Old fear lurks beneath pity and empathy
Miriam O’Callaghan goes back to the future and condemns stereotypes, suspicion and the sacrosanct status quo
IT hit me first in autumn 1980. That sense of being different. In the Aula Maxima at UCC we queued up for registration, fee-paying students in one row, grant-holders in another. It was a time when two honours in the Leaving Cert got you into an arts degree. To do arts with a grant, however, you had to have four. Less welloff students had to do twice as well to access the ‘equal’ opportunity of education.
The fee-paying queue was mostly boys, groups calling out to one another, either as school pals or neighbours. In our queue, also mostly boys, we stood quietly, singly: we didn’t know anybody from school or home. From my bright convent class, only a handful of students had applied to university. Now here I was with the other handfuls from other classes, together but solitary, academically entitled but with a vague sense of trespass.
Initially, I had applied to study English, but a slew of points and the lunatic thought ‘why would I waste them’ resulted in a change to law. Criminal law was gripping. With contract and constitutional law, I lost the will to live. At 17, I raced past the hanging gate at Gaol Cross to the English Department across the Lee. Let me in? Not a chance. For a year, there would be no reprieve.
That year of law was an education. I learned three things: the indelible lesson of Them and Us; how relying on the State for education, or housing, fixes you firmly in the former category; what to call a northsider in a suit: the accused. Science or arts might have been more meritocratic, less nit-witted, clubby. (English and history were bliss, in fact.) But law? Who would you know for an apprenticeship or a job? Imagine you got in when Johnny’s aul’ lad has his sorted but he’s repeating for points? And all the taxes people like Us are paying for people like You? Obviously, we paid for nothing at all. The legal profession might have relinquished the sly desire to be self-admitting, but 38 years on, it is still self-regulating.
Just as in The Dead, Gabriel Conroy found it impossible to compete with a ghost, working-class Gabriellas found it impossible to compete with a stereotype: “Jesus, you’re so like… normal… you can’t possibly live “up there”. It is unclear whether the Crathur imagined “up there” more as Mad Max or A Clockwork Orange, but his parents could have clarified. They, too, were from “up there” albeit stricken by the cognitive deficit common in Ireland: forgetting where and how we grow up. In retrospect, I can see why. arrivistes learn quickly that only global amnesia will appease ‘polite society’, abject loyalty satisfies the status quo.
I loved growing up, “up there” — not along the Rings of Jupiter — but on the northside of Cork city, in a comfortable, red-bricked, semi-detached house with gardens full of asters, earwigs and roses. It was my grandmother’s house, part of the ambitious, villa-type social housing built in Cork in the early 1920s. She was lucky to get the house after her husband, a gambling addict, lost their family home and future to his disease. When they arrived, this pretty culde-sac was in the country. Dan Crean’s field to be exact. Murphy’s Farm and the famed Fahy’s Well just over the hedge.
As children in that house we were taken to plays, the ballet and the opera. We haunted the library, maxing our tickets. Our parents gave us Heidi at six, Anna Karenina at 16. To us she was Anna Kareneena. Next door, our fabulous adoptive family, the Maddens, were doughty travellers: Rome, Fatima, Lourdes, London, Lisbon, then Greece, Malta, Italy, every resort on the Costas, Switzerland, Austria and South Africa. With every trip we would get the map, potted history, photos and a present: Cork was not the world. If there had been free education in their time, my father would have been an academic, my mother a doctor. Once free education did arrive, their children grew up believing university was compulsory. In that respect we might have been unusual. But in one vital aspect, we were the same as every family in the northside of Cork city and every family in the world: we had been upright for a couple of million years.
In 1980, working-class boys at university were clever, ambitious. Girls? Not on your nelly. New or aspiring middle-class mothers, especially, were suspicious. To them we were pretenders, stereotypes, there not to learn about mens rea or invitation to treat or the intricacies of Anglo-Saxon, but to “get ourselves pregnant” and “trap” a husband, viz their sons. Self-impregnation was long the curse of women in Ireland, but it was the voodoo of clever, socially-housed girls who were eerily “normal”.
At the time their attitude was mystifying, mortifying. Now, as a mother myself, I pity them. These antsy mums — never mams — had been poor girls who left school early, some camouflaging their skill at self-impregnation with expertise in entertaining, extreme ice-cream making, bridge or golf. Beyond the freedom of the runabout and the shock of the daily, they were terrified they would be found out. Their reaction was less razor, more erasure.
I thought of them last week as Ireland showed its razor self to another mother who took refuge with her children in a Garda station. Instead of being interlocutors, large swathes of Ireland, turned inquisitor. What is “her breed” costing us, boomed Tuppence to the Penny. The cheek of Them expect Us to subside Their “irresponsibility”. The virtual bounty hunters sniffed through Facebook for evidence of her profligacy: a Communion dress, beer, hand-me-down glass. Her ‘delinquency’ was a minor infringement: historical because it happened yonks ago, historic in that she was the only Irish person, ever, to get drunk. Inquiries as to whether she was bailed for 64 billion, crashed an economy or threatened a currency are ongoing.
The Eighth Amendment ‘No’ lobby was blamed for much of the hate. They were there, all right, muttering in tongues. But so, too, were TogetherforYes abandoning their outposts of Trust and Choice to spit venom at a stereotype, who was in reality, an exhausted girl, down on her luck, doing her best for her children. It appears women can have choice once it is the ‘right’ choice, make decisions once they are the ‘right’ decisions, be shown compassion once they are “deserving” of it. The kind of “deserving” that is deserving of Dickens but perfectly in-keeping with our national smug.
Not long ago, we recoiled at the Legion of Mary functioning as police for the Magdalene Laundries. Now, a secular militia was patrolling radio, social media, reeking of the rage and suspicion that mutilated women in post-war Paris. “Reasonable” citizens, who believe the private market, not public policy, should facilitate housing, were livid at the stereotype challenging the status quo, dangling her children through the social hole in the magic carpet of Ireland Inc.
The unedifying episode proves that despite the joy of equal marriage and landslide
of the Eighth, The Valley of
the Squinting Windows exists intact, millimetres beneath the surface of our modernity: 100pc Formica veneer. Our ‘empathy’ and ‘compassion’ are a Hy-Brasil appearing occasionally from the Atlantic mists, but remaining out of reach. Beyond the dazzle of the expensive, market-tested rhetoric, it is not a caring “hand” new, modern Ireland is holding out to poor, homeless, CervicalCheck or waiting-list women, but a bargepole.
The August fortnight took us on a deep-dive into the consciousness that created mother and baby homes, Magdalene Laundries and Industrial Schools, the disappearing and trafficking of children. A consciousness of loathing, gloating but also of fear. Specifically, fear of the return whence we came; part of our Famine epigenetics like depression and schizophrenia.
In his memoir Returning to Reims, the French philosopher Didier Eribon writes of his destitute grandmother’s public humiliation, ostensibly for collaboration, but actually for “sexual misbehaviour, real or imagined”. He considers how “highly-placed collaborators in middle-class circles never had to experience this kind of public opprobrium, any loss of status, or the violence of public condemnation”. The same logic defines how Ireland’s status quo demonises a single mother as a drain on public finances, while insisting that trillion-dollar Apple keeps its tax, vulture funds pay €8,000 on €10bn worth of assets.
Some hate the poor. Others deny they exist. Mostly, they are feared. Today personal debt is high, financial security low. As more of us realise we mistook opportunity for risk, wealth for debt, fear is rising. Could we slip from Us to Them? Return whence we came?
‘Ireland showed its razor self to another mum last week’