RACE, SLAVERY AND THE BATTLE OF VINEGAR HILL
RACE and our interpretation of it as Irish people has changed irrevocably over the last 20 years. Where once Paul McGrath and Phil Lynott were, as legend has it, the only black people on the island, we are now a nation of many ethnicities, a modern multicultural tribe which celebrates its differences rather than rejects them.
The Fisher Child, the third book in Philip Casey’s Bann River Trilogy, is predominately set in 1998, a time when the Celtic Tiger has just begun to bare its claws, when our new found prosperity made us a viable destination for those pursuing their dreams.
But rather than depict this new Ireland and its attitudes towards these otherworldly interlopers, the prejudice and enmity the new immigrants faced, Casey opts to frame the issue of race in his own way.
Kate and Dan are a married couple with two children. Both are descendents of characters from previous novels in the Trilogy. They live in London, they’re middle-class, relatively well-off and share a passion for the Arts.
That passion brings them to Florence for a holiday, sans-children. The decision to go it alone is motivated by their desire to visit galleries, museums, to bask in the glory of Bosch and the other Renaissance artists.
Kate becomes fascinated by a man in a painting, a white man with a black leg. At first this appears incidental, a strange quirk. But it becomes apparent that many of these paintings, which by and large originate in 16th century Rome and Athens, feature black people.
What also becomes apparent, upon their return, is that Kate is pregnant; a night of passion in Italy the culprit.
And here’s where the reader must, momentarily, suspend their disbelief. When the child, a girl, is born, it is not like Kate and Dan’s other children, at least not in terms of the colour of its skin.
Meg, as she is named, is black. There is no suggestion that Kate has had an affair; her inherent curiosity in black men never acted upon. But naturally her husband is bereft.
Dan retreats into his shell, rejecting the child, his wife, everything he has ever known, and eventually returns to Ireland, to his father, to mull over things.
We are then transported back to June 1798 and the battle of Vinegar Hill and to the exploits of Hugh Byrne, an ancestor of Dan’s and, more pertinently, a Pikeman.
He is on the frontlines, repelling the British invaders, fighting side by side with his brother, the men of his parish, to protect their lands. Yet hours later, he is attending Mass with his family, making arrangements with fellow soldiers outside the church, and making eyes with a smitten young woman wooed by his bravery.
The portrayal of this war - one fought up close and personal in a lawless, heartless fashion - are as dark and horrific as one might imagine, a departure for a writer who, in his two previous novels, had chosen to focus primarily on affairs of the heart.
But what is war other than a fight for land?
A common theme in Casey’s work, this fascination with land, with the ownership of sod and earth, and the rights of one to claim it over another, extends to Montserrat, the small Caribbean island where the next section of The Fisher Child takes place.
There, the Irish own slaves; black men, women and children, who are treated with contempt, flogged, raped and mistreated by those who themselves have only just escaped the clutches of the British Empire.
And it all comes back to Meg, to that black baby born to white parents, and whether Dan can accept her, whether he can take his wife at her word without resorting to a paternity test.
In that one birth, Casey encapsulates our attitudes to race, not just that, but also our heraldry, what it means to be Irish. More so, he helps us understand that such matters are of little importance. We are all interlopers, no one has any claim on anything, land or otherwise, and the most important tribe of all is family, regardless of colour.