Feckers (3 page)

Kevin Christopher Higgins, in a poem about the execution, ‘How He Died’, quoted words attributed to MacBride addressing his firing squad: ‘Let you rest well o’ nights; myself will do it for one!/And tell them nobody cried!’

MacBride, a fearless and heroic soldier, went to his death the victim of what would only many decades later become known as parental alienation syndrome. Although his son was to become one of the central figures in the life of the Irish nation over the coming century, he referred to his father in public or in writing on only a couple of occasions, none of them any more than a perfunctory reference to a man for whom he appeared to have no store of affection. It is therefore perhaps appropriate that his mother, elevated by the poetry of one of the giants of world literature, has become an icon of a society in which, on a daily basis, mothers are enabled by the State to stand between fathers and children, and encouraged to see the next generation of Irish citizens as their own personal property.

3
Arthur Guinness

I
n 2009, Guinness celebrated its 250th anniversary with a load of hoo-hah and humbug. There were posters all over Dublin, allegedly the birthplace of the world-famous alcoholic drink, and advertising campaigns running in every medium inviting citizens to ‘raise a glass to Arthur’. Newspapers who had profited much over the years from advertising campaigns by the company ran fawning articles and editorials paying tribute to ‘the pint of plain’.

But ‘stout’ was actually invented not in Dublin, but in London, and was copied by Arthur Guinness when the standard ale he was purveying began to decline in popularity. Arthur Guinness’s first brewery was in Leixlip, County Kildare, established in 1756, with a £100 inheritance from his godfather. He later passed on the business to his brother and in 1759 opened up a brewery in St James’s Gate in Dublin. It would be several decades before Guinness began to brew stout. The word ‘stout’, incidentally, was also created in London, originally as an adjective to describe a dark ale called porter. Later on, it became the popular term for the drink.

It wasn’t until much later that Guinness was spoken of as the Irish national drink. According to the historian Cormac O’Grada, it was only in the late nineteenth century, in the wake of the Famine, that ‘stout’ began to become popular outside the capital. A major factor in the success of the brand was the spread of temperance movements, which concentrated on spirits, viewing beer and stout as fairly harmless. But stout was still pretty slow to catch on, being regarded as somewhat unpleasant to taste and a poor substitute for the genuinely traditional poitín.

All this is intriguingly emblematic of the overall drift of Irish culture, which has ‘traditionally’ tended towards exaggerated notions of ‘tradition’, often investing enormous levels of enthusiasm in phenomena of doubtful progeny. It is interesting that the ancient Irish harp symbol was initially used as a symbol for Guinness, registered in 1876, and later adopted by the Irish Government as its official symbol. Nowadays, the multinational alcohol conglomerate Diageo, which has owned the Guinness brand since 1997, has its headquarters in London. Guinness is a global brand, with little more than a sentimental connection to its ‘native’ city.

Indeed, alcoholic beverages in general provoke in the Irish personality a particular form of sentimentality not directed at any other liquids. Water is taken for granted. Tea is patronized. Coffee, increasingly, is sneered at as an emblem of Celtic tiger excess. But a pint of plain, it seems, is still ‘your only man’.

Yet, nobody doubts that our culture of alcohol consumption is unhealthy and damaging. Our rates of binge drinking – defined as drinking with the primary purpose of achieving intoxication – are several times higher than in most other countries, with the notable exception of our nearest neighbour. Half of Irish men and one-fifth of Irish women binge at least once a week. More than 100 Irish people die every month as a direct result of alcohol. The average Irish adult consumes twenty-one units of alcohol per week, the equivalent of more than ten pints, three bottles of wine or one bottle of spirits. When you consider that a significant proportion of Irish people – about one in five – do not drink at all, this figure becomes even more bloated.

When you get right down to it, the whole point of a glass of alcohol is to trick about with cognition. Guinness is not a squash or a soda – it is a liquid drug, a mind-altering concoction. The whole point of downing a pint is to do something to your mind – to reduce anxiety, to increase self-esteem, to shake off inhibitions, and in extreme cases, to achieve a temporary annihilation of the consciousness. A pint of Guinness has a certain iconic appearance, but really it amounts to a container of fluid exhibiting pharmacological properties calculated to relax, sedate, disinhibit or stimulate.

Perhaps we should be thinking more about our need for such a substance. Why should a culture choose to celebrate these objectives? Why do we take for granted that it is a good thing that so many of us use alcohol to loosen ourselves up and become more convivial, that drink liberates our vocal cords and enables us to talk more?

The same mind-altering process that relaxes and disinhibits is also the one that impairs judgement, destroys co-ordination, sparks explosive over-sensitivity, induces violent rages and sometimes leads people to arrive at such a dismal view of their existences that they take radical steps to annihilate themselves. The same product that we celebrate as ‘part of what we are’ is also what leads to unspeakable misery, madness and death.

Alcohol has many consequences the drinks companies prefer us not to think about: death, disease, violence, pain, mental incapacitation. Our culture is ignorant about the long-term damage to be traced in the emotional, psychological and social underdevelopment of people whose interior lives become frozen because of their use of alcohol as a crutch to get them through life.

Our culture has developed various stratagems to dispose of uncomfortable voices seeking to alert us to the abnormality of Irish drinking patterns. It is hazardous, in general company in Ireland, to say that you don’t drink. Immediately, you have a sense of being different, and not just different as you might be if you admitted you didn’t smoke or play golf, but different in that, in a quite fundamental sense, you do not belong. To be a nondrinker in Ireland without a ‘good’ excuse is to be a weirdo, possibly a religious nutcase, a health freak, or both.

The public house has long been for the Irish far more than a locus of conviviality and social interchange. It is really a parallel nation in which the emotional life of our society is played out. It is where we go to be completely ourselves. Drink is for the Irish not merely an instrument of sociability, but also a painkiller, an avoidance therapy, a licence to be free, a fumble for eternity, a substitute for faith in something higher. To be excluded from such essential (albeit unhealthy) rituals, even on a voluntary basis, is to suffer a great loss – to be barred from the collective soul of Ireland. It is in some ways only a minor consolation to know that you are missing also the pain and grief that nobody mentions in the drink ads.

For all these reasons, Arthur Guinness might have been a good businessman, but he makes for a dubious national hero.

4
Eamon de Valera

T
here are many things for which Eamon de Valera might plausibly be blamed. The thing is that he is nearly always blamed for the wrong things.

Dev was, undoubtedly, the leader of the ‘second XV’ who took to the field after the first team had been shot in the wake of the 1916 Rising. He subsequently led Ireland into a period of cultural introspection and economic isolation, with arguably catastrophic consequences in the continuance of emigration and the failure of the Irish economy to operate.

There is a delicious story of Dev at Croke Park in the 1950s – the darkest period of the Irish economy until 2008. Dev was throwing in the ball to start an important football fixture, when, in the silence that fell as the ball hung in the air, a voice rang out from the midst of the crowd: ‘Good man, Dev, why not throw in your own two as well and make a pawnshop of the match like you have of the country?!’

Perhaps the greatest damage Dev did to his country, though, related not to his actions but his words, in particular the delivery, on St Patrick’s Day 1943, of a speech that has come to define Ireland’s sense of itself, albeit in a wholly negative way.

The speech, delivered in a radio broadcast on the national feast day, was really formulated to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Gaelic League, the organization which had, with a high degree of success, spearheaded the effort to restore the Irish language and native culture, and reawaken national self-confidence, following the disgrace and death of the great nationalist leader, Charles Stuart Parnell. The main theme of the speech was the importance of continuing the revival of the Irish language. Mr de Valera began his speech in Irish, and then continued in English.

‘That Ireland which we dreamed of,’ he intoned, ‘would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that man should live.’

This passage is at once the most remembered and misremembered excerpt from what is certainly the most famous speech in recent Irish political history. Known as the ‘Dream’ speech, or the ‘Comely Maidens’ speech, or the ‘Dancing at the Crossroads’ speech, the hold it continues to have over the Irish imagination is extraordinary. For, in a sense, the entire edifice of modern Ireland is constructed as a reaction to everything that is contained in the passage quoted above.

As readers may already have noted, there is nothing in that passage about comely maidens, or dancing at the crossroads. And yet, most Irish people would stake their lives on the belief that it contains a mess of verbiage about both of these concepts. Although the phrase ‘comely maidens’ did appear in the official text, the recording of the speech as broadcast has Mr de Valera saying ‘happy maidens’. But ‘comely maidens’ adds much more than ‘happy maidens’ to the caricature that successive generations have created out of the de Valera dream. And so, it has been necessary for us to ‘forget’ that Mr de Valera, before delivering his speech, drew his pen through the word ‘comely’ and replaced it with ‘happy’. And, of course, Dev disobligingly appears to have omitted any reference to crossroads from this or any other oration.

The speech has been used, again and again, to summon up disrespect and contempt for the values to which de Valera was giving mere passing lip-service. Setting out to define what we might become, de Valera might in retrospect be said to have succeeded only in listing all the things we would no longer wish to be. As a result, the name of de Valera, mentioned in today’s Ireland, provokes, almost invariably, snorts of derision. Anyone seeking to mount any serious criticism of the way Irish society has drifted into a ham-fisted version of modernity will eventually find themselves face to face with a caricature based on ‘de Valera’s Ireland’, which they will allegedly be trying to rehabilitate.

Taken in context, for what it was, Dev’s speech was an innocent product of its time. But appropriated in retrospect, by a different age, it became, with a little judicious tweaking, a highly effective weapon of derision. The result of all this is that everything Eamon de Valera ever uttered, stood for or dreamt about is now not simply taboo – it is downright wrong. The correct course in any given situation is therefore as near as possible to the opposite of whatever Dev might have proposed. And this, more than anything else, is what has led us into perdition.

De Valera became a kind of national scapegoat in our pursuit of modernization and prosperity. Because he embodied and represented so much of what we had been, he became a convenient symbol in the demolition of the past and the construction of a future that was eventually to disintegrate under our shoes. He was, of course, highly suitable in this regard. He was old, even when he was young. He was tall and austere and somewhat blind. He had a fascination with boring things, like history and mathematics. He was an archetypal father-figure, and therefore an easy target for Oedipal rage.

But he was, perhaps most importantly, a Catholic who had perceived the importance of spiritual cohesion to an emerging nation and had taken careful steps to stitch the ethos of Catholicism into the fabric of the State. Having evaded the firing squads of 1916, he lacked the complex vision of the revolutionaries who had died. He had a literal view of reality, and was given to flowery rhetoric without much substance.