At the Edge of Ireland (20 page)

“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! Left 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.”

“Yes, Heaney writes powerful stuff. I was rereading
Opened Ground
just last week…”

“Yeah, fine collection that…Very fine!”

“Some of his poem titles…they tell you exactly where his heart is—‘Requiem for the Croppies,' ‘A Loch Neagh Sequence,' ‘Bogland,' ‘The Seed Cutters,' ‘The Toome Road,' ‘Bog Oak'…”

“Ah, yes—the self-absorption of the Irish again. Inward looking, agonizing over all the dreck of a failed society…”

“Who said that?”

“Tha's the second time you…Who the hell do y'think said it! There's only me here thinkin' an' talkin'…”

“Apologies for the third time.”

Seamus Heaney

“Accepted for the third time—but it's the last one y' get!”

“Good brew, this one,” I said. The Guinness was finally beginning to take hold.

“A very effective diversionary tactic—but true, although a glass of full-blast poteen wouldn't go amiss—it's all that's needed to hot-wire the tongue and kick-start the human engine into life again! But to continue, maybe it's that self-absorption that sells Ireland, ‘specially in the movies. I mean, think of the best ones, starting with John Ford's
The Quiet Man
if y' can put up with John Wayne's ridiculous brogue. Then there's David Lean's
Ryan's Daughter.
John Huston made a beautiful little art film of Joyce's
The Dead
, and then, much more recent, we had two from Roddy Doyle's books—
The Commitments
and
The Snapper
. Then there's Jim Sheridan's
My Left Foot
from Christy Brown's brilliant novel, Neil Jordan's
The Miracle
and
The Crying Game
, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's
December Bride.
Then y' got that romp of a thing,
Ned Devine
, and our latest success—Ken Loach's
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2006, and Frank McCourt's
Angela's Ashes.
And of course my all-time favorite—John Keane's
The Field
with Richard Harris.”

“And mine too! I watched it again just last week. Harris does a great job as the mighty ‘Bull' with his determination to hold on to a small piece of pasture he's created over a lifetime from the wild moors. And then, of course, in true Irish heart-wrenching melodrama, it leads to the destruction of everything around him and ultimately himself. Reflecting that eternal cry of the freedom-lusting Irish: ‘I might as well die if I can't fly!'”

“Jeez, y're soundin' like a real film critic!”

“Feels like that after a fourth viewing…And to be honest, I'm a bit protective of it…It got panned by some critics for being far too over-the-top. I think with anyone less than Harris, it might have been…But he carries that part so powerfully, and despite the fact that he's a detestable character in many ways, he holds you right 'til the end…right up to
his
end, flailing away at the waves with his stick, shouting ‘Back, back!' in that terrible King Canute kind of madness…”

“Well put…and I agree. Without Harris it wouldna've worked.”

“So Ireland's certainly made its mark on the arts…”

“Ah, that it has. Some fine modern playwrights too—Brian Friel, Sean O'Casey, Tom Murphy, Martin McDonagh and his
Lieutenant of Inishmore
. And music, naturally—the Chieftains, the Wolfe Tones, the Dubliners. People sniggered at Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers at first, all dolled up in their fancy white Aran island sweaters and puttin' on the brogue and whatnot, but—boy!—they could hammer home our great Irish ballads like nobody else. ‘Fields of Athenry,' of course—our national anthem almost—but also ‘The Bridge of Athlone,' ‘Danny Boy,' ‘Four Green Fields'—that last is one of Tommy's own compositions—all wonderful stuff! Bob Dylan loved the Clancys. Said they got him started and kept him going. And then this crazy Christy Moore. In his early days he'd go through a couple of bottles of Irish a night and still get up onstage for three marvelous hours. And then y'moderns—Bob Geldof, Bono and U2, Sinéad O'Connor, the Saw Doctors, Clannad, the Pogues, Van Morrison, the Cranberries, the Corrs—even Muzak's maestro-maven—Enya! Oh! And not forgettin' Cathal Coughlin—his
Clock Comes Down the Stairs
is one of the best Irish rock albums ever. 'S'all terrific stuff. Ireland's a major force in the music field. But y' also get Tad Meyer, the real traditionalist, too…the unaccompanied
sean-nós
singers, the
uilleann
pipes, the players of harps, tin whistles, fiddles, the
bodhrán
goatskin drum, the preservers of the
céilí
and the
seisuin
and the
fleadhanna
music festivals. Thanks to organizations like Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (CCE, the Irish music movement), the ancient music has been preserved. So now we've got both—the old and best and the new and best…”

“You'd never get high marks for modesty!”

“Credit where credit's due, lad. You ever watch a Riverdance audience and the smiles that appear like magic on people's faces when the Clancys used to start one of their toe tappers? There's no music in the world like our music!”

“No,” I agree. “And when it's sung in the original Gaelic, just watch the tears roll.”

“Tha's true! Though barely one percent of the country can understand the Gaelic and the Gaeltacht regions like Donegal, Galway, and parts of County Kerry and Cork are fast shrinking…except—and this is really odd—except in the cities. Some state-backed schools teach all in Irish now. Our former president Mary Robinson always was keen to keep it going. The English tried to kill it, of course, in the bad old days, but de Valera, after independence, wanted us to be a fully Irish-speaking nation. Problem was finding teachers! And parents too—they spoke mostly English. Sean O'Faolain called Irish ‘a buried part of ourselves.' The British had certainly done a number on us. With their nihilistic selfishness and papier-mâché bravado, they almost completely decimated our culture. But we had a good go at kickin' 'em out—the IRA in Northern Ireland and down here the burning of all those fancy Ascendancy mansions—the homes of the British aristocrats—in the 1920s—places like Dunboy and the Puxley place in Castletownbere. They say there's only thirty or so o'those huge mega-palaces around today out of over two thousand. But somehow we never really got the power back. And so nowadays, for all the bullshit rhetoric and platitudes, it seems a waste of time teaching kids Irish when they could be learning some useful language, like French, German—or even Chinese Mandarin, f' God's sake. Course, these could never have the pride and power of our great Irish language poets and writers. They'd never capture the spirit of mystery and magic that flows through the Irish language—you're always on multilevels of consciousness when you listen to it…”

“Yeah…y'know, even though I can barely speak a word of it, you can hear something magic in the sound and rhythms of the stories and songs. It's quite strange, there really is a sense of multilevels.”

“Ah well, tha's jus' us, isn't it? Strange…and magic…and multilayered. Schizoid romantics gliding insecurely through the days on pillows of positive affirmations! Pragmatic sentimentalists! And stupid proud of it…”

“All over the world!”

“Ah yeah, our mighty world diaspora of emigrant-loyalists! Without them, we'd be a little forgotten island. Those forty-five million or so in the USA alone, like I said. Can y'believe, a third of Australians too—even a sixth of Norwegians—all Irish descendents. I guess that's the Viking link…from their raids in the mid-800s, and it all started with the famines and the ‘coffin ships' in the 1800s. Over a quarter of the population either dead at home or emigrating to build a new world despite our terrible reputation for the drink and the punch-up and the ‘no Irish need apply' prejudices and our huge Catholic families spreading across uncharted lands like algae on still lakes…”