On Being Irish - Part Two - The Bright Side

We don’t get to choose our nationality. It chooses us. For a long time, I struggled with being Irish. I felt at odds with a country that seemed so at odds with itself. I knew of nothing else, except for family holidays to Wales and London pulling my eyes wide open with possibility, and yet the sense of being caught in a time warp was very real. It felt like everything was out of kilter with who I really was. I still feel it, but less so now. I can see more clearly now that some of the heavy rain has turned to mist. The beauty that was always there had to struggle so valiantly to get out from under the cloak of church and state that was thrown over our infected isle for too long. A terrible beauty was born as Yeats so eloquently framed it. Every now and again it exposed itself in our violently brilliant art forms. In the words of Beckett and Behan, or the raucous music of The Dubliners, before the Pogues took up the baton to pummel the righteous conservative guilt pulsing through our gasping veins. For too long we were on the one road, which was the road to nowhere. Only for the angry men and women, who refused to go under, and the brave men and women, who refused to give up, we would have unraveled long before on the altar of contempt and self-hatred.

Others would soon follow to continue to fight the good fight. Their determined struggle showed us there was a way out, but following was not an easy path for the majority to take. Indeed, society’s suffocating straight jacket remains in place today. So does the corruption. The golden circle. Just look at the way any dissenting voices were vilified during the pandemic. There was a time when people had to leave to breathe and grow. They still do. London. Liverpool. Manchester. New York and Boston. Berlin. Spacious cities that ended up being the grateful recipients of what our priests and politicians thought was too precious to hold onto. Our youth were too dangerous to keep at home. People with a vision of how it could be. Our hearts were broken time and again by the damage done. They said it was in the name of love. It was anything but. Only sin filled the devil’s cup. Overflowing with bitterness. The polar opposite of our beautiful, desolate and vibrant landscape and our way with words was screaming out to be heard. We are full of wisdom but we are also silent in the extreme when it comes to standing up for ourselves. We are the same today. Only for the devil, yes him again, in the detail to tip the scales in our direction until we had no choice but to run with it.

It was only when I went to college that I realized that being Irish brought with it an infinite array of possibilities. I worked out that Yeats was indeed right when he alluded to the terrible beauty contained within the pain we had endured. It’s in the anger and the sadness that joy is most powerful, born of a desperate need to breathe, to scream out loud, so fertile in its mischief. It’s in us all, this rage that cannot and will not be silenced. Maybe that’s why we have such a rich sense of humor, self-depreciation, and fun. It’s contained in our madness too. There’s always been a craziness about us, wild as the ocean battering our west coast, an untamed melody, this need to break free. I feel it when I am in a packed Croke Park when the blue shirts of Dublin stand proud and tall against the rest of the country. Jackeens and culchies in a perfect disharmony. A cacophony of dissent springs forth from the stands and the blessed terrace that is Hill 16. It’s in places like this that we let our guard down. Here we can be ourselves. Warts, and all. We get to relent for a little while and to be who we really want to be.

It’s in our passions although we are still tainted by a begrudgery that it seems canno be shifted. Something good is never to be trusted. But when the sun is shining and the breeze is at our back there’s no better place to be. We are the quiet revolutionaries. We get on with things, even when loike now the going is tough, and even manage to giggle along the way. We know what’s going on around us is often ridiculous, and wrong. It was the church, the banks, our politicians and it’s RTE now, it seems the grubby little fingers are still in the greasy till. We’re meant to be shocked, but we know the score, and yet it’s as if we can’t be bothered to do anything about it. We are world champions at taking the piss out of ourselves. It’s what gets us through. Maybe it’s because now we are more invested in the beauty that comes with letting go.

The same beauty that exists in the clash of the ash on a sunny summer’s day in Thurles. The hurling lads frothing at the mouth, lost in the realms of a romantic past, with the excitement of it all. Those crazy moments when we lose the run of ourselves and drop the mask. The giving out we do when the shit hits the fan, as inevitably it always does. We’re Irish after all. It’s something we’ve learned to accept, that after the rise comes the inevitable fall. We are in need of a pick-me-up or a good kick-up the hole on a regular basis. A shake down, a back-to-reality moment, perhaps the crash is the best example of it all. Despite the set back we put our heads down and got on with it. That’s what we do.

It’s in the twists and turns of our rivers and roads. This beauty is all around us. It’s also in the concrete jungles of our cities, our towns, and the suburbs creeping outwards in a vain attempt to catch up. It’s in the magic of the throw away comments we take for granted. Our easy way with thoughts and words. We were born to talk the hind legs off a donkey and well we know it. The to-and-fro of casual conversation, puncturing any silence hoping to get a look in. The only thing that stops us talking is having to take a breath.

We are everything our leaders fear us to be but only when we finally realise it will we be truly free.