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Recognising your identity isn’t always easy
By Joe Horgan
Identity is always changing isn’t it? Our own surnames will tell
us that. At one stage they would have been the only hallmark of who we
were, denoting our extended family, our tribe, our clan.
Before there was any notion of Ireland there was this — the idea
that large groups of people owed each other allegiance through a shared
identity which naturally came to be known through a name. This would have
usually, I suppose, gone hand-in-hand with a geographical allegiance but
this would not have extended far. It would have been a small badge of
identity and one that can still be seen now in Ireland’s townlands.
These names, given to often very small areas of land, are what constitute
rural addresses in most parts of Ireland. Each field and hill and lane
and valley lies within some kind of townland. Within that of course there
is another strata of identity whereby individual fields have names, origins
of which may be lost but linger on even though individual ownership of
fields may have changed many times.
These particular levels of identity are under great threat of disappearing
of course. Cleary’s field may well now be part of the new housing
estate Chestnut Avenue. The townland, our government tells us, should
be buttressed with a postcode. That way our post, which always gets to
us through a combination of co-operation and intimate local knowledge,
will be delivered more efficiently. It will be delivered, to use the deadening
language of our age, according to international best practice.
As if how they do small, everyday things in the USA had anything to do
with how they do it in Co. Clare. As if how they do small, everyday things
in Co. Cork had anything to do with how they do it in Finland.
Then there is of course the very strong identity amongst the Irish of
county allegiance. As the
t-shirts say down here, Irish by birth, Cork by the grace of God. Ireland’s
still strong rural backbone means that county rather than city allegiance
remains very strong. As in its parish-based, townland-encompassing clubs
the GAA is one of the best exponents of this.
The All-Ireland Championships pits county against county the way England’s
football leagues pit city against city. That is the result of two different
histories — of an industrial revolution versus an agrarian society.
It is the result of different identities and of a different evolution
of identity.
National identity comes after that and, certainly compared to names and
townlands, is a much more recent development. In many ways anyway, it
could be argued, national identity is imposed far more than the smaller
identities. It is far more of a political composite than the others or
far more something that others call us rather than we call ourselves.
An Irishman in England does not walk down the street every day thinking
I am Irish but every one he meets, that he talks to, thinks at some level,
he is Irish. And his mind does not drift back to grand ideas about Ireland
and his nation but to memories and recollections of his family and his
townland and his lanes and his home.
A lot of Irish people are Irish when they watch international sports and
watch Ireland playing soccer or rugby. But when they file in to Croke
Park to watch hurling, that king of sports, or football they are Kilkenny
men or Galway women. Identity is fluid isn’t it? Always changing.
Many second-generation Irish might testify to this in that their identity
includes both that of the land of their parents’ birth and that
of their own. They are Irish yet from Birmingham not Roscommon, from Manchester
not Meath, from London not Limerick.
There is no contradiction in this. It makes perfect sense both emotionally
and historically. It has the ring of truth about it. I have always felt
myself to be Irish due to my family and my upbringing. I have never once
considered myself to be English even though I was born and bred there.
But I am from Birmingham. I am from an English city.
My childhood was spent within hearing distance of Birmingham City’s
football ground and that is part of my identity. In that way, by following
that team, I connect with and salute my past and my upbringing even though
I have only visited that city a handful of times in the last 10 years,
even though the corruption of cash makes it a game far removed from the
one I grew up with.
With identity being such a moveable feast it seems strange then that the
second-generation badge is one so mocked and so questioned. Indeed it
would quite clearly take a large amount of psychological dislocation for
someone to subsume it. Surely we do so at our peril.
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