A Traditionalist from the Start...

No communion in the hand for me, Father, thank you.

There are hardly any pictures of me as a kid, so it's kind of miraculous that the moment of my first holy Communion has been captured and survived (though in a rather tattered form). The photo certainly didn't survive because I carefully treasured and preserved it. I came across it purely by chance not long ago. I don't know the name of the priest or the woman smiling in the background.

I don't remember much of the day. I remember getting dressed seemed to take forever, and feeling irritated at all the fuss about my suit. I remember being embarrassed that everybody was giving me money (a rather unfortunate practice in Ireland). I remember the jellies at the communion breakfast. I also remember being very taken with the prayer booklet we were given, which is, alas, long lost.

(P.S. Please note that my first sentence is meant in a light-hearted way, so no comments about early Chuch Eucharistic practices or what the Catechism says about reception in the hand are necessary...)

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.)

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.

You Can Never Really Switch the Television Off

I was brought up by television.

Immediately I write this, I feel I should qualify it, if only for the sake of my parents' honour. I was by no means a "latch-key child", or in any way neglected. In fact, it's probably truer to say I was spoiled. Nor is it at all the case that my home was culturally impoverished. Amongst the most vivid of my childhood memories were the hundreds of books on the bookshelves, their very titles and covers brimming over with promise and mystery. It was the most eclectic assortment of books you could imagine. My father would recite nursery rhymes to us, as well as chunks from Yeats and Shakespeare. We were always encouraged to read. When it comes to "cultural capital" (as the Marxists would put it), I have nothing at all to complain about.

So when I claim that I was brought up by television, I really mean that everybody my age was brought up by television. Of course, "everybody" hardly ever means "everybody". I am sure I will get an indignant comment from somebody my own age or younger who didn't have a television in the house, or who had one but never bothered with it because they were always out bee-catching or cycling or knick-knacking. (Although I am rather sceptical whenever anyone claims that they never watched television, past tense, or never watch it, present tense. It's amazing how much knowledge of shows and actors and presenters is accumulated by people who "never watch television".)

We are rapidly reaching the stage where nobody will remember a time without television. I find this very interesting. Public life is still full of writers, journalists, academics and other people who have vivid memories-- and your earliest memories are usually your most vivid-- of a time when this puppet-show of light and shadow had not taken up residence (or taken up court) in our living rooms. But not for much longer.

TV was our first window onto the wider world, and one's earliest influences always imprint themselves upon the imagination. The blank slate is gone forever. When we started to read, we were already adepts of television, and we did not come to the glowing screen with minds formed by the printed page. We came to the printed page with minds formed by the glowing screen. When we read stories, we imagined them brought to life in a studio. When we read history, we brought to it pictures of period dramas, with all the assumptions of elegance and stiltedness that entails. It took me a long time-- until very recently, in fact-- to stop assuming that the most salient fact about anything that happened before 1960 was its pre-modernity.

Part of the glamour that the printed word had for somebody my age was that it was not television. This fact conferred a kind of prestige, an assumption of high-mindedness, upon every book whatsoever. It only occurred to me after many years that the printed page was simply the only method of mass entertainment and mass communication before the invention of radio. Millions of people had opened copies of The Strand magazine or Peg's Paper or Tit Bits without feeling this aura of edification, or anything like it. They read Sherlock Holmes in The Strand in exactly the same way they would watch CSI: Miami.

In the same way, millions of people in ancient times sat around campfires and listened to stories of Osiris, Loki and Finn McCool in exactly the same way, and with exactly the same motives, as suburban housewives today watch Prison Break or Heroes. They were not thinking about allegorical meanings or breathing the heady mountain air of Mythology.

Reverence is a double-edged sword. In general, of course, reverence is a good thing. But an excessive reverence towards the printed word does have something of a dampening, an inhibiting effect. What was reverence to Charles Dickens in his childhood reading, as fictionalized in this famous passage from David Copperfield?

When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour of our little village alehouse...

C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy describes the same kind of simple, voracious childhood reading, with no conception of self-improvement hovering over it:

I have now to tell you how Wyvern made me a prig. When I went there, nothing was further from my mind than the idea that my private taste for fairly good books, for Wagner, for mythology, gave me any sort of superiority to those who read nothing but magazines...The claim might seem unbelievable if I did not add that I had been protected from this sort of conceit by downright ignorance...Never in my life had I read a work of fiction, poetry or criticism in my own language except because, after trying the first few pages, I liked the taste of it.

And this, I think, is perhaps crucial (or at least, very conducive) to developing a genuine taste for something, including books. C.S. Lewis adopted as a motto for readers, "Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears." He meant that we should come to a book (I almost said 'a text') with no preconceptions or expectations or prejudices. An educated young person today, gingerly reading poetry on his own initiative for the first time, is expecting every poem to crawl with double-meanings, irony and ambiguity. A simple lyric, for instance by Housman, will seem disappointing and flat to him.

I remember, when I read Dante's Divine Comedy, being astounded at several discoveries about Dante and the poem. One was its sheer sophistication; I almost expected I would have to stoop to fit into Dante's primitive mental universe. Instead, I found that the universe he inhabited was broader, deeper and subtler than my own. Another astounding discovery was that Dante wrote in Italian rather than Latin, and chose a form of story that he thought would have universal appeals, precisely because he wanted to reach the common man and woman. I had girded myself to scale Mount Everest, and realized that I was instead invited onto the open plains and into the broad daylight of universality. The most stupendous discovery was that Dante had written his master work first and foremost to win souls to Christ. It was-- horror of horrors!-- a didactic poem! All of my expectations were confounded.

In a similar vein, I always remember a moment in English class in school, when I was fifteen or so. We were studying The Merchant of Venice, and the teacher was describing the anti-semitic assumptions that lay behind the portrayal of Shylock. One girl suggested that Shakespeare would have foreseen how his play would be read in the future, when anti-semitism was discarded. I realized I had been thinking the same thing. We were brought up-- by television, especially-- to regard Shakespeare as a universal genius who existed somehow beyond time and space, a god-like figure. It took me a long time to appreciate that Shakespeare was a working writer who wrote for money, who wrote plenty of forgettable stuff, who had an often-tiresome sense of humour and who was not immune to the prejudices of his time.

Coming to books and literature and poetry with such trepidiation-- on tip-toe, as it were-- it is very difficult to make yourself at home there. And even when we do, we are naturalised citizens from another country-- the country of television.

I am a typical social and cultural conservative, with all the typical conservative hostility to television-- a case that has been made so often and so powerfully, I will not bother to rehash it all here. You've encountered it; you agree with it or you don't. I do recommend everybody to read Peter Hitchens's wonderful chapter on television, The Telescreen Triumphs, in his masterpiece The Abolition of Britain. I agree pretty much with every word of that. I have given up television many times in my life, although I always find myself taking up the viewing habit again. Television is just too convenient, too omnipresent, too obliging. Shunning it seems like a futile gesture at best, a form of priggishness or self-congratulation at worst.

But today I found myself thinking of television, not harshly, but tenderly. Nostalgia is irrefutable. My dawning consciousness of life's wonder and solemnity and possibilities came through television, and I cannot prise any of those elements entirely free from my memories of the small screen. Even all my romantic notions of the simple, the pre-technological and the traditional were supplied by television. In setting myself against the cultural influence of television and popular culture, I am in a sense like some post-colonial African leader who was educated at Oxford or Cambridge. My idylls of cornfields and old farmhouses and pipe-chewing old timers were all dreamed up by a TV director. The very atmosphere of wonder, in my mind, comes with the memory of low lighting and haunting music, or dust motes playing in a beam of light in some cluttered and mysterious attic-- all drawn from long-forgotten broadcasts.

Today, strangely, I feel more gratitude than resentment of this. It is impossible to stay on your high horse all the time. But that doesn't mean you should never mount it. I believe in fair-mindendess, and, as a critic of television (and of the consumer culture of which it is the main pillar), I feel obliged to admit how much I owe to it. I believe that television, on the whole, erodes the world's stock of wonder and awe and magic, and stunts the imagination; but I would never pretend that it is itself bereft of wonder and awe and magic, or that it can never spur the imagination, either.

Aslan Pay Tribute to a Great Ballymun Institution...

As I was walking past Eason in O'Connell Street this evening, I saw a poster for Aslan's new album, featuring the cover that you see above. Aslan, as you might know already, are an Irish rock band. Some of their members hail from Ballymun, the Dublin suburb where I've lived nearly all of my thirty-four years, and where I grew up.

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...