Postcards from the Edge

Mary Kenny

There was jubilation when the Irish minister for equality, David Stanton, recently announced that, henceforth, Irish public houses will be open for business on Good Friday, after a ban of ninety years. It’s all about modernising Ireland and keeping up with progressive ideas, such as ‘secularisation’ and ‘diversity’, said the minister.

Wouldn’t it be mortifying, in go-ahead modern Europe, if Ireland were seen as some kind of backward Catholic place where a cowled inquisition of priests had the power to close the pubs on Good Friday?

And look at the revenue that’s involved! Donal O’keeffe, of the Licensed Vintners Association, points out that the pub business on Good Friday is worth €30 million for that one day alone.

‘Friday is a significant trading day,’ he says. ‘It’s also a Friday heading into a bank holiday [that is to say, ‘Easter’, as we used to call it], and Dublin has a significant amount of tourists.’

Mr O’keeffe has been distressed, in the past, to see poor, bewildered, foreign tourists wandering around Ireland on a Good Friday, unaware that the local tradition was to withhold the sale of alcohol for that one day of penitence. Shocking deprivation!

I’m a Burkean libertarian by inclination and, if the democratic will is to open the taverns on Good Friday, so be it. My only misgivings around this development is what might be called folklorique. I like it when nations and regions have their own quirky traditions: I don’t like it when everywhere begins to seem like everywhere else, like a cosmopolitan shopping mall. It’s not the Good Friday pub session that’s the point: but the way that the rites and rituals of the past are all being ironed out into an international blandness.

In my childhood, you weren’t allowed to listen to the radio on Good Friday (until after 3pm), there wasn’t any TV until 6pm anyway, and the cinemas were shut. You had to fast for the day. Dubliners had collective rituals about visiting the ‘Seven Churches’ on Good Friday – seven designated churches around the city – there to perform the Stations of the Cross and repeat the narrative of Christ’s journey.

We were following ancient European traditions of fasting and feasting in a cycle of the seasons, now abolished to accommodate the sale of Easter eggs in February and the whole notion that we must all have everything we fancy when we choose. And yet Continental Europe still keeps many of its rituals and traditions. Though France is theoretically secular, it holds on to its holy days. Italy reveres its local saints, Spain its religious processions (and it has successfully revived Santiago de Compostela as a place of pilgrimage), and Belgium retains the kermesse.

But the old customs of Ireland are being gradually swept aside – St Patrick hardly figures in St Patrick’s Day. There is just one last ritual that modernisers are aiming to extinguish – the ringing of the Angelus bell, still heard over the national broadcaster’s airwaves. Denounced as offensive to secularists, and an insult to diversity, it can’t, surely, last much longer to remind us of ancestral calls to prayer. The London comedians had a good laugh at the suggestion, coming from Belfast’s DUP, that a bridge should be constructed between Northern Ireland and Scotland – stretching across 25 miles between Larne in Co Antrim and Portpatrick in Dumfries and Galloway. But why not? Bridges adorn euro notes, and the Øresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark is one of the most glamorous pieces of engineering in the world.

The link between Larne and Scotland goes back into the mists of history. Ulster historian AT Q Stewart called this passage of water between Northern Ireland and Scotland ‘The Narrow Ground’: there was heavy waterway traffic across this channel in the early Christian period, when it was easier to navigate water than to penetrate dense forests. Bridges are metaphors as well as feats of engineering. Yes, let’s build the bridge!

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968, when the students in Paris unleashed an anti-authoritarian street revolution that defined a generation.

But hark at this: the student revolt of May 1968 began with a protest at Nanterre University against segregated dormitories between male and female. Students clamoured for the liberation of co-ed dormitories but were ignored by the authorities. The student leader, Daniel Cohn-bendit, challenged the youth affairs minister François Missoffe, admonishing him for not addressing the ‘sexual issues of youth’. And that was the beginning of the student protests, which lit a fire across so many campuses.

Fifty years on, university students are now seeking, not ‘liberating’ co-ed dormitories, but ‘safe spaces’ to shelter them from the perils and dangers of sexual offences, abuse or harassment. Quite a turnaround.