We’re experts on the English, but we’re not so sure about ourselves
Declan Lynch
WE know so much about them, and they know so little about us. If there is one thought that has pleased us the most, during this interesting phase in Anglo-Irish relations, it is this one, all the more so because it is obviously true.
There are many Irish people who could probably rattle off the names of about 90 football clubs in various divisions of the English football leagues, whereas there are supposedly serious Englanders who would have no idea what you were talking about if you tested their knowledge with so much as one “Shamrock Rovers”.
I mean there’s no doubt about this, we know them much better than they know us, and some of us even know them better than they know themselves. On this one we have them bang to rights.
They were always a bit hazy on the subject, but since they went completely doolally on the old Brexit, they have been displaying their lack of knowledge of us in so many ways, it’s been like 24-hour party time for anyone who appreciates that kind of thing — as so many seem to do.
You see men almost drooling into their own tweets as they declare their openmouthed awe at Johnny England’s latest folly in this regard, the fact that evidently they have never bothered to learn anything about Irish politics or history or society, that they seem to find the pronunciation of quite easy Irish words beyond their limited capabilities, that most of them don’t even know where the border is, assuming that they know there’s a border at all.
“Who are these people?” Paddy cries, suppressing his inner delight. “What is wrong with them?”
Perhaps the most egregious offender of all has been Iain Duncan Smith, the Brexiteer who seems convinced that Ireland is about to have some sort of a Presidential election, as a result of which he perceives that the nationalist juices of our political parties are starting to overflow. Though Duncan Smith is himself a nationalist of the English variety, who — like all nationalists — seems happily set on a course which is guaranteed to destroy the old country that they profess to love so much.
So it seems that to the vast reservoir of English ignorance about Ireland has been added this trait which we know only too well ourselves, this nationalism which, as a wise man once said, is “eejitry taken to such extremes, that it becomes a form of evil”.
Traditionally, the Englishman has been more susceptible to becoming a buffoon than an eejit (there is a difference) but by succumbing to this truly wicked strain of Brexit-borne nationalism, they seem to have taken some of the worst aspects of our eejitry and added to it certain peculiarities of their own.
Thus the Tory Party is now a kind of Sinn Fein of the Shires. And thus there has probably never been a time at which England has known less about Ireland, given that the people who are currently running England don’t even know much about large parts of England either, let alone Ireland, or indeed any other place. Nor do they seem to care.
They don’t seem to know much about anything at all, if truth be told, driven as they are by the monstrous inanities of their nationalist cause.
And yet at this moment when we are so tempted to celebrate our superior knowledge, we must not stray into one of the classic errors of nationalism, a basic lack of self-awareness. Yes, we know so much about England, and England knows so little about us. But that is not the end of it.
There is one more stage to go, on this path to true knowledge, the stage at which we ask ourselves: why is this?
Well, one of the reasons we have so much information on our island neighbours, is that for decades we have been devouring their television programmes and many other forms of media, and we have done that because they are so good, and therefore they have given us so much pleasure.
Indeed there have been times when Irish people have measured the essential happiness of their lives according to whether they had access to the BBC or not.
English people, by contrast, would rarely have had much reason to think to themselves, “you know, things would be a lot better around here if only we could get the RTE”.
And while we know and love our own traditional music, we also know and love a multitude of English rock ’n’ roll bands, whereas from their perspective, having The Beatles and the Stones and The Who and Led Zeppelin might have curbed their appetite somewhat for checking out the sounds of the Tulla Ceili Band — which is their loss of course, but perhaps forgiveable in the greater scheme.
I have alluded already to our great obsession with English football, which gives meaning to many of our lives, though our knowledge of the great cities of England is not confined to our appreciation of the clubs who reside there.
Many of us, down through the decades, have also found it essential to live in these places, in order to overcome feelings of what might best be described as General Misery. Conversely, it would be a rare Londoner who’d be sauntering down the West End of an evening, thinking, “this is quite pleasant but you know what? I just wish I knew more about Ireland”.
And then there are times when it’s probably better all round that they don’t know certain things about us — do they know, for example, that of the many social problems which we have outsourced to them over the last century or so, we are still crucially leaving it to them to look after that little abortion issue of ours?
Still, after all these years, that’s where we go, in order to maintain the pretence that there is no abortion in Ireland.
Do they know that we’re still doing that? Do they care? Would they even have the capacity to believe us if we told them that in 2017 we are still making all those journeys?
So yes, we would know a lot about certain areas in particular over there, to which we would travel by plane and boat and train, and back again. Yes, we know those routes perhaps too well.
And after all, the only reason we’re asserting our superior knowledge at this time is because we are involved in these negotiations which demonstrate our vast dependence on the strange people across the water who buy things from us — even things they know very little about, from places they’ve never heard of, which they are willing to consume anyway.
For this, some of us might be willing to overlook the fact that in dispatches they might refer to “Enda Kelly the taysheikh of Southern Eire”, but many of us will mock them for it, because we can.
Yes we know so much about them. But perhaps we do not know so much about ourselves.
‘The Tory party has become a kind of Sinn Fein of the Shires...’