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Mythical malaise
By Joe Horgan
THE weekend in Ireland and a cold cut in the air, a slight hangover and the Sunday papers. A flick through the pages and perhaps it’s the cold, the lazy Sunday or the hangover but the familiar struggle to understand Ireland emerges. Article after article and I’m left wondering what this place now is.
Sure enough I’m thinking of Sunday afternoons in a social club in England with faraway hills and whitewashed cottages painted on the walls. Perhaps that was the land that never was but someone remembered it.
If I admit I was given a version of Ireland frozen in time, nourished by sentimental songs and summer holidays and the myth of going home, am I allowed to say what we found when we came back?
Churches in Ireland are now having security cameras installed and some are locking their doors once mass is over. Churchyards are now often used as drinking areas. What a way we have come.
Now, the church’s history in this country over the last century has proven to has been spectacularly riddled with criminal abuse and corruption. Places of religion were quite often places of torture. The church had a core that was in many instances rotten. Somehow though I don’t think it is those poor souls that are exacting revenge.
Ireland now has one of the fastest rates of heritage destruction in the world. We may not have rainforests or rare animals but we do have a history of global value. Yet in these days of boom 10 per cent of heritage sites are destroyed every decade. Round towers, Viking settlements, castles. All going or gone.
Bord Fáilte portrays us to all those tourists as a country entwined in a deep, mystical past but even as they speak deep, mystical Ireland is being bulldozed.
A landscape sacred to the Irish mind for 5,000 years is to be divided by a motorway purely to cut the commuting time to Dublin. The house in Dublin in which some of the leaders of the 1916 uprising finally surrendered is now threatened by a plan which will demolish it in order to put up a shopping centre. Shopping and commuting. What did we do to deserve this?
A man from Nigeria now seeking asylum in Ireland was recently urgently attempting to get his sick child to hospital. Driving in his car he was stopped by the gardai and asked for identification. He refused to give it and had no identity card to prove who he was. He ran from them and with the child attempted to get into a taxi.
I’d say any parent could imagine how he was feeling. He was arrested and spent two days in custody. Last week he was sentenced to two months in prison for the incident. His solicitor stated that the man pleaded guilty, apologised, was in fact a devout Christian and family man with two Irish born children and was extremely anxious at the time about his sick child.
In court his religious minister spoke up for him. The judge asked her where she was from, stated that “people who are guests in Ireland should not be obstructing or causing hassle to gardaí and his friends should be told that as well” and gave him the two month sentence.
Luckily the man was let out on bail pending an appeal. Two months in jail for obstructing the gardaí? Or was it for being an overwrought father with a sick child? Or for being a ‘guest of the nation’? Or for being an asylum seeker? Or for being black? Or in order to send a message to any ‘friends’ who may have been watching who might also be fathers, or guests, or asylum seekers or black. I mean even Liam Lawlor, who cost the country millions, didn’t get two months.
Michael McDowell, the Minister for Justice (and I’m sorry but I cannot help laughing every time I write that), has responded to the increasing social friction and malaise in Irish life by the route so beloved of the short fat middle classes. He has got macho again.
Instead of looking into the cultural and social direction that Ireland is taking, he has sanctioned garda use of beanbag ammunition, which is fired from a gun along with pepper sprays and aerosol devices. Beanbag ammunition has caused a number of deaths in the USA and the Irish Labour Party have accused McDowell of arming the gardai by the back door.
Meanwhile a Dublin Hotel is hosting a major arms conference, which includes the firm that recently supplied millions of dollars worth of electro-shock guns to the US army in Iraq. That is just a manifestation of the free market so beloved by McDowell and co., where everything has its price and ethics has no place.
Speakers at the event though include senior Garda representatives. Now won’t they be mixing with some unsavoury characters? In the same week that, God bless him, he hit planning problems with his luxury holiday home, McDowell was also described as seeing “inequality as an inevitable part of the society of incentives that Ireland has, thankfully, become.” Now we know what Margaret Thatcher would have looked like if she had gone bald.
Now all of this is fairly hard to take on a Sunday morning on top of a slight hangover and the promise of winter to come. You start to see why so many who left Ireland had feelings of real bitterness and distaste mixed up with their feelings of love for the country.
It was far from the comforts of judges and Michael McDowell that they were reared. Then one last little item. The field where the first All-Ireland hurling final was played in Birr in Co Offaly 116 years ago is to be sold to make way for a Tesco supermarket.
A British supermarket on the spot where they played the first hurling final as the GAA sought to define the fabric of Irish life. Thank God we have our independence.
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