Liadh Ní Riada Can Win Sinn Féin the Presidency

Sinn Féin can claim an astonishing double-result this autumn if they contest the Presidency. Firstly, they can strike another devastating blow to Fianna Fáil, who were too quick to row in behind a second term for President Higgins. But more importantly, by selecting Liadh Ní Riada as their candidate, Sinn Féin can make a profound statement of nationalism and Irish identity, the kind of which we haven’t heard in at least half-a-century.

Why Ní Riada? Because of who she is and what she represents.

Liadh Ní Riada is the daughter of Seán Ó Riada, the man who saved Irish music from doom in the early 1960s. We have made a bags of many, many things as an independent state among the nations of the world, but two things we have to show for ourselves are our games and our music.

Before Seán Ó Riada, people were ashamed of the music. It was strictly for hicks. What made the difference was the music’s embrace by Ó Riada, because Ó Riada came from the classical tradition. He knew the table settings, as it were.

Ó Riada recognised traditional music’s inherent dignity, and brought it to the concert hall. And people who had thought nothing of the music heard the orchestration of Róisín Dubh that Ó Riada did for Mise Éire and thought: hold on – is that us? To echo Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Irish Nation suddenly realised that this music, which they had considered a joke, poor potsherd, was actually immortal diamond and worthy of admiration all over the world.

Ó Riada founded Ceoltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, from whom came the Chieftains. The Clancys and the Dubliners were the beloved sons of the masses but without the Chieftains the music would have sunk back to obscurity. Instead, it lives, survives and thrives.

Seán Ó Riada himself cannot run for the presidency. He died young, in 1971, two months after his fortieth birthday. But Liadh Ní Riada, in coming where she’s from and in being who she is, can be the avatar of what Ó Riada believed in, an Ireland Gaelic, united and free.

Because what does the President do, really? The office is the vestigial tail of the Lord Lieutenancy. It’s either a retirement home or a springboard to a cushy job in the UN or the Vatican (although that’s not going so well lately).

Perhaps the most important role of the Presidency is in telling us who we are, in being an avatar for the nation. And what better avatar than someone who believes in the causes for which independence was won, at the cost of so much blood?

At a time when it’s so hard to say what it is that makes us different, why Ireland deserves nationhood, why, God spare us, the island should be united under one flag, would it be so bad to return to first principles?

Even if she were not to win, Liadh Ní Riada could do her party some service in landing another kick to the prone body of what was once the mightiest force in Irish politics, the Fianna Fáil party.
Fianna Fáil was once renowned for its profound political sense.

DeValera said he only had to look into his heart to know what the nation was thinking. But that political sense is entirely absent from the party now as it lurches from one disaster to another.

The confidence-and-supply agreement was a good move. But everybody knew it was, to echo a phrase of the past, “a temporary little arrangement”. There was no way it could be long-lasting, because there would come a threshold when such kudos available to Fianna Fáil for putting the country first by supporting a government would all have been gained.

After that, the pendulum swings in the other direction, and Fianna Fáil gets all the blame for being in government, and none of the benefit. Fianna Fáil were always going to pull the plug.

Except they didn’t. Opportunities arose one by one, and passed by one by one as Mícheál Martin steadfastly refused to take advantage. The revelations about the Gardaí making up traffic violation reports was the sort of dream chance that oppositions of other eras requested from Santa in their Christmas letters, and still Fianna Fáil held fire.

And now, it is they who have presented an open goal to Sinn Féin, in a misunderstanding of both the age and the current political situation.

Our is a populist age. It an age of clearing swamps, and giving voices back to the people. It is an age of distrust of the establishment and cosy deals among the members of same.

Not only have Fianna Fáil backed President Higgins for a second term, they have done so absolutely, positively, with no way to back down. With Fianna Fáil now backed into a corner - the last place any sensible politician wants to be -  Sinn Féin can now run a candidate that hits Fianna Fáil in both the head and the guts.

The head, by making Sinn Féin look like a party more interested in what the people think than what is convenient for the establishment. The guts, by fielding a candidate who will be a siren song to the traditional vote of the (once) Republican Party.

Can Ní Riada win? Reader, she can win on the first count. She doesn’t even need to say anything. All they need do is play this at her rallies and the Park is hers. Go n-éirí léi.

Ireland's Failure as a Sovereign State Summed Up in One Photograph

This is a photograph of Coombe Hospital, taken yesterday. You’ll notice two big signs – one on the building itself, and one to the left of the gate.

This is the sign on the wall:

And this is the sign beside the gate:

And what you then notice is that the genitive case of the Irish word for “university” is spelled correctly on one sign, and incorrectly on the other. For “ollscoile” to have been spelled incorrectly on both would have been bad. But for whoever is in the charge of these signs to have two different versions up and either not notice or, worse again, not care that those signs are not the same is symbolic of the way we do things in this country. Badly.

Irish is hard language to spell, for different reasons. It’s a broken language, that wasn’t able to develop its own written tradition due the invader’s attempts to stamp it out. And Irish would be hard to spell anyway, because it’s an inflected language. The spelling of words changes according to what a particular word is doing in a sentence.

However. The existence of the language is one of the strongest reasons for their being an Ireland independent of the United Kingdom in the first place, and the place of Irish as the first language of the state has never been seriously questioned.

In the light of this, for so glaring an error to exist so prominently in so historic a location says a lot about the state, its values, and how its governed. And none of it says is good.

Signage costs money. The wording on those signs should the same – how did they end up getting spelled differently? How did the signmaker not notice? How did the buyer not notice? And most of all, how is it that not one of all the employees going in and out of the place every single day never thought: hold on, those signs don’t match up. One of them must be wrong. Let’s do something about it.

The most likely thing, of course, is that someone has noticed, and the issue went up the line until it met that most important person in any branch of Irish government, Fear an Oighir. Fear an Oighir, or The Ice Man, isn’t the man who gets things done. He’s the very opposite, actually.

Fear an Oighir is that fellow at the end of the line in an escalating problem. He’s the man who can look at a problem, sniff, and decide that nobody around here needs to bother his or her arse with this old shite. Fear an Oighir then opens a special drawer in his desk that is in fact a space-time portal to a cold and bottomless pit, and into the vasty deep goes the issue, never to be seen or bothered about again.

This is what you see on the other side of the street, as you look across from the gate of Coombe Hospital:

A wasteland, in anyone’s language. Prime retail area in a less-than-worthless condition in a city with big problems to do with rent, housing and homelessness. But reader, Ireland is a state that can’t even spell a sign correctly – what chance have we of tacking urban renewal, or climate change, or the end of post-Cold War order?

We yak on about how much the language means to us. What do those signs tell any schoolchild who notices on his or her way to school in the morning? It tells him or her that they’ll never, ever learn how to spell Irish words correctly, but worse again, it tells him or her that it doesn’t really matter, because the whole thing is only a cod anyway. It’s just for show. Nobody’s meant to take it seriously.

Twenty-first Century Ireland faces huge problems requiring profound political skill, vision and no small amount of selfless patriotism on the part of the public in general. But we’re either too lazy or too stupid or too uncaring or too much of some other damn thing to even manage to put up a sign without humiliating ourselves and any aspirations we ever entertained, in harder times than these, for Ireland to finally take her place among the nations of the Earth.

Sky Sports and the GAA

Professor Paul Rouse delivered another scathing polemic against the GAA’s current deal to broadcast games on Sky Sports in the Examiner a week or two ago. One of the points that Rouse makes in his piece is that the Association has failed to explain why the GAA did a deal with Sky having maintained for years that it would not. But it is that much of a mystery, really?

The GAA made a deal with Sky Sports for the same reason that 99% of things happen in the world: money. The GAA wanted the money, Sky were willing to stump up. That’s why it happened.

Some of the objections to the Sky deal are centered on the idea that, by dealing with Sky, the great Irish nation is denied its birthright, the watching of Gaelic Games on television for free. But that birthright isn’t quite as clear-cut as may seem.

There was a time when only All-Ireland semi-finals and finals were shown live on TV. You got an hour’s highlights of that day’s games on the Sunday game for the rest of the Championship and that was your lot. As for the League, forget about it. So the notion of the watching of live Gaelic games on TV being part of what we are is a recent development in the long history of the Gael.

There is also the fact that games on terrestrial TV are not free. They are paid for by triptych of license fee, advertising and taxation. That’s not free. And that’s another significant question that the GAA has to wrestle with.

If the GAA cedes the point that watching Gaelic Games live on television is a birthright of the Gael,that limits the parties with whom the Association can do business in terms of selling the rights to those games. A discussion of business environment in which the Association has to deal was noticeably absent from Professor Rouse’s discussion in the Examiner.

As is, there are three terrestrial entities with whom the Association can deal. There is TG4, the best cultural fit, and the channel that were more than happy to broadcast league games, club games and ladies’ games when neither RTÉ nor TV3 would touch them without climbing into the hazmat suit first. Unfortunately, TG4 has no money relative to the other two and are therefore out of the reckoning. A pity, but a lot of things are a pity in this misfortunate world.

The demise of TV3’s coverage is the elephant in the room in all discussions of the GAA’s deal with Sky. TV3 were the first holders of Sky’s current games package, but that deal was not renewed. Why?

TV3 was (relatively) innovative in its coverage. Matt Cooper wasn’t the most thrilling of hosts but Peter Canavan and Darragh Ó Sé were able to give insights into modern football that are beyond some of RTÉ’s current analysts. Insights that were so good that Sky signed that duo up straight away.

So why didn’t the GAA renew their deal with TV3? Nobody’s ever said, but it’s reasonable to guess that they weren’t offered enough money. And that then presented the GAA with a problem.

If TV3 weren’t going to stump up then the GAA had no option but to take what RTÉ were willing to give them. And that severely limits the GAA’s options, not just in terms of money but also in terms of how they want the games to be presented.

There is a strange inclination in the Irish to settle for a fair amount of old rope from the national broadcaster. While the hurling panel can be good, RTÉ prefers to run a Punch-and-Judy show during football matches instead of the sort of half-time analysis that the people want, if not need. But if RTÉ has no competitor, there’s no way that’s going to change.

RTÉ’s coverage of Gaelic Games is lazy in the extreme. Its highlights show during the League is an edited version of the game that was live on TG4 earlier. Its innovative Sunday radio show, presented by Eoin McDevitt and Ciarán Murphy, got the chop after one summer to be replaced by some zombie horror featuring Marty Morrissey and Brenda Donaghue.

Newstalk came up with the biggest innovation in GAA broadcasting when they started doing live games with having two colour commentators, rather than one. It’s been a revelation to hear the likes of James Horan and Darragh Ó Sé discussing a game, an experience that takes adults back to their childhoods listening to adults in the car breaking down a game afterwards. RTÉ persist with Brian Carthy and Tommy “Tom” Carr. What can you say?

If the GAA do not deal with Sky than RTÉ know they have the Association over a barrel. The GAA can’t let that happen. This is a new multi-media age, and the GAA has to keep up and keep thinking outside the box. To never look past RTÉ is to become as stagnant as RTÉ themselves. With so many other obstacles existing in providing the sort of coverage the games deserve, ignoring Sky on a mistaken point of principle would be an extremely short-sighted and naïve decision.

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.

Responsibility v Truth in the Coverage of the Charlie Hebdo Murders

Montage of the victims from the Daily Telegraph.

Truth can suffer collateral damage when the media tries too hard to be responsible. We’ve seen some of this is in the coverage of the murders in Paris last week.

Many media organisations have gone to pains to stress that the murders have “nothing to do with Islam.” But if the murders have nothing to do with Islam, why did the murderers think that they did?

Anjem Choudray, a British Muslim activist, has made a very articulate (and therefore deeply shocking, of course) case that there is indeed a connection, and that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists pretty much had it coming to them. As he wrote in USA Today, “Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people's desires.”

Choudray elaborated on this in a remarkable interview with Miriam O’Callaghan on Prime Time. Choudray made the case that sharia (Islamic) law is the only law and, had the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists been found guilty of insulting the Prophet in a sharia court, they would receive an automatic death sentence. Therefore, what happened to the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists is only what they would have coming to them anyway in a properly-ordered society.

So who’s correct? Is there a connection between Islam and the murders of the cartoonists or isn’t there? Well, that’s not really for anyone who isn’t an Islamic scholar to say.

Islam is different to Catholicism in that there is no pope – there is no one person who can claim to represent all Muslims. The theological tradition of Islam is not like that of Catholicism. Catholicism teaches that scripture is open to interpretation. Islam teaches that the Koran is of divine origin and contains, therefore, the answer to every question that was ever asked or could be asked.

So, there's nobody with whom to discuss and even if there was, it wouldn't matter because as far as an Islamic pope would be concerned, all questions are answered in the Koran.

This makes dialogue over competing values different, and this is the nub of the problem. The west has no business trying to figure out what Islam is or isn’t. What the west has to figure out is how to find common ground between peoples of a different value system.

And this is where we find out whether the idea of multiculturalism is the way to a bright, new world or whether it is a blind alley from which the west has to reverse and re-orient itself.

The hub of multiculturalism is that, while people appear different, they are all actually the same. They share the same values. Contemporary western values hold that nothing is worth killing for. Anjem Choudray disagrees: “Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them.”

Oil, meet Water. Water, this is Mr Oil.

If the central tenet of multiculturalism is that we are all the same, doesn’t this mean that we are monocultural, rather than multicultural? That culture is no more imbedded in us than a hat, something we can take off and put on as we choose? That there are no such things as separate cultures or beliefs or ways of life?

The media are trying to be noble, in their way, in trying to calm raging waters and not make a bad situation worse by inflaming passions that can only lead to pogroms and more pointless slaughter. But they have a responsibility to the truth too, and making sure that we all know exactly what’s at issue here.

The issue isn’t Islam. The issue is multiculturalism, and just how exactly two radically different cultures can conform to one law, before which everyone is equal, regardless of class or creed. The west has believed that this conforming is possible since the end of the Second World War. Events of the past week and, God help us, weeks to come will test that theory to its breaking point.

FOCAL SCOIR: Richard Dawkins should win an award for tweeting the most bien pensant thought of the week. “Ridicule is the best response, never violence,” wrote Dawkins. “Laugh at them, mock their ridiculous beliefs, do what Charlie Hebdo did. Never use violence.”

Very good in theory, of course. But in practice, when a crack squad of Methodist Militia or the Provisional Pentecostal Army break into your office intent on mayhem and getting set to fill you full of lead, you would be best advised not to say something withering about John Wesley, but rather to shoot them before they bloody shoot you.

Margaret Burke Sheridan - Visse d'Arte

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The birthday of the greatest female singer Ireland has ever produced falls on this Wednesday. She is not a national figure because she was an opera singer, and opera has never been popular in Ireland. It’s a pity though – opera is one of the great achievements in human art, and Margaret Burke Sheridan was one of our own.

Very much one of our own, in fact. Margaret Sheridan was born in a house on the Mall in Castlebar on October 15th, 1889, the fifth child of the postmaster in Castlebar at the time, John Burke Sheridan.

Margaret’s mother died when Margaret was five, and her father died when she was eleven. Effectively orphaned – the Sheridan family don’t seem to have been that close - Margaret was raised to adulthood in the Dominican convent at 19 Eccles Street, Dublin 7, now part of the Mater Hospital. And it was while a student with the Dominicans that Margaret Burke Sheridan discovered that she had a gift.

At the age of nineteen, Sheridan left Ireland to study music at the Royal Academy in London. She was a success, but there was a war on and the opera scene in London was something of a backwater. If you wanted to be a star, you had to go to Italy, where opera is all.

Sheridan went to Rome, and started training again under a teacher called Alfredo Martini. And it was while training that she made the decision that set her path for the rest of her life.

A singer in a production of La Bohème in the Constanzi Opera House (now the Teatro dell’Opera) fell ill while Margaret Sheridan was staying in the Quirinale Hotel. The Quirinale is on the other side of the block from the opera house, and the manager of the opera house had heard Margaret practicing - Sheridan was in the habit of practicing her singing at her open window in the hotel. The manager took a notion, and sent a cable to find out if the nobody wanted to become a star in four days, filling as Mimì in Giancomo Puccini’s beloved opera about young love.

Fantastic, you would think. But it wasn’t that simple. Martini, Margaret’s teacher, was dead set against the idea, and for reasons that are do with what makes opera such a challenging art form.

The singing that we do in the shower or when loaded with porter is a natural ability. Sometimes the singing isn’t too bad, sometimes it’s wretched – it’s down to accidents of birth.

But the singing done by opera singers isn’t at all natural. Yes, there are natural voices, but they have to be meticulously trained, not only to make sweeter, richer sounds, but to be able to make those sounds on demand, consistently, for show after show, for performance after performance.

Margaret Burke Sheridan had a natural gift. But she wasn’t yet fully in control of her voice. She could sing, but she couldn’t sing in such a way that she could guarantee her singing wouldn’t impair her ability to sing in future. That’s how severe operatic singing is – if you don’t know what you’re doing, you are in danger of destroying your voice every time you open your mouth.

On the other hand, Sheridan had been living off the kindness of strangers since her father died. Different benefactors had invested in her talent, but it’s not the same as making your own money. And opportunities to sing a major role in a major theatre don’t come along every day. What use was there in completing her training if she were to have a perfect instrument but nowhere to sing? Besides; she could always go back and finish up her training, couldn’t she?

Sheridan made her choice. She sang Mimì in Rome on February 3rd, 1918, and instantly became a star. Even today, Italians don’t always take to foreigners singing Italy’s national art form, but they couldn’t resist Sheridan.

For twelve years she ruled the operatic stage, something John McCormack could never do. Margaret Sheridan sang in London, Naples, Monte Carlo and Milan, and was acclaimed by all. And then, after a performance as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello at Covent Garden in June, 1930, she never sang again.

She tried to, of course. At first, she would claim a cold or a chest infection and pull out of performances, in the fashion of primas donnas. But as the years went by it became clearer that she would never return to the stage. Alfredo Martini had been right. Without the proper grounding and technique, Margaret’s talent was a castle built on sand. It would last for so long but it was always doomed. And when the doom arrived, there would be no way to rescue it.

Sheridan was still a star. She was offered concert recitals – the form that made McCormack a household name and a very wealthy man - but she turned them down. As far as Sheridan was concerned, it was opera or nothing. Opera isn’t just the singing – it’s the acting, the music, the performance, the whole. To just sing without the rest of opera’s heady mix would be like drinking black tea. It just wasn’t the same.

Sheridan turned a brave face to the world, but the remaining thirty-odd years of her life were tough on her. She came back to live in Ireland but we are not a great nation for accepting our countrymen and countrywomen who have had success abroad.

But Margaret Sheridan was generous to the next generation, and did what she could for them. In her definitive biography of Sheridan, Anne Chambers writes of a Feis Ceoil winner, Phyllis Sullivan, who was tutored for a time by Margaret Sheridan.

Sullivan recalled Sheridan as being temperamental, but never mean. If Sullivan made a mistake, Sheridan would sing the line properly herself (while always avoiding high notes). Sullivan asked Sheridan why she didn’t sing in public anymore.

“My voice is finished,” replied Sheridan. “It’s all right singing for you, darling, but I would break on my top notes and I am nervous.”

Margaret Burke Sheridan died on April 16th, 1958, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. The back of her headstone reads “Margherita Sheridan, Prima Donna. La Scala, Milan. Covent Garden, London.” Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam uasal.

In Defence of John Waters

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Martin Callinan’s was not the only high-profile exit from Irish public life in recent weeks. After twenty-three as a columnist with the Irish Times, John Waters is moving on.

Why should we care? We should care because Waters has been one of very few voices in the national media to reflect rural concerns, to speak in a recognisably rural voice and to stubbornly refuse to fit in. That stubbornness has cost him and whether he was right to take some of the stands he did is a broader question. But when at his best John Waters wrote about concerns that were addressed nowhere else in the media, and for that his absence should be mourned.

If he never wrote anything before or since, John Waters should be remembered in Irish letters for his 1991 book, Jiving at the Crossroads. Books that accurately describe the Irish rural experience are by no means common. John McGahern is the most talented novelist to write about rural Ireland, but there is no denying that McGahern’s work is unrelentingly bleak, and maybe McGahern is missing some shading there. Now, in the 21st Century, Dónal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart is a source of true joy to those who like to see the Ireland they know in the novel form.

In prose, Waters’ great forefather and inspiration was a man who wrote in these very pages, Charlestown’s John Healy. Jiving at the Crossroads has a chapter devoted to Healy, and Healy’s efforts two generations ago to remind the Dublin political establishment that actual people lived in the west of Ireland, and that Connacht wasn’t just some sort of wasteland of bog and snipe grass.

Jiving at the Crossroads is John Waters’ homage to John Healy. The book’s opening is a perfect description of what it was like to be young in rural Ireland in the 1980s. Seán Doherty had just been appointed Minister for Justice, and was being hailed as a conquering hero on his return to his home town.

Waters was not part of the reception committee. He and his friend watched the homecoming from a van in the distance, while listening to Bruce Springsteen singing Darkness on the Edge of Town on the van’s stereo.

And that’s it. That’s being young in rural Ireland in a nutshell. Looking at things going on that you want to escape from, while Springsteen sings on the radio about the land to which you want to escape, about the dream of riding out tonight to case the Promised Land, as The Boss himself put it.

And then, as the book’s narrative moves through the 1980s, Waters realises what we all realise, one way or another. Home might not be the Emerald City in the magical land of Oz, but not many places are. And for all the faults home has, there are a surprising number of places that are worse.

And that’s Waters’ narrative. The struggle to escape from home. The escape, and the realisation that the place into which he wanted to escape never really existed. And then, the struggle to return home, and to match the two parts of the story, where someone is from and where someone is going, into a coherent whole.

Through it all Waters’ personal story is mixed with the national story of the early Haughey years. But the national politics thread of the book isn’t about the specificity of Haughey and that time. It’s about the generality of Irish politics, the sharp divide between rural and urban (meaning Dublin only, by the way) concerns, and the fact that Irish politics is reported in a way that does not reflect how it’s talked about on the ground.

It’s always a source of disquiet for the Dublin establishment when it’s challenged on its bias and Dublin-centrism. But that the bias exists there is no doubt.

When Brian Cowen was elected Taoiseach, Derek Davis remarked on the radio that the Dublin media never understood Albert Reynolds and neither would they understand Cowen. How true that turned out to be.

When Albert Reynolds was Taoiseach, an Irish Times columnist sneered that “running a country isn’t like running a dance-hall in Rooskey.” Another Irish Times columnist described Brian Cowen’s Tullamore homecoming as being like “a country wedding.”

Reader, do you get the feeling sometimes that there are people who can’t quite believe that a Mayoman is Taoiseach? It’s not paranoia. Enda Kenny’s Irish has been criticised by people who do not themselves speak Irish. This, surely, is the ultimate instance of the Dublin media monkey eating its own tail.

Waters was the man who called the Dublin-centric media out. It was Waters who pointed out that building a bullet train from Sligo to Dublin would do wonders for the North-West, but a bullet train would never be built because there was more money in rezoning land in Lucan. It was Waters who fought a lonely battle for fathers’ rights. It was Waters who was the long-haired prophet, crying in the wilderness that the Emperors have no clothes.

Did Waters ever put his foot in it? Yes, he surely did. Waters wrote columns and took positions that were hard to understand – a one-man crusade against parking charges in Dún Laoghaire, an extraordinary paean to a model who died of a drug overdose. But then, which of us are perfect? Which of us has never backed the wrong horse, or loved the wrong thing?

Has Waters’ latest row proved his last? Who knows? Waters has certainly become a hate figure for some people who disagree with some of his views and the current standard of Irish debate seems to prefer attacking the advocate rather than the argument. That’s someone else’s fight. What this column is sure of is that rural Ireland needs a loud, clear and articulate voice, and that John Waters’ was that voice for more than twenty years. Who now will speak for the West in his absence?

Welcome Back, Kate Bush

Over the past weekend, you may have noticed people of taste in your circle grinning foolishly for no apparent reason. There is always a reason, of course, and in this case it’s more than likely because the people of taste in your circle have suddenly remembered that Kate Bush has announced that she will perform her first series of live shows in thirty-five years – thirty-five years! – towards the end of this summer, and cannot keep a lid on their happiness.

These are bleak times for music. Every generation seems a paler and paler imitation of the one that went before, and modern marketing produces records of such carefully-honed and deeply cynical soullessness and inhumanity that the old moon/June rhymsters of Tin Pin Alley seem as fearless chroniclers of the human condition in comparison.

And then there is someone like Kate Bush. When a modern – what? Singer? Performer? Personality? Is there even a noun for them? – writes his or her best-ever three minutes of music, he or she still can’t see Kate Bush on her very worst day in the far distance. The word “genius” is overused in our culture – in Bush’s case, it’s faint praise.

Pop songs are of their age. They bear their date like a carton of milk and stay fresh for about as long. Morrissey could only have been created by the British society in the ‘eighties. That’s why he’s such an embarrassment now.

Great music transcends that. Norwegian Wood could have been written tomorrow, and it would still sound like nothing else. The first time I heard Nick Cave’s Into My Arms I nearly crashed my car. Riders on the Storm sounds like nothing else. Heroes. There’s a lot of them.

And there’s no small amount of them created by Kate Bush – “written” is too limiting a word. David Bowie experimented with different genres – Bush is her own genre. You hear one of her songs and you know, instantly, that can only be Kate Bush.

Bush’s ideas come from somewhere known only to herself, and perhaps she herself doesn’t even know. There are esoteric theories of aesthetic creation that posit art is sometimes independent on the artist, that in the case of truly great art the artist is more a conduit than a creator.

Who knows? All we can be sure of is that nothing has ever sounded like Wuthering Heights or Running Up that Hill or any of the others.

She’s not too shabby at singing other people’s songs as well. Bush didn’t write Don’t Give Up, her mid-eighties duet with Peter Gabriel, but she owes it. It’s been written that Gabriel was generous in giving Bush the chorus parts of the duet, but it could be that he had no choice. When you sign a genius, you don’t have her singing backup.

Kate Bush’s version of Peadar Ó Doirín’s Mná na hÉireann is no less beautiful, and her Irish pronunciation should put some recent performances of Amhrán na bhFiann to shame (Brian Kennedy and Nadia Forde, named and shamed).

Hounds of Love is Kate Bush’s greatest album. Because she was so young when Wuthering Heights was released in 1978, by 1985 people began to think she was all-washed up. Her only attempt at touring in 1979 was a disaster, the records released in the early part of the decade didn’t do well, early fame is difficult to maintain.

And then Hounds of Love came out and it sounded like something coming through from another dimension. The drum-machines and synthesizers give the record an ‘eighties flavour, but there’s nothing ‘eighties about its sensibility, scope or ambition. It is astonishing, an expression of a genius at the height of her powers.

Also, the second side is unlistenable, which is something to consider about the upcoming concerts. John Lennon, for all his other faults, was correct in his assessment of the avant-garde, and some of Bush’s work is … challenging. It’s also highly unlikely that she’s do a greatest-hits show in Hammersmith, to send the punters home whistling. That’s not really in her nature.

But here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter a damn. Kate Bush has earned the right to do what she wants. Shy by nature, life hasn’t always been easy on her and the evil of contemporary fame hasn’t sat well with her. When she received a CBE from Queen Elizabeth last year, she made a point of having no interaction with the British media at all. This gives lie to the notion that the woman is nuts; making a point of avoiding the British media is not the act of someone who doesn’t have the head screwed on.

Bush’s own reclusiveness is the best thing about these shows. For many people they will be occasions of tremendous joy but, hopefully, for none more so than Kate Bush herself, who has earned joy over and over and over again.

And now, as a treat, here’s Kate Bush singing – or, more correctly, performing – the Elton John song Rocket Man on Wogan in the late 1980s. Leonard Cohen said once that the sign of a really great cover was that it transformed the song without actually changing it. For Elton John, it’s just another piano ballad. For Bush – well; you decide.

The Island of Sheep and Suckers

What’s more depressing about the #IrelandInspires video that’s so popular currently on You Tube? The very fact of its being there, or the fact that people seem to be taken in by the thing?



Hasn’t anybody read the titles on the film? Does anybody think about what those titles are saying, or what a strange way this is for Bord Fáilte – of all state bodies – to communicate? Or, in an age of six-second attention spans, is this the 21st Century’s iteration of Juvenal’s bread and circuses – the distractions that keep the masses entertained while the Government does what it damn well pleases?

The viewer who has learned the price of naivety the hard way starts getting suspicious when he or she notices that #IrelandInspires has miscounted the Irish Oscar winners who were born here (as opposed to being Irish), and the number of Irish Nobel laureates (ten, not nine, by my count).

OK – we Irish aren’t known for being smart, are we? How would we be able to count anything other than potatoes? But all bets are off when #IrelandInspires gets to its piece about Italia ’90.

The summer of the 1990 World Cup was definitely a turning point in the nation’s history. But that watery line about Bonner suggests that the people who made the #IrelandInspires video don’t truly understand the importance of that World Cup, and that’s unforgivable in a film that is meant to celebrate Irishness.

Con Houlihan, God have mercy on him, said that he was disappointed to have missed Italia ’90, having been in Italy at the time. That’s the kernel of what happened during the 1990 World Cup.

The 1990 World Cup is significant because, for the first time, it gave Irish people a sense that we had just as much right to the world stage, to the best things in life, as anyone else. That there was to be no more doffing of caps or tugging of forelocks before our betters. Without Italia ’90, could there have been Roy Keane? Without Roy Keane, could there have been Brian O’Driscoll? That’s the significance of Italia ’90. Italia ’90 made the Irish believe in themselves.

What film clip should #IrelandInspires have used instead of Bonner? John Healy, a big, fat, bald man, the greatest journalist of his generation, weeping with pride after Ireland won that game against Romania. You’ve seen it on Reeling in the Years, and you can now see it every week on TV – it’s part of the Second Captains opening sequence.

The Second Captains know Healy weeping sums up Italia ‘90. Why don't these lemons?

And why is #IrelandInspires so taken with the dismal science of economics? When Leonidas and his three hundred guarded the Pass of Thermopylae against Xerses and the Persians, did he inspire his men by quoting Sparta’s year-on-year GDP? When Wolfe took Quebec, did he inspire his men by telling them that house prices in Montreal had show year-on-year increases for six consecutive quarters, when adjusted for inflation? No, he did not. Wolfe recited Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard instead, and said he’d sooner have written that poem than win the coming battle. Wolfe was a man.

There is no poetry present in #IrelandInspires, but economic detail is packed into every minute. “Ireland’s the first Eurozone country to successfully exit an economic assistance program,” trumpets #IrelandInspires. Which means – what, exactly?

That Ireland is the first of the Fort Knox bullion robbers to get time off for good behaviour? That Ireland is the first husband on the street to stop beating his wife? That Ireland is the first cook to see the advantage in removing the egg from the boiling water with a spoon, rather than his fingers?

Besides. What is all this economic material doing in a Bord Fáilte video? 1,033 companies choose Ireland as their European base? Ireland has the most adaptable – whatever that means – workforce in the world? What’s any of that got to do with going on your holidays? Shouldn’t that be in an IDA video? When you buy your Rough Guides or Lonely Planets, do you see much mention of the adaptability of the workforce in Corfu, or the quality of scientific research in Marbella?

And why does Haiti get a mention, of all places? It’s four thousand miles away. Are there long and historic ties between Ireland and Haiti? Of all the disadvantaged countries in all the world, why choose Haiti?

#IrelandInspires tells us “our culture and music have reached the world,” while showing performers performing the ancient and traditional Irish art of fire-eating. #IrelandInspires was published during Seachtain na Gaeilge. Any mention of the first language over the three minutes? God between us and small farms.

Seventy-one years ago today, in his St Patrick’s Day address to the nation, Taoiseach Eamon De Valera said “the Ireland that we dreamed of  … [was of] a people who … devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit.”

#IrelandInspires isn’t buying any of De Valera’s old blather, whoever De Valera was. Getting time off for good behaviour when we’re caught with our hands in the cookie jar is inspirational now. Not having any understanding of the tide of history, not just long-term history, but the history of the current generation, is inspirational now. And most of all, the Ireland that we dream of has an eager willingness to lie down with every single multinational that pulls into the quay, without ever stopping to wonder what will happen when the multinationals move on to the next service provider.

At the last election we were told that the crisis would damn a generation. Now, three years on, we’re all on the pig's back? Who’s fooling whom this St Patrick’s Day, Ireland? Who are the eejits here?

Being from Mayo is Just Great

The Palace Bar, Fleet Street - the south-western
corner of the Mayo triangle, September 21st, 2013.

First published in the Western People on Monday.

These are days of magic and wonder in the county Mayo. It’s not always obvious to us, just as it’s not always possible to see the wood from the trees when we’re in the wood. But in time, when the world has turned a little more, and the young have grown up and the old have passed on, it’ll be clear as crystal to those who can look back just how great these recent years have been.

Twenty years ago next summer, the Leitrim Observer was the butt of some cruel jokes when that newspaper published a map of Dublin with directions to Croke Park prior to Leitrim’s 1994 All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin. Ho, ho, ho, thought the bigshots. God love them down in Leitrim, lost in the big city.

But it hadn’t been so long since Croke Park was a mystery to the County Mayo as well. It took twelve long years between 1969 and 1981 for Mayo to win the Nestor Cup, and the win over Tyrone in 1989 was Mayo’s first summertime win in Croke Park in thirty-eight years. Cities change a lot in thirty-eight years; we could have printed a map ourselves, and found it useful.

Now? Now, the people of Mayo know Croke Park as well as we know Croagh Patrick – backwards. We know where to park, where to eat, where to stay, where the good seats are, why it’s not wise in an age of austerity to buy from the concession stands inside or from the hats, flags and headbands men outside. We can spot a ticket scalper from fifty paces, and a man with a spare ticket from one hundred. We meet the same faces in the same places, tell the same jokes and dream the same dreams.

And we’re dreaming yet, of course. The ashy taste in the mouth come five to five on those third Sundays is something we could do without, and you can read better informed opinion on the finer points of the football side of things in the sports pages. But on the social side of things, on the cultural side of things, on what it means to the people of Mayo, at home and abroad – these are days of magic and wonder.

By the time August rolls around, three quarters of the counties in Ireland have resigned themselves to watching the Championship on telly, with no shouting interest. Not us. Mayo are consistently in the first division of the League, and consistently in the final eight of the Championship for the past twenty years. How many other counties can say that? How many other counties carry their banners to the capital, year after year, summer after summer?

For who knows what reason, the stars seemed to align on the Saturday night before the All-Ireland this year. There are two approaches to the All-Ireland Final always – either have a settler or two at home and travel up in the morning, or travel up on Saturday and do your settling in the city on Saturday night.

As your correspondent is currently exiled in the city, this isn’t an issue. Normally, the plan is to have one or two in town and then get home at a Christian hour, the better to rest for the trials ahead. This column made the same plan this year – town, few pints, home on the last bus.

But, for whatever reason, there was something happening in Dublin city that night. Something Mayo. Thanks to the Mayo GAA Blog, the best Irish sports resource on the world wide web bar none, it’s become a thing to assemble in a bar called Bowe’s, on Fleet Street, just south of O’Connell Bridge, before big Mayo matches. And on this particular night, it seemed like everybody in the county was in a transplanted Mayo triangle, formed by O’Connell Bridge, Bowe’s on the eastern side of Fleet Street and the famous Palace Bar to the west.

In Bowe’s, I met my cousin’s daughter, a child in my mind, a clever, chic and sophisticated young woman in reality. In the Palace, I met another cousin, home from Northampton for this most Mayo of events.

We sometimes forget how big Mayo is, and what a distance there is from north to south, from east to west. On that Saturday night, the plain of yews seemed to shrink to that one triangle in the capital, as we compared townland pronunciations, memories of past teams and dreams of the future.

After the disappointment of the All-Ireland Final, Keith Duggan wrote in the Irish Times that it isn’t that Mayo people don’t care about football; it’s that we care too much. And Duggan had a point, up to a point.

We do care too much. Football in Mayo isn’t just football. It’s everything we were, are, and hope to be. Everything that has gone wrong in our lives, everything that we regret, everything that we wish for, is wrapped into the fabric of the jersey that features the green above the red, and that’s an awful lot of weight to carry in one jersey in any one year.

And when Mayo do with their fourth All-Ireland we’ll find that it hasn’t solved everything. That regret is still real, that what’s done can’t be undone, that not all wishes come true. But when that small disappointment subsides, we’ll realise that what we want is what we had all along – the togetherness of it all, the adventure, the having something to look forward to all summer, the camaraderie under the green and red flags and banners, and the heady and thrilling pride of being from such a place as the sweet County Mayo.

Happy Christmas, one and all, and especially to yet another cousin whom I met high up with the eagles on the big day itself and who told me he enjoyed the column. See you next year, Mike. Up Mayo.

Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor is a Triumph for Steven Moffat

Steven Moffat was set no small task on Saturday night. Love it or hate it, Doctor Who is now a flagship BBC property, and worth many, many millions of dollars to the Corporation. The 50th Anniversary Special wasn’t just written for the Doctor Who fanbase – it was written for the broader sci-fi market of America, where the real money is to be earned (hence dollars as the correct currency of measurement).

In writing the 50th Anniversary Special, Moffat had to keep the fanbase happy, impress the Yanks and turn around two years of under-achievement with the franchise, which have been a letdown compared to the promise Moffat showed when he was appointed showrunner in the first place.

Moffat did all that, and more. People sometimes think writing is just pretty prose. It’s not. Without a plot, it all falls into the void. The Day of the Doctor was a tour-de-force plotting performance on Moffat’s part, and a supreme exposition of the screen-writer’s art.

Moffat faced three particular and peculiar challenges, any one of which could have broken another writer. It is to Moffat’s supreme credit that he overcame all three.

The Huey-Dewey-Louie Problem
In his book Hype and Glory, screenwriter William Goldman recounts a problem faced by a friend of his who was a scriptwriter on Charlie’s Angels. It seems the Angels, like all actors, were acutely conscious of billing, and kicked up blue murder if they thought one of their number was getting more lines than the other. That led to ridiculous dialogue where the writers had to make sure that each Angel got an equal amount of speaking time.

So, instead of having one Angel say “I’m going down to Tesco’s to get a box of teabags and a pint of milk,” Kelly would announce her intention to go to Tesco for teabags, Sabrina would tell her to make sure it’s Lyons’, and Jill would remind her not to forget the milk. Equal dialogue for Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Moffat had the same problem. He had three leads – three Doctors who are the same person and yet subtly different. He didn’t have clear delineation of character, but he did have three actors as capable of munching scenery as anyone out there if not kept on the bridle. And Moffat succeeded against the odds – each Doctor was able to co-exist, perform and not crowd the others out.

The Timey-Wimey Problem
Time-travel will never be possible. The potential paradoxes are impossible to resolve in reality. But time travel is always interesting in science-fiction, because it allows us to wonder: what if? What if Hitler won the war? What if John F Kennedy hadn’t been shot?

The problem of writing time-travel science-fiction is in dealing with the paradoxes – following each paradox through to its logical conclusion. This is what made Blink, the Doctor Who episode that really announced Moffat’s genius, so good. The paradoxical elements of Blink fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Moffat was less successful in the expanded River Song story that dominated the season before last, as the plot never quite clicked open and closed as it had in Blink.

The Day of the Doctor isn’t quite as complex as Blink, but there are many paradoxes to be resolved through the three strands of the story – the contemporary, the Elizabethan and the Time War. Moffat tied them all together beautifully in a way that, like all truly great stories, that is both inevitable and unexpected. This was triumphant plotting on his part.

The Gallifreyean Problem
Russell T Davies, Moffat’s predecessor as Doctor Who showrunner and the man credited with much of the modern Doctor Who’s success, made a big decision at the start of that process – possibly bigger than he realised at the time. Because Davies found the Doctor’s essential loneliness an interesting part of the character, Davies decided that he would make the Doctor lonelier still by wiping out the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey.

The problem with that is that it leads to a considerable hostage to fortune as regards future stories – it’s not easy to churn out plots, and by wiping out Gallifrey Davies had denied himself a very rich potential source. Davies was always more of a soap-opera writer than a science fiction writer and either didn’t realise or wasn’t bothered by the problem of the fall of Gallifrey – his own plotting and frequent resorting to alakazam! solutions would suggest the latter.

Moffat, however, is a science-fiction writer and must have known for some time just how important the return of the Time Lords must be. (It would be interesting to find out just when Moffat started plotting The Day of the Doctor – many years ago would be a sensible bet). Because he is a science-fiction writer, Moffat knew that Control-Z wouldn’t cut it, and for him to solve the Time Lord problem just when the series needed a barnstormer for its 50th Anniversary is a breathtaking achievement.

It had been reasonable to assume that Moffat’s attention towards Doctor Who was distracted by his writing of Sherlock, Doctor Who’s blood relation as an archetype. Sherlock has been superb, and Moffat’s Who started falling off as Sherlock thrived. The Day of the Doctor dispelled all fears that the madman in the box is in danger of being neglected. The BBC will be booking convention at Comic-Con in Las Vegas for many years to come, and Moffat deserves no small credit for that. I hope he gets a raise.

Paradise in the Picture Houses

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Bond: Not such an eejit after all

The first film I remember seeing in the cinema was called The Wilderness Family. I loved it. It was the 1970s and the idea of nature and wilderness was iconic at the time, what with the oil crisis and all that.

John Denver was singing about Rocky Mountain Highs on the radio and the big hit show on TV was a thing called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. James Adams was unjustly accused of murder by John Q Law and went off to live deep inside the forest with no-one for company except a great big bear called Ben and a man called (appropriately enough) Mad Jack who used to name his donkeys numerically. He had got as far as Number Seven by the time of the show.

There were no bears in the county Mayo at the that time – although I grant that there may have been a few Mad Jacks – and it all seemed so exotic, even on an old black-and-white Pye television set. As such, the chance to see that same wilderness on the big screen of the Savoy Cinema on Tone Street, just down from the current location of the Western People offices, was impossible to resist.

While Grizzly Adams had his troubles during the cowboy era of US history, the Wilderness Family was contemporary to 1970s concerns. But it was close enough, and 100 years is small change in the lives of mountains. If I sat down to watch the Wilderness Family now, it might not seem so magical, but it’d be a mistake to try. Wonder is always at its height during childhood, as it should be.

The Savoy is long gone, leaving not a wrack behind, but in the 1970s it was not the only cinema in Ballina. There was also the Astoria, an old-style cinema and even more wondrous than the Savoy.

Two reasons for this – firstly, there were huge iron gates on the front of the premises, trellised gates that opened and closed like an accordion instead of swinging on hinges. Those gates made a certain impression on duffle-coated eight-year-olds whose imaginations would immediately conclude that those gates were all that stood between the county Mayo and all sorts of Scooby-Doo villains. Many times I piously reflected that it was the grace of God that they were locked away inside there and not roaming the countryside and causing RTÉ to extend Garda Patrol in the light of the special emergency.

Secondly, the Astoria had a balcony. Watching Christopher Reeve’s Superman from the balcony made it feel that you were up there in the air with him, flying around Metropolis (although why he wasted his time with that girl, Lois Lane, was an utter mystery).

The Astoria is long gone now. The Savoy stuck it out for a longer time, with two new movies every week. There were only two channels on that Pye TV set and the Savoy represented a doorway to a different, wholly exotic life that seemed a million miles away from the mean streets of an Irish market town. Every day coming home from Scoil Padraig I’d stop to stare at the posters before dropping into Keohane’s to stop and stare at the no-less-exotic comics.

It’s funny what sticks in your mind. I can vividly remember staring at the poster for Smokey and Bandit, a 1970s comedy starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field and Jackie Gleeson. Everything Reynolds touched turned to cinema gold then.

I remember the poster for the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, where Bond is framed by the extremely long and toned legs of a lady. I wasn’t as bothered with Scooby-Doo at that stage, and thought that Bond, English though he may be, might not be such a fool after all.

The cinema comes into its own for teenagers, as it fulfils two vital teenage social necessities. The first is the intense need to get out the house and meet your friends when you have very little money to spend. And the second is that burning need to spend quality time with that special someone that is counterbalanced by the horrible dread that, the more time he or she spends with you, the more likely he or she is to realise what a drip you are and not at all worthy to lace his or her sandals.

Not only do you not have to talk during a movie, it is positively rude to do so. You only have to sit there. The only slight problem is what movie to go and see in the first place.

For the middle-aged people reading this who grew up in the 1980s, there were only two movies. If you were a boy, it was Top Gun, and if you were a girl, it was Dirty Dancing.

Top Gun is a movie about US air force pilots, and which of them is the best at flying a fighter plane. I have no idea to this day what Dirty Dancing is about but I’ve been told that its principle message is that one should never put a baby in a corner. Sensible advice, but hard to see how it took them two hours to get it across.

The new cinema opened and closed on Convent Hill during my own time away from Ballina. I heard it was an excellent place, but not enough people went to see films there for it to survive. And then I read in last week’s paper that the cinema is to return, and gave a little whoop for joy.

Even in this age of Netflix and torrents and You Tube and blue-ray DVDs there’s still something magical about the dark of the cinema, and the light above your heard shining onto the screen and maybe, on the really good days, someone nice next to you. You’re not talking, but at least you’re there, the two of you, together. Sometimes that can feel like paradise too.

Singing Mayo Songs

First published in the Western People on Monday.

A friend of the column once told me that the real reason Mayo don’t win All-Irelands is because we don’t have songs. He is from Tipperary, and the memory of Pat Kerwick singing the Galtee Mountain Boy in the Hogan Stand when Tipp beat Kilkenny in 2010 won’t be soon forgotten by anyone who was there to hear it.

However. It is not true to say that Mayo has no songs. Of course we have songs. Our problem is that we are disinclined to sing them.

In some ways, it’s a general Irish thing. We don’t care for being noticed. So at matches, whether GAA, rugby or soccer, we are inclined to sing the anthem sotto voce, in a way that can barely be heard. This contrasts with the French, the Italians or, most impressively, the Welsh, who belt out their anthems con brio, and more luck to them.

Whatever about the national situation, it could be the thing in Mayo that we are inclined to be sheepish when it comes to singing because of the long tradition of being downtrodden in the county. It started with Cromwell and continued all our lives with the idea that the motto of the county was Mayo, God help us. Not the best of banners to bring into battle.

But the times are changing a little. A generation ago, Croke Park was a stadium for other counties to play football or hurling, while Mayo couldn’t get out of Connacht. Now, it’s as familiar to the Mayo fans as McHale Park, while St Jarlath’s Park, Tuam, a torture-chamber for the guts of half-a-century, means nothing. Not every change is a bad thing. Wouldn’t it be nice if, when Mayo take on Tyrone this weekend, we could do a bit of singing when we’re at  it?

But what to sing? The Sawdoctors’ Green and Red of Mayo is the people’s choice, despite Croke Park’s interesting decision after the Donegal game to play the N17 instead. But while it’s lovely and those booming chords are suitable for stadium rock, all proper Irish singing is done in more cosy venues, such as pubs, taverns and westward-bound buses. Without the guitars, the Green and Red of Mayo is something of a dirge.

The greatest song ever to come out of the County Mayo is Cill Aodáin, by Raifteirí. Brian Cowen, a great supporter of Irish, quoted it when declaring the 2011 election, which was about happy a moment as that unhappy man enjoyed in his Premiership.

Although a Mayoman by birth, Raifteirí spent much of his life in Galway. Cill Aodáin is the song he wrote about going home in the springtime, when nature begins to bloom and everything is looking lovely. The song lists what he’s looking forward to on his journey home and ends on a magnificent crescendo, where Raifteirí praises Cill Aodáin for all that grows there and says that were he only at home again among his people, the age would leave him and he’d be once more young:

“Cill Aodáin an baile a bhfásann gach ní ann
Tá smeara is sú craobh ann is meas ar gach sórt
Is dá mbéinnse arís i gceartlár mo dhaoine
D’imeodh an aois uaim, is bhéinn arís óg.”

Beautiful. Unfortunately for our purposes, the air is tricky and there are precious few recordings of it. When You Tube lets you down, you know something is very rare indeed.

Besides, when you’re looking for a sing-song song, you need a song that people can join in. High-stepping your way through complex notes is no good to you – you want songs where people can throw the head back and let her rip.

Even though it was written to be sung by men in tuxedoes standing beside gleaming pianos, Moonlight in Mayo fits the bill for a sing-song. The thing about Moonlight in Mayo is that it’s a fun song to sing. It’s difficult to sing well, of course, but so is Danny Boy and that doesn’t seem to stop people.

Both those songs are challenges. There are big soaring notes in both – “but come ye BAAAAACKK, when summer’s in the meadow…”, “when it’s moonlight in MAYOOOOOO.” You mightn’t hit them every time, but it’s satisfying to try. Less satisfying for the unfortunates who happen to hear you try, certainly, but good old crack when you’re the one doing the lowing.

The only problem with Moonlight in Mayo is that it doesn’t feel very Mayo-y. This is explained by the fact that it was first published in the USA by Percy Wenrich and Jack Mahoney, and it’s reasonable to doubt they were local. It’s reasonable to assume that, like a good professional should, Mahoney picked Mayo for his moonlight because of that soaring “o” at the end – try singing “moonlight in Cork” to the same air and you’ll quickly discover why that wouldn’t fly.

And then, of course, there’s the actual anthem, The Boys from the County Mayo. Widely known though seldom recorded or heard sung. One reason why it’s so rarely sung, perhaps, is because it’s so long and inclined to ramble.

However. If the clever sing-song-singer performs some judicious editing, and sings only the first and last four lines, making eight in total, the Boys from the County Mayo becomes just as anthemic as we would wish it to be. The first four lines set up the love for the home place well, and that magical county is rather beautifully described as a the land of shamrock and heather – what finer plants are there?

And then we get to the business end, which is rather more like the money, with the marvellous white feather reference, the aristocratic distain for the cowardly act, the call to the brotherhood and the identification of that brotherhood with the true-hearted boys of the County Mayo. It’ll be good to hear the home voices echo through the mean streets of the capital this coming Sunday. Up Mayo.

The Vandalism Inherent in the Leaving Cert

First published in the Western People on Tuesday.

A creature, made of clay

The Leaving Cert results are due this week. This will almost certainly result in the children of the rich and privileged disgracing themselves out foreign on holidays, and the publication of po-faced reports of same in a fortnight’s time that will not neglect any sordid detail.

Happily, no Mayo boy or girl would do such the thing – who could leave the country while the footballers are once more on the cusp of glory? Greece, how are ye.

What is a more interesting topic than boys being boys is the actual exam itself, and how the Leaving Cert, like Irish society itself, has changed with the times and not always for the better.

The impossible triangle of the Maths paper made headlines back in June, but that was a once-off blunder, and one that is unlikely to recur. What is of greater worry is the state of the syllabuses themselves, and the dumbing down that is getting more and more apparent as he years go by.

For instance, Project Maths is the great fashion now, rather than the old method of students swallowing their theorems and formulae whole, like so many boa constrictors.

The theory behind Project Maths, that of awakening the mathematician within, is fine but every maths teacher who has spoken to your correspondent about Project Maths does not think it’ll work. On the bright side, they are looking forward to a bull market in grinds for as long as it exists, and the grinds will be conducted in the old fashioned way. Open wide, scholars.

Irish is a tricky one. People involved in the promotion of Irish are generally very reluctant to confess any bad news about the language, and this prevents honest discussion of what’s actually happening.

The press looks no deeper than whether or not Peig Sayers is still on the syllabus, and take her exclusion as a sign of progress, without ever wondering what will replace her. Suffice it to say that the ancient language remains in mortal danger in our schools, Gaelscoileanna notwithstanding.

And then there is the sorry state of the English syllabus. The teaching of English, like so many other things, underwent no small upheaval during the 1960s. Prior to that unhappy decade, there was a Great Tradition of Literature, with every age adding its Great Writers to that Tradition.

The sixties, being the time of revolution it was, had no time for anything as unhip as tradition or standards, but did manage to generate a righteous fury that the so-called tradition was actually a power-structure that supported Dead White Males.

Fifty years on, nobody is really sure what a “great book” is anymore, and that level of insecurity is evident in the current Leaving Cert syllabus. As a matter of fact, the syllabus is so insecure about what a great book is that some of the books aren’t books at all. By the clever use of the word “text,” you can now go to the movies and call it school.

There are six films listed as prescribed texts for the Leaving Cert, ranging from Citizen Kane to Blade Runner, and they have no business there at all. The fact that each film lists its director as its author shows that not only does the Department not know that a film isn’t a text, the Department is equally unaware that film is the ultimate collaborative art form. Who signed off on this?

Bad and all as that is, a look at the poetry section is even worse. Geoffrey Chaucer is the man who wrote the Canterbury Tales, the poem that established English above Latin as a language worthy of literature. There is no sign of him on the latest syllabus, due for 2015.

The gallant and courtly Andrew Marvell – no sign. John Milton, second only to Shakespeare as a writer of blank verse and the only man to successfully write an epic poem in English, Paradise Lost, doesn’t make the grade.

Alexander Pope, “little Alexander the women laugh at,” the greatest of the Enlightenment poets? We don’t want his kind around here. George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, a man whose celebrity in his time echoes the madness of our own? Not good enough for the Leaving Cert.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron’s great contemporary and the man whose Ozymandias gives the culture its great lesson the importance of worldly power? His poems are no good here. John Keats, the last of the great Romantic Poets to be the born and the first to die? Nope, sorry.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the twelfth British poet laureate and the man whose poem “Ulysses” Judi Dench’s M quotes in the blockbuster James Bond movie Skyfall, goes right over the heads of children we now consider educated.

Patrick Kavanagh, second only to WB Yeats as the greatest Irish poet of the 20th Century and the authentic and eloquent voice of rural Ireland? A mystery to those who will sit their Leaving Cert in 2015.

And who’s there instead? Greg Delanty, Kerry Hardie, Liz Lochhead, Richard Murphy and William Wall are all on the syllabus for 2015 and there isn’t one of them whom your correspondent could pick out of a lineup.

This is an appalling state of affairs. Verse is the highest expression of language, any language. English has tradition of poetry that is over a thousand years old, predating even Chaucer, and that thousand-year tradition is being sidelined, and ignored, by the current Leaving Cert syllabus.

The great works are touchstones of what we consider important in life, once the dinner is eaten and the mortgage paid and we sit back and wonder what it is to be human. These poems have travelled down the generations and given wonder and consolation to countless people where-ever English is spoken.

Irish children are now being denied that heritage for reasons that are impossible to understand. This isn’t education. This is cultural vandalism and it’s time someone called a halt to it.

Blurred Lines, Blurred Lyrics - Nobody Ever Listens to the Words

It’ll be seven years this summer since Top of the Pops went off the air. Being Number One in the UK singles chart doesn’t have the same cultural impact it once had – we’re a long way from The Boomtown Rats tearing up pictures of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John when Rat Trap got to Number One in the winter of 1978, or The Specials’ Ghost Town being a commentary on Thatcher’s Britain.

The current Number One single in the United Kingdom is Blurred Lines, by the temptingly named Robin Thicke. You might have heard the song on the radio – it’s the “hey heyhey HEY!” one.

It is unlikely that anyone actually hears anything other than “hey heyhey HEY!” when they hear the song though, because if they did the song would surely have not done so well. An appearance by Thicke on the Ellen show in the USA - the video at the top of this page - makes the song beyond reproach as far as women are concerned, but would Blurred Lines be so popular if people heard any of the lyrics other than the “hey heyhey HEY!” part?

You’re always open to accusations of fogeyism when you wonder if it’s really necessary to fling this filth at our pop kids, but my goodness, the thought that people are growing up listening to this and concluding that this is how adult men relate to adult women is appalling. It’s not a question of feminism or ideology – it’s a question of simple manners.

It could be that the people who love Blurred Lines genuinely don’t hear the lyric. All they hear is the “hey heyhey HEY!” and hit the dance floor immediately, viewing all content other than the groove as superfluous.

Such a reaction would not necessarily be uncommon. Max Martin once told the BBC that the first few notes on the piano of Hit Me Baby, One More Time were the entire song – Britney Spears could have been singing a shopping lift after that and it still would have worked. And Martin, of course, should know, having written the thing in the first place.

This is how we consume music now. A series of motifs are expertly stitched together and rolled out the conveyor belt. And it’s not just the writing teams behind Thicke or Rhianna that do it; Sasha Fr ère-Jones expertly deconstructed Coldplay and U2 in in the New Yorker a few years ago. The tunes bounce around but mean nothing. The lyrics are just another sound in the mix, like raspberry ripple running through the vanilla ice-cream.

Is this a good or a bad thing? It could be that the consumers of these things are as oblivious to the lyrics as the 99% of internet users who have no interest in the mechanics of how this modern miracle works, with packets of information flashing back and forth through the ether in milliseconds. We just want to check Facebook, thanks.

It’s hard to know how many people ever listened to lyrics anyway. Bob Dylan is seen as the greatest lyricist of the modern pop/rock age, even though a huge amount of his lyrics make no sense whatsoever. He made his name as a protest singer and people assumed he was still protesting when he went electric. A quick glance shows this a very big assumption to make.

For instance, what makes Jokerman a great song is that it sounds Caribbean and Mark Knopfler plays guitar on it. But the lyrics are rubbish:

You're a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
Manipulator of crowds, you're a dream twister
You're going to Sodom and Gomorrah
But what do you care? Ain't nobody there
Would want marry your sister

If there is a more forced rhyme in modern music than twister/sister, I don’t know what it is.

Of lyrics in pop songs, ABBA are much deeper than they’re given credit for. Not always, of course – the second line of Waterloo is one of the clunkiest ever written – but in his maturity Björn Ulvaeus wrote some remarkably sad songs, with Winner Takes It All being the most harrowing:

But tell me does she kiss
Like I used to kiss you?
Does it feel the same
When she calls your name?

“Does it feel the same / When she calls your name?” L Cohen himself would be proud of that one. Nothing blurred about those lines.

Where's Your Pride? The Problem with The Gathering

Gabriel Byrne’s visceral attack on The Gathering, the five million Euro tourism initiative which started last night outside the site of Grattan’s Parliament, touched a nerve in the country. Some people said Byrne was a begrudger. More said it was sour grapes on Byrne’s part that he wasn’t the head buck cat of the whole show himself.

But maybe the reason so many people remember Bryne’s attack in November, and why so many people are apprehensive about this whole Gathering project, is that it touched on a deep need and yearning in the soul of the nation.

What do the Irish want more than anything else? It used to be an Ireland united, Gaelic, and free, but at some stage in the past fifty years the twenty-six counties embraced partition as the natural order of things. We all would like to see a deal on the banking debt but we are now in the fifth stage of our fiscal grief – acceptance – and will be simply grateful for any easing of the yoke that our diplomats can wrangle. And at the personal level, we all have our own individual aims, from parents that want their kids to go to college to those poor souls who pray that their kids can somehow stay out of jail.

But the one thing that unites the nation is this: we all want to be proud of Ireland and of being Irish. A people who invented the notion of the hunger strike have nothing to learn about pride and how pride can be more important than life itself.

That’s why there was such a row over the singing when Ireland were getting slaughtered at Euro 2012 this summer. The Singers thought the signing reflected the spirit of the Indomitable Irishry, while the Silent thought the singing shamed the nation by portraying the Irish as happy victims instead of a warrior race raging to the last at cruel fate. But both sides of the argument were motivated by love of country; the only thing that divided them was how that love would be perceived abroad. The patriotism itself was never in doubt.

Which brings us to The Gathering. The idea itself is laudable, both as an acknowledgement to our huge emigrant population (which An Spailpín still insists should be described as a “deoraíocht” rather than a “diaspora,” by the way) and as a much-needed revenue source for one of our few indigenous industries, tourism.

But what’s worrying Gabriel Byrne and a lot of other people is how Ireland is being portrayed abroad by this particular jamboree. Does The Gathering portray an Ireland that is, in Pearse’s words, “august, despite her chains,” or an Ireland of hucksters and gombeens that is a cross between The Irish RM and Killnascully?

The early signs are not promising. The website is badly designed. The idea of a website as a venue for users to take over and make their is a good and modern one, and very much of the zeitgeist in terms of the social web. But it’s badly expressed and it’s not at all clear that that’s the purpose. The first language is also notable by its absence – there’s a little bit there, but certainly not of sufficient quantity to frighten the horses or suggest that we’re all that different from Bradford, Boston or Brisbane.

The chief worry about The Gathering is that it’s going to be cheap and make the nation look cheap in consequence. There’s a troubling section on the website called “I Love Ireland,” that contains a list of things that are meant to cause us to swell with pride. Your faithful narrator swelled with something else entirely on reading “25 things you never thought you’d miss about Ireland.” If that’s what Ireland is like, give me Syria every time. Horrible.

That list of twenty-five things is not who the Irish are. It can’t be. That’s the Irish as seen by the sort of pond life that buys those awful “Little Book of Your Mammy's Bloomers” books. Your correspondent wants no part of them, and doubts he is alone.

In 1916, an IRA battalion took command of St Stephen’s Green, which includes buildings owned by UCD. Liam Ó Briain describes the rebels’ forlorn attempts to barricade their position in his memoir of the Rising, Cuimhní Cinn, using materials found in the surrounding buildings. At one stage, a soldier found some big, old, thick books and suggested they be used in the barricade. Ó Briain recognised the books as copies of the Annals of the Four Masters. “We can’t use them,” he told the soldier. “If we’re fighting for anything, we’re fighting for those books.”

Tourists come to Ireland to have fun, not to read about long-dead monks or the works of those long-dead monks themselves. Of course they do. But at the same time, we should present ourselves as being more than the best little country in the world to get drunk. We should have it within us to realise it’s not all about money, and show some little bit of pride.