During a Celine Byrne concert in Castlebar I heard the familiar lament of a woman whose child threw his dinner out the window
THE FIRST opera singer I ever heard was a big wobbly woman who sang at concerts in the town hall. Even to a child it was clear that her high opinion of her own voice had never been disturbed by much contact with other musicians.
She sang with monumental power, and willowy uncertainty; like a Panzer tank crossing Europe without a map.
Last week in Castlebar I heard something very different; Celine Byrne, a gifted artist with a voice as smooth as silk. She sang so well, in French and Italian, that I felt confidently European.
She was elegant on stage, in a long black dress, and her beautiful eyes gazed directly at the audience.
My cheeks flushed with elation, as I sat enthralled, just behind Pádraig Flynn, a former commissioner of the European Union.
During the interval I overheard a mother talking about her child.
“He was coming from school the other day,” she said, “and he threw his lunch out the window. He thought he’d get away with that; but it flew into the windscreen of a squad car behind the bus. He’s only six, but he was in floods of tears when he came home. ‘Mammy,’ he said, ‘the guards arrested me!’” I presume the child had decided that he no longer wanted to eat in the middle of the day and consequently had no more use for his ham sandwiches.
It’s fashionable in Ireland to eat in the evenings. Gorging on spuds and lumps of bacon at noon is now considered almost as barbaric as attending Sunday Mass.
And neither Sunday Mass nor big dinners can survive in a nation of panini junkies and child-abusing priests.
In fact, apart from the fanatics who worship the dancing sun in the sky above Mayo, the general population has become decidedly cool about religion – presumably because clerics, who had all the power, treated the faithful like mushrooms, and abused all the children.
This may be a simplistic view of history, but in Ireland, history is a simple matter of cause and effect – and finding someone to blame.
God caused the universe, the Brits caused the Famine, and the bankers forced us into three-bedroom semi-detached homes we didn’t want, and caused all our present troubles.
Irish history is a tapestry of tragedy, closely related to the traditional art of “sean-nós whingeing”.
“Whingeing” is an English word for what Irish people relish above all else; that is, issuing long persistent and unpleasant cries of despair from the back of the throat.
It’s been going on for centuries.
The banshee was an embodiment of the condition; a fully formed fairy figure, sitting on the ditches, combing her hair and lamenting every on-coming tragedy, and clinging with tenacity to particular families down the generations, from one death to another.
By the time Hugh O’Neill was cold in his foreign grave, and the other aristocrats of Erin had taken to producing wine in the vineyards of France, “whingeing” was developing into a high art form among the abandoned peasants back home.
Standing outside someone’s door and starving oneself to death while making unpleasant moaning sounds became an excellent method of vindicating one’s cause.
If Brehon Law had survived in Ireland, and nobody had foisted British jurisprudence upon us, then reason and rational argument might be foreign currency in our schools of law; emotion, indignation and the elegance of the "whinge" would be the order of the day, as in Merriman's often misunderstood satire, The Midnight Court.
Necrophilia, rampant among the Republican brotherhood, and among obscure novelists of the 19th century, can also be traced back to the ancient tradition of “sean-nós whingeing”.
In fact, by the middle of the 20th century there was hardly a single play in the National Theatre that did not contain a cathartic moment where a core character spilled out a lavish diatribe of despair.
So there I was having a cheerful cup of coffee at the interval, in Castlebar’s impressive arts centre, standing beside a commissioner of the European Union, waiting to hear more from an opera singer as good as any that one might find on a European stage, when suddenly I heard the familiar lament of a woman whose child threw his dinner out the window.
“I blame the guards,” she said. “You think they’d have something better to be doing, than to be chasing around after a school bus.”