Republican News · Thursday 22 May 2003

The Ireland that we dream of?

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In the first of a series of articles exploring the nature of the republican vision, PAUL O'CONNOR examines the changes in Irish society and notions of identity since de Valera's time

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The prison diary of Bobby Sands has more to teach us than all the volumes of political philosophy ever written. Our history gives the universal values of freedom and justice an immediate and living reality

On St Patrick's Day 1943, de Valera summed up the vision of Ireland held by many at the time.

"That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit - a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens."

We have changed a lot since then, in ways that cannot but affect our sense of what it means to be Irish. It would be funny if Dev came back and walked through any of our cities on a Saturday night. If he wasn't beaten unconscious by a gang of athletic youths, the comely maidens would soon have him groping for his rosary beads.

For much of the 20th century, Irish nationalism was bound up with Catholicism. At times they seemed identical. Far too often, political leaders spoke as though Catholicism was a condition for being truly Irish.

Today, the authority of the hierarchy is shattered. The church hardly features in the lives of most young people. Nor are there many left who would see religious faith as defining our national identity.

DeValera's cosy cottages were set among the green fields of a largely rural Ireland, the majority of whose inhabitants depended on agriculture for their living. Today, most Irish people live in cities, or commute to them to work. The "true" Ireland used to be imagined as a land of small farms and donkeys bringing home the turf. These days, that image must wear thin, even with the more gullible kind of tourist.

Fifteen years ago, Ireland was the poor man of Europe. Today we have - supposedly - the third-highest GDP in the world. Generations grew up expecting to emigrate as soon as they left school. Now, our own shores have become the destination for those seeking a better life.

Once "we" were Catholic and the English (and a minority of Irish) were God-forsaken heretics. Once we were clean-living country folk, while the English lived in cities, had divorce and read dirty books. Now we are urban, agnostic, and supposedly loaded. So what does it mean to be Irish? Does it matter anyway? In a globalised world, can't we settle for being the 52nd US state, a rainy Los Angeles with a Celtic brogue?

Yet somehow we are still not quite boiled down to a mid-Atlantic porridge. The range and depth of Irish opposition to the war on Iraq, for instance, clearly differentiated public opinion in Ireland from that of Britain and America. Given the size of our population, the 100,000 who marched in Dublin represented a bigger show of strength, proportionately, than almost any other country in the world.

It is also significant that the cheerleaders of the war on Iraq in the Irish media were the same commentators who regularly almost choke on their loathing for republicans.

Who we become - as individuals or as a people - has a lot to do with what we experience in life. The Irish experience has been defined for centuries by a struggle against oppression, tyranny, and injustice. No wonder we sympathise with the people of Iraq, subjected to the terrors of an imperialist war machine, or with Palestinians fighting the occupation of their land. No wonder we feel more acutely than some more powerful nations that "inner thing in every man" which Bobby Sands found lighting the dark of his prison cell, and named the Rhythm of Time.

Our history defines us, not by tying us into a straightjacket of the past, but by giving us certain values, a particular outlook on the world. There is no pure essence of Irishness lost in the Celtic twilight. Former generations tried to define Ireland by Aran fishermen carrying their curraghs down the beach, and red-haired colleens skipping over the hills. Go far enough west and somewhere - probably by a turf fire in a white-washed cottage - you would discover the true secret of the Celtic soul. We know that the core of our Irishness lies closer to home. It lies in the things we have learned to value, precisely because we have been denied them for so long - in our hunger for justice and freedom, and the struggle to attain them.

These values are universal. We cannot but call for the liberation of all peoples in demanding our own. Does that make our separate story less important? Far from it. Few of us take our beliefs from abstract tomes of political theory. For a political ideology to have value, it must grow out of the experience of real people in their daily lives - their struggles, their triumphs and their sufferings. What gives Irish republicanism its vitality, its passion, is precisely this rootedness in the reality of Irish experience. In themselves, words like "rights", "justice", "democracy" are just abstractions. They take on flesh and blood in the stories of men and women whose lives have been marred by their denial, or dedicated to fighting in their cause.

Is there a street in our cities, a townland in our countryside, without some tale of suffering or courage? Our whole history is the epic of a people trampled into the ground, subjected to genocide and terror, but rising from their knees no matter how often they were beaten down, still refusing to give up the struggle for freedom. The prison diary of Bobby Sands has more to teach us than all the volumes of political philosophy ever written. Our history gives the universal values of freedom and justice an immediate and living reality.

In every generation, Irish people have claimed their freedom; but each generation has had its own dream of what a free Ireland would be like. Some of the ways we defined ourselves in the past have little relevance to the future. The challenge is to preserve whatever is most vital and universal in our tradition, while remaking our identity from the materials of Irish life in the 21st century.

Of course, we can decide to purchase our identity readymade from Disneyworld and Sky. We can choose to Riverdance up Broadway in Leprauchan hats while tourists are watching, and settle down the rest of the time as good Europeans or good citizens of the 52nd state. We can follow the approved international model, paying workers fast-food wages while a corporate elite rakes in millions and purchases the political system. But is that the Ireland that we dream of?