| Joe Horgan OF course even
reasonable, warm, caring people make statements or claims that are
palpably untrue. So a friend of mine, born and reared here, tells me
that Ireland’s culture is most under threat by the influx of people from
all over the world now arriving here. It is the kind of thing you often
hear. Warm-hearted people are left spouting spiteful, mean-spirited
words because the society around them bewilders them more and more each
day. They maintain on an individual level a welcoming openness but in
general terms they give into fear.
With a country undergoing such a rate of change as Ireland is, it is at
least understandable. And with a country so shamefully lacking in any
kind of leadership with regards to the human consequences of this
change, it is no wonder. Indeed when our politicians do speak, the very
ones who are ever eager to throw more and more bodies into the
insatiable maw of the economy, it is only ever to seek cheap votes by
stoking up this fear of immigration. One voice is that of human failing
and misunderstanding, a voice of genuine, valid concern. The other is
the voice of base, power-greedy politicians and newspapers, who are even
willing to wade in the shallow waters of racial hate if it means
publicity or electoral advantage.
So the image seeps into the national consciousness that it is somehow
the people labouring on the roads or looking after the country’s
children who are undermining the strength of Irish culture. In that way
we can ignore the multi-nationals, the media and the business concerns
that now litter Irish life. In that way we can dismiss the influence of
Sky television, British newspapers, British sport, main streets that
look like main streets anywhere else, American multi-nationals,
all-pervasive American media, English football, a political philosophy
“more Boston than Berlin”, a government that believes inequality is a
good thing and an ordinary Dub Taoiseach whose daughter was married in a
French castle. And I know that’s a private affair but seeing as they
sold the rights to Hello magazine I don’t feel too underhand about
mentioning it. But none of those things have undermined the strength of
Irish culture. No. It is the Poles and the Turks working on the roads.
The Filipino nurses. The East European nannies. The African asylum
seekers living in hostels. Somehow it wasn’t the powerful it was the
powerless.
Still, it may be argued that we do not really need anything like a
national culture. In a global world, in a society predicated almost
solely on economics as the source of happiness what price something as
indefinable as a national culture? Apart from the bits of it that can be
packaged and sold through the tourist industry what is the point of it
anyway?
The answer, I suppose, lies somewhere in how you value the very idea
that we might be more than just our bank balances. Should we just let
the idea of an Irish nation slip away? Should we be done with it as some
anachronistic relic of a different world? Or should we protect it in the
belief that within it is something priceless about who we are? Should we
argue that the idea of a nation is just the idea of community writ large
and that if you lose one you lose the other?
Somehow, thinking about it, and of course I have to admit that someone
like me is just a little hung up on identity, I find myself coming back
to such small but essential things as the very way we talk and the
language we use. Time itself will alter how people speak as it has
always done but to see people’s speech patterns change in a few short
years due to watching certain television programmes is surely a little
frightening. As a country already bereft of a native language, how long
before the sticking plaster of an accent falls off too? Which
admittedly, for someone like me, is a kind of ironic thought.
So, whenever I think about Irish culture and the existence of an Irish
nation I come around again to the loss of the language. It seems that,
in an age where the very existence of an identifiably independent Irish
society is lost beneath a blizzard of remote control buttons, that our
speaking someone else’s native tongue is the one signal about ourselves
that we should pick up loud and clear. There is an Irish phrase that
offers us both that sense of loss but a sense of carrying on too. It
speaks of sadness yet somehow of defiance. Is searr Gaeilge briste ná
Béarla cliste. Better to have broken Irish than clever English.
Better, surely, to at least stay just a little true to who we are. To
stay at least a little Irish. |
