Irishness is determined not merely by genetics

`When", asked Pat Kenny on Friday night as he introduced an interview with the footballer Tony Cascarino "is an Irishman not an Irishman?" The question was prompted, of course, by Cascarino's revelation in a new book that he was a phoney Irishman, a self-proclaimed "fraud" who did not qualify to represent the nation on the soccer pitch.

Yet, however irritating and irrelevant at one level, the Cascarino story is a useful reminder of something important. The tale of Tony's roots imparts a useful moral. Irishness is not a simple concept.

It's not a quality you've either got or haven't got. Pat Kenny's question can't be answered either by a scientific test in which some mathematical formula is applied to blood or chromosomes or by officially approved pieces of paper. This is especially true when we consider what was once supposed to be the clearest of all ethnic fault-lines, the one that divides Irishness from Englishness.

For one thing, the game of absorbing people into one or other national framework has two halves. On RTE's recent documentary Who's That Standing Beside John Murphy? there was, also from the world of soccer, the other side of the Cascarino coin. Liam Brady was talking about the time he was planning to leave Arsenal for the glamour and financial rewards of Italy. A senior club official, trying to persuade him to stay, pulled out what he thought was the clinching argument: "But you'd be playing in a foreign country!" Brady replied: "I already am."

THAT such a point had to be made underlines the fact that, in the convoluted relationship between Ireland and England, assumptions about who's native and who's foreign have to be kept under review. From the Irish side, of course, things have always been complicated.

Roy Foster has pointed out that at the most pivotal moments in the removal of the Irish state from the United Kingdom, the negotiation of the Treaty, the personal histories of almost the entire Irish delegation were entangled with England and the Empire. Arthur Griffith had learned his trade as a journalist in South Africa.

Robert Barton and George Gavan Duffy were educated at English public schools and made their careers, respectively, in the British Army and at the London bar. Erskine Childers was the "quintessential English adventure hero". Even Michael Collins had served his time as a post office official on the Shepherd's Bush Road.

As time has gone on the process has also worked the other way. Imagine, today, a foreign observer drawing up a list of quintessential English figures. Cosiest media figure for middle England? Terry Wogan. Postmodern media icon? Graham Norton. Working-class Northern lass? Caroline Ahern of The Royle family. Bloated bad-boy rock stars? The Gallagher brothers. Greatest contemporary English classical actor? Michael Gambon. Most intensely English actress? Julie Walters.

Both the chairman of the English Arts Council, the official promoter of English cultural identity, Gerry Robinson, and his predecessor Lord Gowrie, are Irish. Barclays Bank and British Petroleum are headed by Irishmen, Matt Barrett and Peter Sutherland. The largest English church is headed by a man called Cormac Murphy O'Connor.

OF course, our imaginary foreigners' list would have to include unequivocal English figures such as Tony Blair who, in the recent book Being Irish makes his allegiances clear. "Ireland," he writes, "is in my blood. My mother was born in the flat above her grandmother's hardware shop in the main street of Ballyshannon in Donegal. She lived there as a child, started school there and only moved when her father died, her mother remarried and they crossed the water to Glasgow. But I still spent virtually every childhood summer holiday, up to when the Troubles really took hold, usually at Rosnowlagh." Blair also notes that in his own salt-of-the-earth Grim Up North constituency of Sedgefield in Durham, which used to be full of coal mines "virtually every community remembers that its roots lie in Irish migration to the mines of Britain". If he was any good at soccer, Blair would have no problem getting a passport.

The Irish and British governments, moreover, have already accepted, in the Belfast Agreement, that the terms "Irish" and "British" are not fixed and determined by either genetics or genealogy, but are open to individual choice. In the agreement, both governments "recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose." This must be the first time sovereign governments have committed themselves on paper to recognising nationality both as a matter of choice and as capable of containing more than one allegiance (that wonderful "or both").

But if this can be accepted for Northern Ireland, why not for "these islands" as a whole? If people born in Belfast can choose to be Irish or British or both, why not people born in Dublin or Liverpool or London? Why do the North-South bodies set up under the Belfast Agreement seem vitally important while the Council of the Isles, which is supposed to represent the complex connections between the different parts of Ireland and Britain, has been almost ignored? The sense of Irish or English (or Scottish, Welsh or British) nationality is, and will remain, strong. But surely, they must be strong enough not to be threatened by the complex identities millions of people actually live with.

Anyway, we should be careful. If we give them back Tony Cascarino, they might just insist we take Henry Kelly in return.

fotoole@irish-times.ie