An Irishman's Diary

WE ALL think ourselves martyrs to the Irish language, just because we were held hostage for a few years by Peig Sayers, or suffered mild torture at the hands of the modh coinniollach. But spare a thought for St Koloman (or Colmán of Austria), who may be history’s only recorded case of someone who did die – violently – for the cúpla focal.

It happened 1,000 years ago this coming October, and I still haven’t heard of anyone in the country of his birth organising millennium commemorations. So I have to thank Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel, who will be addressing an autumn conference at the saint’s burial place – the Benedictine Monastery of Melk, near Vienna – for reminding me of the reported circumstances of his demise.

The Irish monk was returning from a trip to the Holy Land in 1012, apparently, when he was arrested in the dangerous area of Stockerau.

His captors were suspicious both because of his dress, and because of the strange language he spoke. Which, unknown to them, was Gaelic.

We can’t blame Peig, of course. But the modh coinniollach may well have been implicated. In any case, the captors decided that the monk must be a Hungarian or Czech spy. After torturing him for a while, they hanged him from a tree.

KOLOMAN, to whom local miracles were soon attributed, was among the earliest of a long line of distinguished Irish visitors to those parts, as I know from reading a fine essay on the subject by Dr Otto Glaser, whose life was to take him in the opposite direction.

Later migrants tended to be more secular, like Sir William Wilde and Oliver St John Gogarty, who both advanced their medical careers in Vienna. But the case of a third Irish physician, Robert Graves, had certain echoes of the saint’s fate.

It wasn’t Irish that landed Graves in trouble when he visited Vienna soon after the Napoleonic wars. Rather, his flawless German, combined with his inability to produce a passport, led the authorities to doubt his professed nationality. They locked him up for 10 days, again on suspicion of spying. But at least they didn’t hang him.

An even luckier Irish visitor to Austria, some years before that, was an Irish tenor named Michael O’Kelly. Via Italy (where he had become known as “Ochelli”), he travelled to Vienna in 1785 and there became a good friend of Mozart, with whom – when the latter wasn’t busy being a genius – he often played billiards.

O’Kelly may or may not have had a role in a Mozartian footnote to the history of Hiberno-Austrian relations: one that combines the secular and profane.

According to Glaser, Mozart so liked an old Irish drinking song called The Cruiskeen Lawn (“little brimming jug”), that he worked it into one of his Masses, no less. It features in the Gloria in Excelsis section, Glaser writes, and includes the refrain: “We’ll quaff the well-filled jug.”

BUTspeaking of Cruiskeen Lawn, Irish-Austrian migration has not always been one way. During the second World War, in particular, there was a rush in the opposite direction. Indeed, Austrians fleeing the Nazi occupation included the family of Otto Glaser. And they also included the great physicist, Erwin Schrödinger whose escape to Ireland was like something from a spy novel.

The then taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, correctly surmised that Schrödinger might be interested in heading up one of his vanity projects, the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. But Dev knew it could be dangerous to contact him directly.

So the approach was instead made through several intermediaries, one of whom travelled to Vienna and passed a note to Schrödinger’s mother-in-law, who in turn passed it to Schrödinger, who read and destroyed it, before sending a positive reply by the same circuitous route.

Soon afterwards, the scientist was sacked from his university post and, with the Nazis circling, got out of Austria just in time, though effectively destitute. His passage to Dublin was arranged by the Irish authorities. But even then, he was almost refused transit through Switzerland – the authorities suspicious that a man with no money could be travelling first class – before he finally reached Ireland and safety.

THUS BEGANa surreal episode of Irish history, wherein the country was simultaneously an arch-conservative political back-water – cut off from a global conflict it called the "Emergency" – while also a global leader in theoretical physics. And this during an era when that science was turning conventional thought about the nature of reality inside-out.

A small side-product of the clash of civilisations was a libel action brought by DIAS against The Irish Times, after Myles Na gCopaleen made a joke about the activities of the institute in his famous column, also called Cruiskeen Lawn. And 70 years later, another accidental offshoot of those events is Improbable Frequency, Arthur Riordan’s highly-entertaining musical farce, now playing at the Gaiety.

I went to see it during the week and, mid-way through the last act, found myself thinking about St Koloman. Not that there’s anything saintly about the musical Schrödinger: as portrayed by Riordan, he is both nutty scientist and ardent philanderer (this last detail was at least partly based on the Newtonian reality), equally dedicated to unlocking the defences of local maidens and the secrets of the universe.

But in the play, he is also caught up in a war-time spying drama, dogged on either side by British agents and crypto-fascist republicans. At one point, he even has a rope tied around him. Happily, there is no hanging involved. And happily too, he does not suffer any torture; although this is not something that can be said for the script’s multiple Myles Na gCopaleen-esque puns.