Hold on tight: why the past will be a model for our future

CULTURE SHOCK:IN DIARMAID MacCULLOCH'S A History of Christianity(surely the greatest work of historical synthesis of our time) there is a reproduction of a painting of St Patrick. It is easy to recognise the dear saint of our isle.

He wears the green mitre and robes. He is crushing the snakes beneath his feet and ordering them off the island with his left hand. Behind him is an Irish monastic church with a round tower. It is a naive and charming image from Irish tradition. Only the caption tells you what is odd about it: it is not Irish and it is not even Christian. It is from the voodoo temple of Hounfor in La Plaine, on the northern outskirts of Port-au-Prince, in Haiti.

This image suggests two things about the nature of tradition. One is that it can be oddly persistent: it can survive great shifts of time and place. The other is that this resilience should not be confused with conservatism.

Traditions, like species, survive because they can adapt. St Patrick in a voodoo temple may look very familiar to Irish eyes. But his meaning has surely altered in radical and unfathomable ways.

These points are worth making because the idea of tradition, of some kind of reconnection with older forms of meaning and expression, is sure to become more potent in the next few years. In its immediate forms the Irish crisis is fiscal and political. As it plays out over the next decade it will also be social and cultural.

The cultural crisis is rooted in the degree to which the so-called Celtic Tiger was not just an economic boom but also a new identity. It filled the vacuum left by the shattering of the old nexus of Catholicism and nationalism. Something had to take their place – and it was the brash, exuberant, faux-cosmopolitan swagger of the boom times.

Now that, too, is gone, what fills the hole of collective cultural identity? There is no going back to 19th-century institutional Catholicism. Nationalism will always be, at best, ambiguous and complex, a source of uncertainties and conflicts rather than of unifying comforts. But the idea of tradition will be increasingly attractive.

During the Tiger era there was only the present: the past was another country and the future was just going to be an endless projection forward of current conditions. The great cultural symbol of the Tiger was the driving of a motorway through the Tara valley: feck my connection to the millennia, what about my commute to Dublin? When we start to pick up the pieces of that broken dream, the discarded notions of cultural continuity, of being in touch with a premodern sensibility that gave Irish culture its depth, will become potent. But can those notions really be recovered? The answer, as always with Irish culture, is yes and no.

If you listen, for example, to Tuning the Radio, Peter Browne’s superb new CD of music from RTÉ’s archives of field recordings from the 1940s and 1950s, it is hard not to feel, entwined with the pleasure, a sense of loss.

It is not, of course, the music itself that has been lost. What’s gone for good is the broader sense that accompanies this music: that it is part of daily life, interwoven with the mundane. It is traditional in the real sense, which is to say that it does not seem to think of itself as traditional at all. That sense is surely gone for good: 21st-century Ireland cannot reconstruct the mentality of rural societies with vibrant oral cultures.

On the other hand, it would be wrong to imagine that older culture as static or innocent. It was not, for a start, purely oral. The Irish Traditional Music Archive has just republished a facsimile edition, brilliantly edited by Nicholas Carolan, of John and William Neal's A Collection of the Most Celebrated Irish Tunes.It was first published in Dublin in 1724. The commercialisation of Irish music, in other words, didn't start today or yesterday.

Another warning about confusing “tradition” with innocent purity comes from John O’Donovan, collecting folklore relating to place names for the Ordnance Survey in 1837. He noted that “traditional” oral stories retailed by authentic peasants often turned out to be derived from reading books: “I could at once distinguish between a story preserved by pure oral tradition and one manufactured from ‘an oulde histhory’. Several stories have been told me about Saint Patrick, Mave [sic] of Croghan etc., but I have learned upon inquiry that they were not preserved by oral tradition, but read out of Keating, and Lynch’s Life of Saint Patrick . . . In this age when there are so many men that can read, it is not easy to discover whether a tradition be simply oral or fabricated from the oral and written accounts, and if you mistake the one from the other, you will arrive at very wrong conclusions.”

Equally wrong conclusions can be drawn from the great sense of connectedness you get from the recordings on Tuning the Radio.It is the connectedness not of an organic community but of a defiant need to hold on. Paddy Killoran, the Sligo fiddler who plays so joyously here, ran a bar in the Bronx and was recorded on a visit home. The Donegal fiddler Jimmy Lyons lived, of all places, in Rugby. And these are not peasants ignorant of the modern technological world: the lovely Sligo fiddler Joe O'Dowd plays a tune he learned from a Michael Coleman record. It is startling to think that the recording of the Connemara singer Seán Choilm 'ac Dhonncha, singing a 17th-century Gaelic song, was made for a BBC programme on which John Beckett, first cousin of Samuel, also appeared.

Nothing, therefore, is more traditionally Irish than the attempt to find some continuity in the midst of flux and displacement. Whatever tradition we can reconnect to will not be pure and simple and authentic. And it never was.