Val Doonican, and the Fight for Irish Freedom

Val Doonican did at least as much for Anglo-Irish relations as the Queen’s visit, that spurious rugby game in Croke Park, or the existence in material reality of Roy Maurice Keane, Junior. That fact is not widely known in this country, for different reasons, but it should be. Val Doonican is a hero, in his way, and should be celebrated as such.

Not even Val Doonican’s most ardent admirer could deny that the man was born square. Val Doonican was never cool. The jumpers, the rocking chairs, the songs – Delaney’s Donkey, Paddy McGinty’s Goat – no. There is no hipster willing to carry the charade through to that extent. But, in the long and troubled history of two islands in the North Atlantic, Val Doonican provided a bridge when it was needed.

We know there was huge emigration from Ireland to Britain during the war and after. We sing songs about it all the time. But what was that experience like, really? What was it like for someone who had grown up on the side of a mountain to find him or herself living in a terraced house in Blackburn, Lancashire?

There was a marvellous story in the Bullaí Máirtín collection called Peadaí Gaelach Eile, about a man about to go to London to make his fortune but who finds out just how much of a fish out of water he’s going to be before he even leaves home.

It was hard on that generation. They never liked to speak of it themselves, because it was humiliating for them. The current generation doesn’t like to think of it, because they seem to have trouble conceiving of people who are not themselves.

It’s interesting as well that the literature of those who built up and tore England down after the Second World War seems stronger in Irish than in English. Where are the English language equivalents of the navvying memoirs of Domhnall Mac Amhlaigh or Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé?

Nobody wanted to go on the record about how hard it was to come from rural poverty to a major industrial city. And nobody wants to think about the Irish being considered in England the way the Romanians are considered here. Dirty, stinking, going around in gangs, leaving their rubbish lying around, speaking gibberish, not to be trusted.

And then, in the mid-sixties, one of those dirty, stinking Irish people got himself a variety TV show on prime time with the BBC. He wasn’t dirty. He was very well turned out, always with his hair cut and clean and nice sweater on him. He sang comic songs with a twinkle in his eye.

And maybe, after watching the Val Doonican Show on TV, maybe some Englishman heard his Irish neighbours the next day and detected that trace of Doonican in them. Maybe the way they spoke wasn’t gibberish; maybe it was actually a lot like that chap on the television. I wonder could any of them sing songs as well?

What was Val Doonican worth to the Irish community in Britain in the ‘seventies, when the bombs were going off in Birmingham and Guilford and in the car park of the Houses of Parliament themselves? How reassuring was it for the ordinary British person to hear of Delaney’s Donkey winning the half-mile race after the newscaster had just told them that the IRA had just admitted responsibility for the bombing of another bar, resulting in five killed and seven maimed?

Yes, Val Doonican wasn’t very cool. No, Delaney’s Donkey isn’t quite Carrickfergus. But Val Doonican was, by all accounts, a very lovely man who asked for little from life and brought happiness and security to millions and millions. Very, very few of us will get to say that we we are brought to account on the Last Day. Suaimhneas síoraí na bhFlaithis dó.

Queen Elizabeth's Visit to Ireland: The Father Noel Furlong Connection

Is anybody else wondering just which tourists the nation hopes to attract as a result of the visit of the Queen of the United Kingdoms of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to this slice of a country this week?

At a guess, people who enjoy visiting cities with deserted streets and heavy police presences will flock to Erin’s green shore as a result of this visit. We've read of rings of steel all week, and there were so many Gardaí in high-vis jackets strolling in pairs around Dublin on Saturday evening that one couldn’t help but wonder if there were that many members of Dublin Metropolitan Police on the trails of Dan Breen and Michael Collins back in the day.

As well as a tourism opportunity for those with taste for cities where cops outnumber people, the other purpose of Elizabeth’s visit was to show that we, the Irish nation, have “moved on.” Well, the ring of steel security has fairly knocked that one on the head.

It’s an extraordinary visit where we, the nation, are not allowed to meet our visitor, and anybody who does meet her will be carefully vetted first. If we had “moved on,” we wouldn’t have to lock down the streets of the capital city for the visit of a little old lady.

The streets of that same capital will be thronged the week after for Barack Obama, and not even the “Irish” Anti-“War” Movement are kicking up about that. People will fly American flags in a way that you cannot imagine them flying Union Jacks, or being let fly them.

That contrasts shows exactly how much we’ve moved on. We haven’t moved on at all, and just because people wish it doesn’t make it so. The world isn’t like that.

So who thought a visit from the British Monarch would be a good idea? An Spailpín wonders if the people who talked about “moving on” were just using it as an excuse, and if Elizabeth’s visit isn’t just Castle Catholics – who haven’t gone away you know – finally getting their wish to turn the clock back to before the Solohead Beg ambush in 1919.

People are certainly entitled to aspire to being ruled by a British monarch again, as in the dear old days, and God knows they’ve been out in numbers lately. But what An Spailpín doesn’t think people are entitled to do is put the city on high alert at a cost of many millions to prove something – our having “moved on” – that patently isn’t so.

We haven’t moved on. Not because of any fault on Elizabeth’s part. Elizabeth has been one of her countries greatest ever sovereigns by any measurement, but because of ourselves, because we’ve made such a shocking balls of running the country without help from Westminster. Everything that’s wrong here is our own damned fault.

An Spailpín hopes nothing bad happens the Queen on her visit here. Anybody who picks on an eighty-five year old woman has something the matter with them. An Spailpín also hopes that nobody gets shot in the North in order for as foul a pack of traitors as Ireland has been cursed with (and we’ve had some doozies down the years) to make headlines for their own fully evil and utterly traitorous purposes.

But chiefly, above all, An Spailpín feels deeply sorry for the ordinary people of Ireland, who are getting another kick in the head from their ruling elite. On Saturday, driving through the town and looking at the security in place to enable an occasion for which citizens didn’t ask, have no interest in, will be inconvenienced by and will then be stiffed with the bill, it struck me that the perfect metaphor for where we are now was in an episode of Father Ted called “Hell.”

The Irish nation is the youth group trapped in a horrible little caravan in a horrible little caravan park. All we want is for the suffering to end but we can’t say so because we don’t know how to escape.

The elite who govern us, the muppets who think we’ve moved on and people shouldn’t be negative when they’re hunched over from debt and worry and too much Morgan Kelly, are represented by Father Noel Furlong, the worst kind of trendy priest, dancing jigs and telling us how happy we are, are you happy, isn’t this great, isn’t this wonderful, aren’t we all having such fun? And outside, the rain continues to pour relentlessly down.

God save the Queen? Let God save Ireland first. The Queen, with the greatest respect to her, can paddle her own canoe.