Real Ireland

cream tea

As childish impressions go, this one has deeper roots. Mine was the England of the industrial revolution, the centre of colonial administration, a symbol of modernisation and progress - whatever those words mean. If the road to modernity took its toll on Irish culture, particularly with the loss of the native language in the nineteenth century, for a long time the nuances of the Anglo-Irish relationship still dictated that it was our business to be quaint and characterful, and Yeats and Hollywood agreed. I did not.

Still, a sense of cultural distinctiveness has tended to be exiled to the margins of these islands. Paul Kingsnorth’s Real England is a book which examines what this has cost English culture itself. In England’s identikit high streets and corporate pub chains, in the sprawl of its malls and suburbs, he detects a homogenisation of culture, the spread of the bland. In a global economy, the local is under threat as never before. And with it goes individuality, regional diversity, the real sense of community and place which underpins a national culture.

Real England

But Mr Kingsnorth, you have it all wrong.

Learn from my experience. I am not a local. Of anywhere. At least I try not to be. When I was six, my family moved from suburban Dublin to a small country town. With impeccable timing I decided that I was an urban creature and always had been: alienated, deracinated, happiest in an anonymous mob. But just try being part of an alienated, deracinated mob in an Irish country town - it’s hard work. You can’t walk down the street without some old fellow stopping you:

1. I know you
2. Oh, I do
3. I knew your grandfather
4. And your uncle George
5. But aren’t you the spit of your granny
6. Oh, y’are. Y’are indeed.

This is menacing to a six-year-old. No point in telling them not to talk to strangers and then abandoning them to old fellows propped on canes who feign intimate knowledge of their family history and genetic coding. My side of these conversations were invariably silent and repetitive:

a) I don’t know you
b) So I don’t
c) And I didn’t know my grandfather
d) So let’s leave George out of it
e) And get one thing straight right now
f) I am nobody’s spit, mister

I think this love of community, this sense of place is over-valued. There are advantages to being part of an anonymous mass. But in Ireland, such things are endemic. The capital has long been full of part-time Dubliners, people whose allegiances remain with the town or county they grew up in, possibly even the town or county their parents grew up in. These people will settle in the city, talk about building a place ‘down home’, return to do their duty in local elections as I still do. Now they are coming home to changed communities – a bit more EU infrastructure, a few more toytown designer outlets, a spreading commuter belt. These days, the part-time Dubliners are as likely to be travelling from the country to the city rather than the other way round, and local communities are expanding and fracturing at an equal rate. Intel or Dell is most likely to be the biggest local employer, but no one is complaining about globalisation. At least, not until the multinationals ship out again.

But the chain stores haven’t even dirtied their feet with my country town yet. The market square still does a booming trade, but no one has responded to years of entreaties to move in with their cheap standard clothing made-in-Taiwan. Character has been popping out like carbuncles all over the face of my town for years, and still no one is happy about it. I think they call it underdevelopment.

I spoke to a new Dublin exile recently, someone who was priced out of the city by the property boom and who settled in this last redoubt of cheap Irish real estate. She didn’t know her new neighbours, didn’t have much in common with them, but she did like her new vegetable patch. Because she runs an online business from home, she considers herself much more part of a virtual community anyway. One foot may be rooted in the soil, but the lines of communication are running far overhead. Perhaps no one really lives in one place any more. Perhaps there is no such thing as local culture. A century ago, the isolated Aran islanders were taken by many to symbolise an authentic and distinctive Irish culture – one ‘racy of the soil’ and untainted by commerce with the mad modern world. It was a handy notion, but it ignored the fact that one half of Aran was generally found in Boston and New York, sending money and gossip home to the other half.

And yet if the ‘real’ Ireland was always a chimera, that sense of community and place bullishly remains. Despite the new rash of Tescos and Lidls across the country, not to mention the Dublin IKEA store that is awaited like the second coming, in Ireland there is still a strong investment in the local and the particular. Now exiled in my own modern metropolis, I asked my online friend how she was getting on back home. Things had changed. ‘I can’t go anywhere now’, she said. ‘People stopping you every five minutes. “I saw you down town last Tuesdah.” “Was that you up the ladder outside of Winkles?” How does everyone suddenly know who I am?’ That, my friends, is the real Ireland.