Irish immigrants

The editor’s problem — three disparate articles for the weekend edition;

• the regular and popular weekly “nature notes” column;
• your blatant (but wholly valid and engrossing) rip-off of Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in a Hundred Objects;
• since February’s a bit short on what-to-do-in-the-garden, we’ve got  a piece on Traditional skills and where to learn them.

Well, there they were on page 6 of the Irish Times Weekend Review, nicely done, under the header Heritage&Habitat (the Irish Times is not afraid to borrow from Guardian typography).

Each was valid in its own right; but, since Malcolm has seen hedge-laying done and explained Norfolk-style, he here concentrates on the other two.

Taking an axe to it

It’s only, when you’ve read the ten loving and detailed paragraphs, you appreciate why they are so well written. Only then comes the modest by-line: Fintan O’Toole.

This is the second of what will, presumably, take us all the way to 2013, this A History of Ireland in 100 Objects.

The first week was little more than throat-clearing. O’Toole waxed lyrical about:

some small, smooth interwoven sticks [above] embedded in the turf from a bog at Clowanstown, in Co Meath. Its discovery was a side effect of the great Irish boom: it lay in the path of the M3 motorway.

But at the end of the last ice age the bog was a lake. The woven sticks are an astonishing survival, part of a conical trap used by early Irish people to scoop fish from the lake or catch them in a weir. Radiocarbon tests date its creation to between 5210 and 4970 BC.

In point of fact:

The Irish trap could be called a classic design: similar ones are still in use around the world.

Precisely.

On the contrary, this Ceremonial Axe, 3600 BC (left) is something very, very different and  equally as special. All O’Toole’s linguistic texture seems suddenly appropriate:

Even now, its sheen and colour are magnetically alluring, the jade green surface, mottled with darker veins and glimmers of light, polished to a high sheen. The shape is beautifully balanced between sharp edges and elegant curves. It was once thought that it must have come from China. But if it looks exotic and mysterious now, 5,000 years ago in Ireland it would have seemed astonishing.

Its provenance is no less so:

The jadeite axe, from the Erris peninsula in Co Mayo, was never used to cut anything. It was always a rare object, made to enhance the prestige of its owner. We now know just how exotic this one was: in 2003, it was established that the axe came from what was then an extraordinarily distant source: a quarry high in Mount Viso in the Italian Alps. It required enormous labour to mine and transport it. And it was already old – the manufacture of these specialist axes ended around 4,000 BC.

The axe tells us two big things. One is that Ireland was already part of a European-wide network. It travelled first to northwestern France, where it was polished. Then it made its way, either directly or through Britain, to west Mayo. And similar jadeite axes from Mount Viso were being imported into Denmark and Germany. The society that was emerging in Ireland was tangibly European, shaped by contact with the wider world.

Hello! A bit of political correctness (tangibly European) creeping in, Fintan? Hardly: it is a positive nudge that, then and now, this object, and all of us, came by sea. Ireland’s position in the Western Ocean placed it on the prehistoric equivalent of the Hanger Lane gyratory.

A Malcolmian aside:

The series has — this being Ireland — inspired a cod version. It lacks the veneration and literate genius of O’Toole: it is pungent, of the earth, earthy, and as Irish as get out:

As an alternative to the official list:

1. The brown envelope James Gogarty handed to Ray Burke containing IR£30,000.
2. The missing lodgement slip for Bertie’s USD$40,000.
3. The imaginary ladder Bertie used to climb every tree in North Dublin looking for evidence of Ray Burke’s corruption.
4. The soccer bag George Redmond brought back from the Isle of Man containing IR£300,000.
5. Brian Lenihan’s first liver in a jamjar after he got a retread to allow him to drink himself to death for a second time…

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole

Alongside  Fintan O’Toole we find the weekly labour of Michael Viney … Now, look here, you Philistines, where, other than the Irish Times, do you get two writers of such quality, and on the same page? And all for less than half the price of a Starbucks sludge? As well as Viney’s own art-work (left)!

This week Viney ventures into the verdure once trodden by William Boot, the lowly world of shrews (no, not her indoors) and voles.

Viney, like that axe, has his special place in the wilds of Mayo. And he, too, can be read as a piece of political history. This week he shares it with a new-found acquaintance:

What do you do with a shrew in the loo? This lunatic, unquenchable jingle was born of the latest addition to the biodiversity of what was once our cottage porch. Veteran readers will already be familiar with my meditations on its wildlife – woodlice, spiders, the dearg a dhaoil in the shower, and so on – so that the shift up the food-chain should come as no surprise.

The pygmy shrew is an arch-insectivore (like the hedgehog) and nothing to do with the mouse family, so that its rapid skittering around my bedroom slippers impelled only the lifting of feet lest some entomological morsel escape that quivering little snout and grinding, ruby-tipped teeth. Two hours without a meal and a shrew is in a bad way. “There is something indescribably sad, almost poignant, about a dead shrew,” wrote Belfast zoologist James Fairley once, “ flat on its back with its little legs in the air. As animal corpses go, only that of an elephant is more pathetic.”

Viney was surely aware of the perils of a Bootian comparison here. He kills that threat with the Fairley quotation, as much as with the effortful writing that gives such effortless reading.

As Malcolm reads Viney, the pygmy shrew was, until recently, Ireland’s only representative:

This miniature mammal has, however, punched well above its weight in the scientific unravelling of Ireland’s post-glacial colonisation by furry wildlife. The island has mysteriously lacked the larger common shrew that, in Britain and most of Europe, overlaps with and often greatly outnumbers it. In the long to-and-fro of theorising about temporary, low-lying, soggy land bridges to Ireland after the ice melted, much was once made of the common shrew’s need to burrow after earthworms as a major prey, whereas pygmy shrews could survive on soaking-wet moorland, partly by leaping after midges…

Genetic research, however, now suggests that, like most of our mammals, the pygmy shrew arrived along with people. DNA analysis has found the Irish shrews sharing a lineage with those of Andorra, that tiny mountain enclave above Spain.

Which is as astounding, and as telling, as an axe from the Alpine source of the River Po.

Viney then outs two new arrivals:

• Crocidura russula, the greater white-toothed shrew:

This larger shrew, thought to have arrived en famille in the root ball of a big plant imported for an Irish garden centre, commonly enters houses and outbuildings in Europe and often makes a den in the warmer depths of compost heaps. With its larger size and four or five litters a year – twice the reproductive rate of the pygmy shrew – it seems very likely, in time, and with climate change, to usurp the pygmy’s present spread of territories.

• an even more peculiar arrival:

another little widespread furry alien, the bank vole, that arrived in the 1920s with German earth-moving machinery brought in through Foynes to build the Ardnacrusha dam. In the absence of Britain’s field voles, it has further enriched the food supply of the Irish stoat – with the Irish hare, the only true mammalian survivor of the Ice Age on or around this island.

Only last week, the BBC’s Country File had leggy lovely Ellie Harrison seeking, but not finding, the legendary Rathlin Island golden hare.

The hares are one of the things Malcolm looks for, coming in to land at Aldergrove. Fortunately, they generally oblige; to make it a kind of home-from-home coming. Legend has it that one of the reasons for closing the old airfield at Nutts Corner was pilots objecting to umpteen hares’ eyes gleaming back from the landing lights. They closed Nutts Corner: the hares promptly debunked to Aldergrove. A more pragmatic, but less romantic reason is the tight and steep approach path.

Viney then goes on to speculate on the survival of the Irish stoat:

Dr Paddy Sleeman, UCC zoologist and an authority on the stoat, has long been intrigued by the gap in post-glacial prey available to the animal (hares generally run too fast to catch) and has come to the view the stoat may originally have been a coastal predator. In the current issue of the Irish Naturalists’ Journal, Mayo conservation ranger Eoin McGreal reports watching a stoat carrying a fish among shallow intertidal pools on Clew Bay, Co Mayo.

It’s all happening out in Mayo.

Information: Viney has it wholesale. Here at Redfellow’s Home Service, it’s available retail.

Right up to date

Now, in the same jugular vein, bottom of page 7 of Saturday’s Irish Times, we have Mary Fitzgerald profiling Hussein Hamed, Independent, standing in Dublin South constituency:

I am one of the new Irish and I believe we should be integrating in a positive way. I can act as a bridge between the new Irish and the wider community.

Malcolm nominates Mr Hamed to be added to the fishing basket and the ceremonial axe, not forgetting the bank vole, as A History of Ireland‘s object 101.