Joe Horgan Column
By Joe Horgan
IT USED to be the case that there were just the two kinds of Irish. There
were those who lived here on the island itself and then there were those
who lived outside of Ireland. Those two were the Irish. Of course there
were many different variations within those two but that was it really.
It was just those two types of Irish and no more.
That is all changing now on both counts. The Irish here on the actual
island are now going to be made up in the years to come by the Irish of
Czech, Polish, Lithuanian or Chinese heritage. The days of a relatively
unchanged indigenous population are gone.
The Irish in Ireland will now consist of many different origins not
just the old ones of county and parish and townland. Likewise the Irish
abroad are changing. Though in many ways emigration remains and continues
to be the same untold story the great numbers who left in the past are
no longer there. A fraction of the people who once left now leave and
as a consequence the Irish abroad are a changing people.
In Britain the communities established by all those 1950s emigrants are
feeling the passing of time and those Irish communities are changing.
Outside of perhaps certain Scottish experiences, which is a story all
of its own, Irishness will become naturally weakened both by this passing
of time and the subsequent immersion in the surrounding culture.
Is for instance a fourth or fifth generation Irish-American, whatever
in fact that could possibly mean, really in any way identifiably Irish.
Are any of our lives really defined by who our great-great grandparents
were.
And even if some individual has maintained through a particular family
experience and make-up a real Irishness down four or five generations
can that be extended to a community.
Now I’d be the last person to question anybody else’s identity,
that is his or her own personal perception but I can’t really see
how especially in our case as we do not even have a language of our own,
it survives down so many years. The sadness of emigration is intensified
by the knowledge that time will wear away the life of the emigrant in
his descendants’ lives.
A name and a physical resemblance and a few mixed memories might well
remain but in most cases we just have to accept time enfeebles everything.
On a purely personal, human and individual level we have to as a society
embrace these new Irish and what they are bringing to our country. We
have to give them the best of being Irish, hope that they give us the
best of being them and trust that the end result is a better Ireland.
Hostility and prejudice, disregard and bigotry can be tried too as practiced
by the Justice Minister for instance but I defy anyone to suggest that
weíll get a better Ireland out of that.
Still we cannot but help remark on what is the gradual passing of the
Ireland we once knew. That older Ireland we all grew up with both those
of us from outside of the island and those of us always here is greying
and fading now. The writer JP Donleavy, recently remarked: “This
belongs to Europe now, it isn’t Ireland anymore. The saga of Ireland
has come to an end.”
Even in the seven years I have lived here I would not have believed the
changes that have occurred. If somebody had said to me even those short
seven years ago that the country would be like this I would have found
it hard to fathom.
I think such has been the relentless, unyielding pace of change that we
can be forgiven for what might seem at first to be sentimentality. Sentimentality
isn’t such a bad refuge in the face of such social bewilderment.
So we can admit some sadness at all that is now passing away.
And there is this of course. It is often said that down through the
long history of emigration that those who left were often those who were
most identifiably Irish. They were both the mere Irish and the most Irish.
From famine days to the fifties it was often those living the most traditional,
most recognisably culturally Irish life that had to leave.
With that in mind — and this is admittedly pretty simplified history
— is it any wonder that those who always stayed the merchants and
the shopkeepers who were busy throwing off Irishness and aping the English
are now the ones who have been so eager to finally consign an Irish Ireland
to the past or to the pages of a tourist brochure. Pick up your briefcase,
sip your latte; this is your country now.
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