A guilt-free American tour of poor old Ireland

Last week in New York I went to see a press preview of the film based on Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. The media types who attended seemed to love the movie, applauding at the end as if the actors on screen could hear them, or as if their approbation would carry across the Atlantic to a fondly-imagined Ireland.

But what I enjoyed most was not the film, which is in truth rather dull, but the press pack distributed to the pundits. It crystallised for me a vague unease about the McCourt phenomenon that I have been unable to articulate.

Here, word for the word, is the beginning of the synopsis of the movie's story that Paramount Pictures is presenting to the world's media: "In 1935, when it is more common for Irish families to leave their famine-stricken country for America, the impoverished McCourt family do the reverse. Following the sudden death of her seven-week-old daughter, Angela, and her unemployable, alcoholic husband, Malachy snr, set sail from New York Harbour to Cork with their four children, Frank, Malachy jnr and twins Eugene and Oliver, to return to the land which a mystified young Frank had only heard of as `where there was no work and people were dying of starvation and the damp'."

Now, what left me dangling between anger and amusement is not just the boundless ignorance of Irish (and indeed American) history that has the Famine still gnawing away in 1935, over 90 years after it began. It is the stream of consciousness in which cliche begets cliche so that in a two-sentence crash course on the Irish condition we get "famine-stricken", "impoverished", "sudden death", "unemployable", "alcoholic", "starvation" and "damp". And all of it framed in the ultimate horror of abandoning the land of opportunity for a place that any sane person would get the hell out of as fast as you could say "unemployable alcoholic".

Of course, Frank McCourt didn't write this stuff. Nor did he write the film which it all too accurately synopsises. He wrote what is in many respects a wonderful book: vivid, funny, humane and uncomfortably truthful. His story is his own, and he has the perfect right to tell it.

PART of the problem is that Irish self-mockery doesn't travel well. The playful exaggerations we allow ourselves when talking to each other become, when they are projected on to the giant screen of global media success, ludicrous caricatures. The phrase about Ireland being a place of unemployment, starvation and damp that's quoted in the movie synopsis is a good example.

In McCourt's book, this view is explicitly that of a confused child who knows very little about the place. In the movie, where it is repeated in voice-over, it becomes a direct description of reality. Hunger, damp and starvation are practically all that we see of Ireland, unless you add in drink, meanness, bigotry, abuse, consumption and greed.

Or take the quote from the start of McCourt's book that is also used at the beginning of the film: "When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how my brothers and I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

This is, as that lovely "of course" makes clear, more a send-up of the "miserable Irish Catholic childhood" genre than a genuine effort to put on the poor mouth. Especially if you're Irish, it is a wicked little exercise in self-parody. But in the movie, and I suspect in the minds of many readers outside Ireland, it comes across as a straight description of reality. And, as such, it is an invitation to the creepiest kind of smugness.

For what it says to the McCourt consumer in, say, New York is that miserable children are an exotic occurrence, something that exists in its proper form only in weird old, funny old Catholic Ireland. And not, of course, in the Bronx or the south side of Chicago.

The McCourt industry, in other words, allows its consumers to be safe tourists of poverty. In Ireland, Angela's Ashes is a painful, shaming, challenging book that forces us to confront bitter realities. It may not tell the whole story but it is unmistakably about "us". In America and elsewhere, it is about "them". It offers an air-conditioned, guilt-free tour of authentic Irish misery, implying as it does so that this misery is somehow the preserve of a faraway "famine-stricken country".

AND this effect is immeasurably heightened by the fact that this tale of woe was transformed into an archetypal American immigrant rags-to-riches story. The book's success became in itself a big part of its appeal, and that of its successor, Tis. For Angela's Ashes can now be read in the even safer knowledge that its author ended up as that most marvellous of God's creations, an American millionaire. And all, of course, because he had the good sense to reverse his parents' inexplicable return from New York to Limerick and go back to the Land of Opportunity.

In case anyone missed the point, Alan Parker's film makes the moral of the story even more flagrantly plain, beginning with the miserable trudge home to Limerick and ending with the hoariest of immigrant cliches, the boat passing the Statue of Liberty and the beaming face of the young Frank.

As the synopsis so earnestly puts it, Frank "departs for New York and when the Statue of Liberty comes into sight, he knows he has done the right thing and that he is home again." Short of playing God Bless America as the credits roll. Parker could not have laid on the feel-good flattery with a heavier hand or a more craven heart. The appeal of the McCourt industry becomes clear: it is an old-fashioned tale of the nastiness of those little Third World countries and the blessings of America.

I don't really blame Frank McCourt himself for any of this. He didn't set out, after all, to start a multinational industry. And I don't really mind the perpetuation of stereotypes and cliches about Ireland. We have long since passed the point of being obsessed with what others think of us. I don't even begrudge the well-meaning folks from Tokyo to Tallahassee the thrill they get from having a little wallow in the muck of Catholic Ireland. I just think it would be better for them, and for the world at large, if they could face the muck in their own back yards.

Fintan O'Toole can be contacted at fotoole@irish-times.ie