A question of identity

Last week I spent an evening in a bar in Miltown Malbay. I was gorged on seafood and the house served me a fine creamy pint of Guinness. There was talk aplenty, of weather and war and whatever’s between. There was silence too, when a topic had reached its natural end, and there was no more to be said. Though few knew me, I felt welcomed
by all.

Some local ceremony ended nearby, and the bar filled. One of the newcomers produced a whistle and a tune took flight. Other instruments appeared – a fiddle and a concertina. The whistler also played the flute. Pints were had.

They played a few sets. A young girl carrying a small square case arrived, accompanied by her mother. She was perhaps ten years of age, quiet and reserved. She took out her concertina and joined in. When the others took a breather she wasn’t shy in showing them the way. New rules won’t allow it. She’ll be expected to learn the tradition in some conservatory, and not at the elbows of real musicians.

Some years ago I visited Barcelona. Knowing the great Catalan art traditions, I tried to find some Catalan music. No deal. There was no such thing, they said. While some people did folk music in the square on Sundays, my informant wasn’t enthusiastic. Whatever music once expressed the life of these people was long dead and now only existed in neutered academic shows.

Two things will do for the Irish traditions. The first is the infernal bongo. Séamus Ennis was asked what was the best way to play the bodhrán and he replied ‘with a knife’. But that’s so much more true of the bongo.

The second, and to be honest far greater, danger is the new puritanism that has colonised Official Ireland in the last three years or so. At its root is a bitter temperance fundamentalism.

While espoused by hardline public health ideologists, it also has a strong fundamentalist Christian background. Anti-abortion campaigners have targeted young people’s drinking culture as a causal factor in sexual risk-taking. They may be right, but instead of trying to get people to drink less catastrophically (as some of us do), they want to stop us drinking altogether. The lessons of Prohibition are lost.

Apparently, they favour the Swedish model in which pubs are few and far between, and poorly patronised. Somebody – a daft Swedish professor, probably – has persuaded them that Sweden has less of an alcohol problem than we do.

You could have fooled me, but then, I’ve spent time in real Sweden. They’re worse than we are. The difference is that they get pissed at home or in Denmark (or on a ferry in-between). Oh, and they’ve no traditional music to speak of.

In Ireland we still have a culture in which music is a living and intrinsic part. And that’s what I felt in Miltown Malbay. Call it the classic Irish pub experience. Not only have we exported an ersatz version of this around the world, but also hordes come here to find it for themselves. Starting with St. Patrick’s Day next week, many thousands more will follow, we hope.

In Miltown Malbay, there was no drunkenness, no fighting and nobody got sick. If you live life in the moment, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that it doesn’t get much better than this. Few things on earth can surpass sinking fat creamy pints in a cosy bar with good music and good conversation flowing about your ears.

These are complex issues. I mean, I’ve just been watching a politics programme on UTV which featured four representatives of political parties - Dermot Nesbit, Mark Durcan, Peter Robinson and Gerry Kelly. Four grim male Northern Irish visages, all wearing suits and glasses. They all had Northern Irish accents. You had to listen to what they were saying in order to establish what the difference was between them. So which of them was ‘Irish’?

Across the Atlantic, there seems to be no room for such niceties nowadays. They don’t have an active House Un-American Activities Committee but they do have a whole new directorate for ‘Homeland Security’. Some of their web pages are beyond belief and suggest levels of paranoia similar to those once found in the former German Democratic Republic and now found in Iraq and elsewhere.

Being an American is now equated in official circles with unconditional support for George Bush. And in their accusations against anti-war campaigners, Mary Harney and Tom Parlon appear to associate Irish interests with such a narrow view, even though a majority of Americans are apparently closer to the European position than that of their own government.

The tourist season begins in earnest next week. We’ll have less American visitors than before - the craic is getting too expensive and they don’t like flying these days. But there will be others. And while they’re here, apart from trying to make them welcome, we might also learn to listen to what they say about us. We won’t necessarily like what we hear from them. But if we nurture the best parts of our pub culture, and specifically the small local ones, we might all like what we hear around us, the sound of a culture that is still alive and still in love
with life.