Far across the sea lies a small island - always windswept, often rainswept, rarely sun-kissed – whose friendly inhabitants have erected stone statues to honour their ancestors and their legendary heroic deeds.
But you want to read about Ireland – not Easter Island.
It breaks my careworn Irish heart to tell you this but the only heat haze you’ll ever encounter in Ireland is the faraway look which glazes over a resident’s eyes when you ask about Fionn McCumhaill (Finn McCool to you and me), the legendary builder of the Giants Causeway. “Does he play for Galway or Mayo?” is the most probable riposte.
You can inquire about the great warriors of the Red Branch sagas - “Which Manchester United Supporter’s Club might that be?”
Broach the Ulster Cycle of tales of the heroes and warriors and you’ll be told that the next home rugby game will be Ulster versus Stade Francais in Belfast on a wet Friday night and yes, it’s always wet in Belfast on Friday nights in winter, tho’ it’s a fine excuse for a warming bevvy or two.
The truth of the matter is that the traditional myths and legends of Irish history are being supplanted as surely and as steadily as the native Irish were driven to the hills in the north part of the island 400 years ago – and look how well that turned out. And just as surely as the new trophy houses and “dream bungalows” rise up the hillsides like grazing sheep, so the new myths and legends of Ireland are taking shape. Allow me to explain, my friends.
There are some common myth-conceptions about our little island home – whether formed by chance or by well-meaning emigrants’ children – which we should dispel. But we’ll let them dissolve slowly, like the morning mist – and not blast them away with a thousand propane heaters.
The first notion, which we find quite staggering, is that a fair percentage of the population still live in thatched cottages. Now, personally, I blame a hundred John Hinde postcards, a thousand coffee table books of “The Magical Irish Landscape” and millions of reminiscences of how hard growing up in Ireland was, when a family of ten had to live on three pound’ o’ praties - and that was a good week.
Yada, yada, yada – ancient Irish for “Will ye ever give over with all that oul’ blarney.”
Item 1: the postcards, which inevitably featured two flame-haired children standing barefoot outside a whitewashed cottage with a donkey bearing two creels (“panniers” to you) of peat, just brought in from the bog and ready for the fire which their sainted Irish mother kept burning day and night like a votive lamp.
A century ago, Yeats said – and how prescient he was : “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone/It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” And that was long before home heating oil, double glazing and the replacement of vast landlord’s estates by sub-Saharan estates of rough-hewn and plastered masonry blocks, where the new middle class can mortgage themselves up to their necks to acquire their little piece of suburbia, only 18 inches from the neighbours. A sort of Sahel on wheels.
And you think that evictions finished after the Famine? Wait till the Celtic Tiger takes a nap and the mortgage rate doubles.
The fact is that the average Irishman – no longer the archetypal white, God-fearing Murphy, for that is also wrong on all three counts – lives or aspires to live in a comfortable semi or a three bedroom bungalow. When the economy began to boom 20 years ago, there was a rumour that every builder in Ireland offered all new brides a copious choice of styles – A thru F, of course - from the legendary “Donegal Hacienda Handbook.”
Like Henry Ford’s Model T, you could have it in white – or mock white – or, if you were really daring, slightly off-white. And if you don’t believe me, you don’t even have to come and look for yourself – log on to any Irish estate agent’s website and peruse to your heart’s content.
And as for the cottages? Either flattened to make way for the “wee weekend place” – 4 b/r, lg/recp, 2 bath and a kitchen large enough to take 2 SUVs – or sold to the highest European bidder who still buys into the notion of rural Ireland.
Mind you, it could be worse: I was tour guiding a French party recently and they were lamenting the “industrialised agriculture” which has invaded the French countryside. No longer do impoverished French farmers drive battered deux chevaux to clog the streets of Paris – they zoom up the autoroute and the peripherique in 60 mph tractors.
Item 2: the coffee table books. All very picturesque, especially the ones with aerial shots. Mind you, when I was a child, Dublin was full of aerial shots – every house that could afford it had a 20’ aerial to pick up the BBC from Wales or the North, which says a lot about the standard of RTE in those days. All now replaced by satellite dishes, Ireland’s very own aerial killer.
The coffee table books – colourful, heavy – good for bungalow foundations (see above) and the twentieth century Book of Kills – Killarney, Killorglin and Kilmeaden. And every one of them portraying Ireland as a wild landscape of scowling skies, tempestuous brooks and silver strands. Oh aye – and the odd wee town.
Does the phrase: “Hello – wake up and smell the coffee!” ring any bells? Which reminds me – the entire island is currently being Starbucked. ‘Nuff said.
Now, I have to admit that the early morning or evening internal flights, especially Kerry or Derry to Dublin, are wonderful reminders of what a beautiful country we have the privilege of sharing. When you can look out to port and see the Mountains of Mourne rising from nowhere to nearly 3000’ and look to starboard and see the hallucinogenic Dartry mountains loom over Leitrim and Sligo, you really do get a sense of divine perspective.
But come down to earth and oh, how all is changed.
Item 3: the childhood stories. It was hard – and all of you discriminating folk will know that life and its choices are always hard and are always going to be hard. As Max Boyce sings of Wales:
“Oh, it’s hard; Dew, it’s hard/And the pithead bath’s a supermarket now”. But the essence of the human experience; the core of what, with a very humble doff of my flat cap to the late, great Harry Chapin “made America famous” is the fact that so many people took the even more tortuous decision to get up and go.
If you want to know how hard it was, read a book called “Connemara Women After the Famine”. There is no sentimentality here. This is a report by a Scottish surveyor who travelled the country in 1849 and noted that you could always tell where a body was buried by the growth of grass above the grave. He had a Scotsman’s eye for a prospective nine hole course, even then. That’s hard.
What is hard to accept is the fact that Ireland shares other, equally disturbing aspects of the western world. The more money we have, the more the murder rate goes up. And the less people care. The traffic; the noise; the madness. Dublin on any morning but Sunday.
In other words, myth number two – that Ireland is in some magical way immune to the blight of modern living. And this in a country which has built its present prosperity (The Big Lep Forrard, to misquote Chairman Mao) on hi-tech, middle-cost assembly and intellectual capital. The Land of Chips and Colours, no less.
Take the natural extension of the Great Irish Myth – that everyone is hospitable, fond of a drink and must perforce (because of want and need) take the perspective of the eternal upon life. Well, one has to concede, after 50 years of travelling to and fro, that there is still a tradition of helping the stranger within the gates. A sense of not wanting to let the country down by leaving someone in a pickle. As a German tour operator said to me last week: “You are not as remote as the English.” Perhaps, perhaps. But equally there is no doubt that Paddy is much more concerned with affairs of the wallet – sorry, of the portfolio – than heretofore.
And as far as the drink is concerned, Paddy has given way to that well-known spiritual shamrock:
Bacardi, tequila and marguarita. You have to look long and hard to find traditional hostelries offering a TV and muzak free oasis. The rise of the super-pub – a stable for oxys, patronised by morons – has seen to that.
But if you search – and do bear in mind that Ireland, like Gaul, in tribus partis most certainly divisa est :
* Da City (Dublin);
* Da Country (de udder twenty foive counties) and
* Da Nort (dem heathen)
you will actually find that there are still people and places who embody what was once quaintly known as “The Oul’ Decency.”
It is a myth that Ireland is unchanging. There was bank raid in Dublin last week – and the “have a go” hero who foiled the raider was not from Cork, but from the Congo. What is not mythical and what is genuinely legendary is the courage of that man and of many others who have made the brave decision to uproot themselves from their culture and come to Ireland to better themselves and their children. The Brazilians in Clare; the Poles in Antrim.
They know that their children will have the advantage of an EU passport – and that those same children will be divorced from the ancestral homeland as surely as fourth generation O’Connors know Filene’s better than Fitzgeralds. But I applaud them for their courage, their drive and their willingness to adapt. They need no dolmens: they stand as brave men and women in their own right. They are the new Ireland – and three cheers for the lot of them.
