On Being Irish - Part One - The Dark Side

For me being Irish is a topsy-turvy merry-go-round of good times walking hand-in-hand with a certain feeling of loneliness that comes wrapped up in our past. Maybe that’s why we spend so much of our time drinking and talking shite in noisy pubs, on overcrowded trains and empty buses, on the sharp hushed corners of rush hour streets, and in random coffee shops. The conversation is where we go to search for the answers to the questions that define us.

Being Irish is drinking to forget. Often we only find the answers in the late of night, before waking to find we have forgotten them in the freshness of a new morning. We do regret well, probably too well. We sweat everything from the serious to the small that should never matter at all. Our heads aching at the thought of having to do it all over again the next day and the day after that. We are forever holding on. Waiting for the next best thing. Chasing it until we work out that it ever existed in the first place. It’s not easy, this Irish thing. We do all the heavy shit in spades: guilt, shame, and jealousy disguised in a begrudger’s cloak. You name it and it pulls at our heartstrings and messes with our heads. Worry is another of our favourite pastimes. Worrying about what’s gone, what’s to come, and what lies in-between, the slow hum of our thought leaves nothing but doubt to inhabit the wilderness.

Being Irish is U2 singing Where the Streets Have No Name on the roof of a building in faraway flung LA. It’s that feeling of being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It is Paul McGrath throwing his body on the line in Giant’s Stadium or the rise and fall and the rise again of Heffo’s Army on Hill 16. It’s Seamus Darby jumping an Offaly jig of joy in 1982 to scupper Kerry’s five-in-row. It’s Brian O’Driscoll dancing through a blur of French shirts in the Paris Spring. It’s Beehan, Beckett, Doyle, and every story we’ll ever tell. We’re good at that. Every one of us is coated in the thick veneer of history. Yes, even you. We’re all part of it, like it or not. The writers, the dreamers, the singers, and the damned left to rot in hell’s ditch.

We are the drunkards and the blaggards destined to make the same mistakes over and over again. We are gobshites, whores to the past. Gossip junkies. The words wriggling free to show us what we can be when we give it a try. Pressuring us to push the boat out for once and swim free. To know what it’s like not to care what others think. It never has, but we have made it so. We want to be liked by the world and yet we hate ourselves. Just ask Bono. We are the darkness that’s in every one of us. We don’t need to be liked. We just need to be.

Being Irish is the bit of Jim Sheridan that rages at the shite we put up with from the so-called system. For some reason, we think it’s all going to be different when the next election comes around and we vote whoever is in power out, whoever they happen to be at the time. But it’s rarely mattered. It’s always the same old shite over and over again. When will we ever learn that it’s the system itself that’s fucked? Good for nothing. Beyond repair. Democracy in name only, rather than good deeds. We need to step outside to step back in again to something different, something more powerful, more real. Rip it up and start again.

It is Shane McGowan sitting at the devil’s right hand, the ginger lady by his bed. It’s heaven and hell depending on what day it is, even more so on a Sunday. It’s the breaking of bread. The hum of mass talking about the sin that has passed. A bottle of rum beside a Guinness head on a bar counter, waiting to be bled dry by the lips of Lucifer. It’s the church pressing on your neck choking creativity and freedom half to death. It is the barbed wire of church and state. It’s the good priest too, trapped in his own free will. The scriptures are with us still, bent out of shape by those who twist the message to suit their own deeds. These men in black from long before infesting every nook and cranny of our will. They spread the word and tell us what to do, and still we believe, even though we like to think we don’t. Power is a dangerous thing in the right hands. In the wrong it’s catastrophic. In the name of the father and in the name of the son. It’s why we still do what we’re told, it’s why we sit so still. The legacy of the police and thieves as Sir Bob put it so succinctly.

Being Irish is the sunshine that follows the rain only a few minutes apart. There is little doubt that rainbows were invented in Ireland. A forerunner to Apple, Google, and Amazon. Being Irish is about carrying the terrible legacy of the troubles. The killing. Nationalist. Loyalist. Catholic or Protestant. The dying and the living left to grieve. It’s everything that’s been taken from us, and everything we’ve thrown away. The green blood spilt on the battlefields of Flanders forgotten by Easter 1916, the fingers in the greasy till are greasy still. Pearse and his comrades left to die at the end of a bullet from a British gun. They are long dead and gone and we’re still waiting for true freedom to come. They died for nothing if that’s the case. The funny thing is that these days we don’t need any invaders because we’ve become so good at colonising ourselves, leaving only a distant memory of freedom lost that will haunt us forever unless we seize it soon.

Being Irish is not being able to let go of the things that hold us back. The rebel yells in Cork. Independent republic me arse. Put that in your pipe Reggie and smoke it. When it comes down to it, it is nobody’s business except ours. We like to think we’re special. God’s chosen ones; sure didn’t he send St. Patrick to banish the snakes, although it appears he left a few behind. As my father said about Charlie Haughey: it takes a crook to run a country full of them. For me being Irish is those grey Wednesday afternoons in Lansdowne Road before Jack, Davey Langan frightening the life out of a Czechoslovakian winger winning his first cap. The roar of the true believers who were already there before the plastic paddies rode into town. Or singing Amhrán na bhFiann in a packed Croke Park before the Dubs go to war.

When the Pope waved goodbye in 1979, who would ever have thought it would be an Englishman who would temporarily fill the vacuum. Jack Charlton, a gruff Geordie, understood what it meant to be Irish more than we ever did. He liked a drink and a fish did Jack. He liked to talk. He put ‘em under pressure and we reaped the rewards. Stuttgart. Giant’s Stadium. Wembley. Windsor Park. Suddenly, we were a nation once again, the tricolour ripped from its bloody republican grip. We’re on the one road. Sharing the one load. We’re on the road to God knows where. We’re on the one road. It may be the wrong road. But we’re together now who cares. North men. South men. Comrades all. Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Donegal. How Christy Moore must have smiled when Joxer jumped out of the Rhine and into his head. Mind your house Christy! It’s Aldridge to Houghton. The moment when time stood still. June 7th 1988. Suddenly we were free. No blood, no bombs, no hate filled rhetoric, just a leather football looping over Peter Shilton to land in the English net. It was 3.05 when the world stopped turning. George Hamilton roared “One-nil.” By 3.06 the moment had passed into legend. I had a tee shirt that told me so. Soon after, the first words of The Van settled in Roddy Doyle’s head. You’ll never beat the Irish and ole, ole, ole sung loud as we lost ourselves in history. A fleeting moment until we dod what we always do and threw it all away, again.

Being Irish is the emptiness in our bellies borne of the famine. A hunger that’s yet to be filled. We’re storytellers and boy can we talk. Sure don’t we say it all the time, we’d talk for Ireland and it’s true. We do. And if we have nothing to talk about then we talk about nothing and if that fails there’s always the weather to fall back on. Sure wasn’t there a guy in Kuwait who was arrested for giving out about the weather the other day? Jaysus, we’d all be in jail all the time if that were the case. The whole lot of us, banged up for boring the shite out of each other. We like to give out about anything and everything. Bono. The Dubs. The FAI. Even the neighbour down the road, who leaves their wheelie bin out too long after collection. Who do they think they are? What other country would have the Joe fuckin’ Duffy show? Fuck the begrudgers. They’d bore the pants off you. What they need is a good kick up the hole. We’re world fuckin’ champions at talking shite. The times when we need to be quiet, drowned out by the drone of our own din, but we don’t know-how. We seem to think we know it all and yet sometimes it seems that we know nothing at all. Bless me father for I have sinned. I won’t do it again. Next time I’ll take the wheelie bin in.   

Being Irish is to enjoy taking people down. It’s about not getting too big for your boots. It’s a whit inherent in everything that’s said. It’s the Burren, the Giant’s Causeway, and the whispers of Connemara rattling over the bones of the Famine dead that still inhabit the quiet boreens out west to this day. It’s the ones who left and the ones who never got away. It’s a bomb going off on a busy shopping street on a Saturday afternoon in Omagh. The days that we like to sweep under the carpet and pretend it never happened. Not in our name. It wasn’t us. The sadness. The misery. It’s a gunshot ringing out in gangland, some mother’s son cut down before he’s grown. No respect for the living or the dead. We are a killing machine up there with any in the world. It’s the lost, the buried, and the never found lying still under the stony grey soil of border ground. It’s RTE telling us what to believe. It’s the politicians, priests, judges, and the white-collar thieves, the chosen ones chosen by themselves, the fingers fumbling in the greasy till still.

Being Irish is about allowing ourselves to be everything we can be. We’re the past, present, and future. We’re the awful things done in our name. We are the lessons we still refuse to accept. So that when it happens all over again, we’ll pretend to be shocked, just like we always do and there’ll be a tribunal and wailing and gnashing of teeth and a minister will speak and there might even be an apology and we’ll forget all about it until it happens all over again.

It is the darkness inhabiting the status quo. The reasons we will never change. It seems that we’ll never be free until we stand, alone again Kathleen on the edge of the world and breathe in what’s left of our true selves. The clean Atlantic air fills our lungs. It’s called hope. We have to learn to trust in ourselves and no one else. No going back. We need to push on. Onwards and upwards and when we’ve done that we can go back out and be ourselves in a world that is in desperate need of what we bring. Our beauty, our music, our laughter, our wise words, our poetry, our goodness, our kindness, our compassion, our quiet way of getting things done, and our common decency. I’ve seen it breathe when it’s abroad, free of the shackles of what holds us back at home.

Being Irish is a merry-go-round. It’s Groundhog Day. Sure it’ll be grand. We are the sweet melody that walks hand-in-hand with the lyric of Picture This, take my hand and we can go walking, we can go talking about whatever’s on your mind. But we are the sternal darkness too. We are all in the bones of the young lives hidden away so cruelly below unconsecrated ground, lying under a sod turned like our stomachs to mask hatred as belief. We are Vicky Phelan, and the brave frightened women who have died and will die because of the cervical check scandal whilst others who played their part are hailed as heroes.

Our heads are turned towards the setting sun.

We are alone with our thoughts and the pain that comes with knowing we can also be the light.

We are the darkness that can’t be undone, but we are also the hope that it will never happen again.