gallery. miquel berga
Lecturer of English Literature at the UPF University
Mythical pasts and present-day realities
One would expect the Irish are rather relieved with the British Brexit. After all, so much pain was inflicted on the people of the neighbouring island in the course of history that, at least this time, it has been the British themselves who have decided to leave the Irish alone and cut any common ties in the European Union. So, I approach our man in the streets of Dublin –or Galway for that matter– expecting some sarcasm over the issue. But decades of national independence have made the hospitable, rural, ever musical people of these lands more mild and compassionate. The English? Well, if you give your Englishman time enough he is likely to become a trusted friend. These days they see the English not as foes but as human beings, of a sort. And yes, it's a nasty business to use referendums about fundamental issues applying the simple majority principle. As this is the case, it leaves the country with a “huge minority” of people not at all satisfied with the outcome. But their political tradition is the middle way and they have been quick to appoint a prime minister who was against Brexit to handle the process. Those English, insists our Irishman, are good at knowing each other. We are only good at knowing ourselves.
Contradictions
What worries the people of Ireland right now is that more than half their exports go to Britain, and they do not look forward to the return of old commercial barriers. Let it be, yes, but even the Irish were quite content having the British in the same club. Gone are the days of the independence process and the martyrs and their own civil war. And it is always interesting to remember –especially now with all the 1916 Easter Rising centenary celebrations– that the promoters of the Irish Revival had their ambivalent and contradictory attitudes about the whole business. Take the revered WB Yeats. He kept private his now famous poem about the event for some years, waiting for the political situation to work itself out. The resounding verse “A terrible beauty is born” was, therefore, kept until there was a proper state to create past epics. Not surprising. For all their mythologising the lives of the peasants and shepherds of County Galway and the Aran islands, and their celebration of Gaelic, Yeats and Lady Gregory and the playwrights of the Abbey Theatre used English to infuse the masses with patriotic fervour and, of course, they belonged to the upper crust.
Commenting the doings of a Catholic nationalist mob, Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “The old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't.” Colm Toíbín, arguably the finest contemporary Irish writer, used that arrogant metaphor for the title of a well researched, elegantly written, biographical essay: “Lady Gregory's Toothbrush” (2013). Toíbín, a speaker of Catalan and a great friend of our country, produced a fascinating, enlightening picture of the contradictory forces behind the independence process. It is fair to say that Gregory and Yeats –perhaps thanks to their class ascendency– never surrendered their artistic principles and defended the iconoclastic plays of the young JM Synge or the Communist O'Casey against the powerful bureaucrats of the new Irish state. Yet, Toíbín never tires of pointing at curious dichotomies suggesting, for instance, that Lady Gregory was simultaneously extracting rents from her tenants and sitting down with them to record their stories and legends.
Between mythical pasts and present-day realities, with British Brexit or without, the Irish are willing to take economics into account. Their opting for English as a national language while creating the new Free State is still paying rents this summer when, in the streets of Dublin or Galway County, crowds of tourists mix with swarms of foreign students that go to charming Ireland to learn their “English”.
