The morning after Queen Elizabeth died, the phrase “Irish Twitter” was trending. Most of it was pointing out that the reactions here to her death would be distinctly different from the reaction in the UK: that there would be jokes and, allied with Black Twitter, many reminders of Britain’s grim colonial past.
Yet as far as I could tell, most of this commentary was from non-Irish people. Cumulatively, it presented a rather one-dimensional view of what we’re like: there were many other Irish people expressing a degree of sadness at her demise, others who were indifferent and made no comment at all, and, of course, those who maintained that even a scintilla of empathy for the old enemy equalled treachery; a sort of anti-Irishness.
The question of what we’re like — what Irishness is — is one that’s increasingly and wonderfully complex. Herself comes from a medium-sized Irish town, yet once she finished school and went to college, ceased to have any meaningful connection with it. She visits regularly, but that’s to see her family. In every other respect, she’s a Dubliner. Yet she was recently chatting to someone from a similar-sized town who found this baffling: this person could afford to live anywhere but remains in their home town where they are embedded in the community and the GAA. The bafflement came from their assumption that, given the choice, this is what most people would opt to do; to not was weirdly un-Irish.
We have a lot of mutual bafflement in this country. The same weekend the queen died, Dublin was suddenly thronged with people who obviously weren’t local. The accents and the Stetsons gave it away. Many Dubs of my acquaintance marvelled at this. Not that Garth Brooks has a lot of fans, but that there are, at least, 400,000 of them: a massive chunk of the population for whom he and his music have a significance they were unaware of and didn’t understand. It was like discovering a new country.
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But that has always been there. Even if the overwhelming majority of Irish people live in towns or cities or have no connection to agriculture, there is still an urban-rural divide. Hundreds of thousands of people attended the Ploughing Championships this week, but only a minority would have been actual farmers. There is a cultural identification that far exceeds the reach of the agribusiness sector.
And the last few decades have layered on the complexity, produced ever more iterations of our national character. Dublin isn’t Ireland, of course, but in the years I’ve lived here it has become almost unrecognisable from the white and Catholic place it once was. I hear all sorts of accents, see all sorts of skin tones and styles of dress. I see people wearing skirts who may or may not identify as male.
This is no different from most other European nations. Yet if you were to produce some sort of Love Island rip-off and cast with it with some Garth Brooks fans, some people of colour, some people who refer to themselves as they, a taxi driver, a nun, a farmer and a publican, there would still — I like to think — be something they hold in common. They would recognise the Irishness in themselves and each other, even if they couldn’t quite define what that was.
For people who are highly prescriptive about Irishness, this must be a terrible time to be alive. It’s no longer a matter of where you were born or even if you’ve lived here that long. You don’t have to be able to speak Irish or watch the Sunday Game or like the taste of Tayto. You can still be Irish. There’s a quality to Irishness that rubs off on people, becomes part of them and, as it develops over time, is still magically intangible. There are even Irish people who don’t drink tea. Which I am uncomfortable with. There have to be some limits.