Like most people, I know a fair few neurotics. But truth to tell, they constitute a minority of my acquaintances. You too? I thought so. But neurosis is probably the best term to use when discussing the perverse and deeply ingrained tendency in Ireland to believe the worst of oneself, one’s neighbours, one’s fellow citizens and one’s homeland.

It’s all-pervasive. “If you thought the bank collapse, the euro crisis and the mortgage arrears were bad, look at how we drink! Wouldjis look at the state of O’Connell Street!? Look at the weather! Whattabout the floods?”… and so it goes, on and on and on. There’s no rest.
Okay, Dublin’s O’Connell Street and its environs really are a mess and yes, it needs urgent attention. But the rest of it is like neurotic skin-scratching. It just increases the itch.
The current moral panic about anti-social behaviour at or around the Swedish House Mafia concert is just that, a moral panic, and takes its place as the latest arrival on the merry-go-round of Irish pessimist-narcissism.
If it was a recent phenomenon one would be more understanding, given recent history. But it isn’t. The capacity to demean oneself and the rest of us has been evident for eight generations at least. In the last issue I referred to letters from Irish emigrants to Australia in the 19th century. David Fitzpatrick, author of a paper on these, comments that many of the stereotypes uttered in these letters were negative: “I got a good dale of gold but like all Irish men spent it to free after that I marrid and settled down”… “though he is an Irishman he has no compassion for rich or poor he must get his money”… and so on.
Fitzpatrick notes that he found only one ethnic self-image that was incontestably positive. It was written in 1887 by Phil Mahoney who had emigrated several decades earlier from a large farm in Cork. He wrote that his children were “growing up well educated with pure Irish blood running in their veins with one of the best Mothers in Victoria to steer them through a virtuous life”…
Of course, even in this positive image there’s a hint here of the bravado of the Irish football supporter chant “You’ll never beat the Irish.” Maybe you won’t, but that’s because they’re too busy beating themselves.
Maybe we can blame colonisation. Being both subjects and impoverished can’t have done anything for either individual or collective self-esteem. Mind you, the forelock-tugging peasant wasn’t half as humble as he pretended. But practice makes perfect and he learned well.
The growth of a small middle class in Ireland after the Act of Union brought a new pressure, to be as good as the so called ‘quality’. With it came prurience and temperance and a belief that you had a right and a duty to be concerned about other people’s behaviour… in case they let your side down in front of the others or hurt themselves or were a threat to sober and industrious citizens.
Early 19th century descriptions of the Irish come, in the main, from reforming Protestants, sometimes evangelical. In their eyes anything other than a virtuous, compliant, prudent and sober life was a bad life and they didn’t mind saying so. Also, they came with the same sense of superiority and entitlement that fuelled the expansion of the British Empire as the century progressed.
In parallel emerged the imperialist view that the people of these islands divided into the active, forthright, manly, business-like Anglo-Saxons and the soft, listless, poetic, feminine and generally lazy Celts.
As if that wasn’t enough to be contending with, the Catholic Church in Ireland was effectively colonised by clerics trained in Maynooth by Jansenists – that is, real hardliners, more fundamentalist than the evangelical Protestants, more ready to invoke fire and brimstone and delve into people’s behaviours… (other than that of their abusive peers, that is…)
You might say all this has changed and ask how we still cling to the negative stereotypes. Good question…
But how much has really changed? It’s reminiscent of the closing lines of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It’s hard to tell which is which: the new quality are pretty much the same as the old quality. It’s got nothing to do with faith and everything to do with fortune.
Their views find expression in the media and the media are the new church. The belt of a crozier has been supplanted by the belt of a broadsheet editorial. Every day brings another sermon from a commentator in print and on air. Where once priests coursed the lanes looking for courting couples, now you have the tabloids…
And they all hammer home what is essentially the same message, the message that has been handed down for two centuries, that we’re a lazy, feckless crowd of dreamers, chancers and wasters who will fling their money away on horses and card games and craic and will head for the bar or the offie at the drop of a hat or the tinkle of coins.
Okay, there are those amongst us of whom that’s true, people who live down to the messy stereotype. But it’s only some, so why do we contrive to believe the fingerwaggers? Why is this shit still peddled and why do we put up with it? I mean, we’re now so cynical we don’t believe anyone else – yet we seem all too willing to go along with this wretched fiction about Irish people, coined and peddled by our own…
We – and by this I really mean you – deserve better!! This is a good country, full of good people. Anyone want to argue with that?