Myth of the hospitable Irish

John Healy

This article by John Healy, a regular columnist, appeared in the Irish Times on 1 September, it provoked an angry letter from Mairin Lynch, the wife o fthe Prime Minister of Ireland, who virtually accused Mr Healy of treason. The Cathal Daly to whom Mr Healy refers is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnois.

That was a fine lather of sweat we worked UP over the disturbing of the tourist season In the north west. Mullaghmore was doing SO well, too, at the end of the season. The British visitors were ever so welcome with their bigger-than big crisp sterling pound notes, and 'the lads' [the IRA] were so Pleased to see them that they climbed the Side of Ben Bulben and scrawled 'Brits Out' at the beginning of August. More a touch-up job, because they put it there a year, or two, back, but you know how it is with the wind and rain beating on bare I3en Bulden's Head. The lads', they said, did a bang-up job on the paintwork. 'The lads' had quite a day of it on Monday, too. It was the bloodiest of all our bloody days as, 'the lads' took out 18 Paras, and I was minded of the scoreline from terry — Paras, 13; IRA, 0. Not that the scoreline — Provisional IRA, 18; Paras 0 — tells the full story of the match of the day, because you had that little curtain raiser in Mullaghmore which really gave us the full scoreline — Provisional IRA, 22; Paras, 1. The one was sort of an own goal, if you know what I mean. It was one in the eye for the 1NLA lads. They really got into the mega-target business when they took out Airey Neave in the liouse of Commons, and that raised the ante for the Provisional IRA lads. The only Way you followed that was to take out a member of the British Royal family. And as they say in the best TV films — mission accomplished, over and out. And, after that, the agonising.

The bishops and the politicians were in on cue to say their piece, They were shocked and horrified, and the British press, with a

_

oyal victim, could work itself up into _headlines about 'murdering bastards,' as if Britain never exported that particular sort to her colonies, dressed in uniforms, to wreck havoc on colonial subjects from kenya to Derry. The Pope came in too, which just shows You how effective is the strategy of taking (3.ut a mega target — you get quotes from all the best media people, and yards and yards of Space and airtime. Seven days of Indian mourning is a fair old publicity coup When you come to think of it, and the triYthologisers will have plenty of material to work on for the pub ballads, and no mistake.

And what, asks Cathal Daly, has got into s at all; this murdering violence, this killing of innocent people? He only has to be joking, of course. Was he never at a sweaty county final of a summer's day when the ballad man patrolled the side-lines singing 'The Valley of Knockanure'? Did he never hear of Roddy McCorley going to die on the bridge of Toome today? Did he never read 'Kerry's Fighting Story,' or Dan Breen's 'My Fight for Irish Freedom'? Or, does he think that the ballad, 'Shall My Soul Pass through Old Ireland,' is a spiritual hymn of praise to the Lord? Does Cathal, and his brother bishops, think this present genera tion of 'the lads' was, somehow, immaculately conceived and reared and contaminated by a source we have not yet managed to isolate; that the virus is a new strain in Irish political life?

Who has, and had, control of the matrix which stamped 'the lads', North and South, in the days of their formal education? The Jesuits had it right — give me the child for the first seven years and I'll give you the man.

To be sure, no one expected we'd turn out gunmen, and today our Church and State people will vehemently deny that The System — the official cultural matrix — was anything other than Christ impregnated. But, who produced the kids who became 'the lads'? To be sure, the unlicensed culture-makers of the mass media had a hand in the job, but who was watching and Who was speaking out to point out the corruption we were witnessing?

Dublin, as a city, woke up one morning and found that Nelson had been half blown from his pillar, and, if a handful was shocked, that handful kept silent. We worked ourselves into a frenzied mob over the dead of Bloody Sunday in Derry, opened the hotlines to fan the flames, and when the mob, incensed, marched through Dublin to storm and, finally, burn down the British Embassy, you had to be crazy to stand up that weekend and say that we had burned down more than the British Embassy, more than a mere building. We could watch a dozen inoffensive Protestants taken off a work-bus and gunned down in as bloody an hour as Derry's Bloody Sunday by 'the lads,' but you don't have open lines for the Irish dead who are Protestants.

We have glorified the gun, and we have glorified and honoured the men, in word, in song, and in history — who sought to change society by the use of force, and the gun, and the bomb. Whatever it is, it is not alien to our culture, and the ideology is not an imported one: 'the lads' are entitled to wear the 'Guaranteed Irish' symbols on their anoraks all day, every day.

Cathal Daly and Jack Lynch can say it is a travesty of history for them to claim descent from Michael Dwyer of the Wicklow Hills, Roddy McCorley, the Manchester Martyrs, Pearse and Connolly, and all the rest, but the mythology men are at work and the ballads give them their authenticity, and assure them of a noble future and posterity.

An alien culture? When the Catholic Church was hounded from Mass Rock to Mass Rock, and priests sold for a fiver a head; when we had no official culture machine of our own and the Brits held the educational matrix for the privileged few, we were glad and happy to have the mythologisers in the seanachies and poets, the men who handed down, by word of mouth, the prayers and the value system which kept the spark of nationhood in our battered people.

O'Connell and Davitt, in the meanest time in our history, showed the world that the Irish could be politicised, and even if they hadn't a decent meal in their bellies, they still had stomachs for calculated political action which did not depend on the gun and the bomb. They were quick to realise, and to utilise, the power of the ballot box but, as I've remarked more than once in this remembering year, Davitt's simple greatness in taking out The First Garrison of the Landlords, without pikes and guns, does not fit comfortably into the mythology of Irish history which has always demanded a doomed confrontation with the second military garrison.

We have loved to hate Perfidious Albion, from The Boys of Wexford, to the Croppy Boy and Father Murphy from Old Kilcormack, boolavoging his way to a manly death is better material than determined, one-armed Davitt making a monstrously successful army of voters out of the starving peasants of Mayo.

The Uprising of Irishtown, with 8,000 people, was greater in numbers than the Rising of 1916 mustering, and Davitt had to be demeaned, historically, to increase the glory of Pearse and his blood sacrifice. I, myself, heard Daniel O'Connell derided in Dail Eireann because he did not subscribe to the blood sacrifice theory of Irish politics.

So, why get worked up in a sweat today just because the last blood spilled is that of a member of the British Royal family? Why be surprised at it? Cathal Daly may have difficulty following the logic of the Provisional IRA mind, and think it twisted, but 'the lads' are making a culturally correct response to a political situation. I may abhor it. Cathal Daly certainly does. The Fianna Fail Cabinet, which let a mob burn down the British Embassy, may regret that today, and will stoutly maintain that the Provisional IRA has no mandate from the people of Ireland, but it has an historically approved mandate from the mythologisers and historians, and that's good enough for 'the lads' and the 'sneaking regarders' who are already talking of the taking out of the 18 Paras at Warrerpoint as an equalising of the score for Derry.

Well, you can't change a nation's culture overnight, or scrap the matrix in a decade or two. But, it is, at least, a start to try to disarm the mythologisers as much as it is to disarm the Provisional IRA. It is a rather thankless task at the best of times and now, at the worst of times, it is easier to bow our heads in shame and blame alien ideologies in our revulsion at the sight of blasted innocent bodies of an old man and his family who trusted the myth of the hospitable Irish.

We may as well face it, we are a poor people, poorer in our modern opulence than the starving peasants of Mayo 100 years ago, who had a greater moral right to their bomb and the bullet, but who did what they had to do, with the ballot box. . . And, they haven't rated a decent ballad, because they had no guns and killed nobody.