Is that a rugby ball, or the rotting head of Cúchulainn being kicked around by cultural imperialists?
EVERY WEEK reveals new ways in which this country resembles a dead ferret. Some days ago, I found myself sitting on a bench in a public park. I had come to ponder the opening to my latest poem, but, with warm sun on my forehead and cool lager in my belly, I found my attention drifting towards the pretty immigrants and their frolicking, innocent children. Then, just as the troubles of the last month seemed to have lifted from my shoulders, I became aware of a cultural outrage happening beyond the ornamental fountain. It wasn’t the first time.
A group of young men, collars turned up over bronzed necks, were dashing between the statues while throwing a football about the place. Nothing wrong with that, you might say. After all, in the times of the marshes and the druids, the brave Celt diverted himself by kicking a stuffed pig’s bladder.
Here’s the thing. These pampered mother’s boys weren’t playing Gaelic football. They weren’t even playing proletarian association football. Like too many of their easily duped compatriots, they had allowed themselves to be distracted by supposed recent triumphs and had turned towards the hitherto reviled oval ball. Blasted rugby! When did we decide to lie down and invite the English to walk over us in their shiny, leathery boots? Make no mistake. That’s what’s happening. This preposterous craze for rugby constitutes a violation of the cultural independence we have stubbornly forged over the past 90 years.
Look at photographs of hurley players from the middle part of the last century. They have heads the size of slaughtered hogs and ears as hairy as a badger’s pelt.
Now glance around your local “cafe-bar” at the effeminate, anglicised hooting buffoons in their upturned cotton shirts. They use skin-protector on their fat, red faces. They go on skiing holidays. They play bloody golf. They all have Christian names like Colin and surnames like Pennybridge. Pearse did not perish so that Colin Pennybridge could take his cretinous moisturised head off to Aspen every year while the rest of us freeze around spluttering Super Sers. Wolfe Tone did not leap off a bridge so that Colin Pennybridge could listen to Coldplay and thump white balls pointlessly at a distant flag. Dev did not punch Churchill in the face so that Pennybridge could watch rugby in a ground where, not so long ago, English soldiers bathed in the blood of true Gaels.
Now, let me be clear. I have nothing whatsoever against the English. Some of my happiest professional memories involve collaborations with such brothers in poetry as Stig Bozell (the bard of Northampton) and Anorak McNulty (Birmingham's own Baudelaire). In times long past, we'd pluck the banjo and recite verses to the misused miners such as Seam's Like Nowhere or pacifist epics such as Mrs T's Nuclear Vibrator. Their brown beer was thick with beaks and twigs, but their friendship was deliciously intoxicating.
Yet, for all the amity we shared, none of us ever thought to press our culture on any one of the others. The best of English literature – mad CS Lewis, brave Dylan Thomas, crafty Robert Burns – thrives in its own streets, but becomes poisonous when transported overseas. The tyranny of active English imperialism is nothing to the passive self-mortification that we are bringing upon ourselves by aping Albion’s exported games, songs and social mores. When combined with the now undeniable feminisation of Irish society, this movement threatens to totally annihilate traditional notions of Celtic masculinity. Come back in a hundred years and we will all be wearing monocles, sporting top hats and saying things like “jolly good”, “top hole” and “spiffing”. Come back and we’ll all be called Colin Pennybridge.
In recent months I have sought to do something about it. You can too. I have taken to attending the home games of my local hurley side. Nothing can compare to the rush that comes when the ball is thrown onto the pitch and the sides begin smashing each other about their honest faces with their dangerous curved bats.
It is, you might argue, the best “high” available without recourse to illegal stimulants, but it is still best to bring along a mineral bottle filled with a mixture of Powers whiskey, Cork Dry Gin and Cidona. It doesn’t matter that you can’t follow a blasted thing. Who cares that sissified fans keep telling you to mind your language? Shut up and have a bloody drink!
It was after one such adventure that I arrived home to find that my key wouldn’t fit in the lock. After half an hour’s jiggling, the door swung open to reveal my partner standing next to an annoyingly clean man in a starched rugby shirt. He smelt of sandalwood. The usual female tirade followed and phrases such as “neglect”, “violence”, “diarrhoea”, “restraining order” and “underage Slovakian exchange student” were much in evidence.
“This is Colin Pennybridge,” she said. “I met him when I was at the conference in Stourbridge. He’s been very good to me.”
Twelve hours later I awoke on that bench in the park. Off in the distance I could see a group of youths tossing an oval object between the waking beeches. It could have been a rugby ball. But no. It was the rotting head of a shamed Cúchulainn. While the lads cooed in their pseudo-Cheltenham accents, tears of blood fell from his fetid eyes and soaked into the betrayed earth.
Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is resting