OBSERVATIONS UPON THE IRISH

Irishmen sometimes refer to the Atlantic Ocean as a lake of tears. Because so many of them have crossed it to the U.S., the Irish are seldom far from the thoughts of Americans. This is particularly true right now. For months, something not unlike civil war has been simmering in Ulster. This is the week of Eire's national elections. If that were not enough, June 16 is Bloomsday. It is a good time to reflect on the ways and woes of the Irish, and TIME asked Novelist Wilfrid Sheed to do so. Sheed is only part Irish (on his father's family's side). But as an English Catholic schoolboy and an American writer of quality (Square's Progress, The Blacking Factory and Pennsylvania Gothic), he has had the opportunity and inclination to observe the Irish, fondly and sharply, for years.

THE only thing that all Irishmen agree about is that you're wrong. In fact, even that statement would probably fetch you a fight in any decent Dublin pub. So before a word is said about the Irish character, let it be stated that very few Irishmen have it. The Irish character, if the truth be told, is a silly joke played on the English, and is only kept around for the sake of the tourists.

Gaelic folk legend is a long chain of deceptions and false appearances--gods turning into dwarfs, dwarfs turning into cats and, above all, beautiful women turning into death-dealing hags. The outcome of these tales was that the gods were usually razzed, the lowly were usually razzed too, and sex was made to look grotesque. Not so different from other people's legends perhaps, except in their very high quotient of mockery; but Ireland's history, or rather the lack of it, has decreed a strange long life to them. The gods turned eventually into English landlords, and later into American tourists; sex remained an object of death and terror; and the put-on was confirmed as the basic Irish style.

Irony is the first resort of the oporessed. Operating out of two languages, Gaelic and English, the lads found they could shoot up a smoke screen of Irish bulls and blarney that no colonial officer could penetrate. Forbidden to write patriotic songs, they wrote love poems to a girl that sounded suspiciously like Eire, hate poems couched as hymns and generally got things so snarled up that they even have to watch each other. (The best Irish talkers have eyes like terriers'.) Gulliver's Travels, the Anglo-Irish classic, is the high point of the two traditions: a folk tale of giants and dwarfs and transformations, and a good ironic belt at English politics. The stage Irishman, or rollicking boyo, which developed later, is really a put-on that lost its way.

Backbiting Capital of the World

Most of the familiar Irish characteristics--which nobody admits to having seen lately--are survivals and distortions from the past. Under the batswing of English protection, Ireland was spared a role in history almost completely. According to the Chinese, this is a blessed state to be in. But the Irish chafed under it. They cursed the English and they cursed themselves--to the point where cursing itself became a distinct Irish art form. "May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may the High King of Glory permit her to get the mange" is a comparatively mild one. The old Gaelic word for satire (der) also meant a spell that caused facial disfigurement and even death. To this day, the Irish play their satire for keeps. Dublin is the backbiting capital of the world. ("If you want an entertaining evening, tell your hosts who you had dinner with the night before.")

Irish religion is also a stubborn holdover. Post-Reformation England wasted several hundred years trying to bring her offshore island into ideological line, in the process hammering Catholicism deeper and deeper into the Irish system. From the victim's point of view, a cosmopolitan religion was an excellent way of trying to get back into the stream of history. Time and again the Irish signaled other Catholic countries for help. The French or the Spanish would send a few ships--like Khrushchev sending his missiles halfway to Cuba--and another rising would fail, until a mood of fatalism set in and the old warlike mockery became heavily larded with cries of lament and self-pity: "Poor Wexford, stript naked, hangs high on the cross,/With her heart pierced by traitors and slaves." The warrior, the lugubrious drunk and the ironist all took up residence in the same skull.

Charm v. Hustle

The Irish have a well-deserved name for being rebellious, but the fight did go out of a lot of them as their land was stripped away and their leaders were killed or exiled; and some of their self-disgust may stem from not having been rebellious enough. A prose-poem called The Parliament of Clan Thomas (circa 1650) derides the peasantry for selling out to Oliver Cromwell and becoming, coincidentally, Uncle Toms. And after the Rising of 1916, the rebels were actually jeered by their fellow citizens. A few of the noncombatants later came to blather a good fight, but far more of them lapsed into political indifference and deeper cynicism, which is why, for some years after independence, this colorful country produced the world's drabbest politics.

Thus, the conservatism exhibited by the American Irish is not such an unaccountable change of spirit as one might suppose. The dispossessed have reason to be cautious, as even Rap Brown must know by now. After roughly 1700, the revolutionary spark in Eire came mainly from Anglo-Irish Protestants more recently arrived, such as Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and Parnell, and from people rich and secure enough to take chances. The English habit of stuffing their problem island with Britons kept backfiring in this way. After a generation or so, the new settlers were Irish themselves, ready for a fresh fight.

Immigrants to Ireland began to form second and third branches of the Irish soul. It was and is not uncommon for Souths and Norths in any land to diverge on the issue of charm v. hustle. But in Ireland the normal geographical split was widened by the nature of the settlers. In Ulster, these tended to be tough Presbyterian Scotsmen, with little taste for England but less for the Pope. Their role in an island without history was to keep the 17th century's religious acrimony and long-faced industry alive and to form a kind of museum for the Protestant ethic. The Scots seldom assimilate anywhere without a struggle, and Belfast is a lot closer to Glasgow than it is to Dublin, especially on a Sunday. It may help to fix the type if you realize that Woodrow Wilson and Field Marshal Montgomery were both descendants of Ulster. Picture these men locked in a small country with a bunch of unreconstructed Gaels and marvel that the place is as quiet as it is.

In the South, settlers were more likely to be Church of Englanders, casual, snotty, talented. Out of them was spun the raffish-gentleman type: Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde. They too stayed as aloof from the Gaelic Irish as space permitted, and the freedom they fought for was their own, not their servants'. Yet compromise came easier to them. To this day, they have no trouble feeling superior even in a minority setup. Such religious passions as they had, in any case, cooled a long time ago. Southera Protestants have shown no manifest sympathy with their hot-under-the-clerical-collar colleagues up North --who according to Pete Hamill, the American-Ulster-man writer, have no trouble feeling like a minority even when they're not.

The history the Anglo-Irish missed includes the whole Industrial Revolution. The wit of Wilde and Bernard Shaw jumps us back over the smokestacks to the English Restoration, when Dublin and London were more like country towns and a man had time to work on his wit. Now the English have stopped exporting clever fellows across the Irish Sea. Yet their dandyish wit lingers in the air, and when it flicks against the grotesque imagery of the Gaels, it sets off one of those wild word-fires, fastidiously phrased, that can sometimes blaze up in pubs and books alike, becoming a fire-storm in the works of Joyce. God knows the Irish will even deny that they're witty, to make a point, and declare that English influence was the ruination of them. But the mixture of humors has given them a literature which--if you phrase the question right--they will admit is not altogether bad.

Every visitor wants the Irish to stay the way they are. But the younger Irish have known for some time that this depends on remaining outside history; that the culture which has been mummified so long, and looks so fresh, may well crumble at the first blast of fresh air. There are parts of it they would not half mind losing, the strengths and weaknesses being so inextricably entwined.

Much of this has to do with the image of sex and death, which presents hilarity on the one side and melancholia on the other. The confusion has been blamed squarely on the Catholic Church, but a country usually gets the religion that suits it. The Irish attitude to sex goes back a long way. Vivian Mercier, in his indispensable book The Irish Comic Tradition, talks of ubiquitous stone carvings depicting a creature called the Sheela-na-gig, half-whore and half-crone, with enormous sexual parts and withered breasts. This would be the same enchantress of ancient legend who, having seduced her victim, turns successively into scalding water, a beast that eats the poor man's head and a dwarf that fastens his hair to the floor and makes him bald. The Irish have been suspicious of marriage ever since.

The impulse was not particularly puritanical, at least in its early stages. There may have been an ascetic tradition in the monasteries, but Irish behavior at wakes, centuries before they had learned to sublimate with Guinness, was so obscene that the chroniclers (unfortunately) blush to describe it. We do know that at some point, a mock priest with a rosary of potatoes round his neck performed a mock wedding. Death and rebirth were usually celebrated together, until sharp poverty came along in the 17th century to make birth a curse, and sex no laughing matter.

With four-fifths of the country owned by Englishmen or their clients after 1662, a small farmer could not afford even to think about sex. Marriage for him was early death. And he clung to a religion that often tended to confirm his caution. The 18th century priests, trained in the flesh-hating Jansenist seminaries of France, gave him the rationale for what he had to do anyway. It was not a specifically Catholic matter. Protestant churches in Scotland and Wales, countries also under the British thumb, were equally repressive.

Thereafter a war of the sexes set in of unparalleled intensity, out of which came one of the great war poems of all time: Brian Merriman's "Midnight Court," written in the late 18th century. In it, a beautiful young woman complains that the men won't marry her, but only have eyes for the rich old hags. An aging husband lashes back: the young girls are tarts, who will sleep with anyone and beggar a man to boot. Not so, screams the woman. A girl's a poor drudge, looking for a little pleasure between childbirths: the husband is simply too old and loveless to provide it. The court decrees a whipping for all bachelors, and the poet wakes up in a cold sweat. There is a thriving Merriman cult in both this country and Ireland, and small wonder.

Official Ireland, the beloved woman of the old patriotic songs has been a special hag to her poets, chasing them and censoring them like a worn-out scold. But that war is nearly over. A middle class, as conventional and tolerant as anybody's, is now growing up in the cities, and the Charm is being taken over by the Tourist Board. Bogus castles, renovated pubs and professional colorful characters may be all that survive of it, unless the Irish pass a miracle that has defeated other folk people and keep the flower without also keeping the dunghill it grew on.

The young Irish today have other things on their minds. For the first time, England has been pushed out of the light, by modern travel, and the European connection can be made. There is strong sentiment for joining the Common Market.

Pessimism may be the last part of the heritage to go. The Irish are leary of hope look at where it got them in the past! But no one under 50 takes refuge in the Patriot Game any more, that truculent dirge over Ireland's glorious failures.

The church that the angry Ulstermen fear so much is a good deal more adaptable than they admit. As soon as the English eased the fierce penal laws in the 1800s, it made its quiet peace with them, and by the 1916 rebellion was a definite anti-revolutionary force. In the '20s, it excommunicated Eamon de Valera for his part in the bloodshed, only to turn up shortly thereafter in full partnership with him.

The Irish will probably go on cursing the clergy anyway, or defending them against curses, long after the occasion has passed. Anticlericalism is too good and old a sport to abandon entirely, and the most devout indulge in it the most gleefully. The Irish bishops ("the 26 Popes") have drawn their covered wagons up around divorce and the Pill. Book censorship gets feebler all the time, and is now at about the same mean level it was in the U.S. ten years ago. The young clergy are far less tempted by politics than their elders--or by clanking displays of power. "They should put the hierarchy and the politicians on one side" one of them told Paul O'Dwyer recently, "and everyone else on the other."

"Who would want to live in this rotten country?" the Irish still ask you. But the lip quivers a trifle (get an Irishman to actually laugh and he concedes a point to you). They are not leaving the way they were; or else they're leaving and coming back, trained and with a stake. To keep the place lively, the government has announced some eyecatching tax breaks for writers and artists. After all, they say to the English, "our ancestors were great scholars while yours were still running around in blue paint." Perhaps the next dream of the ahistorical Irish, besides the usual one of flooding the world with poets, priests and bums, is to become a cultural sanctuary--after other people have returned to wearing blue paint.

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