Midlife Irish (12 page)

The people who own the bed and breakfast actually live
there, so your room might have a picture of their kids on the wall. The bed might creak a bit and the sink in the bathroom
might be cracked, but it always seemed infinitely better than a room with a minibar and “modern art” on the walls and an array
of little plastic vials, envelopes, and bottles in the bathroom.

After checking in with the Conneelys, we drove into Clifden with the sun settling into the Atlantic Ocean. It looked like
the sort of thing you put at the end of a movie, and we thought this day was just about finished. We went to the pub and had
a huge meal: mussels and lamb and several pint glasses. Suddenly it seemed too early to turn in.

We walked the streets of Clifden looking for loud and overt Irishness. We found it at E. J. Kings, a nice-sized pub filled
with a lot of loud Irish people listening to loud Irish music while they drank Guinness and yelled occasionally in each other’s
ears.

The music sounded like what is called, in Georgia, “traditional country.” As I drank, it sounded better and better.

Everyone was smoking and talking. I quit smoking a few years ago, but it is nearly impossible to stand around with a bunch
of Irish people and not get in a conversation, and that leads (me at least) inevitably to butt-land. When the band was between
sets we talked about Irish politics, American politics, Irish and American theater and movies, books, college, and even money.

Around one-thirty, the place was still packed. Something I asked changed the tone of a conversation I was having with a young
guy from Clifden. I asked him about the town. He told me, but as he told me, his tone changed, and I discovered something
that never completely leaves the Irish mind.

He told me that Clifden exported a lot of crops. Then his voice got a little more precise.

“They exported a
lot
of corn during the potato famine.”

This wasn’t an unusual conversation. As I went around in Ireland, I found that the wound in an Irish person’s mind is there
because of the neighbor across the Irish Sea. These are ancient wounds in the Irish psyche, but they are real, and, if the
people I met in Ireland are representative, the many many years haven’t healed them. To understand anything about Ireland,
one has to be aware of England’s role in the sad Irish story that never seems to end.

In the movie
Trainspotting
, a Scottish kid complains about “being colonized by wankers.” The wankers were easy on Scotland. England is, to this day,
the big black cloud of Irish history. Daniel O’Connell, in 1827, put the English thing this way:

“Accursed be the day…when invaders first touched our shores. They came to a nation famous for its love of learning, its piety,
its heroism…[and]…doomed Ireland to seven hundred years of oppression.”

Ireland has a long, sad history with England. Every Irish kid who reads about it becomes another Irish mind with a little
ugly area marked “England.” No matter how it is sliced it’s pretty grim. Basically, for much of its history, Ireland has been
England’s little island of slaves.

This is an ancient beef. How far back can you go? America is struggling now with the idea of reparations for the descendants
of slaves, but first, to be accurate, they’d have to take care of the Native Americans. In the “Ireland and England thing,”
you can go back to at least medieval times and find England mercilessly beating up on its neighbor island.

The basic ugly situation is this: England “colonized” Ireland by force, and created a woeful state of affairs wherein the
Irish people who lived in Ireland didn’t legally “own” their own country. The country was England’s, and they “rented”
it out to Ireland. Ireland “belonged” to England, basically, because England said so and England has a better army.

If Ireland were a building, this might have “worked.” As Ireland is a country that was literally stolen from itself, it created
quite a bit of what one Irishman called “collective cognitive dissonance,” among other things.

These facts seem to be central to the Irish mind, at least the Irish mind as I’ve encountered it: England has caused great,
unjustified, immoral, grievous, and totally unnecessary suffering to the people of Ireland, and has done this for centuries.

This is pretty much a given in the Irish consciousness. The widely circulated Irish
Notes for Teachers
calls the Irish “a race that has survived a millennium of grievous struggle and persecution.” For a lot of Irish people,
and a lot of Irish-Americans, that pretty well sums it up.

The Irish, as you might figure, didn’t submit meekly to the English. There were dozens of rebellions small and large, but
England always won, and Ireland went deeper into oppression. The pattern was oppression, rebellion, English victory followed
by increased oppression, rebellion, and so forth. Rinse, repeat.

After every rebellion there were always those saying the equivalent of “Ireland’s freedom must be watered with our blood in
order to grow.” There were always more Irishmen willing to die for the next unsuccessful rebellion.

Among first-generation Irish-Americans, my introduction to “British Studies” was typical. The first thing I remember my parents
telling me about England was that England had treated their Old Country in a very cruel manner. I was about six when they
first told me that. I didn’t know anything about the “Old” Country; I didn’t know where the “Old” Country was. How did it
get to be “Old”? Do you wear out countries and then change them?

I didn’t know the capital of the country was Dublin. I
thought, until my big brother straightened me out, that Ireland was a part of New Jersey. I knew nothing about Ireland, but
I knew that the English guys were the bad guys.

There is an old joke that is so well-known in Ireland that you can’t tell it because everyone has heard it. It’s not a funny
joke. It’s a painful joke. Here it is:

God is in heaven. He seems to be very busy, and Saint Michael the Archangel comes up to him and asks him what he’s doing.

“I’m making this little planet. It’s called ‘Earth.’ Everything is going to be balanced there. There’ll be North America and
South America. North America will be rich and South America will be poor. On the whole planet everything is going to be balanced.”

Saint Michael sees a little green dot in the Atlantic and asks God, “What’s that?”

God says, “That’s a little place called ‘Ireland.’ It’s going to be the most beautiful place in the world. It’s going to be
very, very green, with lots of rivers and lakes and streams and little hills and mountains. And the people there are going
to live in peace and harmony. And they are all going to be the people in the world who have the nicest life and the most beautiful
land.”

“How is that going to be balanced?”

“Wait till you see the neighbors I’m giving them.”

This is, of course, a little rough on England. When I was growing up I would look at David Niven (who seemed to be in every
movie when I was a kid) and think, “If they’re all like this little guy with the mustache, they can’t be that bad.” And Cary
Grant? He’s English and I like him. Who wouldn’t? This guy is charming and has a self-deprecating sense of humor and very
good manners. How bad can he be?

If they are all people like David Niven and Cary Grant, why do my parents think that the English are monsters? By the time
of
The Avengers,
with the beautiful Mrs. Peel and the funny Mr. Steed, I was pretty sure that England wasn’t, as my dad put it, “a cesspool
of iniquity.”

But my dad had history on his side, and as I got older, the
more I read, the more angry I got at the land of Niven and Grant and Mrs. Peel. It is irrational to hold a grudge against
an entire nation because of something done centuries ago. Still, when you read the history of English-Irish relations, you
can see that the collective Irish mind is less than thrilled by England. In very compressed form, this is the sad history.
When every new Irish schoolkid comes across it, another Irish mind is less than thrilled:

It is startling to discover that Ireland was first “given” to England by Pope Adrian IV, who officially handed it over to
Henry II in 1155. (This is all the more startling when you consider how much Ireland has suffered because of its Catholicism.
To the English way of thinking, Ireland “provoked” a lot of hostility by supporting Catholic causes throughout modern history.
But if you want to put the blame on one guy, it’s Pope Adrian.)

How did Pope Adrian “have” Ireland to “give”? Constantine was the Roman emperor who made Christianity the empire’s official
religion. According to something called the “Donation of Constantine,” Constantine “gave” the Catholic Church a whole lot
of countries, Ireland included. So the pope, the head of the Catholic Church, could give these countries to anyone he wanted.
He “gave” Henry II the emerald isle in 1155.

Unfortunately, the Donation of Constantine later turned out to be a forgery. Everyone chose to ignore that fact. From 1155
on, the king of England “owned” Ireland. He could do what he wanted with it.

There were, however, some strings attached. The pope gave Henry the country under the stipulation that he would convert Ireland’s
hordes to Christianity. Since this was centuries after Saint Patrick, Ireland was already a Christian country. The pope apparently
either didn’t know or chose to ignore that. (Otherwise, why the stipulation? How could he not have known? He didn’t get the
paper that day?)

There was one other string. The pope asked Henry to require
every Irish person to give the church a small amount of money.

Out of this simple seed, a monstrous tree grew.

Henry II didn’t care much about Ireland. It was little, nearby, and comparatively peaceful. Right after Ireland was “given”
to Henry, however, things got a lot less peaceful.

After the death of Brian Boru, there were a series of undistinguished kings. In the year the pope gave Ireland to England,
a man named Rory O’Connor had the crown. A thoroughly loathsome Leinster man named Dermot MacMurrough wanted to topple O’Connor,
but the Irish people hated MacMurrough, so he went to England and asked Henry to help him. Henry told him that he wouldn’t
send any men, but the Leinster man was free to ask any of Henry’s noblemen.

MacMurrough convinced the earl of Pembroke, better known as Strongbow, to help him. Dermot offered him a lot of money (he
even threw in his daughter!), and Strongbow said he would help him in Ireland.

Though MacMurrough had been beaten by O’Connor before, when Strongbow joined him they easily defeated the Irish. The Irish
had very primitive weapons, and it was an easy, but vicious, victory. They started in Wexford on the southeastern coast and
worked their way up, slaughtering Irish people on the way.

O’Connor read the handwriting on the wall and tried to make peace by offering old Dermot the crown if he would just stop the
massacre. But it was no longer even an Irish war. Strongbow decided that he liked Ireland, and he wanted to be king. Henry
II saw what was happening and paid Strongbow a visit. Strongbow didn’t want to go up against the massive power of England,
so he pledged his loyalty to the English crown.

Henry was happy with that, but in 1177, he named his son John “Lord of Ireland.” A few years later, John became the
king of England, and it was now official: The king of England was the king of Ireland as well.

Compared with most English monarchs, John wasn’t that oppressive. He even did Ireland some good. He brought the English trial-by-jury
system of justice to Ireland, and he minted coins (with harps), but he just wasn’t that interested in Ireland. He let his
noblemen run the place. They built and lived in the many castles that are still in Ireland, and they treated the Irish like
inferiors, and they stole from them and cheated them. By and large, though, this was the benign era of English-Irish relations.

A lot of the English nobles left their castles empty and just went home to England. This would have been fine with the Irish,
but the noblemen still owned everything. There were the infamous “absentee landlords.”

In 1258 the Irish got fed up and proclaimed an Irish king, Brian O’Neill. As you might figure, England came over, crushed
the rebellion, and took Brian O’Neill’s head back with them.

Without war, Ireland started to develop a pretty prosperous economy. (This was during the era depicted in the Mel Gibson movie
Braveheart
.) England, under Edward I, started using Ireland’s resources pretty heavily. Ireland was a good supplier of many commodities,
but, to the English, the most valuable was soldiers, which the king used ruthlessly in his battle with Scotland. After Scotland
“won” its freedom (the end of the movie
Braveheart
: They picked a good place to end, a subsequent history muddied up the Scottish “victory”), the Irish asked the Scots for
help against England, but they were refused. (No one is going to make a movie out of this because the Scots and the Irish
didn’t get along well.)

Continued unrest in Ireland forced Edward III of England to enact an extreme “straighten up and fly right” edict called the
“Statutes of Kilkenny” forbidding any interaction between English and Irish. The use of “Irish names” was forbidden.
The Irish sport of hurling was forbidden, and even Irish music was against the law.

It was impossible to enforce these laws, but they did arouse even more Irish hostility against England. By the end of the
fourteenth century Ireland was a kettle about to boil over. Irish chieftains had just about taken over the island. (Early
in the fifteenth century Ireland actually had an Irish ruler again, James Butler.) The only solidly Anglo area was a little
strip of land from Dublin to Drogheda called “The Pale.”

Finally, in 1511, England spoke again. Henry VIII sent over a mass of troops. They had trouble with the native Irish fighters
who knew the land so well, and they had difficulty establishing a final victory. In 1541, in a “declare victory and leave”
gesture, Henry proclaimed that Ireland absolutely belonged to England and that was the end of it, so there, nyah, nyah.