to romantic Americans rediscovering their roots. Apart from their socialistic castles in the air, which nobody really takes seriously, they seem to have no special vision for Ireland other than "Brits Out", the revival of the language, and perhaps a support for the Gaelic Athletic Association. They are usually hostile to religion and especially the Catholic Church. They want to make Ireland a modern, progressive country-- and (to me) the most obvious thing about a modern, progressive country is that it is barely distinguishable from every other modern, progressive country-- and the things that do distinguish it are historical legacies. Has modernity contributed anything to national uniqueness anywhere? Perhaps in America, with NASCAR and drive-in movies and baseball and hot dogs and Mormonism. But what about elsewhere?
So, if the tricolour flew over all thirty-two counties of Ireland-- what would these purely political separatists feel had been achieved? Do they really consider themselves the heirs of Pearse and Davis and O'Connell?
Sometimes I feel guilty for my lack of interest in a united Ireland. Nietzsche said that blood was the worst of all arguments, and he had a point, but the fact is that many of my forefathers shed blood for the goal of "old Ireland free". And my own family tree is full of men and women who held this as the closest aspiration to their hearts, who even devoted their lives to it. It seems brutal and heartless to simply discard such an ideal.
All I can plead is that the Ireland to which today's Sinn Féin aspires is so utterly different from "the Ireland that we dreamed of", that I am truer to the ancestral cause than they are.
We hear lots of complaints that the Irish only pay lip service to the revival of the Irish language. But we do at least pay it lip service. Ordinary people talk about it in the course of ordinary life. Sometimes, at least.
But, when it comes to the reunification of Ireland, this is simply not the case.
I'm no different. I never think about the North. I think a lot about the preservation of Ireland's nationhood and distinctive culture. I might think about that twenty times a day-- whether it's because I hear someone use a distinctively Irish turn of phrase, or because I notice a a Bed and Breakfast has a name like Iona or Errigal, or because I hear an Irish folk song being played in a newsagent's, or because I find myself looking at a Dublin street sign and comparing the anglicised name to the Gaelic name written underneath, or through a hundred other prompts.
But as for regaining the "national territory" (and even that phrase sounds antiquated)-- never.
Not only do I not feel a burning zeal for a united Ireland, but I sometimes wonder about the thought processes of those who do. If they live south of the border, they are nearly always either liberal-left (Sinn Féin) or even radical left (apparently the Communist Party of Ireland is intensely nationalistic-- and I once worked with a woman who was an ardent republican, an ardent communist, and a strident atheist).
These are the kind of people who take a withering view of sentimental nationalism, who would be first to laugh at the "plastic Paddy" conceptions of Ireland often attributed to romantic Americans rediscovering their roots. Apart from their socialistic castles in the air, which nobody really takes seriously, they seem to have no special vision for Ireland other than "Brits Out", the revival of the language, and perhaps a support for the Gaelic Athletic Association. They are usually hostile to religion and especially the Catholic Church. They want to make Ireland a modern, progressive country-- and (to me) the most obvious thing about a modern, progressive country is that it is barely distinguishable from every other modern, progressive country-- and the things that do distinguish it are historical legacies. Has modernity contributed anything to national uniqueness anywhere? Perhaps in America, with NASCAR and drive-in movies and baseball and hot dogs and Mormonism. But what about elsewhere?
So, if the tricolour flew over all thirty-two counties of Ireland-- what would these purely political separatists feel had been achieved? Do they really consider themselves the heirs of Pearse and Davis and O'Connell?
Sometimes I feel guilty for my lack of interest in a united Ireland. Nietzsche said that blood was the worst of all arguments, and he had a point, but the fact is that many of my forefathers shed blood for the goal of "old Ireland free". And my own family tree is full of men and women who held this as the closest aspiration to their hearts, who even devoted their lives to it. It seems brutal and heartless to simply discard such an ideal.
All I can plead is that the Ireland to which today's Sinn Féin aspires is so utterly different from "the Ireland that we dreamed of", that I am truer to the ancestral cause than they are.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Why I am Irish
I used to be English, you know.
I was born in Dublin of Irish parents, and I never set foot outside Ireland until I was twenty-seven. I have no more English blood in me than most Irish people (I know there are Dixons somewhere in my lineage). And yet, for some considerable time, I made the conscious decision that I was spiritually English rather than Irish.
I have to admit that, to a great extent, this was a reaction. I come from a very nationalistic background, and I attended Irish language schools without ever developing a command of our native tongue. I was genuinely horrified by the murderous campaign of the IRA. Teenagers (and overgrown teenagers) are all about forging their own identities, and I didn't have much interest in inheriting a ready-made one, especially one that put me (as I thought) in the same camp as Sinn Féin.
But it was more than just rebellion. I was (and I am) an ardent anglophile. English humour, English poetry, English accents and English history spoke to my depths (as they still do). I thought names like Brompton, Kent and Hampshire were far more poetic than Salamanca, Luxor or Casablanca-- or, indeed, Connemara or Béal na mBláth. My soul thrilled at all the elements of Englishness: roast beef, strong tea, hedgerows, hot water bottles, deliberately mispronounced French, eccentrics building useless machines in garden sheds, ghost stories, hopeless last stands, noble yeomen, bumbling fops, dreary weather, nonsense verse, colourful pub names, muffins, the Beano-- the whole lot.
I can't remember what finally led me to accept and embrace my Irishness. Perhaps it was realising that Sinn Féin didn't have a copyright on national pride. Perhaps it was leaving school and not having to struggle with Irish tenses anymore. Perhaps it was the growing left-wing attack on all patriotism, on the very concept of the nation.
Irishness isn't like Englishness. I imagine that, to the English, Englishness is a comfortable pair of slippers, crisp and bracing air, a cosy pub-- something you can ease back into, stretch your arms in, luxuriate inside. Something that is invisible most of the time. But being Irish requires more of an effort. It is something of an assertion. We don't speak Irish naturally. We even use many Irish-English phrases, like roola-boola or craic, rather self-consciously. When we watch Irish films, we feel like we are watching foreign films- at least I do. There is the same feeling of slight mental strain. We know less about medieval Irish history than we know about the Venerable Bede and the Peasant's Revolt.
But all this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I absorbed, in my childhood, the idea that a nation was an ideal rather than a thing, and I prefer that way of looking at the matter. A nation wasn't just a population with the same language and customs, who found it more desirable to be self-governed than to be governed from abroad. A nation had a soul. Self-government was only a means to an end, and that end was a deeper and deeper development of national uniqueness. I may have resented having to get my tongue around the Irish language, but being taught Irish mythology, history, dancing, sports and music-- and absorbing the idea that all these things were cultural treasures, to be guarded and cultivated-- had a profound and (I think) beneficial effect on me. Either it actually made me a traditionalist, or it brought out my latent traditionalism. I came to see the good things of life as being fragile, inherited, and requiring constant loving attention. It also made me see society as being, not just a modus vivendi between strangers, but a kind of joint project, even a shared quest.
(Of course, this was all before my reaction against Irishness, which came in my teens and lasted till my twenties.)
I have reached the age at which nostalgia begins to bite, but it does seem to me that the Ireland of my childhood-- and especially the Ireland of my family and school background, which was nationalist, working class intellectual, labourist and Catholic-- swarmed with ideals and ideas, most of them still in the air from the Irish Revolution and Irish Renaissance of the early twentieth century. The Dubliners (the folk band) have come to stand in my mind as the perfect example of this all-sympathising idealism. "Lord of the Dance" was a Christian hymn, "Joe Hill" commemorated a fallen trade union leader, "A Nation Once Again" and a hundred others celebrated the Irish struggle for nationhood, "Raglan Road" took you into the realm of poetry and high culture (which is an idealism of its own), "Danny Farrel" drew attention to the plight of Travellers, "The Button Pusher" protested nuclear weapons. And to my childish mind, there was no contradiction or even tension between Christianity, liberalism, socialism, aestheticism and nationalism. In fact, they were all somehow draped in the Irish tricolour. James Connolly, Eamonn De Valera, Christy Moore, Patrick Pearse, W.B. Yeats, Phil Lynnot, Brendan Behan, Cu Chulainn, Granuaile, Saint Patrick-- they were all batting for the same side, all part of the same wild jaunt into the Celtic utopia.
My childish imagination was peopled with piano-playing and poetry-reading slum-dwellers, political prisoners learning Gaelic, ancient Celts perpetually building dolmens and passage tombs in the solemn light of dawn, homemade bread, Druids in Persil-white robes, gaunt intellectuals in overcoats and jam-jar spectacles discussing poetry over pints of stout, barefoot children walking to school through the fields, open air clandestine Masses, earnest-faced men in shirtsleeves puffing on cigarettes and discussing whether to call strikes, jovial and scholarly priests, and a whole gallery of other scenes and characters that seemed all of a piece to me. And underneath all of them, linking them together, was an intense excitement, a reaching towards the millennium, a vision of life as a many-splendoured thing, a spree into the sublime and the transcendental.
Maybe it's just nostalgia. Maybe I am projecting. Maybe I am wrong to contrast the (just about) still-idealistic Ireland of my childhood with the irony-heavy, rights-obsessed, hedonistic, pop-culture infatuated, disenchanted Ireland of my maturity. But I can't help feeling that the ideologies that were still alive in Ireland when I was a kid-- nationalism, trade unionism, liberal humanism, art for art's sake, hippydom, and a host of others-- were all good stepping-stones to Christian faith. They all treated life as something both intensely serious and potentially glorious. They were all aimed towards a jackpot of some kind, whether that was the artistic masterpiece, the socialist revolution or national revival. And the pay-off, they always hinted, would be beyond our wildest dreams; pressed down, shaken, overflowing.
I get the impression that today's partisans, of whatever cause, don't hold out any such bright prospect. I don't imagine gay rights activists think that gay marriage will usher in a golden era. Feminists today seem to aspire to mundane goals, compared to the galloping romantics of the past, who expected we would all start dropping capital letters and dismantling armies once the patriarchy fell. Student politicians want to retain free fees, rather than reshape the world. In some ways that's a good thing, but...
But where has it gone, the visionary gleam?
I may be wrong, but I think I was lucky to catch the tail-end (perhaps merely the echoes) of an idealistic era in Irish life and culture. I think it likely that anyone who has been seized by the vision of some overwhelming, all-demanding, transformative cause is that much closer to religious faith. And I look at Ireland today and I really do think I see a country that has ceased to believe in anything.
(P.S.: Re-reading this, it seems fist-bitingly pretentious and barely coherent. I got carried away! What the heck. Let it stand.)
I was born in Dublin of Irish parents, and I never set foot outside Ireland until I was twenty-seven. I have no more English blood in me than most Irish people (I know there are Dixons somewhere in my lineage). And yet, for some considerable time, I made the conscious decision that I was spiritually English rather than Irish.
I have to admit that, to a great extent, this was a reaction. I come from a very nationalistic background, and I attended Irish language schools without ever developing a command of our native tongue. I was genuinely horrified by the murderous campaign of the IRA. Teenagers (and overgrown teenagers) are all about forging their own identities, and I didn't have much interest in inheriting a ready-made one, especially one that put me (as I thought) in the same camp as Sinn Féin.
But it was more than just rebellion. I was (and I am) an ardent anglophile. English humour, English poetry, English accents and English history spoke to my depths (as they still do). I thought names like Brompton, Kent and Hampshire were far more poetic than Salamanca, Luxor or Casablanca-- or, indeed, Connemara or Béal na mBláth. My soul thrilled at all the elements of Englishness: roast beef, strong tea, hedgerows, hot water bottles, deliberately mispronounced French, eccentrics building useless machines in garden sheds, ghost stories, hopeless last stands, noble yeomen, bumbling fops, dreary weather, nonsense verse, colourful pub names, muffins, the Beano-- the whole lot.
I can't remember what finally led me to accept and embrace my Irishness. Perhaps it was realising that Sinn Féin didn't have a copyright on national pride. Perhaps it was leaving school and not having to struggle with Irish tenses anymore. Perhaps it was the growing left-wing attack on all patriotism, on the very concept of the nation.
Irishness isn't like Englishness. I imagine that, to the English, Englishness is a comfortable pair of slippers, crisp and bracing air, a cosy pub-- something you can ease back into, stretch your arms in, luxuriate inside. Something that is invisible most of the time. But being Irish requires more of an effort. It is something of an assertion. We don't speak Irish naturally. We even use many Irish-English phrases, like roola-boola or craic, rather self-consciously. When we watch Irish films, we feel like we are watching foreign films- at least I do. There is the same feeling of slight mental strain. We know less about medieval Irish history than we know about the Venerable Bede and the Peasant's Revolt.
But all this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I absorbed, in my childhood, the idea that a nation was an ideal rather than a thing, and I prefer that way of looking at the matter. A nation wasn't just a population with the same language and customs, who found it more desirable to be self-governed than to be governed from abroad. A nation had a soul. Self-government was only a means to an end, and that end was a deeper and deeper development of national uniqueness. I may have resented having to get my tongue around the Irish language, but being taught Irish mythology, history, dancing, sports and music-- and absorbing the idea that all these things were cultural treasures, to be guarded and cultivated-- had a profound and (I think) beneficial effect on me. Either it actually made me a traditionalist, or it brought out my latent traditionalism. I came to see the good things of life as being fragile, inherited, and requiring constant loving attention. It also made me see society as being, not just a modus vivendi between strangers, but a kind of joint project, even a shared quest.
(Of course, this was all before my reaction against Irishness, which came in my teens and lasted till my twenties.)
I have reached the age at which nostalgia begins to bite, but it does seem to me that the Ireland of my childhood-- and especially the Ireland of my family and school background, which was nationalist, working class intellectual, labourist and Catholic-- swarmed with ideals and ideas, most of them still in the air from the Irish Revolution and Irish Renaissance of the early twentieth century. The Dubliners (the folk band) have come to stand in my mind as the perfect example of this all-sympathising idealism. "Lord of the Dance" was a Christian hymn, "Joe Hill" commemorated a fallen trade union leader, "A Nation Once Again" and a hundred others celebrated the Irish struggle for nationhood, "Raglan Road" took you into the realm of poetry and high culture (which is an idealism of its own), "Danny Farrel" drew attention to the plight of Travellers, "The Button Pusher" protested nuclear weapons. And to my childish mind, there was no contradiction or even tension between Christianity, liberalism, socialism, aestheticism and nationalism. In fact, they were all somehow draped in the Irish tricolour. James Connolly, Eamonn De Valera, Christy Moore, Patrick Pearse, W.B. Yeats, Phil Lynnot, Brendan Behan, Cu Chulainn, Granuaile, Saint Patrick-- they were all batting for the same side, all part of the same wild jaunt into the Celtic utopia.
My childish imagination was peopled with piano-playing and poetry-reading slum-dwellers, political prisoners learning Gaelic, ancient Celts perpetually building dolmens and passage tombs in the solemn light of dawn, homemade bread, Druids in Persil-white robes, gaunt intellectuals in overcoats and jam-jar spectacles discussing poetry over pints of stout, barefoot children walking to school through the fields, open air clandestine Masses, earnest-faced men in shirtsleeves puffing on cigarettes and discussing whether to call strikes, jovial and scholarly priests, and a whole gallery of other scenes and characters that seemed all of a piece to me. And underneath all of them, linking them together, was an intense excitement, a reaching towards the millennium, a vision of life as a many-splendoured thing, a spree into the sublime and the transcendental.
Maybe it's just nostalgia. Maybe I am projecting. Maybe I am wrong to contrast the (just about) still-idealistic Ireland of my childhood with the irony-heavy, rights-obsessed, hedonistic, pop-culture infatuated, disenchanted Ireland of my maturity. But I can't help feeling that the ideologies that were still alive in Ireland when I was a kid-- nationalism, trade unionism, liberal humanism, art for art's sake, hippydom, and a host of others-- were all good stepping-stones to Christian faith. They all treated life as something both intensely serious and potentially glorious. They were all aimed towards a jackpot of some kind, whether that was the artistic masterpiece, the socialist revolution or national revival. And the pay-off, they always hinted, would be beyond our wildest dreams; pressed down, shaken, overflowing.
I get the impression that today's partisans, of whatever cause, don't hold out any such bright prospect. I don't imagine gay rights activists think that gay marriage will usher in a golden era. Feminists today seem to aspire to mundane goals, compared to the galloping romantics of the past, who expected we would all start dropping capital letters and dismantling armies once the patriarchy fell. Student politicians want to retain free fees, rather than reshape the world. In some ways that's a good thing, but...
But where has it gone, the visionary gleam?
I may be wrong, but I think I was lucky to catch the tail-end (perhaps merely the echoes) of an idealistic era in Irish life and culture. I think it likely that anyone who has been seized by the vision of some overwhelming, all-demanding, transformative cause is that much closer to religious faith. And I look at Ireland today and I really do think I see a country that has ceased to believe in anything.
(P.S.: Re-reading this, it seems fist-bitingly pretentious and barely coherent. I got carried away! What the heck. Let it stand.)
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Differences Between Ireland and America
(Or at least between Ireland and Richmond, Virginia):
1. Americans don’t eat with a knife and fork. They mostly just use a fork. Knives are strictly for cutting and spreading, not for trapping food against the fork.
2. They call cutlery “silverware”, even when it’s made of plastic.
3. Advertising is much more direct. Here we have ads that often have a very tenuous connection to the actual product; short films or vignettes or sketches. Over here, you often can’t tell what is actually being advertised until the last second. American “commercials” are more likely to be a talking head telling you exactly why you should use their business. I think this difference is down to European squeamishness about money, and American readiness to talk turkey.
4. Instead of VAT, Americans have sales tax. The price on the tag is not the price you pay at the till. This kept catching me out. I also think it’s part of the reason Americans are so conscious and resentful of government. Taxation is much more visible to them.
5. Credit/debit cards are more popular. At least, I think so. I always use cash for over-the-counter transactions myself, so maybe I don’t realise how popular plastic has become over here, but it seems to me that most people in Ireland still pay in cash. In America, most people pay with cards.
6. Americans call courgettes “zuchinnis”.
7. They don’t have the term “runners” for “trainers”.
8. As anyone who has seen the famous Des Bishop sketch will know, Americans don’t have to heat up their water to have a shower. It’s just there.
9. Americans don’t say “take a left” but “make a left”.
10. I was refused alcohol in a restaurant and in an off-licence because I had no ID, despite being well past my salad years. This probably differs across states.
11. Supermarkets are bigger and have a bewildering variety of brands and products. And futuristic gimmicks, too; motion-activated voice-recordings make sales pitches and artifical thunder and lightning storms draw your attention to particular products.
12. In one supermarket, there were racks of inspiring reading which mostly consisted of Christian books. Impossible to imagine this in an Irish supermarket.
13. Much to my pleasure, Americans fly flags everywhere. The stars and stripes are omnipresent, but there are lots of other flags on display, too; State flags, college pennants, rainbow flags, and many I didn’t recognize. Lots of Americans fly a flag of some sort on their porch (and most houses have porches.) They also like to announce their allegiances on car registration plates and bumper stickers.
14. Their traffic lights have no green and red men. Instead, there is a white walking man and a “Don’t Walk” caption. The high-pitched beeping noise that most of our traffic lights use, to alert blind pedestrians when they can cross, is much less prevalent there, even though America seems to be generally ahead of us in terms of provision for the disabled.
15. Residential streets seem to go on forever. There are often thousands of house numbers on one road or avenue.
16. Television is almost omnipresent—in shops, airports, hospital waiting rooms, and so on. And it usually has subtitles, and isn’t muted in public places.
17. Despite our stereotype, Americans don’t actually say “have a nice day”. They do say “have a good day”, or “have a good one”, or “have a great day”, or some variation thereof. They say those all the time. But I don’t think I heard anyone say “have a nice day”. (I mentioned this to a colleague and he suggested it might differ according to region.)
18. “Sir” and “ma’am” are ubiquitous. Perhaps this is a Southern phenomenon. I strongly approve. Also, Americans (even adult Americans) address their aunts and uncles as “Aunt Such-and-Such” or “Uncle Such-and-Such”.
19. Virtually all toll-booth operators are black women. The racial divide is very evident. Black people tend to have a different way of speaking to white people—a faster tempo that I sometimes found hard to keep up with. Beggars are mostly older black men and they say “spare some change?”. There are far fewer beggars in Richmond, Virginia than there are in Dublin.
20. Religion is much more visible. There are many more churches, and a huge variety of different denominations. Churches tend to be, not old stone buildings with spires, but broader and flatter buildings made of brick. They hustle for custom with big placards and signs (at least in the case of the Protestant denominations). Religion seems to play a huge role in social life, too, with many people belonging to church groups and associations, such as the Knights of Columbus.
21) When Irish or English people say "homely", we mean "cosy", "comfortable", "down-to-earth." In America, "homely" has only one meaning, and that's "ugly". This can be important to know.
1. Americans don’t eat with a knife and fork. They mostly just use a fork. Knives are strictly for cutting and spreading, not for trapping food against the fork.
2. They call cutlery “silverware”, even when it’s made of plastic.
3. Advertising is much more direct. Here we have ads that often have a very tenuous connection to the actual product; short films or vignettes or sketches. Over here, you often can’t tell what is actually being advertised until the last second. American “commercials” are more likely to be a talking head telling you exactly why you should use their business. I think this difference is down to European squeamishness about money, and American readiness to talk turkey.
4. Instead of VAT, Americans have sales tax. The price on the tag is not the price you pay at the till. This kept catching me out. I also think it’s part of the reason Americans are so conscious and resentful of government. Taxation is much more visible to them.
5. Credit/debit cards are more popular. At least, I think so. I always use cash for over-the-counter transactions myself, so maybe I don’t realise how popular plastic has become over here, but it seems to me that most people in Ireland still pay in cash. In America, most people pay with cards.
6. Americans call courgettes “zuchinnis”.
7. They don’t have the term “runners” for “trainers”.
8. As anyone who has seen the famous Des Bishop sketch will know, Americans don’t have to heat up their water to have a shower. It’s just there.
9. Americans don’t say “take a left” but “make a left”.
10. I was refused alcohol in a restaurant and in an off-licence because I had no ID, despite being well past my salad years. This probably differs across states.
11. Supermarkets are bigger and have a bewildering variety of brands and products. And futuristic gimmicks, too; motion-activated voice-recordings make sales pitches and artifical thunder and lightning storms draw your attention to particular products.
12. In one supermarket, there were racks of inspiring reading which mostly consisted of Christian books. Impossible to imagine this in an Irish supermarket.
13. Much to my pleasure, Americans fly flags everywhere. The stars and stripes are omnipresent, but there are lots of other flags on display, too; State flags, college pennants, rainbow flags, and many I didn’t recognize. Lots of Americans fly a flag of some sort on their porch (and most houses have porches.) They also like to announce their allegiances on car registration plates and bumper stickers.
14. Their traffic lights have no green and red men. Instead, there is a white walking man and a “Don’t Walk” caption. The high-pitched beeping noise that most of our traffic lights use, to alert blind pedestrians when they can cross, is much less prevalent there, even though America seems to be generally ahead of us in terms of provision for the disabled.
15. Residential streets seem to go on forever. There are often thousands of house numbers on one road or avenue.
16. Television is almost omnipresent—in shops, airports, hospital waiting rooms, and so on. And it usually has subtitles, and isn’t muted in public places.
17. Despite our stereotype, Americans don’t actually say “have a nice day”. They do say “have a good day”, or “have a good one”, or “have a great day”, or some variation thereof. They say those all the time. But I don’t think I heard anyone say “have a nice day”. (I mentioned this to a colleague and he suggested it might differ according to region.)
18. “Sir” and “ma’am” are ubiquitous. Perhaps this is a Southern phenomenon. I strongly approve. Also, Americans (even adult Americans) address their aunts and uncles as “Aunt Such-and-Such” or “Uncle Such-and-Such”.
19. Virtually all toll-booth operators are black women. The racial divide is very evident. Black people tend to have a different way of speaking to white people—a faster tempo that I sometimes found hard to keep up with. Beggars are mostly older black men and they say “spare some change?”. There are far fewer beggars in Richmond, Virginia than there are in Dublin.
20. Religion is much more visible. There are many more churches, and a huge variety of different denominations. Churches tend to be, not old stone buildings with spires, but broader and flatter buildings made of brick. They hustle for custom with big placards and signs (at least in the case of the Protestant denominations). Religion seems to play a huge role in social life, too, with many people belonging to church groups and associations, such as the Knights of Columbus.
21) When Irish or English people say "homely", we mean "cosy", "comfortable", "down-to-earth." In America, "homely" has only one meaning, and that's "ugly". This can be important to know.
Friday, June 1, 2012
As Ireland Votes Away Even More of its Sovereignty...
...the Late Late Show celebrates fifty years broadcasting.
My non-Irish readers might not know about the Late Late Show. It is (I have just read) the longest-running TV chat show in the world. For almost forty years, with a brief hiatus, it was presented by one man, Gay Byrne, whose silky voice is deeply soothing and comforting, even if you think (as I do) that his influence on the nation has been a bad one. The Late Late Show served as something of a banner for the liberalisation of Ireland over the years, tackling "taboo" subjects and opening "debate".
At least, that's what they always say. I don't remember much of that myself. I don't even remember the famous show featuring Annie Murphy, the woman who had a child by Bishop Eamon Casey, triggering the first of the 1990's scandals featuring the Irish Catholic Church.
No, all I remember of the Late Late Show is lying on the couch or the sitting room floor on Friday nights, happy to have a weekend stretching before me, often drifting to sleep while the studio conversation formed pictures in my head. So even though the Late, Late Show was a harbinger of Modern Ireland, I very much associate it with the Ireland of my youth-- which was the very last dregs of Catholic, nationalist Ireland.
But it was more than that. Since the topics covered ranged from serious to light-- Ireland was still, at this time, a fairly cultured nation-- it gave me an impression of the wholeness of life, and made me think of Ireland as one big extended family. (Especially as my parents usually watched it-- that is, my mother never missed it and my father usually sat in to complain about the guests.)
I've barely watched it since I was a child, but I understood it has become as jazzy, slick and superficial as the Ireland it helped to create.
Will I watch the fiftieth anniversary edition tonight? You know, I feel half-tempted (an odd expression but sometimes the right one). At least it will keep me from thinking about the referendum.
My non-Irish readers might not know about the Late Late Show. It is (I have just read) the longest-running TV chat show in the world. For almost forty years, with a brief hiatus, it was presented by one man, Gay Byrne, whose silky voice is deeply soothing and comforting, even if you think (as I do) that his influence on the nation has been a bad one. The Late Late Show served as something of a banner for the liberalisation of Ireland over the years, tackling "taboo" subjects and opening "debate".
At least, that's what they always say. I don't remember much of that myself. I don't even remember the famous show featuring Annie Murphy, the woman who had a child by Bishop Eamon Casey, triggering the first of the 1990's scandals featuring the Irish Catholic Church.
No, all I remember of the Late Late Show is lying on the couch or the sitting room floor on Friday nights, happy to have a weekend stretching before me, often drifting to sleep while the studio conversation formed pictures in my head. So even though the Late, Late Show was a harbinger of Modern Ireland, I very much associate it with the Ireland of my youth-- which was the very last dregs of Catholic, nationalist Ireland.
But it was more than that. Since the topics covered ranged from serious to light-- Ireland was still, at this time, a fairly cultured nation-- it gave me an impression of the wholeness of life, and made me think of Ireland as one big extended family. (Especially as my parents usually watched it-- that is, my mother never missed it and my father usually sat in to complain about the guests.)
I've barely watched it since I was a child, but I understood it has become as jazzy, slick and superficial as the Ireland it helped to create.
Will I watch the fiftieth anniversary edition tonight? You know, I feel half-tempted (an odd expression but sometimes the right one). At least it will keep me from thinking about the referendum.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
A Wonderful Idea
I spend enough time kvetching on this blog, so I thought I would say something nice for once! Walking through my local shopping centre in Ballymun yesterday, I saw this notice:
In 2012 Ballymun Market will celebrate traditional market festivals including Beataine, Lúnasa Samhain & Nollaig. If you are a local community group involved in singing, acting, music, art, dancing or other entertainment displays, Ballymun Market would like to work with you. We have a limited budget for each festival which is available to those community groups who participate.
Seeing this really gladdened my heart. I think this is exactly what patriotism and the celebration of our national identity should look like. It should not be restricted to pride in international sporting events and Nobel prize winners and chart-topping rock stars. It should be rooted in the rhythms and routines of our everyday life, and in things-- festivals and customs and traditions and institutions-- that are distinctively Irish. National identity is one area where it is absolutely essential to be backward-looking.
Monday, May 7, 2012
John D. Sheridan, Humourist of Catholic Ireland
The newspaper column is one of my favourite forms of writing. It seems comfortably ensconced between journalism and literature, the private chat and the public square, the topical and the timeless. My favourite writer of all time, the matchless GK Chesterton, used the format to near-miraculous effect. His column in the Illustrated London News ran for three decades. The free and loose format allowed full play to Chesterton's undisciplined genius. Even the title of one of his most famous newspaper articles-- Rhapsody on a Pig-- gives some idea of the scope and versatility of his talent.
The first columnist for whom I developed a passion was Keith Waterhouse, an English writer whose long career ended with his death some years ago. I found a book of his newspaper columns, Monday Thursdays, lying around the house when I was a child, and read it over and over again. I remember one column about a delicious cheese he had bought as a gift on a visit to some English country town, and every crumb of which he ended up scoffing himself. Another column described an encounter he had with a graffiti artist on the London Underground. When Waterhouse asked the surprised vandal why he was defacing a wall, the young fellow asked him what else there was to do. Waterhouse takes up the challenge and gives him a pretty long list of suggestions. I remember two of them were "eating a Mars bar" and "building a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks". When he is finished, the vandal gives Waterhouse a pitying look and says, "You're a sad git, you are."
I remember the cover of Mondays, Thursdays showed a cartoon of various figures sitting on a merry-go-round. They included Mickey Mouse and JR of Dallas fame. I think this is the poetry of the newspaper column-- it gives us a confidence in the inexhaustible variety and picturesqueness of life.
Another book of newspaper columns I enjoyed was An Irish Eye by Anthony Cronin (though I disagreed with nearly all of his opinions) and-- of course-- the majestic Best of Myles by Myles Na Gopaleen. Cruiskeen Lawn by Myles Na Gopaleen was probably the apotheosis of the newspaper column. In fact, it is difficult to even think of Cruiskeen Lawn as a newspaper column, since Myles (AKA Flann O'Brien and Brian O'Nolan) rarely paid much attention to the events of the day, or engaged in the kind of social observation and commentary that is the bread and butter of most columnists. Cruiskeen Lawn instead was a dazzling display of comic fireworks, too idiosyncratic and brilliant to bear much comparison with any other columnist.
It is a perfect contrast with the columns of John D. Sheridan, an Irish newspaper humourist whose career overlapped with that of Myles. Sheridan wrote for the Irish Independent, while Myles wrote for the Irish Times, the other major Irish national daily. Both writers were Catholics, though many readers of Myles might be surprised to learn of his religious faith. John D. Sheridan, on the other hand, was much more straightforwardly devout, writing for a magazine called The Irish Rosary and even producing a book-length defence of Catholic doctrine (The Hungry Sheep).
The biggest difference, it has to be said, was that Myles was a literary genius, while John D. Sheridan was-- not.
All the same, I am a fan of Sheridan. Reading him takes me back to an Ireland that I never knew, but for which I feel nostalgic anyway, the Ireland of the fities and sixties. (He was published from the thirties onwards, but I've mostly read his later writing.) It was a fairly complacent Ireland, or (as John Major might put it) a nation at ease with itself. The great majority of Irish people were Catholic and nationalist, while those that were not Catholic were still Christian or, at the very least, respectful of religion. The turmoil of the War of Independence, the Civil War and the Emergency were a memory, and the Troubles in the North were yet to come. Ireland was enjoying the first comforts of modernity-- cars and radios and foreign holidays-- while still retaining a vibrant national tradition.
Even the dustjackets of John D. Sheridan's books describe his humour as "gentle"-- and if it was gentle then, it is trebly gentle now. (It has to be admitted that, in this case as many others, "gentle" is sometimes a synonym for "mediocre" and "bland". But even mediocrity and blandness have their charms.)
Sheridan was not just a newspaper columnist. He also wrote poetry (especially children's poetry), biography (a biography of James Clarence Mangan, the poet) and novels. I've read only one of his novels, The Magnificent McDarney. It is a surprisingly gritty and dark work, somewhat similar to the novels of Walter Macken in style. It chronicles the last days of an alcoholic who neglects and exploits his family, a former actor who gets by on handouts and charm. The novel does not flinch from the ugliness of alcoholism, poverty or feckless fatherhood, but-- spoiler alert-- it has a happy ending, in which McDarney goes on a retreat and makes a good confession before suddenly dying. An ending like that, in which Catholic beliefs are not only a metaphor or a theme, but actually crucial to the whole point of the story, is difficult to imagine in a popular writer today.
But it is Sheridan's newspaper articles that I enjoy the most, and they are much lighter in tone. Even their titles convey a certain naivety, a lack of obliqueness that I find refreshing. Scanning down the contents page of My Hat Blew Off (one of two collections on my shelf), I find titles like Christmas Parties And Paper Hats, On Wedding Breakfasts, On Asking the Way and A Letter to Santa. They read like set titles for schoolboy essays-- an appealing association, in my view.
It has to be admitted that Sheridan was not always inspired, often stretching a theme as far as it could go and further, even within three pages. He has one feeble piece in which he describes an evening alone in the house, during which he amuses himself by ringing its various bells. (It sounds more interesting than it is.) And then there is the article in which he tries to make comic mileage out of the awkwardness of railway station farewells, a situation in which nobody (he insists) can ever think of anything to say. Artistic representations of boredom are always boring, and I no more want to read about somebody with nothing to say than I want to meet (or read) somebody with nothing to say.
But more often, Sheridan does have something to say-- usually some meditation on the mishaps of daily life, or the little pleasures of existence, or the changes in manners and in ways of life.
Writers like him are a good source of social history. In one of the articles in My Hat Blew Off-- a piece decrying the observance of the New Year-- he records that the "War on Christmas" had begun as long ago as 1951 (the year the collection was published):
It is not without significance that as New Year's becomes more and more of a feast, Christmas is becoming less and less of a feast-- in the sense that millions of people the world over no longer believe in the Founder of the feast. We have reached the stage where we commemorate a birthday without adverting to the tremendous and central fact that Someone was born; and it is on record that, some years ago, an American director of education issued instructions to his teachers, saying that every school should have a Santa Claus and a Christmas tree, but banning all songs, carols and dramatizations that "mention the Nativity" or "stress the religious significance" of a feast that has no other significance. For you cannot even use the word "Christmas" without declaring your allegiance, and even "Xmas", that miserable subterfuge, begins with a letter that is shaped like a cross.
(Incidentally, I don't myself think there is anything wrong or anti-Christian with "Xmas", and I often use it. I also don't see any conflict in celebrating both Christmas and the New Year)
One of my favourite articles is On Wedding Breakfasts, in which Sheridan lambasts the pretentiousness of modern wedding breakfasts. He writes:
Presently the guests are taken off to breakfast, and they expect, but don't get, a magnificent breakfast. They get one and a half sardines, five congealed green peas, two cubes of beetroot, several unrecognizable foreign bodies, and an immensity of knives and forks.
Sheridan is right to abhor all this, and I wish I could shake the man's hand for his own recommendation, which is exactly and even exuberantly correct:
The backbone of a breakfast, wedding or ordinary, is rashers and eggs and TEA; lashing and leavings of tea-- and from the word "go", not when one has been chilled with diced betroot and green peas. For a wedding, of course, there should be something more: since the guests expect it, and since the bride's father will have to pay through the nose whether or no. So we should have-- in addition to the basic constituents-- such trimmings as liver, sausages, black pudding, fried bread and potato cake; not all on one plate, but distributed in easily-accessible places, like side-dishes at a hunting breakfast.
Oh, all ye organizers of parties and celebrations and nosh-ups of every kind, commit these words of wisdom to memory, and never fail to heed them:
A feast should mean enormous helpings of the things you are used to, not a dismal succession of bite-sized fragments that are as unfamiliar as they are unappetizing.
A man who has made his mind up to enjoy himself thoroughly is in no mood for experiment.
Many of his articles appeal on account of their Irishness. Just One Little Word is a meditation on the Irish dialect word oul' (as in Dublin in the Rare Oul' Times). Sheridan spells it owl, and gives quite an accomplished and entertaining description of its range of meanings, its many uses and undertones. In the final paragraphs, Sheridan writes:
We Irish are supposed to wear our hearts on our sleeves; but we don't. We are terribly afraid of our hearts, and the old Gaelic reticence is still strong in us. We hide our deepest feelings, and give our emotions no words.
We can coin mighty compliments when we speak from the head, but when we speak from the heart we are tongue-tied. However, we manage to get along. We have one little word that sees us through all our emotional difficulties, and it is a fine stand-by when th'owl tongue lets us down.
Another instance in which Sheridan gives tongue to my own views is in his tirade against eating out of doors, entitled (with usual imagination) Meals Out-of-Doors:
Country folk, with centuries of true culture behind them, never take their food out-of-doors-- unless some desperate adventure is afoot, like mowing the far meadow, or selling a cow in the neighbouring town. They may bring a can of tea to the meadow, or a few monster sandwiches to the town, but when they do they have the air of exiles, and they are always glad to get back again to the one place where a human being can eat properly...Every time you go on a picnic, you sell your birthright and become a beast of the field.
I can't cheer this loud enough! As far as I'm concerned, there are two requirements to the proper enjoyment of food and drink. One is a table beneath you, and the other is a roof above you.
Sheridan's essays usually reflect a comfortable, middle-class world-- "the office" is taken to be the typical working hours location of the reader-- but, this being Catholic Ireland, he is aware of poverty and deprivation. One article describes his experience of volunteering for the St. Vincent de Paul, while another describes a carefree down-and-out sunning himself by the O'Connell monument in Dublin.
In an article entitled By The Sea, Sheridan puts forward a thesis that I have established to my own satisfaction, by spending the entirety of a passage between Dublin and Holyhead on the deck of a ferry:
I found that man of normal intelligence can exhaust the intellectual possibilities of the sea in about twenty minutes. After that it becomes monotonous. You have seen the picture through dozens of times, and there is nothing for it but to go home to your supper.
(The sea serves very well for a backdrop when you are thinking of other things, or when you are walking along it discussing other things with another soul. But try gazing into it for any length of time and you will find that Sheridan is entirely right.)
Sheridan's most touching and enjoyable pieces are usually his forays into nostalgia, and his accounts of how times have changed. This is a valuable service that the topical writer performs for posterity; he is there to capture the passing of one way of doing things, and the introduction of another. New Lamps for Old is a fascinating description of electrification, and an affectionate tribute to the oil lamp:
One of the things I noticed during two recent runs by car to places west of the Shannon is that the lights of the cities have rivals now in the lights of the little towns. Main Street is not yet as bright as O'Connell Street, but it at least belongs to the same order of brightness...the thing is spreading. To-day the towns, tomorrow the villages, and the townlands the day after...Manus the Shop, who can sell you anything from a quarter of cough-lozenges to a bag of meal, now has electric irons in his shelves, and old men are telling each other that it was all set down in Colmcille's prophecies and the end of the world is only round the corner.
(I can remember my own uncle, a Limerick farmer, discussing Colmcille's prophecies with a neighbour, in no flippant tone.)
This is what he has to say about the oil-lamp, and it makes me envious of people in those days:
Getting the lamp going was almost as soothing as filling a pipe. The globe was breathed on and polished with soft flannel, the wick was trimmed, and women cautioned their daughters to keep the flame low until the glass had time to heat. The light did not burst on you suddenly, and your eyes were ready for the full glare when it came...
One essay, A Happy Christmas, is written in Ogden Nash-like verse and shows that Sheridan's attitude towards Christmas shopping is the same as my father's:
I want to have my old-fashioned Christmas fun and do all the things that in the best circles are no longer done.
I want to be trampled and squeezed to death, to dig with and be dug by elbows as I struggle for breath,
To move in a sardine crush of reactionary fellow-shoppers in places like the Coombe and Henry Street
Where I have to ask total strangers not to stand on my feet.
I want to be one of the gawkers who stand and look at the hawkers
To be importuned to contribute to the gaiety of nations by buying a dancing sailor or a Christmas motto or the last-- the very last-- of the Christmas decorations.
I do admire the ideal, but I am afraid it is too heroic for me. I shop ahead.
One essay, On Bridges, in which Sheridan laments the city habit of passing bridges without stopping to stare into the waters below for a meditative moment, has actually changed my own behaviour. I now usually remind myself not to pass the glories of running water, even in a bus, without pausing to look.
An essay entitled The Country Dresser praises this piece of furniture and mourns its passing. One paragraph in particular is a fine summation of the whole cultural and social world that Sheridan's columns occupy:
There were letters for answering, and ink to answer them with; Rosary beads hanging from nails, prayer books, tin "pandies" with wire handles, scones of bread, neckties that were worn only once a week, and a crock of cream with a piece of fine butter-muslin across it. You went to the dresser for everything from a drink of clean water to a dab of holy water. It answered every need and was the universal provider.
Sheridan writes perceptively and sensitively about childhood. His own children, who he calls Morsels One, Two and Three (I wonder how they liked that as they grew older?) often form the subject-matter of his articles. I liked this description of a child's love for lemonade (a love I share-- and American readers, please note that, in Ireland, lemonade is a fizzy drink, commercially produced rather than homemade):
Children love lemonade. They love the fizz and sparkle of it, the cold cutting taste of it, and the tickle that it gives the throat as it goes down. They can almost feel the beaded bubbles crumbling between their teeth. They tire in time of iced cake and trifle, and they sometimes leave a sliver of apple tart on the plate, but they would sell their nearest and dearest for lemonade, and the party is never over until the last siphon is empty.
I like John D. Sheridan because he is sentimental. I like him because is nostalgic. I like him because he is affectionate. I enjoy reading his books as much on account of the things I know won't be there as the things that I know will be there. There will be no explicit sex references, no scatology, no blasphemy or disrespect to religion. The references to pop culture will be limited to mentioning a film star here and there. The moral universe he inhabits is one that assumes every human being has dignity and worth-- there will be no reference to "losers" or "loners" or "wasters". Perhaps these are the virtues of the public he wrote for, rather than virtues particular to his work. But the point is that John D. Sheridan gave voice to that public-- he wrote for a society whose taboos and pieties, I believe, actually created more freedom than oppression, on balance. Another man may feel oppressed in a culture where he cannot describe unsavoury bodily functions in lurid language; but I feel rather liberated in knowing that he is not going to do so.
My favourite of Sheridan's articles goes by the title A Letter to Santa, and it actually made me weep one very early morning, while I was waiting to take a bus to Dublin Airport, en route to America. I think an article like this illustrates how drastically our society has been de-Christianized. In today's Ireland it is considered acceptable to write seriously about God only if you are a licensed God-botherer; a priest, or a theologian, or a spokesman for the Iona Institute. That a humourist writing for the masses, today, might introduce a serious Christian theme is almost unthinkable.
I also love this article because it makes a case for the Santa myth in a Christian household. Many of my favourite Catholic writers, like Edward Feser and Mark Shea, discourage the propogation of the Santa myth. Chesterton, on the other hand, defended it, and Tolkien (an ardent Catholic) wrote his children letters from Father Christmas every year. Is Santa a lie? Or is he an allegory that children come to understand as they mature? I don't know the answer, but I know which answer I prefer. I certainly don't feel my faith was harmed by the claim that Santa brought me gifts at Christmas time.
Sheridan writes:
Once-- and not so long ago-- Europe, at this blessed time of year, was a blaze of lighted chuch-windows, carols meant more than carousals, and red, symbolic candles shone out from a million sills to guide your landings. But the lights grow fewer every year, and a great darkness is spreading over the face of Christendom.
You were always a legend, Santa, but now they are trying to make you a lie; and you were never a lie. You were, rather, a logical necessity. You just had to be invented. You stand, not just for a parable, but for a whole medley of parables.
You represent, for instance, the belief that prayers are heard-- and answered; the belief that time and space do not exist in the spiritual dimension; the belief that there is a Bounty that is not embarrassed or diminished by the number of clients or the immensity of their needs.
Futher on, Sheridan insists: "Nothing is surer than that the spatter of Christmas lights that once pin-pointed Europe, from Tagus to Volga will come again in God's good time."
His closing lines are even more touching, and show that, though Sheridan wrote a lot of dull and plodding pieces, now and again his prose could sing:
That is why I am still prepared, in spite of the cost of living, to act as your local representative and depot superintendent until my Illustrious Virtues [his children] find both of us out; why I am prepared to perpetuate a legend that looks like a lie but is merely a cloak for the truth; why I can say, literally and with all reverence, that the tiny things I have wrapped in brown paper and hidden away against the Vigil of the Feast are part of the Deposit of Faith.
But sure, who am I telling it to?
John D. Sheridan was by no means a great writer. But I turn to his writings with great pleasure and relief, because I believe they reflect a time and a society that had attained something like greatness-- or (if that is too bold a claim) a society that was, at least, turned towards those mysteries and dogmas that are the only truly great things in this world, and are also the only enduring pillars of a life that is fully human, humane, and happy.
(NOTE: If you liked this post-- and it seems to generate a fair amount of traffic, probably because there is so little about this author on the internet-- you might also like my review of The Hungry Sheep, Sheridan's book in defence of the Catholic faith.)
The first columnist for whom I developed a passion was Keith Waterhouse, an English writer whose long career ended with his death some years ago. I found a book of his newspaper columns, Monday Thursdays, lying around the house when I was a child, and read it over and over again. I remember one column about a delicious cheese he had bought as a gift on a visit to some English country town, and every crumb of which he ended up scoffing himself. Another column described an encounter he had with a graffiti artist on the London Underground. When Waterhouse asked the surprised vandal why he was defacing a wall, the young fellow asked him what else there was to do. Waterhouse takes up the challenge and gives him a pretty long list of suggestions. I remember two of them were "eating a Mars bar" and "building a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks". When he is finished, the vandal gives Waterhouse a pitying look and says, "You're a sad git, you are."
I remember the cover of Mondays, Thursdays showed a cartoon of various figures sitting on a merry-go-round. They included Mickey Mouse and JR of Dallas fame. I think this is the poetry of the newspaper column-- it gives us a confidence in the inexhaustible variety and picturesqueness of life.
Another book of newspaper columns I enjoyed was An Irish Eye by Anthony Cronin (though I disagreed with nearly all of his opinions) and-- of course-- the majestic Best of Myles by Myles Na Gopaleen. Cruiskeen Lawn by Myles Na Gopaleen was probably the apotheosis of the newspaper column. In fact, it is difficult to even think of Cruiskeen Lawn as a newspaper column, since Myles (AKA Flann O'Brien and Brian O'Nolan) rarely paid much attention to the events of the day, or engaged in the kind of social observation and commentary that is the bread and butter of most columnists. Cruiskeen Lawn instead was a dazzling display of comic fireworks, too idiosyncratic and brilliant to bear much comparison with any other columnist.
It is a perfect contrast with the columns of John D. Sheridan, an Irish newspaper humourist whose career overlapped with that of Myles. Sheridan wrote for the Irish Independent, while Myles wrote for the Irish Times, the other major Irish national daily. Both writers were Catholics, though many readers of Myles might be surprised to learn of his religious faith. John D. Sheridan, on the other hand, was much more straightforwardly devout, writing for a magazine called The Irish Rosary and even producing a book-length defence of Catholic doctrine (The Hungry Sheep).
The biggest difference, it has to be said, was that Myles was a literary genius, while John D. Sheridan was-- not.
All the same, I am a fan of Sheridan. Reading him takes me back to an Ireland that I never knew, but for which I feel nostalgic anyway, the Ireland of the fities and sixties. (He was published from the thirties onwards, but I've mostly read his later writing.) It was a fairly complacent Ireland, or (as John Major might put it) a nation at ease with itself. The great majority of Irish people were Catholic and nationalist, while those that were not Catholic were still Christian or, at the very least, respectful of religion. The turmoil of the War of Independence, the Civil War and the Emergency were a memory, and the Troubles in the North were yet to come. Ireland was enjoying the first comforts of modernity-- cars and radios and foreign holidays-- while still retaining a vibrant national tradition.
Even the dustjackets of John D. Sheridan's books describe his humour as "gentle"-- and if it was gentle then, it is trebly gentle now. (It has to be admitted that, in this case as many others, "gentle" is sometimes a synonym for "mediocre" and "bland". But even mediocrity and blandness have their charms.)
Sheridan was not just a newspaper columnist. He also wrote poetry (especially children's poetry), biography (a biography of James Clarence Mangan, the poet) and novels. I've read only one of his novels, The Magnificent McDarney. It is a surprisingly gritty and dark work, somewhat similar to the novels of Walter Macken in style. It chronicles the last days of an alcoholic who neglects and exploits his family, a former actor who gets by on handouts and charm. The novel does not flinch from the ugliness of alcoholism, poverty or feckless fatherhood, but-- spoiler alert-- it has a happy ending, in which McDarney goes on a retreat and makes a good confession before suddenly dying. An ending like that, in which Catholic beliefs are not only a metaphor or a theme, but actually crucial to the whole point of the story, is difficult to imagine in a popular writer today.
But it is Sheridan's newspaper articles that I enjoy the most, and they are much lighter in tone. Even their titles convey a certain naivety, a lack of obliqueness that I find refreshing. Scanning down the contents page of My Hat Blew Off (one of two collections on my shelf), I find titles like Christmas Parties And Paper Hats, On Wedding Breakfasts, On Asking the Way and A Letter to Santa. They read like set titles for schoolboy essays-- an appealing association, in my view.
It has to be admitted that Sheridan was not always inspired, often stretching a theme as far as it could go and further, even within three pages. He has one feeble piece in which he describes an evening alone in the house, during which he amuses himself by ringing its various bells. (It sounds more interesting than it is.) And then there is the article in which he tries to make comic mileage out of the awkwardness of railway station farewells, a situation in which nobody (he insists) can ever think of anything to say. Artistic representations of boredom are always boring, and I no more want to read about somebody with nothing to say than I want to meet (or read) somebody with nothing to say.
But more often, Sheridan does have something to say-- usually some meditation on the mishaps of daily life, or the little pleasures of existence, or the changes in manners and in ways of life.
Writers like him are a good source of social history. In one of the articles in My Hat Blew Off-- a piece decrying the observance of the New Year-- he records that the "War on Christmas" had begun as long ago as 1951 (the year the collection was published):
It is not without significance that as New Year's becomes more and more of a feast, Christmas is becoming less and less of a feast-- in the sense that millions of people the world over no longer believe in the Founder of the feast. We have reached the stage where we commemorate a birthday without adverting to the tremendous and central fact that Someone was born; and it is on record that, some years ago, an American director of education issued instructions to his teachers, saying that every school should have a Santa Claus and a Christmas tree, but banning all songs, carols and dramatizations that "mention the Nativity" or "stress the religious significance" of a feast that has no other significance. For you cannot even use the word "Christmas" without declaring your allegiance, and even "Xmas", that miserable subterfuge, begins with a letter that is shaped like a cross.
(Incidentally, I don't myself think there is anything wrong or anti-Christian with "Xmas", and I often use it. I also don't see any conflict in celebrating both Christmas and the New Year)
One of my favourite articles is On Wedding Breakfasts, in which Sheridan lambasts the pretentiousness of modern wedding breakfasts. He writes:
Presently the guests are taken off to breakfast, and they expect, but don't get, a magnificent breakfast. They get one and a half sardines, five congealed green peas, two cubes of beetroot, several unrecognizable foreign bodies, and an immensity of knives and forks.
Sheridan is right to abhor all this, and I wish I could shake the man's hand for his own recommendation, which is exactly and even exuberantly correct:
The backbone of a breakfast, wedding or ordinary, is rashers and eggs and TEA; lashing and leavings of tea-- and from the word "go", not when one has been chilled with diced betroot and green peas. For a wedding, of course, there should be something more: since the guests expect it, and since the bride's father will have to pay through the nose whether or no. So we should have-- in addition to the basic constituents-- such trimmings as liver, sausages, black pudding, fried bread and potato cake; not all on one plate, but distributed in easily-accessible places, like side-dishes at a hunting breakfast.
Oh, all ye organizers of parties and celebrations and nosh-ups of every kind, commit these words of wisdom to memory, and never fail to heed them:
A feast should mean enormous helpings of the things you are used to, not a dismal succession of bite-sized fragments that are as unfamiliar as they are unappetizing.
A man who has made his mind up to enjoy himself thoroughly is in no mood for experiment.
Many of his articles appeal on account of their Irishness. Just One Little Word is a meditation on the Irish dialect word oul' (as in Dublin in the Rare Oul' Times). Sheridan spells it owl, and gives quite an accomplished and entertaining description of its range of meanings, its many uses and undertones. In the final paragraphs, Sheridan writes:
We Irish are supposed to wear our hearts on our sleeves; but we don't. We are terribly afraid of our hearts, and the old Gaelic reticence is still strong in us. We hide our deepest feelings, and give our emotions no words.
We can coin mighty compliments when we speak from the head, but when we speak from the heart we are tongue-tied. However, we manage to get along. We have one little word that sees us through all our emotional difficulties, and it is a fine stand-by when th'owl tongue lets us down.
Another instance in which Sheridan gives tongue to my own views is in his tirade against eating out of doors, entitled (with usual imagination) Meals Out-of-Doors:
Country folk, with centuries of true culture behind them, never take their food out-of-doors-- unless some desperate adventure is afoot, like mowing the far meadow, or selling a cow in the neighbouring town. They may bring a can of tea to the meadow, or a few monster sandwiches to the town, but when they do they have the air of exiles, and they are always glad to get back again to the one place where a human being can eat properly...Every time you go on a picnic, you sell your birthright and become a beast of the field.
I can't cheer this loud enough! As far as I'm concerned, there are two requirements to the proper enjoyment of food and drink. One is a table beneath you, and the other is a roof above you.
Sheridan's essays usually reflect a comfortable, middle-class world-- "the office" is taken to be the typical working hours location of the reader-- but, this being Catholic Ireland, he is aware of poverty and deprivation. One article describes his experience of volunteering for the St. Vincent de Paul, while another describes a carefree down-and-out sunning himself by the O'Connell monument in Dublin.
In an article entitled By The Sea, Sheridan puts forward a thesis that I have established to my own satisfaction, by spending the entirety of a passage between Dublin and Holyhead on the deck of a ferry:
I found that man of normal intelligence can exhaust the intellectual possibilities of the sea in about twenty minutes. After that it becomes monotonous. You have seen the picture through dozens of times, and there is nothing for it but to go home to your supper.
(The sea serves very well for a backdrop when you are thinking of other things, or when you are walking along it discussing other things with another soul. But try gazing into it for any length of time and you will find that Sheridan is entirely right.)
Sheridan's most touching and enjoyable pieces are usually his forays into nostalgia, and his accounts of how times have changed. This is a valuable service that the topical writer performs for posterity; he is there to capture the passing of one way of doing things, and the introduction of another. New Lamps for Old is a fascinating description of electrification, and an affectionate tribute to the oil lamp:
One of the things I noticed during two recent runs by car to places west of the Shannon is that the lights of the cities have rivals now in the lights of the little towns. Main Street is not yet as bright as O'Connell Street, but it at least belongs to the same order of brightness...the thing is spreading. To-day the towns, tomorrow the villages, and the townlands the day after...Manus the Shop, who can sell you anything from a quarter of cough-lozenges to a bag of meal, now has electric irons in his shelves, and old men are telling each other that it was all set down in Colmcille's prophecies and the end of the world is only round the corner.
(I can remember my own uncle, a Limerick farmer, discussing Colmcille's prophecies with a neighbour, in no flippant tone.)
This is what he has to say about the oil-lamp, and it makes me envious of people in those days:
Getting the lamp going was almost as soothing as filling a pipe. The globe was breathed on and polished with soft flannel, the wick was trimmed, and women cautioned their daughters to keep the flame low until the glass had time to heat. The light did not burst on you suddenly, and your eyes were ready for the full glare when it came...
One essay, A Happy Christmas, is written in Ogden Nash-like verse and shows that Sheridan's attitude towards Christmas shopping is the same as my father's:
I want to have my old-fashioned Christmas fun and do all the things that in the best circles are no longer done.
I want to be trampled and squeezed to death, to dig with and be dug by elbows as I struggle for breath,
To move in a sardine crush of reactionary fellow-shoppers in places like the Coombe and Henry Street
Where I have to ask total strangers not to stand on my feet.
I want to be one of the gawkers who stand and look at the hawkers
To be importuned to contribute to the gaiety of nations by buying a dancing sailor or a Christmas motto or the last-- the very last-- of the Christmas decorations.
I do admire the ideal, but I am afraid it is too heroic for me. I shop ahead.
One essay, On Bridges, in which Sheridan laments the city habit of passing bridges without stopping to stare into the waters below for a meditative moment, has actually changed my own behaviour. I now usually remind myself not to pass the glories of running water, even in a bus, without pausing to look.
An essay entitled The Country Dresser praises this piece of furniture and mourns its passing. One paragraph in particular is a fine summation of the whole cultural and social world that Sheridan's columns occupy:
There were letters for answering, and ink to answer them with; Rosary beads hanging from nails, prayer books, tin "pandies" with wire handles, scones of bread, neckties that were worn only once a week, and a crock of cream with a piece of fine butter-muslin across it. You went to the dresser for everything from a drink of clean water to a dab of holy water. It answered every need and was the universal provider.
Sheridan writes perceptively and sensitively about childhood. His own children, who he calls Morsels One, Two and Three (I wonder how they liked that as they grew older?) often form the subject-matter of his articles. I liked this description of a child's love for lemonade (a love I share-- and American readers, please note that, in Ireland, lemonade is a fizzy drink, commercially produced rather than homemade):
Children love lemonade. They love the fizz and sparkle of it, the cold cutting taste of it, and the tickle that it gives the throat as it goes down. They can almost feel the beaded bubbles crumbling between their teeth. They tire in time of iced cake and trifle, and they sometimes leave a sliver of apple tart on the plate, but they would sell their nearest and dearest for lemonade, and the party is never over until the last siphon is empty.
I like John D. Sheridan because he is sentimental. I like him because is nostalgic. I like him because he is affectionate. I enjoy reading his books as much on account of the things I know won't be there as the things that I know will be there. There will be no explicit sex references, no scatology, no blasphemy or disrespect to religion. The references to pop culture will be limited to mentioning a film star here and there. The moral universe he inhabits is one that assumes every human being has dignity and worth-- there will be no reference to "losers" or "loners" or "wasters". Perhaps these are the virtues of the public he wrote for, rather than virtues particular to his work. But the point is that John D. Sheridan gave voice to that public-- he wrote for a society whose taboos and pieties, I believe, actually created more freedom than oppression, on balance. Another man may feel oppressed in a culture where he cannot describe unsavoury bodily functions in lurid language; but I feel rather liberated in knowing that he is not going to do so.
My favourite of Sheridan's articles goes by the title A Letter to Santa, and it actually made me weep one very early morning, while I was waiting to take a bus to Dublin Airport, en route to America. I think an article like this illustrates how drastically our society has been de-Christianized. In today's Ireland it is considered acceptable to write seriously about God only if you are a licensed God-botherer; a priest, or a theologian, or a spokesman for the Iona Institute. That a humourist writing for the masses, today, might introduce a serious Christian theme is almost unthinkable.
I also love this article because it makes a case for the Santa myth in a Christian household. Many of my favourite Catholic writers, like Edward Feser and Mark Shea, discourage the propogation of the Santa myth. Chesterton, on the other hand, defended it, and Tolkien (an ardent Catholic) wrote his children letters from Father Christmas every year. Is Santa a lie? Or is he an allegory that children come to understand as they mature? I don't know the answer, but I know which answer I prefer. I certainly don't feel my faith was harmed by the claim that Santa brought me gifts at Christmas time.
Sheridan writes:
Once-- and not so long ago-- Europe, at this blessed time of year, was a blaze of lighted chuch-windows, carols meant more than carousals, and red, symbolic candles shone out from a million sills to guide your landings. But the lights grow fewer every year, and a great darkness is spreading over the face of Christendom.
You were always a legend, Santa, but now they are trying to make you a lie; and you were never a lie. You were, rather, a logical necessity. You just had to be invented. You stand, not just for a parable, but for a whole medley of parables.
You represent, for instance, the belief that prayers are heard-- and answered; the belief that time and space do not exist in the spiritual dimension; the belief that there is a Bounty that is not embarrassed or diminished by the number of clients or the immensity of their needs.
Futher on, Sheridan insists: "Nothing is surer than that the spatter of Christmas lights that once pin-pointed Europe, from Tagus to Volga will come again in God's good time."
His closing lines are even more touching, and show that, though Sheridan wrote a lot of dull and plodding pieces, now and again his prose could sing:
That is why I am still prepared, in spite of the cost of living, to act as your local representative and depot superintendent until my Illustrious Virtues [his children] find both of us out; why I am prepared to perpetuate a legend that looks like a lie but is merely a cloak for the truth; why I can say, literally and with all reverence, that the tiny things I have wrapped in brown paper and hidden away against the Vigil of the Feast are part of the Deposit of Faith.
But sure, who am I telling it to?
John D. Sheridan was by no means a great writer. But I turn to his writings with great pleasure and relief, because I believe they reflect a time and a society that had attained something like greatness-- or (if that is too bold a claim) a society that was, at least, turned towards those mysteries and dogmas that are the only truly great things in this world, and are also the only enduring pillars of a life that is fully human, humane, and happy.
(NOTE: If you liked this post-- and it seems to generate a fair amount of traffic, probably because there is so little about this author on the internet-- you might also like my review of The Hungry Sheep, Sheridan's book in defence of the Catholic faith.)
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Aslan Pay Tribute to a Great Ballymun Institution...
I'm pleased to see that the ad features a "van", which were distinctive (or even unique?) Ballymun institutions of my childhood. Vans were simply van trailers from which groceries were sold. I presume they were pillars of the black market, though I'm not sure. Maybe they were kosher. "I'm going to the van to get some milk", tripped easily of our tongues. Non-Ballymunners who heard us speak thus probably presumed we had trailers full of supplies parked outside our homes.
What I remember most about vans are the sweets and crisps they sold. We couldn't get enough of them as kids. We used to loiter around outside the van and pester passers-by for "tempence for a bag of cripps". (At least, other kids did. I was too timid.) Everything was priced "tempence", it seemed.
How well I remember all the goodies we devoured! There were Winks crisps, which had a picture of a woman winking on the packet and were the sauciest, tangiest crisps I've ever tasted. They had prawn cocktail flavour at a time when this was exotic. I remember Alien Spacers, which were crisps (or, as my American readers would say, "corn snacks") with a science-fiction theme and (marvels of marvels) actual comic-strip STORIES on the packet. They came in three flavours but nobody wanted the cheese ones.
There were A-Team crisps, Barry McGuigan crisps (Barry McGuigan was an Irish boxer of brief superstardom), Payday bars, Chomp bars, Mint Crisp bars, Macaroons bars, Burger Bites...I remember eating vast quantities of all of them, even the ones I didn't like so much. I think the only reason we weren't all massively obese is because we also spent hours playing never-ending soccer games on the grass, back before all the fields in Ballymun had been built over. No matter how long these games went on, and no matter what the score might be, they always ended in "last goal wins", when it was too dark to go on any longer and mothers were calling us back indoors from tower and apartment block windows.
And then, after the soccer games (for those who weren't summoned back inside), there was the telling of ghost stories as we lay sitting or sprawled in a dark field and the evening air grew chillier. Those stories! One told of how a kid had drawn a pentangle on one side of a garden shed door, and a witch on the other. When he revisited the shed the next day, the pentangle and the witch had switched places. The sheer economy and oddness of that story seriously spooked me. Looking back, I can only admire the creativity of whoever made it up. If it was made up, that is...
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
This Could Be My Favourite Ad of All Time...
I think it's my favourite modern portrayal of Irishness, too. The fellow looks as though he is an executive of some kind but not by any means a "suit", and certainly not somebody whose mental and cultural horizons are limited to the Dow Jones and the ISEQ. He looks and talks like a man at home in the twenty-first century, but not cut off from his national or human heritage, either (as you can tell from his easy references to Yeats and Friel, Godot and Gulliver, Dracula and Dorian Gray.)
I wish this was what being Irish in today's world really looked like. It's a nice ideal.
I think one of the things I dislike most about modernity (or perhaps I should say postmodernity) is a kind of stiffening of the imaginative and cultural arteries. Pop culture, consumerism, liberalism, libertarianism, atheism, careerism-- all of them seem, most of the time, to inolve a shrinking of the mental world, a foregrounding of the here and now and of the business at hand, a simplification of the world into rights, or into cashflows, or into empirically measurable phenomena. A freeman of poetry and history and philosophy will never suffer from that kind of claustrophobia, and will regard the pageant around him with a certain twinkle in his eye. Like this raffish fellow.
I love the music, too. So expressive of wonder and anticipation-- rare commodities in our jaundiced and ironic era.
I wish this was what being Irish in today's world really looked like. It's a nice ideal.
I think one of the things I dislike most about modernity (or perhaps I should say postmodernity) is a kind of stiffening of the imaginative and cultural arteries. Pop culture, consumerism, liberalism, libertarianism, atheism, careerism-- all of them seem, most of the time, to inolve a shrinking of the mental world, a foregrounding of the here and now and of the business at hand, a simplification of the world into rights, or into cashflows, or into empirically measurable phenomena. A freeman of poetry and history and philosophy will never suffer from that kind of claustrophobia, and will regard the pageant around him with a certain twinkle in his eye. Like this raffish fellow.
I love the music, too. So expressive of wonder and anticipation-- rare commodities in our jaundiced and ironic era.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Shock! Horror! The Gaeilgeoirs are Unhappy Again!
The Irish Times reports:
The offices of the President and the Ombudsman are among those public bodies whose language schemes expired more than three years ago, and two-thirds of all public bodies have no scheme, Mr Ó Cuirreáin confirmed in his annual report as An Coimisinéir Teanga, published yesterday in Galway.
The report notes a 5 per cent rise in complaints about problems dealing with State services through the medium of Irish, with 734 new complaints in all.
The Garda Síochána was among the bodies at fault, when an investigation found that eight of nine gardaí assigned to service in Gweedore in the Donegal Gaeltacht weren’t able to carry out their duties through Irish.
I find it very hard to be sympathetic. This is not because I am anti-Irish language. I believe the Irish language is a precious cultural legacy, and the Irish nation is entirely right to cherish it, and to seek its revival. I also believe that it's entirely legitimate for the language to be preserved and promoted through legislation. I would not be in favour of removing compulsory Irish from schools.
But I do dislike the attitude and behaviour of many of the Irish language brigade. They are never going to bring about a revival of the Irish language through pressurising and embarrassing their compatriots, or by simmering in a perpetual state of grievance and sanctimoniousness.
It is true that they have a legal right to services through the Irish language. It is also true that this right rests upon a polite fiction. If it were consistently applied-- if every state employee who deals with the public was actually required to have functional Irish-- then the constitutional status of Irish as our first language would be dropped quicker than you can say "slán abhaile".
Of course gardai in Gaeltacht areas should be proficient in Irish. But somehow I guess that most of those 734 new complaints were motivated by kind of petulant, point-scoring identity politics.
I think one thing that militant Gaeilgeoirs forget is that linguistic competence differs dramatically from person to person. Learning Irish is a much bigger commitment for some people than it is for others. Some of us seem to pick up languages almost without thinking about it. Others, like me-- and my entire primary and secondary schooling was through the medium of Irish-- find it extraordinarily difficult.
The Gaeilgeoirs should concentrate upon reviving the language through example and persuasion, rather than by resorting to the politics of entitlement.
The offices of the President and the Ombudsman are among those public bodies whose language schemes expired more than three years ago, and two-thirds of all public bodies have no scheme, Mr Ó Cuirreáin confirmed in his annual report as An Coimisinéir Teanga, published yesterday in Galway.
The report notes a 5 per cent rise in complaints about problems dealing with State services through the medium of Irish, with 734 new complaints in all.
The Garda Síochána was among the bodies at fault, when an investigation found that eight of nine gardaí assigned to service in Gweedore in the Donegal Gaeltacht weren’t able to carry out their duties through Irish.
I find it very hard to be sympathetic. This is not because I am anti-Irish language. I believe the Irish language is a precious cultural legacy, and the Irish nation is entirely right to cherish it, and to seek its revival. I also believe that it's entirely legitimate for the language to be preserved and promoted through legislation. I would not be in favour of removing compulsory Irish from schools.
But I do dislike the attitude and behaviour of many of the Irish language brigade. They are never going to bring about a revival of the Irish language through pressurising and embarrassing their compatriots, or by simmering in a perpetual state of grievance and sanctimoniousness.
It is true that they have a legal right to services through the Irish language. It is also true that this right rests upon a polite fiction. If it were consistently applied-- if every state employee who deals with the public was actually required to have functional Irish-- then the constitutional status of Irish as our first language would be dropped quicker than you can say "slán abhaile".
Of course gardai in Gaeltacht areas should be proficient in Irish. But somehow I guess that most of those 734 new complaints were motivated by kind of petulant, point-scoring identity politics.
I think one thing that militant Gaeilgeoirs forget is that linguistic competence differs dramatically from person to person. Learning Irish is a much bigger commitment for some people than it is for others. Some of us seem to pick up languages almost without thinking about it. Others, like me-- and my entire primary and secondary schooling was through the medium of Irish-- find it extraordinarily difficult.
The Gaeilgeoirs should concentrate upon reviving the language through example and persuasion, rather than by resorting to the politics of entitlement.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Tea, the Quintessence of Irishness
If I had to choose a symbol of Ireland, it wouldn't be the harp. It wouldn't be the Irish wolfhound or the round tower or the shamrock. Don't get me wrong. I thoroughly approve of all those symbols, and I wish they were still as commonly seen as they used to be on school copy-books, jam jar labels, and shop signs.
But, to me, the best symbol of all things Irish is a cup of tea. We drink more of the stuff per capita than any nation in the world, and I am prouder of that than of all of our Nobel prizes, Olympic gold medals and famous names in history.
Tea! I doubt that a day has passed since my childhood in which I didn't drink tea. When an Irish person tells me that they don't drink tea, I feel as if they'd told me they don't laugh or read or walk. I can't even imagine my life without this sepia-coloured liquid delight. Torturers could probably break me much quicker by withholding my tea fix than by thumbscrews or waterboarding or sleep deprivation.
Please understand me. I do not mean herbal tea, iced tea, peppermint tea or any of those fancy-schmancy varieties that never came (Irish people will know what I mean here) in a red or a green box, with tokens of black-and-white minstrels you could cut out and collect to win a car. I mean the sort of tea that comes in Lyons and Barry's boxes. I mean dark, sustaining, full-bodied, Irish mammy tea. Breakfast tea.
There was a time when I took sugar in tea. I find it hard to imagine now. Sometimes someone gives me a cup of sugared tea and I do my best to pretend I don't mind. Really it's like salt in your corn flakes, or maybe sleeping on a wet mattress.
They say you should give sugary tea to people in shock. If I'm already in shock, I think sugared tea might drive me all the way into trauma.
This is how tea should be served (although even writing "served" makes me wince, since the formality jars. The Irish have a tea-making ceremony just like the Japanese, but the Irish tea-making ceremony is much more elastic and subtle and probably imperceptible to an outside observer).
It should on no account be watery or weak. I used to like this, too, unimaginably. Weak tea is a statement of spiritual lukewarmness, the natural beverage of the wishy-washy and half-hearted. Tea should not taste like an infusion of leaves into boiled water but rather like a primary element in liquid form. The marriage of ingredients should be so perfect, so unified, that you could imagine the stuff in your cup came from a hot tea-spring surging up from igneous rocks in some fiery country.
Tea is a symbol of the folk life, the folk spirit. If it is not full-bodied, it is nothing at all. It should be as pungent as a proverb, as overwhelming as hospitality, as thick as the strongest of accents. Nothing else is really Irish tea.
A cup of tea should, ideally, be a mug of tea. Dainty china should be kept for doll's tea-parties. Nobody ever took a deep draft from fine bone china, smacked her lips, and declared that "that hit the spot".
No, tea should come in a thick mug that you can comfortably cradle between your open palms. Considerations of age and sex do not enter into this. There is nothing lady-like about taking dainty sips of tea. Nor should children be confined to toy cups if they are ever going to develop (as they must) into serious tea imbibers.
There are some occasions when the young and the old, the male and the female meet on equal terms, and sharing a cup of tea is one of them.
Tea should not be black unless you are performing penance. How can tea perform its office of comfort and reassurance if it is all bite and no balm? The keenness of the beverage must, absolutely must, be softened by the mildness of milk. Not too much milk, of course. Not enough to take away the golden tinge in the bowl. Nor should the tea be stirred so consistently that the swirls and streaks of colour are mixed into one flat monotone.
Tea should be hot enough that steam rises from it. On a cold morning this can be visual poetry.
I love everything about tea. I love its announcement: "Let's have a cup of tea", "Would you like a cup of tea?", "Make a cup of tea there". I love the brisk, deft rinsing of cups and fishing of tea-bags from boxes, the low hum of the boiling water becoming more and more excited until it is a feverish bubbling. That's in an electric kettle, of course. If it's an old-fashioned kettle on a hob, you even get an incomparable, cheerful-solemn whistle-- perhaps the most magical of all sounds perceptible to the human ear.
Then there is the tinkle of water into the cups, the beautiful dark brown before the milk is poured in, the sight of your reflection in that circular mirror-world, dim and faraway and strangely transfigured. There is the ringing of the spoon against the sides of the cup as you vigorously shake the tea-bag. There is the graceful descent of the life-giving milk, and the slow-but-quick transformation of the happy fluid from treacle-coloured to an ambery-sepia.
And then-- ah then!-- the lifting to the lips, the deep and grateful draft, the filtering of warmth and replenishment and comfort and uplift through all the thoroughfares of the body.
Tea is-- at one and the same time-- both special and everyday, hardworking and leisurely, soothing and stimulating, down-to-earth and dreamy. It is a pleasure in itself and radiates a pleasure through the world around it. Even seeing somebody holding a cup of tea gives me a warm feeling inside. A news reporter or a politician or a foreman or anybody at all looks so much more trustworthy and human and salt-of-the-earth when they are grasping a nice thick steaming mug of Ireland's national beverage.
I can't imagine my life without tea. Come to think of it, I feel like a cup now.
But, to me, the best symbol of all things Irish is a cup of tea. We drink more of the stuff per capita than any nation in the world, and I am prouder of that than of all of our Nobel prizes, Olympic gold medals and famous names in history.
Tea! I doubt that a day has passed since my childhood in which I didn't drink tea. When an Irish person tells me that they don't drink tea, I feel as if they'd told me they don't laugh or read or walk. I can't even imagine my life without this sepia-coloured liquid delight. Torturers could probably break me much quicker by withholding my tea fix than by thumbscrews or waterboarding or sleep deprivation.
Please understand me. I do not mean herbal tea, iced tea, peppermint tea or any of those fancy-schmancy varieties that never came (Irish people will know what I mean here) in a red or a green box, with tokens of black-and-white minstrels you could cut out and collect to win a car. I mean the sort of tea that comes in Lyons and Barry's boxes. I mean dark, sustaining, full-bodied, Irish mammy tea. Breakfast tea.
There was a time when I took sugar in tea. I find it hard to imagine now. Sometimes someone gives me a cup of sugared tea and I do my best to pretend I don't mind. Really it's like salt in your corn flakes, or maybe sleeping on a wet mattress.
They say you should give sugary tea to people in shock. If I'm already in shock, I think sugared tea might drive me all the way into trauma.
This is how tea should be served (although even writing "served" makes me wince, since the formality jars. The Irish have a tea-making ceremony just like the Japanese, but the Irish tea-making ceremony is much more elastic and subtle and probably imperceptible to an outside observer).
It should on no account be watery or weak. I used to like this, too, unimaginably. Weak tea is a statement of spiritual lukewarmness, the natural beverage of the wishy-washy and half-hearted. Tea should not taste like an infusion of leaves into boiled water but rather like a primary element in liquid form. The marriage of ingredients should be so perfect, so unified, that you could imagine the stuff in your cup came from a hot tea-spring surging up from igneous rocks in some fiery country.
Tea is a symbol of the folk life, the folk spirit. If it is not full-bodied, it is nothing at all. It should be as pungent as a proverb, as overwhelming as hospitality, as thick as the strongest of accents. Nothing else is really Irish tea.
A cup of tea should, ideally, be a mug of tea. Dainty china should be kept for doll's tea-parties. Nobody ever took a deep draft from fine bone china, smacked her lips, and declared that "that hit the spot".
No, tea should come in a thick mug that you can comfortably cradle between your open palms. Considerations of age and sex do not enter into this. There is nothing lady-like about taking dainty sips of tea. Nor should children be confined to toy cups if they are ever going to develop (as they must) into serious tea imbibers.
There are some occasions when the young and the old, the male and the female meet on equal terms, and sharing a cup of tea is one of them.
Tea should not be black unless you are performing penance. How can tea perform its office of comfort and reassurance if it is all bite and no balm? The keenness of the beverage must, absolutely must, be softened by the mildness of milk. Not too much milk, of course. Not enough to take away the golden tinge in the bowl. Nor should the tea be stirred so consistently that the swirls and streaks of colour are mixed into one flat monotone.
Tea should be hot enough that steam rises from it. On a cold morning this can be visual poetry.
I love everything about tea. I love its announcement: "Let's have a cup of tea", "Would you like a cup of tea?", "Make a cup of tea there". I love the brisk, deft rinsing of cups and fishing of tea-bags from boxes, the low hum of the boiling water becoming more and more excited until it is a feverish bubbling. That's in an electric kettle, of course. If it's an old-fashioned kettle on a hob, you even get an incomparable, cheerful-solemn whistle-- perhaps the most magical of all sounds perceptible to the human ear.
Then there is the tinkle of water into the cups, the beautiful dark brown before the milk is poured in, the sight of your reflection in that circular mirror-world, dim and faraway and strangely transfigured. There is the ringing of the spoon against the sides of the cup as you vigorously shake the tea-bag. There is the graceful descent of the life-giving milk, and the slow-but-quick transformation of the happy fluid from treacle-coloured to an ambery-sepia.
And then-- ah then!-- the lifting to the lips, the deep and grateful draft, the filtering of warmth and replenishment and comfort and uplift through all the thoroughfares of the body.
Tea is-- at one and the same time-- both special and everyday, hardworking and leisurely, soothing and stimulating, down-to-earth and dreamy. It is a pleasure in itself and radiates a pleasure through the world around it. Even seeing somebody holding a cup of tea gives me a warm feeling inside. A news reporter or a politician or a foreman or anybody at all looks so much more trustworthy and human and salt-of-the-earth when they are grasping a nice thick steaming mug of Ireland's national beverage.
I can't imagine my life without tea. Come to think of it, I feel like a cup now.
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