Tomorrow evening will witness one of the unique features of Irish cultural life when England play the Netherlands in the semi finals of the European soccer championship.
What is unique and fascinating about it is that lads who invest much of their emotional energies in the fortunes of the “us” and “youse” of the English Premier League will now become equally emotionally and patriotically invested in “them,” as in Ingurland, getting beaten. If this happens it will be a cause of huge outpourings of national joy.
Which reminded me of something that one of the founders of Conradh na Gaeilge, Douglas Hyde, said during a seminal lecture in Dublin in November 1892, a year before the Gaelic League was founded. His talk, at the National Literary Society, was entitled The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland.
In it, Hyde implied that what he described as a “dull, ever-abiding animosity” against England existed paradoxically alongside a sympathy among most people for the political objectives of Irish nationalism – then embodied in achieving Home Rule – and the fact that most Irish people and Irish society as a whole were happily engaged in “imitating England and yet apparently hating it.”
Plus cá change, you might say. Hyde’s main point of course was that unless the Irish people saved our own language and other aspects of our culture, including music and games, and brought them to life again as the lingua franca of everyday cultural and intellectual discourse then no political objective could compensate for their loss. For, as he said, the English were well on the way to achieving “the greatest stroke of all in our Anglicisation, the loss of our language.”
D.P. Moran was even more disparaging of that type of political nationalism. In his The Philosophy of Irish Ireland he stated bluntly that a “republic, absolutely foreign to the genius of the Irish people” would be worth nothing because even “if England went down to the bottom of the sea tomorrow that distinct civilization which we have turned our backs upon, that woof of national tradition which we have cast from us would not be restored.”
Of course, embracing Irish culture and above all that part centred on our own language does not mean having to hate or to be ignorant of other cultures, England’s included. For as Hyde said the Irish national project was “not (as) a protest against imitating what is best in the English people, for that would be absurd, but rather to show the folly of neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to adopt, pell-mell, and indiscriminately, everything that is English, simply because it is English.”
I doubt somehow that what Hyde had in mind as “what is best in the English people” was the soap opera of the EPL, or indeed TV soap operas and the increasingly lowest denominator crap that infests television land on both sides of the Irish Sea. Nor indeed the obsession of some with an English Royal Family that makes the comedic Royle Family look like the Waltons at times.
Rather, Irish nationalism must be a positive thing. It still ought to have as a central objective the revival of our language as an everyday part of Irish life. And sadly, even yet a key part of that remains as it was in the 1890s to ensure that Irish as a spoken language does not become even more isolated and endangered within the surviving Gaeltachts.
One of the threats to that remains the outflow of young people alongside an unprecedented inward migration of people. Fundamentally it remains a factor of the failure to create a viable independent state and an economy that is not dependent, and increasingly so, on the needs of international capital.
Capital has indifference, even disdain, for Ireland as anything other than an extension of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or any pharmaceutical or technological industrial site anywhere on the planet. We are an Anglophone low taxation facilitator of the “free movement of capital and labour.”
The Congo as a supplier of lithium ranks materially, but in few other existential ways, lower in the pecking order of that division of labour and comparative advantage to capital. And with a political establishment across the board which sees this as our destiny as a people. To the extent our being a “people” is not offensive to them, at least.
One of the phenomena that Seán De Fréine wrote about, in his 1960 book Saoirse Gan Só, an excoriation of the economic and intellectual and indeed moral failure of the post-independence Irish state, was mass emigration. It was and remains an indictment of that state, more so as it is “compensated” for by mass immigration. Any serious state or intelligentsia would not accept this as either normal or positive.
Yet, it might not be too late to turn that around, including focusing on those who have left and the wider diaspora as a positive. For one of De Fréine’s other points was that despite much of the official state propaganda – and what sort of normal state would even celebrate having a diaspora many times the resident population? – the diaspora was and is pretty much invisible and ineffective as a positive factor in contemporary Irish life.
“F**k off away to Oz or wherever and we’ll have the buzz with you on the Portal, and maybe even lose the run of ourselves if the great-great-grand child of a starvation times workhouse boss becomes President, but don’t be threatening to come back or look to vote.” For purposes of comparing how other states engage positively with their relatives think of American Jews and their connection with Israel.
Collins and others of the revolutionary period regarded our exiles in a different light. Firstly, they wanted to create a society which would attract those who had left home. Where that was impractical then they wished to attract investment from those in the diaspora who had the money and the commitment to make that society functional and independent.
All of that was abandoned. In the first instance by the first Free State government, which was happy to allow the old economic and financial elite to retain its power and to frustrate even their mild attempts to create a viable economy. Fianna Fáil in the 1930s and 40s did initially make a better attempt but were insufficiently ruthless in uprooting the ruling elite and were happy in the end, as the likes of Lemass and others grew old and cynical, to come to an accommodation with it and to be taken in as partners.
It is not too late to have another try. Or maybe it is and as Kevin Boland, one of the scions of the post-revolutionary generation, once wrote that the highest patriotic ambition will remain to do something like breeding or training the winner of the Epsom Derby. Or if that is out of your league, to see the Brits getting beaten in the Tan football.