New Ways to Kill Your Mother (23 page)

A year or two later, when the IRA hunger strikes were causing an upsurge of sympathy for the movement and its martyrs, someone told me that Roddy Doyle was writing a comic novel called
Your Granny’s a Hunger Striker
. Although brought up in the bosom of the Fianna Fáil party and the Catholic Church, I looked forward to the novel. Like many of our generation, I had had my fill of Irish piety and wished only for jokes on these matters. This was, perhaps, one of the rights for which the earlier generation had fought, and one of the inevitable consequences of their struggle, even if it did not seem like that at the time.

Your Granny’s a Hunger Striker
was never published, but in 1987 Doyle’s novel
The Commitments
appeared, followed by
The Snapper
(1990),
The Van
(1991),
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
(1993) and
The Woman Who Walked into Doors
(1996). The novels, and the movies that were made from some of them, were original in their tone, fast-moving, sharp, irreverent. They also became, in the images they created of Dublin, immensely influential.

The city of Dublin has always stood apart from the Irish nation. When Roddy Doyle’s great-uncle, Robert Brennan, heard in prison about the extent of the 1916 Rising in Dublin, his informant told him: ‘Dublin was grand. No longer shall we hear [the] jibe about the city of “bellowing slaves and genteel dastards”.’ By the time Rory, Roddy Doyle’s father, began his apprenticeship as a printer twenty-five years later, working with men from Dublin city, however, the city seemed to have returned to its old self. ‘It was an eye-opener for me, like being in a different country. The philosophy was profoundly anti-Republican, anti-Gaelic, almost anti-Irish. As far as they were concerned, they were Dublin men, not Irish. They bought and read English newspapers … They spoke of nothing but soccer, all the Dublin and English teams.’

This, then, was the world in which Rory’s son set his novels, a world in which there was no mention of the struggle for independence or its legacy, and no mention of the conflict in Northern Ireland, at its most intense in the years the novels were published, and no mention of the Catholic Church. It was a world stripped of the props that readers most associated with Ireland, and filled instead with rock ‘n’ roll, much wit and shouting, and sex and swearing and soccer. It could have been Liverpool or Birmingham or Manchester, except for something absolutely central to it, which was the spirit of the city, which everyone who knew Dublin recognized. Making this image of the city popular, almost official, as Doyle did in these years, was a seriously political project in a country whose self-image was rural and Catholic and
conservative and nationalist. In doing this, Doyle came in a distinguished line of Irish novelists who sought to reinvent Ireland, from Joyce, who placed a Jewish hero in his irreverent capital city in
Ulysses
in 1922, to John Banville, who made Irish history into a great burlesque and a set of comic sequences in
Birchwood
fifty years later. The novelists sought to reassemble the nation.

In 1999, in his novel
A Star Called Henry
, Roddy Doyle came to deal for the first time with the nationalism of his grandparents and the heritage and history that provide the background to
Rory & Ita
; he made an effort to apply his comic skills to the lives of his grandparents. Henry, his hero, who plays a crucial part in most events in Irish history, is also a Dubliner who comes in contact with the members of the nationalist movement:

They hated anyone or anything from Dublin. Dublin was too close to England; it was where the orders and cruelty came from … Ireland was everywhere west of Dublin, the real people were west, west, west, as far west as possible, on the islands, the rocks off the islands, speaking Irish and eating wool … they were more Irish than I was; they were nearer to being the pure thing.

Rory & Ita
quietly and subtly dramatizes the lure of this Dublin life and its softening effect on the nationalists who settled in the city after independence. Rory did not join the Fianna Fáil party because of his nationalist sympathies; he said he

became involved in Fianna Fáil because I was born into Fianna Fáil. I never joined; I was born into it. I never joined and I never left. My father was one of the Republicans who followed de Valera when he founded the party in 1926 … Anyone who belongs to Fianna Fáil, just look at them; they don’t need a card – they are who they are.

Fianna Fáil has managed since 1926 to be many things to many people. It soaked up nationalist energies, diverted the old brigade from fighting wars into fighting elections. In theory, it
sought to restore Gaelic as the national language, to reunify Ireland, and to represent the lower middle class and the small farmers, but slowly it put most of its energy into staying in power. It began to represent big business and corruption. It managed to offer allegiance to both Brussels and Boston. My father, who was a staunch member, having also been ‘born into it’, always said that if you voted for the opposition, your right hand would wither away. He too believed that you could tell a Fianna Fáil person by looking at them. He, like Rory, put enormous energy into election campaigns and derived great pleasure from winning them. ‘Election campaigns are highly emotional – soaring adrenaline and non-stop hard work,’ Rory says. In 1977 Rory set about organizing the campaign to replace Conor Cruise O’Brien, who was a Labour member of the Irish parliament, with a Fianna Fáil candidate. ‘I’m sure he was a charming man to meet, but I never did meet him, and we took his seat,’ he says.

Rory manages to be charming also, and mild-mannered and funny. Like many other ordinary members of Fianna Fáil, he embodies a certain low-key decency, excited by local rivalry as much as large ideologies, lacking zealotry. These are the very qualities that made the party very difficult to unseat. Even those of us who, despite being ‘born into the party’, loathe its politics, find it hard to dislike its actual members. This makes killing your Fianna Fáil father a rather onerous task; Roddy Doyle has been wise, perhaps, to try to do it to his with kindness.

Despite Fianna Fáil’s interest in restoring Gaelic as the national language, neither Rory nor Ita took the matter too seriously. When Rory bought a new suit of Donegal tweed he wondered if he might be mistaken ‘for one of those Gaelic League people who went around talking Irish out loud. I wasn’t talking Irish out loud but I was going around in this lovely suit, and enjoying myself.’ So too Ita and her friends, when they
were ignored at an Irish traditional dance, ‘ended up dancing with each other and more or less jeering and sneering at the Irish zealots around us’.

3

The father of the writer Hugo Hamilton also went around in the same streets and attended the same dances during the same years as Rory and Ita. But he did so, his son tells us in
The Speckled People
, ‘talking Irish out loud’ and becoming one of the ‘Irish zealots’ sneered at by Ita. Unlike the Doyles, who brought merely their deep affections and modest ambitions into the domestic sphere, Hamilton’s father in
The Speckled People
carried his politics into the house, burdened his family with his fierce views on Ireland, and made the home into a state under siege.

Hugo Hamilton, who was born in 1953, published his first three novels in the early 1990s. They were set in Germany, where his mother came from, and dealt with the large subjects of history and treachery and memory. The tone was stylish and restrained and ironic, the drama subtle. It was as though his own upbringing in the Dublin middle-class suburbs in the years when nothing happened did not seem in itself worthy of his attention, being too quiet and settled, too contented perhaps to be useful to a novelist interested in large historical and political subjects. His two subsequent novels, set in the Dublin underworld, served to confirm that his own comfortable background did not offer him material for fiction.

A happy childhood may make good citizens, but it is not a help for those of us facing a blank page. In 1996 Hamilton published a story, seven pages long, called ‘Nazi Christmas’ in a collection called
Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow
. It told a story that was so unbelievable that it could not have been made up. The three Dublin children in the story with a German mother are harassed
by their neighbours. ‘It began with the man in the fish shop saying “Achtung!” and all the customers turning around to look at us.’ As the family in the story appear in public: ‘There was something about us that made people laugh, or whisper, or stop along the street quite openly to ask the most bizarre questions; something that stuck to us like an electronic tag.’ Soon the children are attacked and beaten up.

The story was written in that distant style that Hamilton used in his first three novels, where all judgement is withheld and the emotion, coiled and ready to spring, is buried in the coolness of the tone. His memoir
The Speckled People
, a best-seller in Ireland, has that same masterfully suppressed rage. It is as artful and deliberate in its textured use of voice as Roddy Doyle’s book is intentionally artless. The world here is viewed through the eyes of a child who does not judge, merely details and describes. But each detail and each description convey enormous and carefully measured levels of concealed emotion and blocked-out pain.

Language itself has been the ground of the child’s suffering, not only the language of his mother, which causes the events of ‘Nazi Christmas’ to be retold here as memoir, but the English language itself, which the father has decided his children should not speak or listen to, even though it is the only language spoken in their Dublin suburb. The father wishes his children to speak and hear Irish, and in order to fulfil these wishes he will need to keep them away from the outside world, from radio and television and popular music and playmates. He will also need to mould them according to the ideology that he has decided to bring home, unsoftened by the atmosphere all around him, by the city of Dublin in all its diversity, but also by the spirit of compromise that took over from the revolutionary spirit in Ireland as soon as the British departed.

The debate between Hamilton and his father is the same
debate as occurs between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors in James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’. When Miss Ivors encourages Gabriel to go to the west of Ireland on his holidays, Gabriel tells her that he wishes to go to the European continent instead, ‘partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change’. When she challenges him with ‘And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with – Irish?’ he replies, ‘Well, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.’ Finally, she accuses him of being a ‘West Briton’.

In his memoir, Hamilton adopts the style of Stephen Dedalus in the early pages of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, in which the world is described through the eyes of a child: ‘When you’re small you’re like a piece of white paper with nothing written on it,’ he writes. ‘My father writes down his name in Irish and my mother writes down her name in German and there’s a blank space left over for all the people outside who speak English … My father says your language is your home and your country is your language and your language is your flag.’

The Hamiltons, an island of non-English speakers in a West British city, imported Aine, a servant from the west of Ireland, whose tasks included the speaking of Irish, which is her first language, to the children. ‘What good is that to them?’ Aine asked when Hamilton’s mother insisted that she speak only Irish to them. That is the question that haunts any account of the slow decline in the use of the Irish language over the past two centuries. ‘Irish doesn’t sell the cow,’ is the reason advanced why the language was abandoned in favour of English by family after family until it was spoken as a first language only by a small number of people along the west coast of Ireland.

‘By the late 1970s,’ the historian J. J. Lee writes in
Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society
, ‘the population of the real Gaeltacht … was calculated to be only 32,000, compared with more than ten
times that number at the foundation of the state.’ The official Gaeltacht was, during all these years, much larger than the real one. In the late 1980s, when a friend of mine made a journey through the parts of Ireland officially designated Irish-speaking, he found that the most mountainous regions of County Kerry, completely uninhabited, were marked as Irish-speaking by the government. He supposed that the rain came down in Irish and the wind blew in that language, and when snow began to descend it changed its name to
sneachta
as it hit the ground. But there was no one listening.

No historian of the language’s decline has managed to explain why those who wished to sell cows did not become bilingual, why so many abandoned the language completely. The economic argument, Joe Lee has written, would

strictly speaking … explain the acquisition of English, but not the loss of Irish, unless it be assumed that Irish brains were too small to accommodate two languages, or that the Irish were simply too lazy, or too utilitarian, to be bothered with the less materially useful one … The burden of the small language did not suffice to prevent Sweden, or Norway, or the Netherlands, or Flanders, from exporting successfully to Britain, from growing more rapidly than Britain since the late nineteenth century, and from overtaking British living standards in the course of the twentieth century.

Lee suggests that one reason why Ireland adopted English with such zeal had to do with the sheer intensity of emigration to both Britain and the United States from the time of the Great Famine. Parents needed to do something radical to prepare their children for separation. It is also possible that the levels and grades of poverty were so enormously varied and so minutely structured – and knowledge of Irish was associated with poverty – that abandoning the language was a way of moving upwards, however strangely and imperceptibly.