At the Edge of Ireland Page 13

  I was fascinated by his nose drips, which seemed to intensify with the loosey-goosey vigor of his oratory or the volatility of the subject under discussion.

  “Well, it certainly seems to have changed things. You’re one of the most expensive countries in Europe nowadays, and house prices in Dublin are higher than just about any other city on earth!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah—and the Catholic church is going belly-up with its pernicious priests and their pedophile scandals sending young kids into a sexual twilight from which many have never really emerged. No more Christianized coddlin’ and canonical clap-trap of the sinful—makin’ ’em dependent but feelin’ safe and protected. Now there’s all these blue, diamond-shaped pills for instant sexual gratification, legalized birth control and homosexuality, maybe even divorce and abortion allowed by the church one day soon! All very naff! And no more of that censorship of books, films, theater—you name it. All gone. Ah tell ya—we’re gettin’ as heathen and hedonistic as the rest of Europe smothered in our contemporary plague of self-preoccupation. Goin’ t’hell in a cushy, euro-plush handbasket, some claim. Not me, though. Good on you, I say! Go on—listen to the fast-track entrepreneurs and your Charlie Haughey politicians and the ‘new world’ Fianna Fáil. Go build y’ fancy bungalows by the billion, enjoy your weird music-to-eat-muesli-by, fly high on y’crack and y’craic, buy y’second BMWs. Go and liberate y’lovely ladies and let ’em sashay on swishin’ and swayin’ like sparkle-eyed models in those erotic lingerie catalogs. Let them work themselves into a narcissistic lather like all the rest o’ them high-tech, nouveau riche lads, barely outa the cradle titans of testosterone, planning to retire as gazillionaires at forty. Then see if the whole shebang makes y’feel any better than the good old days with the carnal density of intermingled lives and lusts and a couple o’ fields and some sheep and the wife and a carload o’ kids and a good sup every night at the local—and then mebbe a real Saturday night dopey stoner session followed by a crash ’n’ burn punch-up and a bleary Sunday in church nursing a chewed-up earlobe and a jackhammer headache from too many slugs of poteen…and your conscience tellin’ you to ’fess up, clean the slate, and start the rampage all over again!”

  Another pause. (He seemed to need one badly after that almost pauseless bit of pugilistic punditry.) I wasn’t sure how seriously to take Patrick, although I was impressed by his ever-increasing gushings of glorious verbiage. He combined a volcanic intensity that sparked and rushed with raw heat and an almost feminine silky smoothness topped by a Prince Charming smile.

  “Ah, man, don’t look s’damn serious. It’s only a bit o’chat we’re havin’…” He paused, as if wondering how to continue. “Y’see…How shall I say it? Well—y’gotta understand us Irish are all a bunch o’ fakes. Even poor old God has his own hell—his love for us Irish! There’s two kinds mostly—there’s your blue-eyed, red-haired bogman Irish descended from Celts and Vikings and your dark-hair, dark-eye ‘Black Irish.’ They’re said to be descended from Spanish troops marooned here after the British wrecked the Spanish Armanda in 1588 and sent the ships that weren’t blown apart sailing all the way round the top of Scotland trying to get back to Spain. Most didn’t. A few ended up here. But outsiders don’t really notice the difference. People see us as just full of the old blarney and the jokes and the wide-eyed charm and the oh-so-friendly arm around y’shoulder matey-ness, but y’know what we are beneath all the blither and blather? We’re sandwiched between boggy blogosphere baloney and big fat slabs of self-inflated, self-indulgent mediocrity. Okay, and superstition too, rearing its creaky medieval head and binding us all in its fearsome tentacles. We’re melancholy, moody, self-doubting introverts pretending to be eloquent extroverts—oh, and loquacious liars, too—we invent our own history to suit our needs or our audiences. We’re Beckettians as opposed to Brendan Behans. We’re cowed Catholic cowards pretending to be playboys and ‘princes of the craic’ We’re all O’Casey’s paycocks, if y’know what I mean. We’re spoilt little mama’s boys like those Italian machos—jewels in their mamas’ eyes—trying to morph ourselves into a kind of half-ass maturity but still scared to leave home and not marrying until we’re way past our prime. Compared to most Europeans we were true novices in the sexual arena. Even our love poems had to be exchanged in code! Listen to this lusty one—if I can remember it right:

  “When stormy winds are passed and gone

  Shall quiet calm return?

  I often saw in ashes’ dust

  Lie hidden coals of fire.

  With good attention mark your mind

  You will a secret question find.

  Sweet is the secret; mark it well

  Heart for heart, so now farewell.”

  “Nice but hardly lusty, is it?” I said.

  “See, you missed it! It all sounds floppily innocent but the key line is ‘You will a secret question find.’”

  “So what’s the question?”

  “Well—how about lining up vertically the first word of each line…”

  “I can’t remember…”

  “Hopeless. S’good job this message wasn’t for you—you’d have missed a nice ripe invitation right off! The real ‘secret question’ reads vertically: ‘When Shall I Lie with You, Sweetheart.’ Get it?!”

  “Aaah! Okay—got it…clever trick…”

  “Yeah—and one that you’d have missed by a mile! Tough luck! Anyway, back to criticisms of my own beloved countrymen…We’re complex creatures, y’know…we’ll ask y’ questions y’ wouldn’t even ask y’self and we’ll listen with a nod and a wise smile to the answers, or at least pretend to…But don’t y’ try the same thing on us or you’ll likely lose a tooth or two. We’re kinda pretend-intimate but private as all hell under it all. Hypocrites—the lot of us! Don’ y’ trust us, I keep telling people, and ‘specially the blow-ins, but th’ eejits never listen. They’ve bought all the Irish bullshit hook, line, and baloney; they’ve read all the tourist bumpf; and the women, well, they come on over expecting to have their knickers charmed off by folktale-telling, folk-song-singing, sparkle-eyed, curly-haired Adonises all too happy to oblige you daft so long as you don’t expect ’em to hang around too long after enjoying the lust o’y’loins, so to speak, because they got to get home to their dotin’ mamas. Or maybe they come to hear our horror stories and songs of famines and emigrations on ‘death ships’ and all the battles we lost and Oliver Cromwell’s rape and pillage of our fair land, and the English landowners who saw us as penniless peasants to be worked to early deaths. Keeping them in fine gentry homes and fancy clothes and riding stables big as the Dublin Customs House and all that. And then you’ve got our rebellions—the Troubles—the glories of the 1916 Easter Rising, the bloody—and bloody stupid!—Civil War—the great day of independence from Britain in 1921 and all of it told and sung a lot like it happened yesterday. All the lead characters—de Valera, our Taoiseach [prime minister] for sixteen years can y’believe, Michael Collins, Sean Lemass, John Costello—talked about like they’ll be poppin’ into the pub for a glass or two any moment now. And it all still works, ’specially for the blow-ins, who want to see Ireland as an underdog nation fighting for its fragile independence and hard-won survival. But—thank God—for most of us nowadays, and especially for the young kids, it’s much more future-looking…Some say it’s a sneaky form of neo-colonialism, with the Americans on the throne seats suckin’ all the air out of our little nation with all their TV programs, megainvestments, and subsidiary companies, and that eternal reminder that over forty-five million Americans—over twenty percent of the population across the Atlantic there—claim Irish heritage, as opposed to our little country of barely four million! Hell—we escaped the British Empire, we’re trying to escape the Vatican empire, but now we’re as good a part of the American world empire!”

  His pell-mell narrative delivery contained the tumultuous spirit of a Brueghel painting. I thought it was time for me to interject, especially as Padraig’s nose drips had reached
an almost nonstop flow after another long oration. “But surely Ireland’s not doing too badly exporting its own culture—traditional and modern. Look at the great Irish films recently, great plays and world-famous rock bands—Bob Geldof, Bono, and U2—folklore extravaganzas like Riverdance…and Celtic Woman…”

  “Surely, surely,” he said, waving his whiter-than-white handkerchief dismissively. “All impressive stuff, although most of it’s real ersatz Irish—more Irish than we Irish ever were. But still, it keeps us on the map, and people seem to like us as passionate eccentrics brimming over with frolic and fun—even if it’s fake! Dammit—even the craic is gettin’ fake! But times are lush and flush now and the lucre flows rich and thick…and deep down we still believe that old motto: ‘We don’t beat the grim reaper by living longer. We beat him by living well—bloody well!’”

  We laughed together. For the first time it seemed to be genuine and mutual laughter. I still didn’t quite trust my opinionated colleague, though, and felt he was possibly letting off his tirades of blarney-blather at my expense. (So far I’d bought all the drinks, and was even considering the need to bowdlerize some of his remarks to subdue his rousting rhetoric.) But what the heck. I was gaining some insights and certainly viewing the Irish psyche and “condition” from a very different viewpoint than previously.

  Then this prince of windbaggery and the pregnant pause was off again. “Y’see, it’s the have-nots. That’s where the real cancer starts. When the begrudgin’ begins. Like that old saying ‘The fat and full will never understand the thin and hungry.’ Ah mean, y’ can understand a guy out in the boggy boonies who can’t get his feet on the ladder to the great pot o’ gold in the sky. He’ll be pissed and rightly so. But the dangerous ones are the ones who’re already rakin’ it in in a Thatcherite kinda way, but still don’t have that real entrepreneurial spirit—y’know—the real hunger for status, power,…and big-big cash! The Americans have it in spades and the Germans and they run a lot of the fast-moving companies here…But our guys still dither about—that old Irish insecurity—and bitch and begrudge and debunk. And that can be dangerous. We might well castrate our beloved Celtic Tiger. If we don’t pull our collective fingers out, we’ll be sucked back into the slipstream of our own miserable history. The problem is, we won’t take chances. Don’t or won’t make decisions. We forget—if we ever knew—what Nietzsche said: ‘The noble soul has reverence for itself.’ We fudge about in a stupor of our self-forgiving Catholic ignorance and we’re scared shite-less of ‘getting above ourselves’…”

  “Ah,” I said, “the tall poppy syndrome.”

  “What?”

  “Tall poppies—it’s an Australian saying…If you’re a boaster, lifting yourself up over others—you get your head lopped off.”

  “Ah well—that’s a fine metaphor. I’ll be remembering it…But what was I…? Oh, and my God! Even the Poles can show us a thing or two about initiative. They come over in droves and start off at minimum wages. There’s over 200,000 of ’em over here at the moment—but you watch ’em wise up and learn the tricks. Our guys are gonna have to stop gawpin’ an’ moanin’ and start movin’. One good example of a ‘made it’ native is our Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, and he sees the problem. He says ‘We’ve lost our coherent idealism.’ Well, maybe that’s the problem when you’ve destroyed most of your demons. Then you’ve got to face the challenges of success! Whole new hurlin’ match, that, unless you’re an Irish horse trader or breeder. Most of us are still getting used to that idea. Roddy Doyle plays around with it in his books and films like The Commitments and The Snapper. We’re doing that old Irish thing again of prattling on with the gab—words never touchin’ the ground—to try to find out what we’re really thinkin’: we’re swimming desperately in the muddy waters of social and spiritual confusion…”

  “Who said that?”

  “What?”

  “The ‘muddy waters’ thing.”

  “I just did. Why, is there someone else doin’ the talkin’ ’round here?”

  “Apologies.”

  “Accepted…So, eh…Ah! The muddy waters. Right. And no one’s there to help. The government’s always five steps behind, so they’re no bleedin’ use. And the church—the great omnipotent Catholic church, once the bully-dictator of just about everything in our lives—where is she nowadays, I ask? She’s in a feckin’ mess, is where she is, despite the fact that over seventy percent of the people here still attend Mass, which compares with barely ten percent in Catholic France and not much more in Italy. Oh, and don’t get me going about Italy. Land of romance they call it, right? So how come they’ve got the highest divorce rate and lowest birth rate in the world? Because they’re bloody fakes too! Just like us, and so maybe we’re fakin’ it all again. It’s like our thing with fairies and the little people. We claim it’s all a load of hogwash and stupid superstition, but we wouldn’t dare intrude on a fairy circle after dark—‘just in case,’ we’d say. And somewhere, deep down, we’d mean it! Same with the church—‘just in case’ insurance. No matter how decadent our priests get, the people’ll still go to Mass because they’ve been programmed in deep guilt, imprisoned in persnickety protocols of gawping obedience, made paranoid about sex by frustrated celibate priests who know not a jot about the joys and the horrors of marriage and sex and the like. Deep, deep down, we all still truly fear the eternal fires of hell! Wonderful comment from a politician recently on all our moral confusion—‘There was no sex in Ireland until the BBC came!’”

  “And Gay Byrne with his Late Late Show…”

  “Ah, yes, gorgeous Gay indeed! Bishops used to call his broadcast ‘this dirty-evil show’ and preached sermons against his discussing just about every ‘ethically challenged’ taboo subject in Ireland, which at that time in the 1960s and through the 1980s covered a hell of a multitude of mortal sins. Of course that was when contraceptives were illegal, there was no sex education in the schools, priests were supposedly celibate, and the Clintonian version of marital fidelity had not yet crept in! Talk about the blind leadin’ the bloody blind. Right off the bleedin’ cliff top! [Another deluge of nose drips at this point.]

  “One of our best writers—William Trevor—wrote Reading Turgenev and shows the horror of a young girl’s life without sexual education. John McGahern, Sean O’Faolain, John B. Keane, Edna O’Brien, with her The Country Girls, and—of course—O’Casey and Synge. Oh, and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa—all describing the terrible dark worlds of sexual ignorance, incest, and impotence and all that stuff. And it’s all so strange. Education has been highly valued in Ireland ever since the secret ‘hedge schools’ in the eighteenth century when the local priests and other villagers would illegally teach literacy to peasant children. But then the church took over like they took over everything else! You remember that saying: ‘If there’s a goose to be found anywhere, it’ll be on the priest’s table’! Anyway, education became more of a Catholic brainwashing process. No use at all for a healthy sex life, but well—maybe it shaped the lives of some of today’s finest writers. They saw what booze did to creativity and longevity and they became the ‘Ballygowan Boys’…”

  “What’s Ballygowan?”

  “Ireland’s beloved mineral water! God forbid y’have t’drink th’ stuff!”

  “Well, that’s great,” I mused, “weaning them away from the booze. But church censorship can’t have done much for free creativity.”

  “Tha’s so true—they were pretty tight. Anything with overt sex, even covert, or implied homosexuality, blasphemy, abortion, and on and on—all banned! Orwell, Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Behan, and all the other great writers at that time—they all got chopped. Even plays at Yeats’s Abbey Theatre got axed. Weird, though—James Joyce snuck through. Maybe no one could understand his crazy stuff anyway—’specially Finnegans Wake! Or when he got himself labeled ‘Ireland’s literary genius,’ even the church felt it better back off a touch! But again it’s that fake Irish thing—he hardly ever lived here! Le
ft Dublin in 1902 at the age of twenty and spent most of his life in France. A lot of it with old Sam Beckett.”

  “But what about Yeats?”

  “Ah—our immortal bard! God! Someone once described him as a technician’s technician whose massive output of poetry is a blizzard of stanza shapes and metrical variations. No one dared touch him. He played a canny game—mixing up very quotable lines with his role as arbiter of the theatrical arts. Y’know he founded the Abbey Theatre with good old Lady Gregory. He was one of the greatest nationalistic public figures of his generation. An unbeatable blend. The church couldn’t reach him…not even when he went a little wacky with his belief in fairies and all that Irish bog lore!”

  William Butler Yeats

  “So who’s the modern-day Yeats now?”

  Padraig paused briefly while signaling the barman for two more pints and, miracle of miracles, backing up his request with a bunched ball of euro notes pulled slowly from his trouser pocket along with a set of keys and a half-finished roll of Polo Mints.

  “So,” he began again, “y’re askin’ about the modern poets an’ I was thinkin’ about the whole creative cat’s cradle of them—Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Durcan, Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella…But I reckon m’ favorite fella has to be Seamus Heaney…even though he’s from the wrong side of the border…a Londonderry man…when he’s not off professoring at Oxford or wherever. Even one of your top American poets, what’s his…ah—Robert Lowell—he claims Heaney’s the greatest Irish poet since God himself, otherwise known as—William Butler Yeats.”