As the St Patrick’s Day celebrations around the world demonstrated, the Irish diaspora is vastly larger than the population of Ireland itself. We are a strange little country. Its historical trajectory has taken us through colonialism, rebellion, religious monopoly, liberalism and cosmopolitanism. It makes Ireland a unique place and its people an interesting blend of both tradition and contempt for tradition.
Despite appearances, we might argue that the Irish political project has been more successful than the Irish cultural project.
At home, we associate Ireland perhaps too deeply with state rather than culture. Most of us emerge from 14 years of Irish language education with little beyond the ability to recite a rote-learned paragraph detailing what we did over the summer, and this we promptly forget as we embark in a life rooted digitally and materially in the Anglophone world. Yet, Irish identity seems to be laid claim to by half the world. It may be in spite of or because of this that we keep a jealous grip on it at home. It’s a particularly heated subject at present. The comments section under articles in Irish publications frequently devolve into debates on Irish identity and who is entitled to claim it. As though this is something one individual might determine on behalf of another.
Irishness is as vague a concept as there is, and when you leave Ireland that vagueness only escalates.
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I wore my “Notions” necklace to the Irish Embassy in Australia last week for a St Patrick’s Day reception. It was created by Irish designer Margaret O’Connor. It’s appropriately self-deprecating and fun so it seemed a fitting accessory for celebrating Ireland in the closest thing to home Australia offers – the place you run to in total panic if you accidentally drop your passport into Lake Burley Griffin.
I went to get a sense of the Irish community living in the Australian capital. Canberra is not the chosen destination of most Irish immigrants to Australia. Its inland location, mellow pace and family atmosphere may be a touch sanguine and settled for young adventure-seeking Irish people. After five years of being elbowed in the neck by strangers on packed London underground trains, the space and placidity of Canberra seep through my liver like Panadol en route to a bruised . . . well, neck.
As a blow-in to Australia, I nursed a distant hope that I might meet somebody powerful and well connected at this event who could tell me where I might buy Kerrygold in the Australian capital. Australian butter is leagues ahead of the flinty, anaemic British stuff, which shatters over toast like a disdainful expression, but there are some elements of home you continue to miss and the platonic form of butter is one of them. The lure of potential familiar accents was also tough to resist. Voices from home.
It’s so like us to spread ourselves across the world and then determine that those who have our country carved into their hearts aren’t doing it right
The yodel of a Kerry accent or the long, beleaguered exhalation of Limerick vowels.
With the new wave of younger Irish immigrants to Australia, I expected to find at least a few people as freshly arrived as myself. What I found far more of were conceptions and expressions of Irishness distinct from my own. Second- and third-generation people whose sense of Irishness melded with their national identity as born and bred Australians. I met several Irish-born people who moved to Australia 30 or 40 years earlier and whose Irishness has been infused with the culture of their new home. They’ve done what good parents do – raised their children to feel at home in and function within the society in which they’re born, even if that leaves those parents feeling somewhat between worlds themselves. They have built their own distinct Irish community and culture here in Australia. I find the idea of someone like me, newly arrived, critiquing its authenticity, or passing judgment on it in any way utterly preposterous.
All these people have a conception of Ireland and Irishness mediated by their own experience and all of them have the same entitlement I have to feel a connection to home. Some possess the sort of admiration that you can only hold for a place you’ve never visited, having never stood in the rain at a Dublin bus stop only to watch three scheduled 15a buses disappear from the “Real Time Passenger Information” display over 20 incomprehensibly damp minutes. Some carry a more tempered perception of Ireland. Either way, in many cases the distance only serves to increase their passion for and commitment to Irish culture. Those who aren’t in a drenched rage waiting for a mendacious bus are perhaps more inclined to positively.
At a distance, there’s space for appreciation.
The Irish Government’s focus on diaspora is not surprising for all the disdain many Irish people may carry for those who feel a connection to or admiration for the culture we ourselves sometimes take for granted. The global network of Irish people and those of Irish descent has historically been critical to the State and those who worked to form one, from Irish Catholics in Boston funding the bumpy route to independence, to the Irish in London keeping pressure on the British government’s side at the optimal level of thorniness.
It’s so like us to spread ourselves across the world and then determine that those who have our country carved into their hearts aren’t doing it right. Because they haven’t stood long enough at a bus stop where the bus rarely actually stops. If we’re cynical, we need the diaspora because Ireland is a global product, and a lucrative one. But we also need such people to remind us that we can be a shower of almighty curmudgeons sometimes and all the while, there they are all over the world lifting us up.
Spending their money to visit us, reading our writers, helping to keep our dance and our music and our language alive. People who feel connected to us, and so they are connected to us.
We’d want to cop ourselves on, really.
