WE Irish are unique. Upon this all authors of guide books and other works of cultural exegesis seem agreed. Quite why we should be unique is less clear. Mr Gray, for his part, is a great believer in the power of topography to shape our ends. "For the Irish," he writes, "the thing that made them different from all the other nations of Europe, was the nature of the land itself: the island of Ireland."
Quite so. But here a small problem arises. For on page one we learn that "Ireland didn't become an island until about 50,000 years ago," before which time a holiday in Connemara would have required "only a relatively short stroll up from the Iberian peninsula". By page four, however, Ireland "has been an island for 450,000 years". Not only that, but it "could once have been part of the North American continent".
And what of the people who have been shaped by this erratic geological inheritance? Mr Gray has a theory about them, too. It is "that the fairy folk live on in the Irish people who continue to live in Ireland". When he and his family came to live in London, they "began to think of those who, had stayed on as slightly odd, certainly a little bit fey. They couldn't see it, and we could never have seen it ourselves until after we had left Ireland for good, but it's one reason why we could never go back there."
The other reason, one is tempted to add, is this book: a mildly patronising attempt to explain how the fey little people who chose to remain behind in this strange island managed to create a modern European state, dominate world literature and music, elect a thoroughly modern President and still have time for craic which, as every guidebook reader knows, is Irish for conviviality (see review above of The Words We Use - Ed.).
St Patrick's People is just the latest entrant in a very crowded category - the socio cultural guide for the discerning tourist who wants to know more than the location of three star restaurants.
The Irish are in that sense the most explained people on earth. Nobody seems to think it worth their while to explain the English to foreigners, for example. But every Tom, Dick and Tony has his two pennyworth to say about us.
Mr Gray's contribution ranges widely over our history, politics, economics, culture. He travels fast always advisable when skating over thin ice - and there are times when he seems dangerously dependent on secondary sources. From a recent column in The Irish Times, I gather is not a phrase designed to enhance an author's credibility as a first hand guide, but Mr Gray actually uses it as a preamble to some idiotic assertions about the sexual mores of Irish youth.
His credibility is further reduced by a number of elementary schoolboy mistakes. Charlie Haughey's celebrated retreat is not on "Inishvicklane"; "Clannaid" is not the name of the wellknown group; "feeley" is not an accurate phonetic rendition of filidh; and Samuel Beckett was never Joyce's "one time secretary". In the circumstances, perhaps it is just as well that the book doesn't have an index.