Ireland: the end of the world

The Bangkok Post 1989

On early maps of the world cartographers inscribed ‘here be monsters’ above the amorphous island of Ireland, floating in the Atlantic on the westernmost edge of Europe. It was considered the end of the known world. The Irish, like islanders everywhere, like to bring all of world history to their shores; insularity gives them character. After a pint or two of Guinness, your pub Irishman might concede that Jesus Christ was reared in Judea but that his mother was Irish and that he himself knew the family very well. The Christs were first cousins to the Kennedys and they all ended badly.

In the 1960s, most rural houses had pictures of the Kennedys on the walls. When Jackeline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis, in defiance of the wishes of the Pope, her picture was ceremonially removed from the wall of many households. She was no Irishwoman. The Kennedy clan represent the Irish the emigrant made good, even if it was under-the-counter prohibition money which financed it. Thousands of emigrants took to trans-Atlantic boats – called ‘coffin ships’ – over the course of the 19th century, to escape famine which wiped out half the population. Emigration is a fact of Irish life and the population is a relatively small four and a half million.

The very first emigrant was Saint Brendan, who reputedly reached the North American coast via Iceland in the 12th century, beating Columbus to it by a few hundred years. After another pint or two, your man at the bar is convinced that, not only did an Irishman discover America, but he secretly got to the moon before Armstrong did and had a pint at the bar to while away the time waiting on the Apollo boys.

Ireland doesn’t share the awe and cloning of American lifestyle that has become endemic in urban Thailand. Every year thousands of descendants fly in to ‘rediscover’ their ancestors and spend days driving up and down muddy lanes in rented cars looking for the shack their grandparents were born in.

A few years ago Ronald Reagan garnered an Irish honorary degree (a sizeable majority of Irish academics lodged a formal protest but the Pentagon PR men got their way). The joke was that weeks before the CIA men in their Brooks Brothers suits were running around country lanes trying to build some sort of a hut out of old Hollywood galvanise and Disneyland bricks. All the Irish bishops and the cardinal were ‘unavailable’ for Reagan’s visit, reportedly because the Reagans had left Ireland Catholic and Ronnie returned not only Protestant but divorced as well. The things you have to do to succeed in America! Such jocular irreverence is central to the Irish character.

Culturally, the Irish are Celtic, as are our Scottish, Welsh and Breton (in Brittany, France) brethren. We like to think the English are firmly Anglo-Saxon, with some fringe benefits from the Germans along the way. The Celtic make-up is characterised by imagination and a tendency towards the melancholy, combined with a sense of humour. Industry is not one of our strong points, which might account for the perennial economic crisis. Irish jokes are told all over the world, even in Thailand. The typical format has a Scottish, Welsh, English and Irish man stranded on a desert island, with punch lines reflecting national traits: stinginess for the Scot, stiff upper lip for the Englishman, dim-wittedness for the poor Irishman.

Reverence in Ireland is considered pretentious, which often gets me in trouble with the more candyfloss aspects of Thai culture. Nothing escapes the butt of an Irish person’s humour. The Catholic Church (reviled and revered), the Chernobyl disaster, Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth have all spawned their respective jokes. The late ‘Uncle Ayu’, long-time columnist for the Bangkok Post and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, had this quality at its best. No doubt he picked it up during his student days. Many Thai people were educated in Irish boarding schools and universities, usually of the better sort. It must have been a vogue among the upper classes or, perhaps, the religious schools in Bangkok acted as referral agents.

Ireland has a long, colourful history of colonisation, which accounts for much of the irreverence. The Danes, the Normans and finally the English have left their mark. The Republic of Eire achieved independence from Britain in the 1920s. The Six Counties of Northern Ireland, in the vagaries of shuttle diplomacy, stayed with England. This simplified history accounts for the present-day Troubles. The street battles have raged since the Civil Rights days in the 1960s. The recent Anglo-Irish Treaty, granting a say to the Republic in the North’s affairs, is the focus of heated differences of viewpoint both north and south of the border. Tanks and armoured cars are still in the streets and half the province of Ulster is on English social security and a lot of Valium.

Ireland too colonised, but in a spiritual sense. At one time it was referred to as ‘The Island of Saints and Scholars’, definitely a step up from ‘the end of the world’. Most of Western Europe owes its Christianisation to the wandering Irish saints and scribes who established monasteries and schools. One of the oldest and most beautiful of these monasteries is at Glendalough, an hour’s drive from Dublin. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland and March 17 is his feast day. It is celebrated with a great profusion of green all over the world, from New York to Australia. Even in Bangkok, there is a St. Patrick’s Society, which meets at the British Club, of all places.

Apart from its saints, Ireland is also known for its writers, some of them far from saintly. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, was the author of Gulliver’s Travels. He was a satirist who believed that the pen was mightier than the sword and that a spade should be called a shovel.

Oscar Wilde, dramatist, wit, poet, novelist, was born in Dublin but died in Paris, like so many - exiled, poor, deserted by his wife and children, ostracised for his scandalous behaviour and his homosexuality. He was the author of such famous witticisms as: ‘I have nothing to declare but my genius,’ when stopped by a New York customs officer.

William Butler Yeats is regarded as one of the century’s greatest poets (he won the Nobel Prize), and perhaps the most famous prose writer of the century is James Joyce. The latter was born in Dublin in 1882 but spent the greater part of his life abroad, in Paris, Zurich and Trieste. Ulysses, his best-known book, is set in Dublin and begins in the Martello Tower, a fortress looking towards England, one of the first sights the visitor sees on arriving by boat. It is now what must be the tiniest museum in the world, devoted to the country’s greatest writer.

Samuel Beckett, also a Nobel prize-winner, is the latest in a long line of writers of genius.

Arriving at Dun Laoraigh from Holyhead on the Welsh coast, the first thing one sees is SHUT SELLAFIELD painted in white on the harbour wall. The nuclear power station is just four hours east across the water and the new consciousness in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster has Irish people very aware of prevailing winds. The beautiful green and purple Wicklow hills are behind Dun Laoraigh, and give the country its nickname, ‘The Emerald Isle’.

The Irish landscape is rugged. Clouds scurry across an uncertain sky, lending lights and atmosphere to the valleys and patchwork fields. Tourism is a major revenue earner for the Irish. The country has some of the last unspoiled scenery in Europe and clean lakes stocked with fish. Many travel to Ireland from the continent just for a week’s quiet fishing.

Ireland is small – nowhere is one far from sea, river or mountains. A 15-minute drive from the centre of Dublin brings you to wild, lake-pitted bogland, where turf cutters dig the carbonised fuel from ground that has preserved bones for millennia. Ireland used to be entirely covered with forest, and the land now supplies large quantities of peat and gas.

The lakes in the Wicklow hills are calm, black and glacial. Monasteries gone to ruin dot the countryside. Ireland’s reputation as a centre of learning has survived in one of the highest literacy rates in the Western world. Irish teachers, usually nuns or priests, have taught children and adults all over the world. Many of the religious schools in Thailand are indebted to them.

The pub, as in England, is the focal point of social life. The Irishman likes to drink, and next to drinking he likes to talk. Discussion, politics, gossip, jokes: all grist to the national mill. Controversy is welcomed and gentility produces yawns. Music and song form part of pub life too. In a climate as cold, rainy and exposed as Ireland’s, life is usually merry inside.

The week I left to catch my plane to Bangkok, small girls were going to church in Holy Communion frocks, and little boys were in dapper suits with white rosettes on their lapels. Up on the border, black British soldiers were lounging against the security sandbags and gazing down their Armalite rifles. People were discussing the up-coming referendum on divorce, still illegal in Ireland. It was raining as usual. Your man was at the bar as always, out of work and the worse for drink. He ordered up another dark pint. I knew I’d be back. Those who leave always go back, if not in fact then in words. It must be some sort of itch in the blood.