HE SAID HIS NAME WAS LIAM—Liam Farrell—but to me he looked more like Liam the Leprechaun. He was little—very little—with sharp ferret eyes, a purple nose, strangely long and thin fingers, and a definite preference for shamrock green in his clothing. Not a very clean green, in fact a distinctly grubby green, but close enough to traditional leprechaun getup, I suppose.
We met kind of incidentally. I was sitting on one of the benches by the Waterford waterfront wondering which restaurant Anne and I should grace with our presences for dinner when she’d completed her “shopping” (always a mysterious process. Beyond a diminished bank account—I rarely got to see the results of her retailing pursuits. Especially in the clothing area when, if I see her wearing something new, she’ll inevitably respond with a dismissive—“Oh, darlin’, I’ve had this ages…don’t you remember…”). Anyway—next thing I knew, this little man had slid into position beside me and was offering me something that looked like a once-white peppermint now coated in thick pocket-dust.
“Er…no thanks. I’m fine…”
“Oh, I can see that. You’re lookin’ very fine indeed, sir. Are you touristin’ round here then, is it?”
“No, no. We’re driving down to the Beara Peninsula. I’m just about to go and buy a couple of books. On Irish history.”
That was my first mistake.
“Ah—the Beara Peninsula, is it now? Fine, fine choice indeed, sir. One of the finest spots in the southwest. Very…authentic, one might say…very wild. And—well now—that’s a true coincidence…”
“A coincidence? How’s that?”
“Well, y’won’ need ’em now, will y’?”
“What?”
“Y’books. On Irish hist’ry. ’Cause I’m a walkin’ encyclopedia of Irish hist’ry. Y’couldn’do any better than ask me anythin’ about Irish hist’ry.”
“Okay,” I said politely (hoping to get rid of him—and wondering if maybe he was just a few slices short of a full loaf). “I’d like a nice accurate summary of your history.”
I should never have said that.
“Would y’ now—well, d’y’wan’ it fast o’ slow?”
“What?”
“Hist’ry—our hist’ry. The grand hist’ry of our fair land.”
“Well, let’s start with a fast version, and then I’ll flush out the details later when I get the general hang of it.”
“Oh, that y’ll never do!”
“What?”
“Get th’gen’ral hang of it, like y’jus’ said sir. Likely hang y’good self in all the complexities of the whole t’ing.”
“Well—the fast version’s fine for the moment. I’ll leave the big books ’til later.”
“Right y’are then, sir. Very good decision y’made there or I’ll be talkin’ at y’ ’til the fairies pop out with the stars…Not that I’d mind, mind y’, because y’seem like a decent enough fella an’ it’d be a pleasure…”
“Thanks, that’s very nice of you, so…any time you’re ready…”
“Ah, I see y’re a man who gets t’th’point, so t’speak. T’th’ nub o’ things, and I like that. Can’t stand people prattlin’ on about nothin’ an’ never getting started…so much time a’wastin’, don’cha think? So much paddywackery in a lot of the Irish blarney…”
“Yes, I do. So let’s not waste time. Let’s get to the nub and hear your fast version.”
“Ah yes—a man after me own heart y’are, sir. So all right, then. This is how it goes…thousan’ plus years in a nutshell, so to speak. Although, I must admit, I never really understood that nutshell thing. D’y’think maybe…”
“Whenever you’re ready…”
“Ach, y’re a real cracker, sir. Okay, here goes. It seems that after all the great times of legends and the mighty magical worlds that wrapped our little Ireland in shrouds of mist and mysteries…should I tell y’more about that time…before the coming of the Celts…I’ve got some wonderful tales of far off down all the years…tales of our ancient rulers, the Tuatha Dé Dannan, who were defeated by Milesian invaders around 250 BC and went to hide underground and became our fairy people. And all the great stories of that time like Táin Bó Cuailnge—The Cattle Raid of Cooley—or lots of others and Finn MacCool, our great warrior hero, and the Druids…”
“Let’s maybe come back to all that fairy stuff later…”
“Ah, sir—be careful now. You don’t mess about with the fairies—you never know when they’re listening and they’re devilish clever, and cruel when they get upset. Oh yes indeed…”
“Okay, point taken, but let’s start with the coming of the Celts. When was that?”
“Well, they sorta crept in like from around 600 BC. Not like later fast invasions—the ‘casserole of the cultures,’ as they like to call these times. Slowly they got rid of the ancient Stone Age–type tribes, and after St. Patrick arrived in AD 432, they kind of merged their old Celtic and Druid pagan ways with the new Christianity coming over from Rome. ’Course by that time, there wasn’t much of Rome left. The barbarians were flooding in—including a few of the old Asian Celtic tribes, and you’d be right in thinkin’ where the heck was Jesus when he was needed, especially as Constantine had made the Roman Empire Christian! Bit of a letdown there, I’m thinkin’. Anyway, so the Celts settled down nicely as Christians and built churches and monastaries despite what happened later on, they gave the Irish—us—a deep love of language and poetry and mysticism and music and all that good stuff…”
“So what happened later on?”
“I’m comin’ t’that. Don’t rush the storyteller once he’s off and runnin’…”
“Sorry.”
“Right. Well. Anyway, so what happened was that the damned Scandinavian Vikings at the end of the eighth century came roarin’ in. Sailin’ by with their huge boats, pillagin’ and plunderin’ and messin’ up the whole Celtic world here. They were a restless bunch to start with—makin’ off with our women and all the rich stuff from the monasteries—even burning the books our monks had copied from libraries brought over here from Rome, which was in a real mess. Most famous is that Book of Kells in Trinity College Library. Beautiful, beautiful thing. And then there’s that book writ recently—How the Irish Saved Civilization—that tells if it wasn’t for our monks in the monasteries in lonely places here, we’d have lost most of the world’s classical learning. Think of that! Little old Ireland savin’ the whole cultural world! Anyway, the Vikings were a real nuisance and a threat to the Church, so around AD 1169 the pope, who just happened to be English at the time, granted the Anglo-Norman King Henry II—you’ll remember the Normans had conquered England in 1066—everybody remembers that date. He granted him the whole of Ireland as an ‘inheritance’ to protect his churches and whatnot.”
“The pope just gave it to the Normans—despite all the powerful Celts and Vikings still living here?”
“Tha’s right. Jus’ gave it. He was the pope—the big boss! So—when Strongbow the Norman invaded to claim the king’s ‘inheritance,’ it turned out he had a pretty easy time taking over the whole place and building mighty castles and dividing the land up between all his Norman barons. And there’s an old saying that they liked the place so much that they became ‘more Irish than the Irish.’”
“And that was it? The Irish just accepted things…”
“Well, there was a bit of a ruckus when Scotland tried to attack us in AD 1315 and boot out the Normans, and also Richard II, who tried twice in the 1390s to remind the Irish who was boss but made a real mess of things and ended up with only Dublin and the Pale—a small area around Dublin—as his little tiny empire…”
“So the English Normans were booted out?”
“Well, not quite. It looked bad for them for a while, but then Henry VIII, after his break with the Catholic church—you remember, because the pope wouldn’t allow his divorce from two of his wives, well—he and his Protestant church of Englanders came over and grabbed all the land back. And then his daughter Queen Elizabeth I sent in massive armies in the early 1600s, then James I packed Northern Ireland, you know, the ‘six counties’—now called Ulster—with English and Scottish Protestant settlers. And then in came Oliver Cromwell in 1649 and his vicious army, which pretty well wiped out all Catholic power. And, oh God, was he cruel—massacring the population of Drogheda, slaughtering hundreds of women in Wexford, expelling all the Catholics from cities like Cork—just booted them out. I remember my mother’s warnings when I was young—‘Cromwell’ll get you if you’re bad!’”
“Poor old Ireland. What a lousy history.”
“Oh my, sir—I’ve hardly begun! It goes from bad to worse an’ then even worser! Especially when James II was king from AD 1685, and he was Catholic, would y’believe, and tried to be a bit nicer to us, but he got the boot too, and in comes William of Orange with his huge army and smashes us to pieces at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, and then later at Aughrim and Limerick. Then he, William—once again—hands out lands to his most powerful ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ supporters, enforces the terrible penal laws to destroy Catholic power, and right through to the 1850s the Protestants and ‘Orangemen’ fight off rebellion after rebellion—Henry Grattan, the Society of United Irishmen, the ‘White Boys’ and ‘Ribbon Men,’ Daniel O’Connell, and on and on. And then comes the worst thing of all.”
“Let me guess. The great potato famine?”
“Spot-on, sir. Ah, so y’do know a bit of our terrible convoluted turmoil then. Although no one can truly know what a black time that was from 1845 to 1850. They called it Gorta Mór, the great hunger, when almost our whole potato crop failed every year for six horrible years, and well over two million people out of a population of eight million starved to death, or were evicted by Protestant landlords and sent off on emigrant ships to Canada and America. An unbelievable disaster, and all the while our food—grain, cattle, sheep—was being shipped off in the thousands of tons to England to—as they said—‘maintain the economy of Ireland.’ Maintain my bloody…you know what…if you’ll forgive the expression, sir. There was a popular saying at that time—‘God gave us the potato blight but it was the English who gave us the famine.’ While they were glorifying in their world empire, gentrified affluence, and pedigreed aristrocracy, we were trying to stay alive by eatin’ grass and leaves.
“It’s amazing we ever recovered from all this horror, this pernicious scythe of death and human decimation that swept across our poor little nation—but by God we did! Irish emigrants abroad sent money back here to support nationalistic groups like the Fenians, the Manchester Martyrs, and the Land League, all demanding independence and home rule. Except up in Ulster, of course—Northern Ireland—they didn’t want to be split off from Britain, and so they had to battle on and on with Sinn Fein and the IRA.
“And then came the glorious Easter Rising of April 24, 1916, in Dublin, which was actually a bloody fiasco, except that the stupid British executed sixteen ringleaders and made them into instant martyrs. So this was followed by the start of the ‘Troubles.’ First, a two-year war of independence led by Michael Collins—y’ remember him? Very famous. Very popular. Then a peace treaty with Lloyd George, the British prime minister in 1920. But that wasn’t much use. Ulster was still left as a British colony, y’ might say, but a lot of southerners wanted a united Ireland. So what happens? We have another damned war—the Civil War—us fightin’ ourselves, can y’believe, until Eamon de Valera—our taoiseach (prime minister)—says, the heck with it, accept the bloody treaty, we’ll become the Irish Free State and we’ll deal with Ulster later on. And well, y’know that story. Decades of Catholic-versus-Protestant slaughter and bombings up there around Belfast and Derry until today, when we’re a republic and—God willing—the power-sharing peace treaty in Ulster might actually work now. But you’ll notice—I’ve got m’fingers crossed. And that last bit—from Civil War ’til t’day, especially that time they call ‘The Troubles’—has filled a thousand books describin’ the unbelievably tangled shenanigans of politicians and freedom groups and just plain terrorists. I couldn’t even start to give it to you straight. And anyway, you asked fer a fast version an’ that’s what I’ve given you.”
“So that was the fast version then?”
“Fast as I could do it.”
“Well—thank you, and thank God I didn’t ask for the slow one.”
“Aye, well—y’d’ve been here fer another few hours, tha’s fer sure…”
“You must be very thirsty by now.”
“Well—b’jeez at last! I thought I’d never ever hear the offer of liquid sustenance, which I am more than ready to accept, kind sir!”
I FOLLOWED UP ON this brief introduction to Irish history from my diminutive friend in Waterford with far more extensive readings and now wholeheartedly agree with his description of his poor country’s fortunes as “our terrible convoluted turmoil.” One of my favorite must-reads, of course, is the long—very long (in dealing with Ireland how could it be anything else?)—epic Trinity, by Leon Uris. His book generated the full spectrum of reactions from horror to hurrahs when it was first published, but as I came to realize that every resident here has his or her own take on the nation’s history, such discordant reactions were obviously to be expected.
A slightly less contentious nonfiction book by Uris is Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, completed with photographs by his wife, Jill Uris, in 1975, and I use his words to summarize the traumatic fate of this tiny nation:
Over eight hundred years of occupation and four hundred years of intense colonization, Ireland has been cruelly and stupidly administered and her people shamefully persecuted, with every sort of indignity brought to bear. The most wanton penal laws legislated by a civilized western nation (Britain) denied the Irish Catholics every human and material right. In the mid-Nineteenth Century the Great Famine was little more than a subtle, or not so subtle, exercise at “gentlemen’s genocide.” The land had been stripped naked through court intrigues and run red to the sound of clanging armor and bellowing cannon in an epic of boundless bloody greed…This stricken land, a ponderous religion, and a tortured foreign occupation have made it impossible for decades of Irish to exist in their own country…Yet it has become a depository of the folkways of a dozen cultures, the haven of the last great peasantry of the west. All this, mixed in with their own Celtic bizarreness and the deeply practiced mystical aspects of Catholicism, has given them the universal image of “leprechaun people”…They are as warm and lovely as any on earth. Their wit is incomparable. Their use of words and language has enriched life wherever they may have touched it…Through it all a magnificent people have survived with their own identity intact!
I couldn’t say it better myself.
So I didn’t…except to add a celebratory postscript on Ireland’s recent economic and social good fortune after joining the EU in 1972 (previously the EEC—European Economic Community). Once the penurious basket case of Europe, the “Celtic Tiger” has led the whole community for years in booming economic expansion, international business investment, reverse emigration (Irish workers returning home), and “best place to live” appeal. As the popular saying has it—“There are only two kinds of people on this earth—the Irish and those who wish they were”!
The only problem is that when tiny, dilapidated row houses in Dublin sell for well over a million dollars, both groups are finding it harder and harder to afford even the most modest accommodations in the major cities. Nevertheless the momentum of ambition, accretion, and affluence moves this proud nation forward, and you can almost hear the little green leprechauns giggling with delight as they watch all the gold rolling in and the coffers filling and swap tales of the Irish buying up fancy apartments in Manhattan and second homes all along the Mediterranean coast.
Even back in the peasant-poor Middle Ages, poets like Edmund Spenser celebrated Ireland’s enduring charms: “Ah to be sure it is yet a most bewtifull and sweete country as any is under Heaven.”
And today—in celebrating the “Celtic Tiger”—it’s a hearty Sláinte! again, a booming Céad Míle Faílte (“A Hundred Thousand Welcomes”), and this popular blessing too:
Health and long life to you
Land without rent to you
A child every year to you
And if you can’t get to Heaven
May you at least die in Ireland