Since the whole world and his Irish mother is talking about identity, here’s my pingin rua’s worth. I was born and raised a Catholic in rural Tyrone, and having circled the globe a few times, I’ve ended up back where I started in the home place. The house goes back at least a few generations on my father’s side, and my mother was McDermott from a few miles up the road.
I feel 100 per cent Irish; not northern Irish, not an Ulsterman, not a bit British, not a child of the universe. I married an Englishwoman from Ipswich but I don’t dream of Suffolkation. I’m not into the tricolour, the national anthem, Guinness, St Patrick or his Day, GAA, Mass, not a republican or a nationalist or a Buddhist, I’m an inner free state pagan half-fluent in the language Irishman.
Where I grew up, our corner of the parish was fairly mixed and civil, but you wouldn’t have to stray too far to find hotbeds of “activity”. My first experience of social undercurrents was aged five on the bus to the country school. Some kids were dropped off en route at another small school, and one of them had a strange phrase: “we’ll get a rope and hang the pope”. I asked my mother what it meant. “Oh,” she said casually, “just tell them they’ll have nobody to curse on the twelfth of July.” I learned her words off by heart and trotted them out the next time the subject arose on the bus; the pope’s executioner just stared at me, looking puzzled, and that was the end of the community dialogue.
I was an enterprising wee bigot; I remember shouting after a couple of young “gypsy” women (to use the language of 1960) on their horse and cart, my curiosity getting the better of my fear, “are yous Protestants or Catholics?”
“I’m a cat-lick, tank God,” came the reply in an exotic accent from southern outer space.
When I was 18 I made a dash for Dublin, having survived the Troubles and the Christian Brothers. My strategy for both was to keep the head down, although I was so angry after Bloody Sunday in 1972 that I went straight out and bought Paul McCartney's Give Ireland Back to the Irish and turned it up to 11 on the Dansette. While I'm at it, I'd like another crime against music to be taken into consideration– an unhealthy attraction to the Wolfe Tones, to the point of going to see them live in Edendork. I remember when they belted out "the Sten guns and the rifles, a hail of death did pour", a lusty cheer went up from the audience, even though the aforementioned hail was from the boul' RUC in the direction of Sean South. Or maybe there were a few branch men in.
Fate soon had its revenge in Dublin, when it placed me in a bedsit in Wexford Street, a few doors down from the Wexford Inn, where the Wolfe Tones had a long-standing residency. Having the rifles of the IRA shoved down my throat repeatedly every week while I tried to sleep cured me of my militant folk phase for life.
I’m very grateful to the Free State for being there for me in 1974; it was a real tonic, and a life saver. I felt a great weight slip off my shoulders when I crossed the border, while in Dublin they had this amazing new social media thing called conversation, where you could say what you thought about anything under the sun, or describe things or babble nonsense in a pub – unlimited usage of the English language 24/7 free of charge, that was my kinda package.
It’s very quiet these days here in Drumnakilly. The kids all grown up and flown the nest, nothing to look forward to now except Brexit and a United Ireland. Slán.
Kevin McAleer plays Cork Comedy Festival on September 24th and 25th
