Ireland – Page 8 – For the fainthearted . . .

Please don’t sing The Fields of Athenry

Three tickets for the autumn internationals have been bought – matches against South Africa, Australia and Fiji. After the series win in New Zealand, Ireland are ranked at No 1 in the world for the first time in the history of the rankings.

There will be a familiar feeling as the words echo around Lansdowne Road. When Ireland are winning a rugby match it is a refrain circulates repeatedly. It’s probable that most of the singers know little more than the refrain:

Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once

…

Another year of uncorrected history

Every year the 12th July parades come around and every year there is a continuance of the wilful ignorance of history.

The Eleventh Night bonfires declaring hostility to the Pope and Catholicism are a nonsense. (One placard this year announced that, ‘All Taigs are targets.’ It would seem unlikely that the person responsible would have had any idea that ‘Taig’ is simply a version of the Irish for Timothy.)

Protestant community leaders have done little to educate their supporters as to the realities of late-17th Century history, perhaps there has …

The Bleak Fifties

The Letters of John McGahern was received as a gift at Christmas. The days of January were dark enough without my reading adding to the gloom, I left the book until the long summer holidays.

In the past, I would have doubted John McGahern.

The doubt would not have been a questioning of the veracity of the accounts in his novels of 1950s Ireland; they are too detailed, too consistent, too alive with emotion, to be anything other than accurate reflections of the realities which he encountered. Doubts would have …

Celtic cults

I told myself I was only going into the bookshop because it had a good range of philosophy books and that there might be a slight chance that among the stock there would be something on the German philosopher Martin Buber.

Of course, the search was in vain. It did not mean, however, that nothing had been bought. It always seems impolite to leave a bookshop empty-handed. Dublin might sustain more bookshsops per head of population than many places, but that didn’t mean that they were not struggling.

Among the …

I’m standing here tonight because of John Burke

The young men standing behind me are discussing the forthcoming European fixture. It is European football at a level as far from the Champions League as can be imagined. The opposition will from Slovenia or Moldova. They discuss the safety of making such a journey, presumably they have some concern about Moldova, for Slovenia seems the safest of places.

What would prompt someone to pay hundreds of Euro to fly to a distant spot in Europe to watch a match against a team of whom they have never heard?

The …

Country writing

Today is Bloomsday, it is the annual commemoration of James Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom and his day on 16th June 1904 as it is described in Ulysses.

Moving back to Dublin last year after an eleven year absence, there has been an increasing conviction that perhaps Irish literature should not be classified as such, rather there should be Dublin literature and (occasionally) Irish rural literature. It was a conviction that began whilst walking across a field one day with a farmer of mercurial moods to check there was enough …