Celtic Idyll - Part I: The Lament of the Curlew on the Wind

Relations between Britain and Ireland have always been strained. For centuries the British aristocracy exploited the Irish, colonised their land and subjugated them. But Irish people have a long tradition of migrating to England so that they could enjoy the fruits of greater freedom, opportunity and benefits than their native land could offer. In fact, my maternal grandmother was one of these, London Irish, from West Cork in the southwest of the island. She bore the good old name of Mary Carney, and her mother was a classic Irish peasant, superstitious and sentimental. Perhaps the streak of sentimentality in my own personality comes from my Irish roots. Coupled with the Cumberland origins of Ivy Alexander, my paternal grandmother, it can fairly be said that I am more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon. This is also clear in the set of my nose and eyes.
But origins and appearance do me no good where politics are concerned. The same is true of my uncle, who married a Donegal colleen, a tall girl with raven hair, pink skin and a warrior personality. She was quite comfortable with the hypocrisy of criticising Britain and the British, even fighting them, but reaping the economic benefits of living in London.
As a university student I lived in Westminster, central London, at the time of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's bombing campaigns of the 1970s. Just before Christmas in 1974 a car bomb blew the windows out of the university dormitory where I lodged. The cut price clothing store in front of it opened the day after with no glass in its facade and its damaged wares out on the pavement under a banner that said "Save a bomb". On another occasion, from behind police barricades in Oxford Street, I watched a military artificer walk into a restaurant to be blown to pieces seconds later in an explosion. He had a wife and three young children. And there were other incidents that killed or maimed which I recall vividly.
We were all fearful of the bombs. I tried to avoid using public transport and always walked along backstreets where I thought the risk of bombs being planted was low. When passing through railway stations I moved quickly and kept my eyes open for any suspicious circumstances. On one occasion a passenger left a briefcase on a train and a porter, trembling like a leaf, had to remove it and place it far away from other people until the bomb disposal squad arrived. It turned out to contain a newspaper and a folding umbrella. Meanwhile, my Irish relatives would gather at my uncle's house late in the evening to drink home-made potheen, distilled from potatoes, which they carried in little plastic bottles shaped like the Madonna and purporting to contain holy water from Lourdes.
They loved to sing Irish revolutionary songs. When my uncle married, his brother-in-law, Father Frank Kelly, an excellent tenor as well as a priest, sung the bride and groom a tear-jerking song about how the British soldiers had cruelly exterminated a blue-eyed, golden-haired Irish boy in front of a white cottage with red roses around the front door. This sentimental lack of cultural sensitivity was entirely Irish and a calculated insult to the ethnic London contingent of the family who were present. I remember thinking thank goodness for the virtues of English tolerance (when I wasn't thinking about a girl called Maeve, who had come over from the Republic for the occasion and was about my age and decidedly pretty, but far too awesome for a timid 14-year-old to chat up; she told her mother I was "a bheautiful bhoy", which was probably a significant exaggeration, but I was trying).
Nevertheless, there is something fascinating about Irish culture. It is catholic, easy-going, laid back, clannish, sentimental and convivial. So when I had finished studying for my degrees I went there to tour around and see. I made County Limerick my base, as it is further north than Cork and thus makes the centre of the country more accessible. Ireland, Eire, was then much more rural, even primitive, than it is now that the 'Celtic Tiger' of economics has raised his head. The sky was, for the most part, leaden, the countryside was intensely green and the pints of draught Guinness were black and fruity, looking--if not tasting--as if they were extracted from the squelchy peat-bogs of County Offaly.
So I drove slowly around the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking part in the southwest of the Island, looking at the Celtic crosses, with centuries of history etched into the patinas of their surfaces, striding through the heather with my face caressed by drizzling rain and soft winds, drinking pints of Guinness in the warmth of roadside bars. People were courteous, sometimes friendly, but a few were hostile. There is no disguising an accent, and mine is redolent of London, but not London Irish. On two occasions the hostility looked as if it would crystallise into outright violence, but for my promptness in getting out of the way quickly. It always saddens me when people assume that a person they have barely met is an arrogant ideologue, or even simply that the individual is personally responsible for the policies of his government. My father taught me to take people on their individual merits, not generalised ideologies, and it is always a good strategy.
Nevertheless, the past weighs down upon Ireland like a ball and chain clamped to a leg. At every turn in the leafy boreen roads are ruined castles, towers and monasteries. On the walls there are green-and-white signs put up by the Eireann Monuments Commission that give a brief the history of the buildings. In many cases they were once the scenes of massacres. There are also the shells of villas and stately homes that were burnt down in the 'Troubles'. First there were the very old troubles of the famines of the 1840s, then the old troubles of the struggle for independence, 1900-1919, and now the new troubles of the Northern campaigns from 1971 onwards. In Ireland there is a very great difference in character between North and South. The 'Troubles' are a way of life in Ireland, but the southerners are milder and more resigned than the northerners, whose Scottish ancestry has given them a bellicose and brutal character that the southerners find hard to understand.
Or at least, they find it hard to understand until alcohol takes over, for alcohol is responsible for a good portion of the national character. In 1890 the advertising manager of Bovril, a beef-flavoured extract, had the brainwave of designing a poster on which was emblazoned: "Two infallible powers, the Pope and Bovril". So successful was it that sales of whiskey dropped as people turned to drinking beef extract and water. But predictably it didn't last. When the Irish are drink-sodden they become maudlin. It is not uncommon to find a whole room full of them crying over their drinks, the old and the young alike. The more pacific of them turn to music, and take up the bodhran drum, tin whistle, fiddle and uillean bagpipes, reproducing accurately the lament of the curlew riding on the wind. The less pacific of them turn to violence and revolution.
My companion trapped her hand in the casement window of the farmhouse we were staying in. So we called a doctor. He arrived smelling strongly of sheep: evidently he was a doctor to more than the local population of human beings. He took a quick look at the damaged hand, said it would heal of its own accord and then revealed the other famous aspect of the Irish national character, the power of persuasion, known as the "gift of the gab", for he tried to sell us a copy of a book he had written about the universal curative powers of a vitamin concoction of his own devising. Indeed, the gift of the gab has been institutionalised: Blarney Castle in County Cork is the home of the Blarney Stone which tourists can kiss in order to make them eloquent. A leprechaun of an Irishman with a big smile and a green Donegal tweed suit is permanently on hand to assist attractive young ladies with the contortions required to bend backwards over the battlements so that their lips can make contact with the stone.
But some Irishmen are naturally phlegmatic and uncommunicative. They saunter into the pub and exclaim to the barman, "It's a pint there!", and little else. One with whom I came into contact was a smith who worked in the forge of a museum of Irish rural life. His job was to make miniature horseshoes for the tourists to take home and put on their mantlepieces. He looked tired and bored as he bent and hammered the red-hot metal. A party of Irish-American retirees trooped dutifully into the forge and watched him as he worked. A bespectacled old lady with a blue-rinse hair-do eventually asked, "Gee, is that a real horseshoe?" He looked silently at her with a withering glance that he could not have improved on if he had been nailed to the cross.
Years later I was interviewed for a teaching post at Belfast Polytechnic. I had no chance of getting the job, even though I was the only candidate with a PhD and a research record. It was obvious that I was being discriminated against because of my origins and accent, but there was no redress. On a social level, I always took care to disguise my English accent (either by speaking Italian, as it was virtually in the Italian quarter, or by keeping silent) when I went into the Black Rose Irish pub in Boston, as it was a hotbed of republican activity. Yet I have never lost my affection for Ireland, and neither has my uncle, even though he has now left his warrior wife from Donegal.