The New Irish Identity

It is our fortune to live in interesting times as we witness the ongoing tumults in the peace process. When we look beyond our immediate horizons what we find is equally, if differently, fascinating. Change is everywhere. It’s a fundamental dynamic of society.

Look at Dublin. City planners forecast that by 2015 its population will have increased by 500,000. It’s an amazing thought – that’s equal to one third of the present population of Northern Ireland.
Exactly what this will mean for politics in Ireland is anybody’s guess. But be sure that things will change. Walk around central Dublin, especially on the north side of the river, and look and listen.
For better or worse, the Irish economy is hoovering in large numbers of people from the new EU member states and beyond. And we’re talking large numbers, throughout the country.
Many of these people will return to their own countries in due course, but also, a lot of them will stay. At present they are part of the Irish economy but as they settle in they will become part of Irish society.
They will bring their own preoccupations, interests and gifts to our various social, political and cultural discourses. They’ll bring challenges too. Certainly, they’ll alter the past-fixated Irish political landscape.
They come from all over the world. Some come in such numbers as to significantly change our ethnic mix. For example, there are more than twice as many Chinese, mostly young, in Dublin than there are Travellers in all Ireland. Apart from people from EU countries, we have sizeable communities of Nigerians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Americans, Brazilians and Australians.
It would be unrealistic to expect that they would know or understand our complex Irish creation mythology.
By this I don’t mean the old stuff about Milesians and Fomorians and Tuatha de Danann, interesting as such might be. No, the first pillar of our dominant creation myth tells of a golden Gaelic past sullied by perfidious invaders from England.
You could sum it up as ‘800 years of oppression’. And starvation. And emigration. Describe any horror that has befallen any people across the world and within moments the Irish will be likening their own history to that of the latest victims.
And we have long memories. Like when the Duchess of Abercorn was to come to a school in Tyrone and locals objected, with one man shouting at an RTE reporter that ‘that woman’s ancestors drove my ancestors into the hills’…
Perhaps they did, I don’t know. But for a millennium Europeans did little else other than drive one another into or out of the hills. The whole point of the EU is that the past is the past. We have to live for now.
The second pillar of our creation myth is the belief that these experiences have made us more compassionate and caring. There is some truth in this when we are confronted by a catastrophe like the Ethiopian famine or the recent tsunami. But we are a great deal less giving when it comes to our own dispossessed or to those who seek shelter on our shores.
And the third pillar is what the world calls the craic. Ah, the drink, the talk, the songs. Ah, the Irish… Well, milk it while ye may, I don’t think it’s sustainable in the long run.
It’s not just that we’re too rich to still be whinging that we were robbed three or four centuries ago. I mean, get over it. But also, these are our stories. These represent what it once meant to be Irish. Those immigrating into Ireland share neither this creation myth nor the identity that goes with it.
What does an Estonian or a Brazilian or a Nigerian care about who drove whom from a Tyrone hillside in 1605? Do they give a toss about Sarsfield, William of Orange or Wolfe Tone? I doubt it.
All is passing. Within twenty years, the old idea of Irishness will be as dead as Dillinger. The centenary of the 1916 rising may coincide with the arrival of the millionth immigrant.
We will be cheering greenshirted footballers with African and Slavic names as they represent us against others of equally diverse origins in the European championships. And Roy Keane’s children may play for England as Stephen Roche’s son Nicolas rides for France today…
Recent months have seen a space craft land on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Through this and other scientific research we have discovered more and more about how life began and how it evolved. We have discovered that the old creation myth was just that, a myth.
Likewise, current changes are consigning the old Irish creation myth to the boneyards. We have, in effect, to unlearn that old identity, to shed that old skin and grow a new one.
Only a fool would pretend that this will be easy. It will take a lot more than clapping hands and playing football together. The experience of our fellow Europeans is not a happy one. The Dutch tried, they really did, and it is falling apart on them even as I write.
In Ireland we don’t even try. We react rather than act. We let it happen. That way we can blame someone else. And inevitably, we put more value on posture and piety than on planning and pragmatism.
Our future deserves better.