If it feels that way then that is how it is. Statisticians will roll their eyes, but, like most humans, I am sticking with such shabby, low-level empiricism.
A case in point. Hard evidence is scanty on this, but I feel we Irish still find it endearing to be late for stuff. “Oh, don’t get your knickers in a twist,” my invented friend says. “Sure, people love our informal tardiness. It’s as much a draw as the soft weather and the useless directions from people who don’t actually know the way. It’s charming.”
It is not charming. It is rude. Obviously, if a genuine catastrophe – meteor strike, nuclear attack, severed limb – occurs then the laggard is excused (or so, to seem sane, I’m pretending). The objection here is not to lateness itself; the objection is to not caring about lateness. “Oh, you know me. I’m never on time. Ha ha! Aren’t I terrible?”
Yes, you are. You are a bad person. You are not a bad person like Dr Crippen or Vlad the Impaler (again, I have to pretend I believe this to avoid incarceration), but, by always arriving 15 minutes after time, you have established undeniable mid-level badness.
Why do the Irish still think it’s charming to be late for everything?
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There is always “traffic”. Do you wake up every morning to discover children you didn’t know you had? If you are offering the same excuse each day then you really must work on your problem-solving skills. You. Need. To. Leave. Earlier.
There are smidgens of evidence to suggest we really are worse at this than other nations. Speaking, last year, to Ellen O’Donoghue for the New to the Parish column in The Irish Times, Carol Ho, who arrived to Galway from Hong Kong in 2017, showed admirable restraint in her assessment of the nation’s timekeeping.
“I learned about Irish time, which is when I organise events and you have to give at least, like, 30 minutes’ buffering time,” she said. “You cannot start right away, because people will arrive later and they don’t think they are late. They think they’re on time.”
Well said. That is exactly it. Too many people in Ireland “don’t think they are late” when they arrive 10 minutes after the time on the invitation.
[ ‘I learned about Irish time. People arrive late and think they are on time’Opens in new window ]
This column was prompted by the end of the autumn film-festival season and return to a very Irish form of habitual discourtesy. Elsewhere in the world, attendees at movie screenings, press conferences and theatre shows arrive in good time to take their seats and prepare for the coming entertainment.
Here, many regard the advertised kick-off as being loosely advisory. The great and the good will filter into the theatre and chat amiably in the aisles while decent honourable folk worry that vein in their own temple might throb itself to explosion.
Again, the point is not that you people are late. The point is that you don’t care about being late. I ran madly up the street to ensure I was at least five minutes ahead of curtain. You are exchanging pleasantries when you should be apologising your way to your seat.
So what is going on here? There is a well-worked strategy of using lateness as an assertion of hierarchical power: the boss who makes his staff wait to demonstrate their time is less important than his. While the “little people” are sitting outside your office they have more opportunity to brood about the colour of dressing down you are about to put their way.
That’s not what’s going on when bad people refuse to take their seat at the theatre, is it? Is this a horrible prank at my expense? Let us not get paranoid here.
Philippa Perry, the distinguished psychotherapist, has proposed the theory that, in contrast, lateness may be down to a lack of self-worth. “It could be that they don’t value themselves enough,” she wrote in The Observer a few years back. “If this is the case, might they be unable to see how others could possibly mind their non-appearance?”
Well, maybe. But none of this gets at the uniquely Irish notion that we are just too freethinking, original-minded and temporally creative to live by the demon clock. Is that how poets organise their days? Isn’t being on time the preserve of colonial overlords?
All right, this is a silly generalisation that would cause gross offence if issued by any visiting Englishman. The nation is certainly better at keeping time than it once was. We are rightly less patient with the caricature of Irish people as cheery, unreliable blather merchants. But let us agree that being late is a bad thing. Not so bad as neurotics such as me believe it to be, but bad enough to require a genuine apology.
