Are the Irish different? There’s a loaded question. Argument begets counterargument: we’re a nation of narcissists cursed with self-obsession born of low self-esteem engendered by generations of colonisation. We’re the best little country in the world: tough, resilient, convivial. We’re a race of drunken clowns who, on the brink of success, can always be relied on to blow it. We’re uncommonly gifted in the realms of music, sport and literature. We’re a clatter of land-mad peasants afflicted with racial famine memories who got suckered wholesale by property developers, builders, banksters and mortgage mafiosi.
No wonder Irish studies are an international industry. Are the Irish Different?, a collection of essays by prominent academics and sociologists, edited by Tom Inglis, a professor at University College Dublin, suggests not that we don't talk enough about our collective identity but that we're often found discussing the wrong subjects. Many of these essays cover familiar ground – nationalism, emigration, postcolonialism, Catholicism – but the majority assert that we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the Irish condition.
Grim portrait
Certain of these dispatches – Irishness and Nationalisms by Sinisa Malesevic, for one – calmly dismantle the notion that we're any different from other nations. Others unpack the aspects of our society that are unique: Bryan Fanning's autopsy of the long-term alliance of Church and State; Tony Fahey's take on the Irish family (particularly the late arrival of divorce); and Anne Byrne's study of the Irish single woman, which paints a grim portrait of an age in which a woman in her 30s might marry a drunk rather than risk spinsterdom or hazard a career (an unrealistic prospect in the era of the civil service marriage bar).
Inglis's own essay, The Irish Body, couches its subject exclusively in terms of the psychological and physical abuse perpetrated in orphanages, industrial schools, reformatories and asylums. It's worth remembering that corporal punishment was banned in Irish schools only as late as 1982. Is it coincidence that the young entrepreneurs and hip London expats who emerged over the following decade might well have been the first generation of Irish schoolchildren who were not roared at, beaten or told they were worthless on a weekly basis?
But while the Irish clergy and education system were for decades infested with men and women made neurotic – some might say psychotic – by celibacy, the psychotherapist Marie Keenan, in her essay Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church, warns that, after generations of widespread denial and systemic complicity, the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction: "In the aftermath of the disclosures of abuse of countless children by Catholic clergy, we have not so much transcended as inherited a new state of fear and oppression in Ireland. This time it is not the Church hierarchy that is to be feared but rather a new state of fear has been born that is based on an approach to children, families and 'child protection' that, far from bringing forth a safer society for children or a new state of well-being for victims of abuse, has rendered all men as suspects and a generation of children denied the love of men."
It is a statement that will be read with a wry eye by any single or separated father who has had to petition the courts for “access” or “visiting rights” to his children.
One national myth that has been lately punctured is that the Irish don’t protest. Back in 2008 the Dundalk troubadour Jinx Lennon could still classify the Irish as a race who would stand up only for a football result.
But in a dissertation entitled The Irish Political Elite Kieran Allen writes: "There is, in fact, a myth among many academics and journalists that Irish people have not protested. It is a myth that is sustained by the way protests have been covered in the media and debated in the public sphere . . .
“While the political elite have been extremely skilful in drawing on a historic style of rule to manage the crisis, they must still rely on a promise that sacrifices today will bring rewards tomorrow. When those rewards appear ever more distant, there is likely to be considerable ‘austerity fatigue’. And that also means that the myth of the passive Irish, who do not protest, may also be broken.”
Allen’s conclusion has of course been borne out in recent months, as ordinary Irish people have instigated unprecedented revolt against seven years of “austerity” – a Beckettian word co-opted for political capital, as if poverty were an aesthetic choice – and Irish Water.
Doublespeak
This may prove a watershed in the progress towards a long-overdue process of psychological decolonisation. Geraldine Moane's essay Postcolonial Legacies and the Irish Psyche reiterates postcolonialism as a condition that manifests itself through low self-esteem, alcohol abuse, dysfunction, doublethink and doublespeak long after the coloniser has gone, but it also indicates that forms of social domination and control – be they colonial (the crown, the church) or postcolonial (the troika, the IMF) – have always required the collusion of a domestic elite.
She goes further out on a limb by proposing myth, storytelling and even indigenous shamanism as possible means of healing the national schism.
Inevitably, some subjects go unprobed. The GAA as a social phenomenon is covered, but international achievements in rugby and boxing are mentioned only in passing.
And although the editor may have justifiably skimmed over Irish literature, given the sheer volume of studies written about the old guard of Joyce, Yeats, Beckett and so on, there’s surely cause to investigate how the boom-and-bust era heralded a mini literary renaissance, spawning a generation of younger stars, among them Kevin Barry, Donal Ryan and Eimear McBride.
Elsewhere there's a scholarly summation of the history of Irish traditional music by Martin Dowling, but little thought is given to modern Irish musicians' ability to translate natural aptitude into commercial and critical success, from Van Morrison and U2 to Glen Hansard and Hozier. (Once is mentioned only briefly, in the context of Bryan Fanning's study New Irishness and the Irish Nation.)
It appears that popular music is still considered an illegitimate expression of native culture, a miscegenation. Yet any study of the Irish diaspora that does not include John Lydon, The Pogues, Morrissey and Kurt Cobain is incomplete.
Fusty formula
In fairness, it would take a Bible-sized volume to cover such terrain. And it is to the contributors’ and editor’s credit that most of these essays avoid footnote neuroses and the kind of windbag waffle that blights so much academic discourse.
True, many of the chapters adhere to a fusty university formula – a padded-out statement of the essay's aims, followed by the body of the argument, capped by a pat conclusion – but, nevertheless, Are the Irish Different? serves as a valuable roadmap to the paradox-pocked landscape of the national psyche.
Peter Murphy is the author of John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River
