Back Home to Sligo

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

(L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between)

I had occasion recently to visit a part of my past, a period immensely important and formative for me, a place which was, for seven years, both focus and circumference of my whole world, the centrality of which was so self-evident to me that I could not then imagine that it would ever be otherwise in my life.

I was seventeen years old when I left Sligo. The leaving was a wrench, soul-tearing, ambiguous; on the one hand I was taking a self-chosen step into a different world, a new life, for I had decided to join the Dominican Order, on the other hand I was leaving nearly everything and everyone I knew behind me. The parting was all the more radical, for at the same time, my father was transferred and our whole family moved to the other end of the country. Although I was to return there frequently in the years that followed, the basic bond was broken; the continuous connection formed by the unity of family and place was gone. It meant that the inevitable decay of most youthful friendships was greatly accelerated in my case, for home had been sundered and the most basic part of it had moved elsewhere.

It hurt, that sundering. I remember feeling very aggrieved, with the unthinking, naïve selfishness of youth, that my parents had moved away from Sligo while at the same time being perfectly self-righteous about my own move into a new life, which also took me to other places. But I recovered. After all, in the following years, I still went back there, even if not as frequently or for as long as I might have wished, and I still retained my basic feeling of identity with and love for the place. Given my peripatetic history, the simple question “Where are you from?” has always been a little problematic for me, but Sligo still remains one of the default answers.

After I was ordained a Catholic priest, therefore, in 1985, it was completely clear to me that Sligo would be one of the places where I would celebrate a formal “First Mass.” And if someone had told me that day that it would be twenty eight years before I would return, I would have laughed in disbelief.

But that is what happened. In the following year, primed by the potent fuse of love, my life exploded into scintillating chunks and shards of new directions, possibilities, preoccupations and priorities. I found myself in a different country, living a very different life, with a wife and baby daughter, and practical decisions concerning job and career to be made and carried through. While I continued to visit Ireland throughout the following nearly three decades, limitations of time and practical considerations somehow never made the journey to the north-west of the country possible.

Another in my family had made a very different choice; my sister, Máire, had found her way back to Sligo and has lived in the coastal village of Strandhill, six miles from the main town, for many years now. So when she invited the whole family to join her in celebrating her fiftieth birthday this month I finally found myself on my way back to the town of my youth, on a journey into the world of my own memories and the contrast between their local background and the reality of the present.

Ireland has changed enormously since the mid-1980s. The country I left was still, for the most part, traditional and conservative. It was poor, in recession, unable to provide attractive prospects for many of my generation, who were leaving to find decent, interesting jobs and adventure in a world of much wider horizons. But then the Celtic Tiger came, nurtured in its infancy by a massive transfer of structural funds from Europe. It grew up, roared mightily for around ten years before becoming so bloated on a diet of hubris, fantasy and speculative funny games with international capital that it crawled into a corner and died – of a strange combination of economic gluttony and malnutrition.

The traces of all this were clear to be seen on my journey, from the new motorway leading out of Dublin to the empty property developments in towns like Carrick-on-Shannon along the way. Even the approach to Sligo was completely different to that of my memories; the towns of Collooney and Ballysadare bypassed, a new road to the town itself, leading to a new bridge across the Garavogue river.

The following morning, Saturday, I spent a couple of hours walking around town. It was very strange. The basic geographical skeleton remained as I remembered it but much of the flesh on the bones had changed; new buildings, new shops and businesses in old buildings. Deeper, stranger changes too; children of African and Asian backgrounds speaking with the distinctive Sligo accent, a Polish butcher’s shop – signs of the internationalisation of Ireland through immigrants, drawn by the boom of the Tiger years, something unimaginable in the mono-cultural world of my youth in the seventies when Ireland was a country which exported rather than imported people. In the past five years the export has begun once more.

I knew, of course, that things would not be as I remembered them; I had no expectations that the place would spontaneously open its arms to me, recognising and welcoming the long lost son. It was curiosity which led my steps, a desire to see just what had changed. But as my feet led me along the streets I had walked so often as a teenager, I found myself becoming more detached. The time elapsed was just too great, the changes – perhaps, most of all, the changes in myself – too profound. Though I had already intellectually known that there is no such thing as time travel, that the past is irrevocably gone, it was something more to really practically experience it in this fashion. “Something’s lost and something’s gained,” Joni Mitchell sings, “in living every day.” Over ten thousand days had past since I last set foot in Sligo, so much lost and so much gained in all that time that it had, I thought, become impossible to regain any sort of deep contemporary contact.

And so my urge to walk further waned. There was a Sligo which was real for me, that town which had been the stage for my life during those oh so intense years of the ending of childhood and the unbearably exciting and frightening growth into increasing adulthood, but it had little to do with the town in which I now found myself. Looking at my watch, I realised that I still had an hour before the next bus would leave for Strandhill where I was saying. Finding myself at the junction of Wine Street and Quay Street, I noticed that Lyons’ Café was still there and decided to spend the time I had to wait with a cappuccino.

Climbing the stairs to the hundred and fifty year old café, I discovered that here at least much remained as I remembered it. Oh, the menu is more extensive, sophisticated and cosmopolitan but someone has been careful to preserve the basic character of the place and the small tables and wooden chairs are still the same as they were in the seventies when this was one of the favourite haunts of the teenagers of the town. There weren’t all that many places where the boys from Summerhill College and the girls from the two nuns’ schools could meet on common ground and do all those things which are so important for teenagers; preening, flirting, talking, teasing, laughing, showing off, making dates and plans … just hanging out and wasting time. Lyons’ was one of the few establishments back then which tolerated us, though we were all experts in making a Coke or a coffee last for a whole afternoon, far more interested in each other than in giving custom to the café. Today the coffee was good and the place, I was glad to see, was doing a brisk business.

As I drank a second cappuccino, I tried to understand what I was doing; what I had expected of my perambulation and what exactly I had experienced. Perhaps some part of me had been hoping for the kind of epiphany described by Proust in his famous madeleine episode in À la recherche du temps perdu, where a particular taste throws his protagonist completely into a memory of the past. If so, it didn’t happen for me; sitting there in the café, many recollections of my youthful years did come to mind, but still far away and detached from me, the teenagers of the mid-seventies populating the room around me like barely perceived, transparent ghosts. Reality, I thought, was more like L.P. Hartley described it, the past is a foreign country.

And then, that evening at my sister’s party, I had an encounter which changed everything. One of the guests was someone I had known back in the time, the memories of which I had been attempting to recall with my walkabout through town. She was another member of that clique to which I had belonged as a teenager – to be honest, I’d had quite a crush on her when I was sixteen, but had been too uncertain and insecure to ever mention it to her then, or to attempt to move it beyond the confused desires of my youthful wishes into the realm of practical action. Now we were meeting again after more than thirty five years of life and all that it had done with us during that time. I had gone away and never returned; she had left for a number of years but had come back, and married another of my friends from that time. Our children are now older than we were back then.

And as we talked, I suddenly I realised that I had somehow come to the place I had been looking for that morning. Having exchanged the broad outlines of our stories of the long interim, we started reminiscing together about that faraway world of our youth. I discovered myself (and so, in a real sense, rediscovered my earlier self) asking about people I hadn’t thought of for decades and she (who had remained in – or, rather, returned to – Sligo) knew a lot of the answers. We found ourselves sharing memories of things that we had done together, of events commonly experienced. The past, which had seemed so irretrievably far away to me just a few hours earlier, was suddenly just around the last corner we had turned, the years between not negated but somehow bridged. It occurred to me later that I’d had this kind of experience on a number of occasions over the past decade or so, a period where I have had the great good fortune to reconnect with quite a few friends with whom I had lost contact. It’s what happens when you meet old friends and discover that you can, amazingly, just pick up where you left off.

And I realised a truth – at least something that is true for me. While place is important (and one would suffer from some kind of serious deficiency not to cherish the beauty of Sligo, magnificently set as it is on an Atlantic bay to the west, framed by the mountains of Benbulben to the north and Knocknarea to the south), in the end it is people and not place which are more central to a feeling of belonging, of home. And though in memory we organise things by assigning them a location, this is only background, the setting of the stage of life on which we perform the stories of our lives in interaction with others. In my case, I would wager (and I suspect that my mistake is not uncommon) that I had tended to confuse the importance of people in my life, and the stories we created together, with the place in which these stories took place. Setting is of course important – context is everything, as Derrida once remarked – but people, not place, are the most significant component of context.

It is a realisation with which I, for one, am quite content.

"Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15378#sthash.gzT4zz0E.dpuf

Pictures retrieved from:

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Ireland's Abortion Legislation Mess

It is not an easy thing to say, particularly to say publicly in a forum like this for the whole world to read. But it is the way I have been feeling for the past week or so.

At the moment, I am ashamed to be Irish.

On November 14, the Irish Times published an article telling the story of Savita Halappanavar, who died in an Irish hospital on October 28. The immediate cause of death was septicaemia, more commonly known as blood poisoning, resulting from the miscarriage of a foetus in the 17^th week of pregnancy.

A tragedy. Something which commonly happened a hundred years ago, which – thankfully – seldom happens now, at least in developed countries with a generally well functioning health system.

The massive septicaemia was able to take hold because Savita spent three days in a condition of cervical dilation with amniotic fluid leaking. There is an overwhelming medical consensus that in such a situation the foetus is not viable and will inevitably die. The basic medical procedure is, therefore, to terminate the pregnancy as quickly as possible in order to avoid the kind of complication which killed Savita. As a medical professional (a dentist), Savita was well aware of this and repeatedly over the three days begged that the birth be induced so that her life could be saved – a procedure which is, technically, an abortion. According to her husband, she was told that this was not possible, because Ireland was “a Catholic country.” Savita spent three days in great pain until the foetal heartbeat finally ceased without outside assistance and the dead foetus was removed. In all probability, the septicaemia had gained such a hold during this time that it was impossible to combat.

In all probability, Savita need not have died.

Abortion has always been illegal in Ireland (well, at least since 1867). Around thirty years ago, a number of right-wing Catholics decided that this was not enough. They argued that there was a danger that the elected politicians might some day decide to change the law, that, as they saw it, the right to life of the unborn child needed to be copper-fastened in the Irish constitution. In Ireland, the constitution cannot be changed by parliament; any amendment must be approved by a popular vote. A well-orchestrated public campaign began.

I remember it well; it was extremely sophisticated and very nasty. Anyone who expressed doubts about the wisdom of such a course was immediately accused of being pro-abortion, politicians were put under pressure, questions of the wisdom of trying to constitutionally regulate such a complex area of law, morality and religious belief were swept aside. Though I was a member of the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church at the time, I remember feeling very uncomfortable about the whole thing; even leaving aside my (perhaps for a “professional” Catholic unusual) personal doubts about the moral clarity of a blanket condemnation of abortion, and my deep reluctance as a man to take a definitive position on something which I regarded as really being a women’s issue, I felt that changing the constitution was no way to deal with the subject.

I voted against the amendment. Not that it mattered – it was passed by a two-thirds majority. Four years after the pope had come to visit, the Irish people felt a need to express how Catholic they were. The fact that any Irish woman who had the courage, the necessary information (and the money) could easily travel to Britain to have an abortion was generally known, accepted, disapproved of, ignored, and conveniently forgotten. Holy Catholic Ireland had won a famous victory against the menacing forces of godless international liberal left-wing secularism.

Nine years later that victory came back to haunt the self-proclaimed “pro-lifers.” The wording of the eighth amendment had been framed to try to comprehensively express Catholic teaching in a positive formulation:

“The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.” (Irish Constitution, Article 40.3.3°)

The parents of a 14 year old girl who had been raped by a neighbour planned to take their daughter to England for an abortion (the so called X case). Their principle reason for this was because the victim had threatened suicide should she be forced to give birth to the child. Before going to England, the authorities were asked whether DNA from the aborted foetus could be used as evidence against the accused rapist. The state applied for a court injunction to prevent the girl from leaving the country, the issue quickly landed before the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutionally permissible for the girl to obtain an abortion as the danger of suicide constituted a threat to her life and so was a case which fell under the category of “due regard to the equal right to life of the mother.” Ironically, the danger of the amendment actually providing a constitutional ground for abortion in certain circumstances had been pointed out by its opponents during the campaign leading up to the referendum (among others by Alan Shatter, who is now the Irish Minister for Justice), but this opinion had been dismissed by its proponents. (In the event, the girl had a miscarriage before she could travel to England, the rapist was subsequently convicted.)

Justicia, ironically, is female

In a wider context, the eighth amendment, the X case, two further attempted (and rejected) “pro-life” amendments, as well as a number of other cases taken through the courts all the way to Europe, can all be seen as part of an ongoing transition of values in Ireland, particularly with regard to the waning influence of the Catholic Church in the country. But this provides only part of the background to Savita’s tragic and scandalous death a few weeks ago.

In the course of the past twenty years, the judges in the Irish Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights have been explicitly critical of the failure of the Irish Dáil (parliament) to legislate concretely for the whole area of the termination of pregnancies, even within the extremely limited circumstances they have defined as existing according to the eighth amendment to the constitution following the X Case. The judges have pointed out that it is their job to interpret the law; it is the duty of legislators to make it, to give practical form to the consequences of the interpretations provided by the courts. For twenty years now Irish governments (containing every significant political party in the state with the exception of Sinn Fein [the radical left-wing party which has historically been the political wing of the IRA] in one coalition or another) have frequently promised action and done … nothing.

As a result, doctors, counsellors, and other care professionals have no clear legal guidelines when it comes to dealing with specific situations. It is possible that the doctors in Savita’s case were reluctant to terminate the hopeless pregnancy because they could not be sure that they might be acting illegally and thus exposing themselves to possible (however unlikely) judicial consequences. This is all the more ironic, given that that the termination of her pregnancy could even possibly be justified by a line of argument following traditional Catholic moral philosophy using the Principle of Double Effect (a line of reasoning which has always struck me as being just a little too clever; casuistry, in other words).

Whatever. Why have Irish politicians failed to legislate to regulate such cases, to provide legal certainty for all involved? There are two possible reasons, both reprehensible.

It may be that they are just indifferent. The situation of pregnant women with health or serious mental conflict issues just isn’t important enough for them.

Or, more deeply, perhaps they are simply afraid. Afraid of the negative image of them the vituperative groups calling themselves “pro-life” are capable of and expert in projecting of them. Any politician who supports any legislation to legalise abortion, even in the most limited of cases, will be open to be portrayed as “anti-life,” “murderer,” promiscuous, irreligious, anti-Catholic, even, somehow, not truly Irish. An exhibition of honesty and backbone might well be toxic at the ballot-box, especially if the well-organised and well-funded (there are reasons to believe that large sums flow from the religious right-wing in the USA) anti-abortion groups decide to run negative campaigns against them.

The horrible thing about it is that they may be right. I have a sneaking fear that large numbers of my compatriots are still deeply influenced by a self-righteous, holier-than-thou picture of themselves as “pro-lifers,” secure in a reality-denying mindset made possible by the fact that any woman who really wants an abortion can easily go to godless England and get it there. And we won’t talk about it honestly. A nasty Irish version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Maybe I am too pessimistic. Maybe the erosion of that particular narrow-minded hypocritical version of Catholicism which dominated Ireland for a large part of the past century has finally reached a stage where my countrywomen and men are finally prepared to be honest with themselves, to face up to hard truths and harder realities about their collective responsibility for the society they want to make for themselves in a world in which moral opinions about the rights and wrongs of what people do (especially in the whole complex area of relationships, sex and reproduction) are informed more by humility, tolerance, compassion and honest doubt than simplistic expressions of religiously grounded infallibility.

There are all sorts of things I could write here about the difficult question of abortion. About the women I know who have had one and have told me about it. About the agonising they went through concerning their decision, both before and after. About serious moral arguments in favour of abortion. About the dangers of black-and-white absolutist arguments and the use of horrible emotive language and images to browbeat those who may not agree with you. About the fundamental truth that women become pregnant and men can’t and that, therefore, this is one issue where women should be leading the discussions and decisions on the subject and men should be playing a subordinate role.

But precisely because this is primarily a women’s issue, I, as a man, won’t go into any of these points more deeply here. I will only hope that the Irish will become more honest with themselves, that their politicians will face up to their responsibilities and at least legislate for the very limited, specific cases of abortion allowed by the present constitution. Of course, ideally I would like to see a more general debate leading to the replacement of that misbegotten 1983 amendment to the constitution, but I honestly don’t think that’s going to happen in the near future.

But Savita’s case may just have started a ball rolling. The pressure of public opinion, both within Ireland and worldwide, will probably twist the politicians’ arms enough to make them legislate for cases like hers. Then this beautiful, vibrant woman won’t have died completely in vain.

And perhaps then, my feeling of shame at being Irish will start to fade.

This is not a great version of the song, but the Boomtown Rats' music is as inaccessible on YouTube as that of Bob Dylan - at least here in Germany. But it really did have to be this song!

Images retrieved from:

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Travelling ...

The thunderstorms which swept through during the night had wakened me briefly, but they had left the summer morning air with a wonderful cleanly-washed feeling. The sun was shining and the pleasant fresh warmth promised to become close and muggy later but that didn’t worry me. By the time that later came, I’d be gone, flying nearly a thousand kilometres westward to Ireland.

The first stage of the journey was by rail; from my home town Remscheid to Düsseldorf, with a change of train in Solingen. The highlight of this is the crossing of the Müngsten Bridge, the highest steel railway bridge in Germany. Remscheid and Solingen are both built on hills, and you can see one town from the other, but they are divided by the deep valley of the river Wupper. You look 350 feet down from the train at the river, winding its way through a densely wooded canyon. A magnificent sight on this fine morning, with wisps of water vapour lazily writhing above the water. The bridge itself has a something of a sinister reputation locally as a popular attraction for desperate people, planning to end their own lives.

I change trains in the Solingen suburb of Ohligs. Like both the other two cities in the so-called Bergisch-Metropolitan-Triangle, Wuppertal and Remscheid, it is an amalgamation of various pre-existing smaller towns. Solingen is known as the “City of Blades” and has a tradition of steel and cutlery making going back for many hundreds of years, with an historical reputation comparable only with Sheffield and Toledo. Ohligs itself is on the border between the old Duchy of Berg and the Rhineland and has, if the truth be told, more a Rheinisch than a Bergisch character. Historically, the Rhinelanders have a reputation for being relaxed, laid-back and fun-loving, while the inhabitants of Berg are more frequently described as being dour, taciturn and serious. It is, perhaps, not entirely coincidental that the Reformation made a lot of ground in Berg, while the Rhineland remained largely (if generally unfervently) Catholic.

The journey from Remscheid to Dublin is one I’ve been doing three or four times annually for the past years, ever since my parents moved to Dublin. As the train moves smoothly towards Düsseldorf, I find myself thinking about how routine it’s become for me. I was twenty one years old before I flew for the first time; now it’s just part of my life. But the world has changed in the past thirty years.

The most basic defining fact about Ireland is that it is an island. This has always made it harder to get to or leave than countries with land borders. In my youth, the most common way to and from the country was the “boat” across the Irish Sea to Liverpool or Holyhead. I’ve taken the boat too, often enough in my youth, crossing England to take yet another boat to finally reach the continent, where the way generally continued by train.

I realise that it has been quite a few years since I took a long train journey. There’s something lost there, for I find rail travel more comfortable and relaxed than flying. You have more room, you can look out the window and watch the ever-changing variety of towns and countryside, you can get up and walk around. You’re more inclined to get into conversation with your fellow travellers – or perhaps I’ve just become older and more taciturn. But that loss of relaxation is what you exchange for that most highly rated modern commodity, time. To get from Remscheid to Dublin by train and boat would take a couple of days; the way I do it now, I travel from door to door (including all the waiting at airports) in less than six hours.

Though, even in terms of relaxation, I have nothing to complain about. I do this journey so often that I have long since personally optimised every phase of it and, from the moment I arrive at the first railway station, I have moved into a personal, time out mode. I know where to get tickets, which platforms to go to, where to check in, etc., and all this stuff runs semi-automatically. So I have the inner space to just enjoy the feeling of being on the move, without pressure.

My flight is from Düsseldorf International Airport, the third biggest in Germany after Frankfurt and Munich (though it will probably be relegated to fourth after the new single Berlin airport finally gets up and running next year). Düsseldorf, with a population of just under 600,000 isn’t one of Germany’s biggest cities, but it’s one of the most successful. There are various reasons for this, one of the most important being the decision by the western allies after the Second World War to make it the capital of Germany’s largest (by population) province of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Düsseldorf has an intensively competitive relationship with Cologne, just a few miles farther up the Rhine. Cologne is bigger and over a millennium older, having been founded by Agrippa, the faithful adjutant of the Emperor Augustus, while Düsseldorf isn’t mentioned historically until the Middle Ages. Cologners tend to regard Düsseldorfers as parvenu and claim that the insecurity resulting from this is the reason why the residents of their rival city are so concerned with status, fashion, and being “in.” Certainly, the Königsallee (popularly known as the “Kö”), the premier shopping street in Düsseldorf, would claim to compete with New York’s Fifth Avenue, or the Via Condotti in Rome, and you might be forgiven for a feeling of taking the tone of the place down if you find yourself driving down the Kö in a car which isn’t a Porsche, a Mercedes, or a BMW.

Düsseldorf and Cologne both have their own varieties of beer. In Düsseldorf it’s a dark ale known as Alt, while in Cologne they brew a light, lager-type beer known as Kölsch. It’s more than your life is worth to try to order an Alt in Cologne, while the Düsseldorfers generally say that Kölsch is a liquid which passes unchanged – apart from the temperature – through the human body.

With its finely-tuned consciousness of chic, Düsseldorf is, inevitably, a major centre of culture, although here there is also a keen rivalry with Cologne. One of the city’s most successful cultural exports in the past thirty years is the cult band, Die Toten Hosen (literally “Dead Trousers,” the phrase being a slang expression meaning “nothing going on,” or “boring.”), who play a good-humoured form of punk rock, often with a healthy dollop of social criticism thrown in.

The airport is, thankfully, easily reached by rail. Thankfully, I say, because, in common with nearly all others, it costs an arm and a leg to leave your car there for anything more than an hour or two. The last stage of the journey involves a short trip on the Sky Train, a hanging monorail which takes you from the station right into the terminal building. This is large and airy, the result of a comprehensive rebuilding programme after a major fire there sixteen years ago, thus providing enough room to handle 20 million passengers a year.

Air travel, as I’ve already mentioned, has changed considerably in Europe in the past couple of decades. The key phrase is “low-cost flying.” Whereas thirty years ago flying still had a cachet of being a bit exclusive, it has now become affordable travel for the masses. Part of the philosophy behind this is the optimisation of every element of every element of the process and the reduction of the fundamental fact to its minimum, the flying from A to B. The basic flight price – on a route where the size of the planes and the frequency of flights have been carefully analysed to ensure that the vehicles are always well occupied – is kept as low as possible. Everything else costs extra; luggage, meals and drinks on the plane, choice of seats, often even personal checking-in. One of the most successful of the low-cost carriers is the Irish firm Ryanair, with its spectacular in-your-face Managing Director, Michael O’Leary (if you’re interested, you can watch him outlining the company’s philosophy here). Fortunately, I don’t have to travel with O’Leary’s firm, who are pretty ingenious at thinking up new methods to make you pay extra (they don’t fly from Düsseldorf, claiming that the landing charges there are too expensive) – as the pressure of competition with them has forced to Irish national carrier, Aer Lingus, to go low-cost too, so that I can generally get a return flight from Düsseldorf to Dublin for less than US $ 150.

“I used to think Genitalia was an airline until I discovered Aer Lingus,” some comedian once commented. Personally, I’d prefer sex to flying any time. To be truthful, I find flying both boring and frequently annoying, uselessly annoying. It starts with the security check. Even today, years after the ridiculous measure has been introduced, there still seem to be passengers who haven’t realised that you’re not allowed to carry liquids onto the plane. It doesn’t matter which queue I choose, I always seem to finish up behind the lady who wants to bring her shampoo, face-cleaning fluid and Chanel No. 5 in her hand-luggage and engages some bored, underpaid security worker, who only speaks broken German, in an interminable and increasingly bad-tempered discussion. Forget it lady, ditch your Chanel or get another flight!

But even in the world of proposed extra charges for using the aircraft toilets, Aer Lingus still retains some of its old charm. The flight attendants are always very friendly and helpful, and they still offer a warm traditional Irish breakfast, with sausages and rashers, black and white pudding, fried tomato, potato cake, brown bread and butter with orange juice, coffee or tea. It’s not free of course – though, on reflection, it never really was, after all, it was all part of the princely price you paid for your ticket – but at € 7.50 it’s still a bargain. As I usually take the morning flight, and only drink a cup (or two) of coffee before leaving home, it has become another ritual of mine whenever I take this flight.

An hour and a half after taking off, we land. And now, another aspect of low-cost flying really comes into its own for me. All the cheap carriers make you pay extra for checked-in luggage. I have become expert at travelling light, carrying everything I really need in my hand-baggage. And so, only ten minutes after the plane as stopped, I saunter past the people standing hypnotised at the baggage carousel, waiting seemingly forever for their bags to be spewed up out of the innards of the airport, down the green customs line and out of the airport. A little more than five hours after leaving home, I’ve arrived. Now there’s just the short bus and car trip to my parents’ place.

It would have taken me just as long to drive from home to Berlin or Munich – and would have cost me just as much. Funny old world, isn’t it?

This little piece from the Toten Hosen is a love song from an extremely jealous lover, who first offers to kill himself to prove his love ... and finally decides to kill both himself and his girlfriend.

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Hail Glorious Saint Paddy

The top o’ the mornin’ to ye! Begorrah, bedad, an’ bejaysus, sure isn’t it a grand day and all for us to be celebratin’ the feast of our own glorious Saint Patrick, it bein’ fifteen hundred and eighty years since he arrived on the misty green shamrock shores of the dear auld emerald isle, wavin’ his bishop’s crozier to banish the snakes and bring the benighted pagan Oirish into the bosom of God’s holy church?

Is that enough stage-Irishness for you? Enough Paddywhackerry? Will you wear the green today, go off to watch or even march in the parade and get all tipsy and lachrymose on green beer, Guinness or whiskey (always to be spelled with an “e”)?

In Germany, where I live, St. Patrick’s Day barely causes a blip on the radar screen, apart from parties organised in the Irish Pubs, one of Ireland’s most successful modern cultural exports, which can be found in nearly every middle-sized town. There’s a street in the Altstadt of Düsseldorf which has three of them, one being a gay pub. And speaking of gays, as far as I know, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, organisers of the New York parade, still don’t allow openly LGBT organisations to take part. They would do better to recall the great Irish bisexual, Oscar Wilde, and honour his memory.

Contradictions. Insofar as national stereotypes are valid at all, the Irish are nearly as full of them as the stereotype neurotic New York Jew. There is a kind of deep insecurity at the heart of the Irish character, born of an unholy conjunction of colonial oppression and Catholic guilt. And even these further stereotypes are themselves contradictory. For while there is no doubt that the “native Irish” were exploited, oppressed, discriminated against, killed and starved in their millions by the more powerful English between the 17th and the 19th Centuries, at the same time there was much of what was Irish which contributed to the growing identity of Britishness during that period, and – particularly in the 19th Century – there were many Irish people who were as comfortable with the dual identity of Irish and British as most Scots and Welsh are today (and, indeed, in the 20th Century, hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants in Britain who have adopted a British identity, while retaining, to various degrees, a sense of their original Irishness).

Then there’s Catholicism. Similar to the Poles, religious separateness developed in Ireland as a defining national characteristic in reaction to English acceptance of the Reformation. Because the English became Protestant, it became a part of Irish self-definition to be Catholic and, the more being Catholic became a criterion for discrimination and persecution, the more stubbornly the Irish clung to it. Yet parallel to all this, most serious Irish nationalist thinkers retained a strong sense that being Catholic was not synonymous with being Irish and a large number of those who developed and espoused ideas of Irish separatism were Protestant, from Jonathan Swift to Wolfe Tone, Charles Stewart Parnell to Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats to Douglas Hyde (independent Ireland’s first president).

But Catholicism remained a major part of the Irish identity, for many the defining component. The decades of national trauma following the disaster of the great potato famine in the middle of the 19th Century coincided with a restructuring of the Catholic Church worldwide along strict, all-encompassing, highly-structured lines, defining itself sharply in contrast to the ever more pervasive ideas of the Enlightenment, politically expressed in the American and French Revolutions. The result, in Ireland, was a particularist Nationalist culture, whose religious component offered an extra reason to reject everything British as being a product of obdurate heretic Protestantism, whose adherents were, basically, damned by God to eternal hellfire. And it was a variety of often joyless Catholicism which defined much of modern life and what it had to offer as “occasions of sin” (most particularly in relation to anything to do with sexuality) and stoked the subconscious Freudian fires of guilt with rigorous efficiency, while at the same time allowing for frequent, ghastly violence, abuse and hypocrisy. To anyone who would dispute this interpretation, I simply recommend watching Peter Mullen’s 2002 film, The Magdalen Sisters, the basic accuracy of which, as far as I know, nobody has been able to call into question.

“Hail, glorious St. Patrick, thy words were once strong

Against Satan's wiles and a heretic throng;

Not less is thy might where in Heaven thou art;

Oh, come to our aid, in our battle take part!”

According to my researches, the words of this most popular of hymns to St. Patrick – and one which I learned in my earliest schooldays – were penned by a Sister Agnes in 1920. The “heretic throng” she refers to was, for the Irish Catholics of the time, clearly Protestant. Historically, of course, the Patrick who spread the Christian message in Ireland in the fifth Century (whichever one of them you take, most historians believe there were at least two of them!) had nothing to do with heretics, as those against whom his words were strong were pagans, but that wasn’t important. As a child I was certain – for so I was taught – that Patrick was a Catholic. The fact that the Protestant Church of Ireland also reveres St. Patrick as its founder and that one of its two major cathedrals in Dublin is named after him didn’t matter. As far as we were concerned, those cathedrals were rightfully Catholic anyway, and had been robbed from us by the Protestants during the Reformation. The fact that Patrick was most probably an Englishman, bringing a foreign religion whose basic goal was to extirpate the cultural uniqueness of the native Irish druidal religion, was never presented in these terms and much was made of the remote possibility that the young Romanised Patrick, who had been captured as a slave by Irish pirates and brought to Ireland to herd pigs, in fact came from a settlement on the northern coast of Gaul.

When the Irish Free State became independent in 1922, the predominant ethos became that narrow Catholic definition of Irish identity – a development accelerated by the fact that the great majority of the Protestants on the island lived in the province of Ulster, most of which remained British as Northern Ireland. The new state was over 90% Catholic and for the rest of the 20^th Century, the small Protestant minority declined ever further. And that narrow exclusivist understanding of national identity contributed to a withdrawal on many levels from the wider world, contributing even to a declaration of neutrality during World War II. In that atmosphere of righteous isolation, it was possible to cultivate further the national neurotic mythology of persecuted specialness, doomed to suffering, mediocrity and failure by centuries of foreign political, economic and religious oppression.

Even during my childhood it was showing cracks, under assault from (far too slowly) growing prosperity, rock and roll, television and the insistent spiritual “pollution” from a more open, exciting wider world. The Church itself was undergoing its own revolution as a result of Vatican II. From the beginning of the nineties up to a couple of years ago, the roaring of the Celtic Tiger seemed to have been systematically banishing the last vestiges of the old, limited, outdated, claustrophobic national identity to the scrapheap of history.

The Celtic Tiger was so enthusiastically, exaggeratedly embraced by the Irish, perhaps, because it offered a new possibility for self-definition. It certainly ultimately led to a kind of collective unreal hubris, and the throwing out of a number of babies with large amounts of undoubtedly filthy bathwater. All this made the crash, when it inevitably came a few years ago, all the more bitter.

But for all the flaws in the current rescue strategies, and all the suffering the Irish people are currently going through – much of it unnecessarily demanded by a corrupt, twisted, global finance mafia – there is no going back to the old, narrow, neurotic nationalism. That mould, at least, has been broken forever. The Irish who celebrate their national holiday today are undoubtedly more sombre, thoughtful, self-questioning than those of a decade ago. But they are also more mature.

The (Protestant) Irish rebel leader, Robert Emmet, executed in 1803, made a famous last speech, which became part of the sacred scriptures of Irish nationalist republicanism. He finished by saying

“Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance, asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, and my memory in oblivion, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.”

Today, I would argue, his country has indeed taken her place among the nations of the earth – no better, but certainly no worse, than most of the others. His epitaph can be written, has, indeed, been written in the course of Irish history since his death, and particularly in the past fifty years, long after notional political independence was achieved.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! Be proud to be Irish, because today is the day we allow everyone worldwide to share our identity – with all its flaws and glories J.

Pictures retrieved from:

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The Happiest Days of our Lives?

When I was ten years old we moved from Wicklow, on the east coast of Ireland, to Sligo on the north-west coast. It was quite a long distance, which meant for us children leaving friends and familiar places definitively behind us. It also meant going to a new school – and that shortly before the end of a school year.

There is a strong tradition of segregated education in Ireland, and so my brother and I landed in St. Antony’s National School for boys, run by a congregation of Catholic teaching brothers. Boys arrived in St. Antony’s in Second or Third Class and it was traditional that classes generally remained with the same teacher until the boys had completed Sixth Class and moved on to Secondary School. My younger brother was lucky enough to be put in the Third Class of a brother who was a born teacher and became something of a beloved legend in the town. In his late eighties, half blind and deaf, he amazingly turned up at my brother’s funeral three months ago, over thirty-eight years after their ways had parted.

I was placed in the class of Thomas Mooney, joining around fifty other ten-year-old boys in our own peculiar blackboard jungle. We were a mixed bunch, mirroring the town in which we lived; one or two kids from wealthier families, a spread of middle and working class youngsters and around seven or eight representatives of what would be called “poor white trash” in parts of the USA. These were children who were more or less disengaged from the whole educational process, missing frequently, mostly not having schoolbooks or anything else with them. The requirement to do or present homework seemed generally foreign to them and they exuded a general atmosphere of resigned untouchability, occasionally tempered with an undertone of dangerous, unpredictable violence, something reinforced by the fact that most of them were up to three years older than the rest of us, having frequently repeated classes. They were just hanging around at school, barely literate, waiting to achieve the age of fourteen, when they could legally get out of a system with which they had no identification and – if they were lucky – find occasional work as labourers somewhere.

A group of over fifty ten-year-old boys is a pretty unruly, often savage mob. A teacher in control of such a group needs an unconscious, all-encompassing, completely confident sense of his own authority, otherwise he is lost before he begins. And Thomas Mooney did not have that authority.

He may have had it previously and he may have achieved it subsequently, but my classmates and I encountered him at a particularly vulnerable stage in his life. When I met him he was around forty years old and had come to St. Antony’s only recently, after the small country school in which he had worked had been closed, a victim of rationalisation. The contrast between dealing with a small number of country children of both sexes, spread over a number of classes all taught by the same teacher in the same room, and a large class of harder, more sophisticated town boys must have been considerable for him. But there were deeper reasons for his debilitating lack of confidence than just this.

Thomas Mooney was married to a woman he loved deeply. They had no children and his wife was seriously ill, suffering (as I am now fairly certain) from chronic deep depression. How do I know this? Because, in his despair, Mr. Mooney told us of it, frequently, at some length.

Was he trying to win our sympathy? At the time I thought so and – along with my classmates, with the callous cruelty of ten-year-olds in a mob – I despised him for it. With the infinite wisdom accrued through a whole decade of life, I judged that he had realised that he lacked that control which was the basic prerequisite for his job and was trying to substitute it by appealing to our better natures. If such was the case, he had miscalculated very badly.

It is not that ten-year-olds don’t have better natures; they do, but they are also in the process of moral development and are subject to many other powerful motivations, one of the strongest being peer pressure. Add to this the fact that children from a very young age have a finely developed sense of the security with which adults perceive their own authority and you can understand why Thomas Mooney never had a chance with us.

He was, at the time, a deeply unhappy man, a subtle, sensitive person questioning many of the fundamental certainties on which his life had been based, and this had fatal consequences for his control over the mob we were. He was the teacher, the enemy, and we sensed his weakness, judged him accordingly, and there was little he could do to reverse this instinctive implacable judgement of failure. He was like a poker player holding a pair of deuces whose opponents were well aware of what he held in his hand – bluffing was useless.

There was an alternative available to him, one hallowed by tradition, and in general accepted use in the school; that of violence and pain. Corporal punishment was, at that time, still legally permitted in Irish schools and most teachers still used a bamboo cane as a disciplinary and pedagogical instrument. At the end of every pause and lunch break a queue of boys could be seen waiting apprehensively before the principal’s office; waiting for the cold, impersonal administration of “six of the best,” to be endured as a consequence for misbehaviour. You presented the flat of the palm of each hand alternatively, open at arms length, anticipating the whish, the crack, and the burning pain. We did not question this – it was an inherent component of the general culture of school – but it reinforced our general feeling of education as a state of low-level warfare between pupils and teachers, a fundamental division between us and them, where they had nearly all the power.

Thomas Mooney refused to use the cane in his classroom. Instead of respecting him for this, we judged it as a further sign of weakness and despised him all the more for it. As a result, his class was generally unruly, undisciplined and loud. He frequently left us for long periods to our own devices, setting us work to do while he sat at his desk, doing I no longer remember what. Maybe nothing at all. It didn’t really concern me.

Though the work he set us to do was sometimes interesting. In Fifth Class, he told us we should begin a project of writing our own books and occasionally showed interest in what we were producing. Most of my classmates took these long periods for personal creativity as an opportunity for goofing off, but I became involved in a complex Buck Rogers-type science fiction epic, heavily influenced by the style of Leslie Charteris’ Saint series (I had discovered the books around that time and they served to increase my admiration for Simon Templar, initially awakened by Roger Moore’s TV depiction of him). However, at a certain stage he lost interest in it and my masterpiece was never finished.

When he applied himself to it, he could be an excellent teacher. He encouraged my interest in history and tried to instil in us a sense of the importance of politics and debate. It was a classroom in which debate was frequent; given his lack of fundamental authority, those of us with rhetorical ability could engage him in endless discussions, or encourage him to hold forth on themes which interested him. But, more often than not, he was listless and unmotivated and frequently avoided teaching subjects, like the Irish which (following the official national ethos of independent Ireland should one day resume its long-lost position as first language of the country) was compulsory and generally hated by a majority of the pupils. Thomas Mooney spoke fluent Irish himself, but seemed to find the effort of pounding it into our thick reluctant skulls too much. Our lack of progress here would cause a number of my fellow pupils serious problems later on (Irish remained compulsory as a major subject right up to the end of secondary school), but, fortunately for me, my parents spotted my deficits pretty quickly and arranged for me to get extra tuition outside school.

When we left him at the end of Sixth Class to move on to secondary education, he took over another group of eight-year-olds in Third Class, but a number of years later I heard he subsequently left to take over a position in a rural school. I suspect that he was very glad of the change and hope that things worked out better for him away from St. Antony’s.

For there was something fundamentally very evil going on in that school, though my brothers and I were fortunately, miraculously untouched by it. During the years I was there, five of the ten teachers (three brothers and two laymen) were sexually abusing many of the boys entrusted to their care. One of them was the tall young brother teaching the class parallel to ours, a class in which I was often a guest on the (not infrequent) occasions when Mr. Mooney called in sick. His ready use of the cane ensured that he had no discipline problems. He also had the custom of having boys sit on his lap for long periods of time – fortunately, he had his particular pets and we guests were not selected for this “special” treatment.

In the many court cases which have taken place since the whistle was finally blown a little more than a decade ago, a number of other teachers gave testimony that they were unaware of what was going on. As far as I can ascertain, Thomas Mooney was not called to testify. Even if he had been, given his detachment and preoccupation with his own problems, I would guess that he would also say that he didn’t know anything. And yet, that visceral part of me which does not always comply with my rational world-view wonders whether the underlying miasma of evil and misery in the school didn’t contribute somehow to his obvious unhappiness.

Those of us who were pupils there – apart from the unfortunates who were the victims of abuse – didn’t realise that there was something fundamentally wrong, but then, of course, kids usually don’t have the comparative apparatus to judge such things. We knew that it was a cold, hard, unloving sort of place, but it was school and we didn’t expect anything else. One of the effects it did have on me was that casual brutalisation which led to my harsh boyish judgement of Mr. Mooney. Under different circumstances I might have learned much more from him and today I regret that I didn’t. If he is still alive today and, by some remote chance, happens to read this, I would like to say to him that I now cherish him retrospectively much more than I did at the time.

(“St. Antony’s” and “Thomas Mooney” are pseudonyms. For those whose stomachs can take it, this link leads to an account of the abuse cases in the school and contains a laudation of the exceptional brother I mentioned in this piece who was my brother’s teacher)

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An 18th Century Gentleman

Join me, if you will, on a little harmless flight of fantasy. Imagine you had the choice of whenever and wherever in history and geography you could live, and that you were free, moreover, to choose your status in life there and then too. Where and when and who would you like to be?

Westport House in Mayo, Ireland

On reflection, I think I would like to have been an Irish gentleman of comfortable means in the second half of the eighteenth century. As such, I would have been a member of a small, privileged elite, the group known as the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, which, following the defeat of the old Irish great lords like the O’Neills and O’Donnells at the end of the sixteenth century and the Cromwellian defeat and dispossession of the great majority of the remaining native or Norman Catholic gentry in the middle of the seventeenth, had attained secure control over both land and power in Ireland. Many were descendants of Cromwellian officers or settlers, installed by the English in that period, along with some few older settlers or even native Irish gentry who had accepted English rule and the English protestant religion.

They grew to form a peculiar class. The hardening of religious positions in the seventeenth century led to a situation where, for the vast majority of the native Irish, Catholicism became more than a religion, advancing to part of a cultural identity which made the religious difference just one part of a definition of Irishness, coalescing in self-understood difference from (and generally sullen opposition to) what was increasingly seen as an unwanted foreign occupation. This development was, of course, mirrored – and often exacerbated – by the growth of the Anglo-Irish self-image and the policies of the controlling English crown, which equated popery with treason and imposed all sorts of legal sanctions against Catholics (known in Ireland ever since as the Penal Laws), including disenfranchisement, inheritance disadvantages, judicial preference of Protestants, prohibition of worship, etc.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Ascendancy was firmly in control, sure of their supremacy – both in the superiority of their nature above that of the native Irish and its guarantee by England. That society was ordered was a divinely ordained fact of life and their position at the top of the heap was clearly a reflection of the divine will.

Yet this was also the era of the enlightenment, an age of reason and even – within certain boundaries – tolerance. Certainly the atmosphere of the time was one which respected rationality and moderation and abhorred what was often described as “enthusiasm.” It is perhaps ironic that it was the general stability of society, coupled with limited tolerance for ‘free thinkers’ and a distaste for the religious enthusiasm which had nearly torn Europe apart in the 17^th Century, which created the environment in which those ideas would develop which would lead to the destruction of many of the foundations of that society; ideas propagated by thinkers such as Hume and Voltaire, Paine and Rousseau.

This then, is the background to the Irish gentleman whose life I would like to live. I imagine my wealth and income as fundamentally based on land, good land; an estate preferably in County Meath, or Kildare, somewhere, at any rate, not too far from Dublin, where I would also maintain a town house.

Dublin in the second half of the eighteenth century is one of the most pleasant European cities in which to have a residence. Large enough to be a centre of culture, it is still small enough to be familiar, developing that special identity it retains to this day as a huge village where everyone, through two or three connections, knows everyone else worth knowing and where gregariousness is a fundamental fact of life. It is a city undergoing splendid renewal in what came to be called the Georgian style, with the building of fine houses, magnificent civic buildings and beautiful parks, including the largest public park in Europe, the Phoenix Park.

Georgian Doors in Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin

My Dublin residence I imagine in one of these fine new Georgian streets, at best fronting one of the tasteful squares built around a green park, such as Mountjoy or Merrion Square, perhaps even on the central St. Stephens Green. From there I would be able to easily participate in the busy cultural life of the city; going to musical performances in Mr. Neal’s Music Hall in Fishamble Street (where Handel’s Messiah was premiered), attending (if my wealth were great and my contacts influential enough) civic occasions and balls at Dublin Castle – the seat of government of the English Lord Lieutenant, the top aristocrat who represented the crown – perhaps frequenting Sunday services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, to hear its great dean, the glorious man of letters, satirist and addict of controversy, Jonathan Swift, preach.

For my religion, naturally, would be that of the established church, the Church of Ireland, the Hibernian version of Anglicanism; an obviously supremely reasonable kind of Protestantism, retaining much of the better older traditions which had been initially part of the universal church until Roman popish superstition had perverted them. Though, if I am to be truthful, my personal religious convictions are not particularly deep – in fact, if pressed, I would probably describe myself as a deist, though this is not a position I would loudly profess publicly. Among educated friends of my own class, my position is widely shared but we still see the value of religion as a necessary part of societal order and guardian of public (and, to an extent, private) morality. Moreover, the church provides a means of living for many younger sons of gentle birth and has, in Ireland, thrown up such prodigies as the aforementioned Mr. Swift, or the great philosopher, Bishop Berkeley.

It is conceivable that I might have a seat in parliament. Indeed, at the end of the eighteenth century, for 18 glorious years, the Irish parliament in Dublin succeeded in throwing off practically all the controls the British parliament in Westminster had accrued over the previous centuries and exercised wide-ranging autonomy in the administration of the country until fear of French invasion and native Irish rebellion – the Irish rising of 1798, while unsuccessful, was alarmingly inspired by French revolutionary ideas – led to the Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800 and the abolition of the Irish legislature.

I regard myself as a man of progress, a man of reason. As a young man, following a few years at Trinity College, I have made the Grand Tour of Europe, experiencing something of life and culture in continental Europe; an experience which has reinforced my conviction of the superiority of the British way of doing things. Nevertheless, combined with a certain studious inclination, the experience has helped me to improve my knowledge of French, which has basically replaced Latin as the lingua franca of civilised men and the mastery of which enables me to maintain a correspondence with other men of ideas throughout Europe.

As a gentleman I would be married, though – given the perils associated with childbirth in a society in which medical knowledge and, in particular, the knowledge of hygiene were still fairly rudimentary – I may well be a widower. The path for my sons is clear; the eldest will be my heir, the second would go into the army (in which case, I will have had to purchase a commission for him), the third would possibly try to make a career in the church or train in one of the professions, like law. For my daughters I would have to provide a dowry before finding suitable husbands for them.

The basis of my prosperity is my land. Most of this is farmed by tenants, and their rents make up a considerable portion of my disposable wealth. It is a good time to be renting land. The spread of the potato has meant that tenant families are able to feed themselves on relatively small farms, so their numbers are growing and the possible subdivision of the lands they rent increases my income.

Not that I regard myself as an exploiter. I see myself as a fair, concerned landlord and squire, interested in modern ideas of farming, trying to improve the lots of my tenants (insofar as they are prepared to listen to me), reading and applying the ideas of modern agricultural thinkers such as Jethro Tull to the model farm areas of my estate which I administer myself. I see myself as being fair to my tenants, being approachable and even prepared to postpone rents or find other solutions, for those going through difficulties. While I deplore their papist superstition, I am tolerant enough to allow them to follow their superstitious ways of worship and even have an amiable relationship with their (technically illegal) priest – quite an educated fellow as a result of a number of years spent studying abroad in Salamanca and Rome.

Life on my estate is, in many ways, fairly self-contained. The army of servants necessary to keep my manor (known to the native Irish as “the Big House”) comes from the estate and we form a little community of our own. My children all had Irish wet-nurses – as, indeed, I did too – and, before they were old enough to be educated and learn the necessary awareness of their status, their playmates were ordinary peasant children. A large amount of what we consume is produced on the estate, though such necessities as sherry, claret and port have, of course, to be imported.

But, in contrast to the rich cultural life in Dublin, the intellectual stimulus on the estate is rather poor. Many of the neighbouring squires are rather ignorant, more interested in hunting, gambling and duelling than in serious use of the mind. Though my position demands that I hunt occasionally, I have no interest in gambling, and have seen far too many men ruined by ill-considered bets, generally fuelled by drink. The number of educated men around in the vicinity of my estate are not many; the schoolteacher, the vicar (unfortunately a pompous bore, who drones on interminably about the dangers of the teachings of Mr. Charles Wesley) and the doctor and lawyer from the nearby town. They join me regularly for dinner where we discuss everything from politics to the works of Mr. David Hume and the Prussian thinker, Emmanuel Kant.

Oliver Goldsmith by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Having passed fifty, I am starting to feel my age, having begun to suffer from that curse of men of my class, gout. My friend, the local doctor, speculates that a diet high in red meat, port and claret may exacerbate the condition, though I find it hard to accept that my after-dinner port can be a contributory factor to the pain in my big toe. He might as well claim that it is a result of my wig being too tight!

I recently had a visit from one of my university compatriots at Trinity, Mr. Oliver Goldsmith. A most agreeable fellow, and one of some literary pretensions. He read to me from his latest work, The Deserted Village. It is a fancy of mine that his observations concerning the heedless doings of the richest of men, uncaring of the general common weal, may retain a significance beyond my own time, still retaining relevance, perhaps, in centuries still to come:

“Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen who survey

The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay,

'Tis yours to judge how wide the limits stand

Between a splendid and an happy land.

Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore,

And shouting Folly hails them from her shore;

Hoards, even beyond the miser's wish, abound,

And rich men flock from all the world around.

Yet count our gains.  This wealth is but a name

That leaves with useful products still the same.

Not so the loss.  The man of wealth and pride

Takes up a space that many poor supplied;

Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds,

Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds;

The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth

Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth;

His seat, where solitary sports are seen,

Indignant spurns the cottage from the green;

Around the world each needful product flies,

For all the luxuries the world supplies:

While thus the land, adorned for pleasure all,

In barren splendour feebly waits the fall.”

Pictures retrieved from:

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