Irish lessons

Just after we returned from Ireland, I posted a brief blog about the trip—mostly pictures, accompanied by an obliquely informative limerick. I said I’d write more, but I’m finding it difficult to distill the variety of moments into some manageable form. So I decided to write about a few interesting things I learned and see where that takes me. 

First, the short, simple lessons:

• There are more shades of green in the world than I ever imagined. My earlier blog talked about 40 shades, but I’m sure I saw far more than that over the course of two weeks. For one thing, the green fields and hillsides look very different recently washed by rain than they do on a dry, sunny midday walk to the top of the cliffs, and there are colors in the heather, the bog, and the moor that are simultaneously shades of green and shades of … other colors. Green is not simply green. 
• Irish soups are out of this world. I had my first bowl early in the trip, and it became my absolute staple for lunch for the next two weeks. They’re mostly pureed, mostly vegetables, entirely delicious. The seafood was excellent, too, as we’d been told by friends. But I’d trade even that for a bowl of Irish soup and a hunk or two of dark Irish bread. 
• You are virtually prohibited from visiting Ireland without drinking Guinness, the dark, heavy beer (“stout”) for which Ireland is famous. I don’t drink, and usually saying that will stop people from pushing … but not with Guinness. I can’t count how many times I was prodded while I was there and queried after I got home: “… not even a little Guinness when you’re in Ireland?!” 
• James Joyce closed his famous book Ulysses with a super large period (although our period is called a “full stop”). He worried that the printer would mistake it for a drop of ink on the manuscript, and it was the first thing he checked when he received the final product from the printer. 
• It is not always rainy and windy in Ireland. We had virtually no rain, except, fortuitously, a couple of times while we were traveling in the bus. And we had no wind. Not even on the cliffs, where it would have been wonderful and idyllic to feel windblown and wild. Of
  
  course, we had the help of a friend, who grew up in Ireland and told us the best time to go. Still, we took sweaters, light jackets, down vests, and rain jackets for the cold, rainy, windy conditions others had warned us about—and never took any of them out of the suitcase.
• The Irish have their own game of football, played for centuries in slightly evolving forms. There’s even a national Irish football league; all of the players are amateurs (really!). It’s a bit like soccer, except that the field is bigger, the ball is larger and heavier, you don’t “head” the ball (unless you want an instant skull or neck injury), you can handle the ball, sort of like in rugby, but there’s no tackling. They play another game called “curling,” which is a bit like lacrosse, with a goal and all, except there’s no basket on the stick but rather a bat sort of like a baseball bat except that it’s curved and flat. The ball is hard and heavy and seems to have evolved only very slightly from a rock. We didn’t get to see or play either of these (though some folks watched football on TV), but we got a bit of a “lesson” about both from some real players. 
• The Irish also have a distinctive language—not Celtic, but Irish—that’s still spoken by many folks in more rural areas, although most folks also speak English, sometimes heavily accented. The road signs always have two names for locations—the first in English and the second in Irish. Our tour leader speaks fluent Irish, and we’d hear her converse with local folks in this tongue that sounded totally foreign to the rest of us. Like many Irish children, as a child, she spent summers living in areas where Irish is the first language, at language schools where their time was devoted to mastering Irish. In these locations, designated as Irish-speaking areas, the first name on all the signs is in Irish, and the second in English. There are several local dialects of Irish, so sometimes folks from one area have difficulty understanding folks from another. 
  
• It’s hard to play an Irish tin whistle, although we brought some home, and I could practice if I were so inclined. Similarly, the simplest steps in Irish dancing are not simple. Fortunately, I have no incentive to practice that. We got to try both musical forms, just for fun, but no one in our group seemed inclined to take them up as a new avocation.
• You can live on a diet of almost nothing but potatoes. In fact, people have. It turns out that prior to the potato famine in the mid-1800s, many poor Irish folks, especially sharecroppers who farmed tiny plots of rented land, relied almost entirely on potatoes—especially a type called “lumpers”—to feed their large families. It turns out that potatoes have adequate nutrition, especially if they’re supplemented with buttermilk. So that’s what most peasant families lived on: potatoes, with maybe buttermilk for the kids. Today, this affection for potatoes lives on. Potatoes are served with every meal, sometimes in multiple forms. We had one meal that included meat, mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, and potatoes au gratin.

From potatoes to the Catholic church (and back again) … the more complicated lessons:

• My most surprising lesson began when I realized that my understanding of the role of the Catholic church in Ireland was far too simplistic. I had come to think of the church as a vast, often morally compromised institution that had violated the trust of Ireland as much as that of any nation. The sexual abuse scandal; revelations about child abuse in “work homes” for children; the discovery of hundreds of death certificates and scores of corpses of babies, all found at Catholic homes for unwed mothers in Ireland. All evidence, in my mind, of the church’s abuse of power. But I was quickly introduced to information that challenged that view: 
• Historically, the Catholic church and its members in Ireland (especially poor Catholics) were sorely oppressed. During some periods, Catholicism was banned, churches and monasteries were destroyed, priests and monks went into hiding or were killed, and Catholics were prohibited from voting, owning property, or working in any but the most
  
  menial of jobs. This treatment stemmed largely from England’s imposition of the Anglican /Protestant faith, which was the state religion of England and therefore of its territories (including Ireland). Despite all this, Catholicism has been the majority religion in Ireland since Pagan times. 
• Irish Catholics therefore tended to be relatively poor and generally powerless—no surprise, if you’ve learned lesson the previous lesson, but totally new information if you haven’t (as I had not). Protestants, on the other hand, had not experienced the same sort of oppression. They tended to have more land, better access to jobs, and higher social status. They also had political power. The rural poor of Ireland were disproportionately Catholic, often sharecroppers working fields owned by wealthier (Protestant) landlords, with only a small rented plot to grow their own crops. Since they were Catholic and the church prohibited birth control, they had large families to support with few resources. So families grew and grew, and poverty grew and grew.
• The potato famine that struck Ireland in the middle of the 1800s was especially cruel to these peasants. Those who lived from their crops (potatoes; see the lesson above on potatoes) had nothing to eat. Those who were unable to pay their rent because they had no crops were evicted. Over a period of about 5 years, about a million people died—disproportionately peasants, most Catholic—and about a million more emigrated (though figures vary; I hear even higher estimates). Remarkably, during this time, Ireland, then under the rule of England, continued to export substantial amounts of grain, even as its citizens starved or fled.
• The late-20^th-century “troubles” in Northern Ireland had their roots in this long history of English domination and of Protestants’ relative wealth and power in contrast to Irish Catholics’ relative powerlessness and poverty. The struggle in Northern Ireland was a battle over the wish for an independent Irish state that included all of Ireland vs. the desire to retain allegiance to England, at least in part of the island. The former position was held largely by working class, mostly Catholic “Republicans,” and the latter represented the stance of generally wealthier, largely Protestant “Loyalists” or “Unionists.”

And all of this brings me to the most important lesson of all, one that evolved from my shifting thoughts about the role of the Catholic church in Ireland.

• That lesson seems simple now: “Right” and “wrong,” “privilege” and “oppression” are always a matter of context, of time and scale. I arrived in Ireland skeptical of the Catholic church. As I learned Ireland’s history, I found myself totally siding with the Catholic peasants of the 19^th century, joining in their allegiance to that very same church. But the time and the scale, the context were not the same at all. 

It was an excellent reminder of the fact that the urge to consider an institution or an individual to be simply and thoroughly good or simply and thoroughly bad always risks losing sight of the complexity of real life. People are far more complex than that, and so are institutions, nations … and individuals. The Catholic church, the Anglican church, the English, and both sides in “the troubles” have been, over time and at different levels, both targets of oppression and agents of privilege. Surely the same can be said of other churches, of other nations, of any group … and of any individual (except maybe Leprechauns).

My Irish lessons, from the simplest to the most profound. All happy souvenirs of a grand trip.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

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