WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT TV’S IRISH STEREOTYPES
As the row over Gone With The Wind’s depiction of slavery rumbles on, it is worth remembering that it is also full of the sort of one dimensional “Oirish” stereotypes that have historically been used to keep Irish people down too.
Scarlett O’hara’s mawkish, sentimental father is a “fightin’ Irishman... quick with his hands”, who had to flee Ireland after murdering a rent collecting Orangeman. Well, of course he is.
Then there is The Quiet Man. Actor Malachy Mccourt once memorably said the plot of that film consisted of “wife beating, priest-ridden, blather-talking gombeen men getting drunk and then erupting into stereotypical violent fighting”.
These cartoonish portrayals were considered acceptable for decades as Irish people were either depicted on the screen as terrorists (Brad Pitt in The Devil’s Own springs to mind), or happy peasants who say “begorrah” way too much (yes, Darby O’gill And The Little People, we’re looking atyou).
In the 1950s Taoiseach Sean Lemass complained that the BBC “rarely if ever presents a play about Ireland without the characters moving around in clouds of alcoholic vapour”.
Irish people have long had to get used to these stereotypes in comedy as well, from the dodgy builder in an early episode of Fawlty Towers, to the standup comedians of the 1970s with their crude anti-irish jokes. Dick Emery actually played a red-haired Irish detective by the name of Flynn O’thick.
It’s not as if all this is safely in the past either. Little Britain may have been removed from screens this week in a backlash against shows in which white actors appear in “blackface”; but what about The Catherine Tate Show?
The cast of characters in that programme includes Bernie, an Irish nurse in England, whose face is so twisted with oversexed stupidity that it is painful to watch.
In one sketch her sisters Brenda and Bridie and brothers Seamus and Paddy come over from Ireland to visit. They all look exactly the same, with obligatory red hair, and the sketch ends with them Riverdancing in the ward.
The town drunk in The Simpsons is, inevitably, Irish, and on St Patrick’s Day there is a float in the Springfield parade devoted to “drunken Irish novelists”.
Video games are not immune. The drunken character in Red Dead Redemption is called “Irish”, presumably in case anyone missed the not exactly subtle joke.
As for soaps, the residents of Eastenders came to Dublin some years ago to trace their Irish roots for a series of episodes in which one reviewer said “everyone was either drunk, poor, dirty, rude, lazy, smelly, lecherous or pious”, adding that “they even had farm animals wandering the streets”. The BBC was forced to apologise.
And let’s not forget Coronation Street’s Jim Mcdonald, the ex-army man from Belfast who “liked his drink”, roughed up wife Liz after calling her a “whore”, then went to jail after robbing a building society with a shotgun because he was a bit short of cash. As you do.
Jim gets away with it because Charlie Lawson (left), who plays him on screen, is such a great and funny actor that you can’t help liking him. But it is not what you would call a positive image of Northern Irish manhood.
In recent years series such as Derry Girls have shown another side of Irish life, whilst Give My Head Peace may deal in local cliches, not least in the shape of loyalist bigot Uncle Andy, but always does so with such knowing affection that it is impossible to be offended.
What complicates things is that Irish people have bought into these stereotypes themselves. Father Jack, the cursing drunken priest in Father Ted, could not be more of a cliche, but we love him.
The truth is that, as long as people on this island keep making excuses for Mrs Brown’s Boys (above), we can hardly complain when people in other countries sometimes get the wrong end of the stick about what we are like.