Culpable negligence

Household insurance at Redfellow Hovel requires three locks on the rear doors to the garden. After all, that’s the weaker, less observed point of access. So very reasonable stuff.

In another context Malcolm found himself reviewing how Éire coped with the outbreak of World War II. That’s a far bigger topic than can easily be contained here; and others — Brian Girvin, John Duggan, and Clair Wills sit on Malcolm’s shelves, alongside more general histories — have done it more than adequately anyway.

In the course of his fossicking, Malcolm hit on this, from Questions in Dáil Éireann on Thursday 25th April, 1940:

Risteárd Ua Maolchatha: asked the Minister for External Affairs if he will state the number of occasions since the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 25th April, 1938, on which there was direct personal discussion between Irish and British Ministers on matters of mutual trade, and if he will say in respect of each such occasion the date, the various Ministers who took direct part in the discussion, and the matters discussed.Minister for External Affairs (The Taoiseach): There have been no direct discussions between Irish and British Ministers since April, 1938. Questions connected with the trade between the two countries have, of course, been discussed from time to time through the High Commissioner and the British representative here, and within the last few months officials of the Department of Supplies and the Department of Agriculture, acting on behalf of their respective Ministers, have had direct discussions with officials of the corresponding Departments in Great Britain. I may add that, following these latter discussions, the Minister for Supplies and the Minister for Agriculture will go to London next week for conversations on certain outstanding points with the British Ministers concerned.

General Mulcahy: Seven months of the war situation have passed without any of our Ministers discussing their problems with the British, and nearly two years have passed since the Agreement was made. Is that so?

The Taoiseach: That is so.

General Mulcahy: Will the Taoiseach say whether he intends to report to the House, as a result of the meeting that, happily, it is proposed should take place next week after such a long period?

The Taoiseach: I do not know. Any arrangements that may be made will have to be reported to the House in one form or another.

 Read, mark and inwardly digest!

Most sentient beings here present may be raising a knowing eyebrow.

• That was happening a fortnight after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, and six days after the Dutch PM announced a “state of siege” (doubtless aware of troop movements next door).
• Risteárd Ua Maolchatha had been Chief of Staff for Óglaíg na hÉireann (should you prefer: the IRA), and it was his signature on the ceasefire order for 11th July 1921, when the Treaty negotiations were begun.
• The Taoiseach is none other than de Valera, himself. Dev was never one to use words lightly, and without deliberation.
• Richard Mulcahy was no goat’s toe: the image at the top of this post is Mulcahy, watching his back, while Michael Collins wonders what he has just stepped in. Even in 1940 Mulcahy was the coming man in Fine Gael. Ua Maolchatha was, as far back as the War of Independence, Mulcahy’s backstop. Even if this was no “planted question”, the speed with with Mulcahy jumps in, and de Valera’s reply implies all parties were aware more was being said than being spoken.

The question was, ostensibly, about “trade”; but the answer seems more general: “There have been no direct discussions between Irish and British Ministers since April, 1938″.

That has to be a clue to intense frustration in Dublin. In any case, “trade” (the ostensible subject of that question) was code for beef, bacon and butter in exchange for fuel and some minimal matériel for the Defence Force.

There had been constipation in London. A proper diplomatic channel with Dublin had not been opened. De Valera wanted a British minister or ambassador in Dublin (a grandeur which Chamberlain couldn’t accept). The term “high commissioner” was too colonial for de Valera: its parallel was the British High Commissioner in Egypt, the de facto power in the land. The gap was finally plugged by Sir John Maffey, retired as permanent under-secretary for the colonies, becoming the British “representative” in Dublin — a rôle to which he was shackled for the next decade. All too little, too late.

We’d need to have in mind the other numerous other frustrations the British imposed, mainly out of necessity, on the Irish. All telegraphic and external postal traffic — and pretty well all other communications — went through London. Folk from Donegal could not pass through Northern Ireland into Great Britain — Sam Beckett, born in Dublin, claiming Irish citizenship, was refused permission to return to France by the only route possible. And so on.

Meanwhile Churchill, in the Cabinet, was muttering about invasion and seizing the Treaty Ports.

What had Neville Chamberlain’s Government in London had done to keep De Valera and Éire on side? Even after eight months of the war, had no serious attempt been made to lock the back door?

Incredible! But, apparently, true.

Every day a new distraction

Today’s was William Bloat.

That has divided those who venture these ways into an immediate switch off (the usual “dwell time” on a blog page is reckoned in micro-seconds) or a more positive, Oh, yes! I know that one!

Well, here’s the best-known rendition (from the Clancy’s reunion concert):

Once the final verse gets into one’s neurones, it’s ever-lurking, ready to pop out:

But the strangest turn of the whole concern
Is only just beginnin’:
He went to Hell, but his wife got well,
And she’s still alive and sinnin’
For the razor blade was British-made
But the rope was Belfast linen!

There is considerable debate about that “British-made”. That’s the version Tommy Makem gave us, and he was the first (as far as Malcolm knows) to marry the verse to The Dawning of the Day. Well, even that’s arguable. There’s a delicious, earlier, Makem concert (also on YouTube) when the blade is “Japanese-made”. That’s worth a visit if only to see Tommy trying to break through the rigidity and hyper-politeness of the RTÉ audience (don’t miss the lady with the hat).

We have, then, another opportunity to deploy the pencilled variae lectiones. But this is folk-music, for heaven’s sake! The whole point is modification, adaptation, re-working, interpretation. It’s what kept Cecil Sharp (and others) in tea and biscuits.

What we may grasp at is that the verse was by Raymond Calvert of East Belfast. And that’s Orange country. It seems the original blade was “German-made”.

Confuse a Mudcat

In any case of doubt or difficulty over folkery matters, a ready resort is the Mudcat Café. Sure enough, there’s a couple of threads on William Bloat. What is evident there is the lack of understanding of what goes on in Ulster (even in Irish) humour. Above all, it is wry. It is self-referential. And it crosses all the divides of religion and culture. The same jokes crop up each side of the Great Divide: all that happens is the protagonist is ‘ours’ and the stooge or ‘antagonist’ is one of them uns.

So, depending on where one is — north or south — the razor-blade may be be Free State-made or English-made. Belfast linen, though, is a matter of pride both ways. It’s the same as the Titanic gybe: it took 10,000 Ulstermen/Belfast men/ Irishmen (that bit depends on locality and allegiance) to build it, but only one Englishman to sink it (that bit is common to all parties).

While we in these parts …

The other — perhaps far greater — song that is set to The Dawning of the Day is Paddy Kavanagh’s love-lorn appeal to Hilda Moriarty:

There’s a useful RTÉ archive on the song, including Benedict Kiely asserting that Kavanagh had the tune in mind, and intended it to be a song rather than just a verse. There also is Hilda Moriarty briefly commenting on the inspiration.

For a couple of years in the early ’60s, undergraduate Malcolm used to stagger home, alone, bereft and unloved,  to his cold-water basement flat in Elgin Road, Ballsbridge, after a night at O’Neill’s in Suffolk Street. If it wasn’t Wellington Road, it would be Raglan Road he passed down. He never met or was inspired by a Hilda.

Dublin is a small place, and Hilda — having discreetly repulsed the inept gropes of Kavanagh — went on to marry Donogh O’Malley, the later Minister of Education. Which, finally, brings us to another personage worthy of respect and admiration.

The not-so-great and the not-so-good, no. 30: “George Smiley”

No, not really: try John Michael Ward Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook. Same difference?

Malcolm doesn’t pretend to omniscience, quite. [In passing, he ventured "omniscient" in a Sixth Form essay at the High School, Dublin, and had it crossed out as a spelling error. It still rankles.]

The spur for this one came out of a book review, by Stella Rimington (no less)  in the current Spectator. The book under review is Michael Jago’s The Man Who Was George Smiley: The Life of John Bingham. To his discredit, Malcolm only made the connection fully when he read:

Born in 1908, the heir to an Anglo-Irish barony, [Bingham] saw his ancestral home sold for a pittance and his parents living in genteel poverty. The French and German families with whom he had become friends in the 1920s were broken up or turned into enemies by a war which destroyed the Europe he knew. He was still in the Service when the situation in Northern Ireland  began to raise new security threats, but he retired before he saw the radical change that terrorism was to bring to agent-running and everything else about the Service. He would not have liked it.

Note that Mrs Rimington does not say that “agent-running” is a matter of history, merely that the practice has been “changed”. She is also explicit about what the practice had originally been:

When I was a new MI5 recruit, working in Leconfield House in 1970, there was a group of middle-aged men who came and went at unusual times of the day, often gathering in the late afternoons, talking loudly and cheerfully. They were the F4 agent runners and I envied them; they seemed to be having a lot more fun than I was.

F Branch, the counter subversion branch, was responsible, amongst other things, for monitoring the activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain and in particular for identifying its members, in support of Clement Attlee’s 1948 ‘Purge Procedure’, excluding communists and fascists from work vital to the security of the state. By 1970, the F4 agent runners, of whom John Bingham was one, had done a pretty thorough job. The Party’s King Street headquarters was penetrated by long-term agents, the membership records had been regularly covertly copied and the building was thoroughly bugged.

Malcolmian asides:

Clement Attlee’s 1948 ‘purge procedure’ is covered by Peter Hennessy in The Secret State, and, more sensationally and subjectively, by (but natch) Chapman Pincher in Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-Ups. The accepted version seems to be that, in mid-1947, the Whitehall in-crowd were pressured by MI5 to set about excluding “communists” from sensitive work — on the basis that such “communists” might have divided loyalties. “Communist”, of course, increasingly became a very elastic term, allowing the right-wing governments that followed to spook on all and any “enemies within”, who were inevitably on the left.

Attlee went public on the “Purge Procedure” on 15 March 1948. In April 1950, after  the conviction of Fuchs, Attlee authorised the further development of “positive vetting”.

Both the ‘purge procedure’ and ‘positive vetting’ are spun out of MI5 files: no more, no less. Donald Cameron Watt, reviewing The Secret State for The Political Quarterly has a tart, but pertinent observation about:

British security policy towards the ‘enemy within’, that fifth column which had turned out to be so mythical in its nature during the 1939-45 war with Nazism, and still has to be properly assessed for the forty-five years of the Cold War.

Our value of those MI5 files might be enhanced did we not know:

• that Jack Straw, of worthy citizens, was the subject of one of them [while an interview Malcolm had in 1994 suggested someone in the Home Office had information on his alter ego from the early 1960s];
• that Charlotte Bingham (Lord Clanmorris’s author daughter, and also employed  in “intelligence”) once “mislaid” 29 of them,
• and that David Cornwall (later “John le Carré”) was recruited as an undergraduate at Lincoln College, Oxford, presumably to report on his contemporaries.

Be all that as it may, Bingham’s name crops up sequentially in the “usual sources”, such as half-a-dozen mentions in Guy Liddell’s Diaries (interviewing a Polish émigré about approaches from the Germans; posing as a German secret serviceman to wind in a suspected enemy agent — and being denounced by her as a Gestapo man; “baby-sitting” a “safe house”).

The Bingham heritage

North-east of Dorchester, on the River Piddle (stop sniggering!) is the ancient seat of the Bingham family. As these things go, it is Bingham(‘s) Melcombe (above). In the time of Henry VIII, one Robert Bingham had a prolific marriage to Alice Coker. Their third son, Richard, distinguished himself in Elizabeth’s Irish wars, and in 1598 was appointed Marshal of Ireland and governor of Leinster. Richard’s next younger brother, Henry, followed and set up shop at Castlebar [☟]: this is the line we shall shortly follow. Meanwhile …

Three generations, and five successive baronets, later we arrive at Sir John Bingham. He married Charlotte Sarsfield (sister of the more famous Patrick) — who was a niece of the Duke of Monmouth, and a grand-daughter (albeit by one his many irregular connections) of Charles II.

By now the more genealogically-sensitive will have spotted where this is leading. Sir John Bingham’s second son, Charles, became Baron Lucan of Castlebar in 1776, and the first Earl of Lucan in 1795.When Charles popped his well-heeled clogs in 1799, the title passed to an earlier Richard Bingham.

Scandal!

What else would one expect of this family?

The 1838 edition of Debrett has it succinctly, if baldly:

married 26 May 1794, Elizabeth Belasyse, da. and co-h. of Henry, last duke of Fauconberg, (whose marriage with Bernard-Edward, duke of Norfolk, had been dissolved by act of parliament the same year,) and by her had issue, — 1. Elizabeth, b. 1795.

Do the sums. The divorce was passed in May 1794, She married Bingham forthwith. In due course, a decade later,  they separated, and she went to life in Paris. Anyway, something wrong: “Duke of Fauconberg”? Err, no: daddy was Sir Henry Belasyse and 1st earl of Fauconberg: mummy was Charlotte Lamb.

Five generations on we arrive at the infamous Lord Lucan.

“Baron Clanmorris”: who he?

Ah! Someone’s paying attention!

We have to start with Henry Bingham, whom we met above, the younger brother of Sir Richard — who was last seen setting himself up in state at Castlebar [☝]. Sadly, he was on 22 July 1691 decapitated at the Battle of Aughrim.

His son, Henry, was Lord Justice of Ireland, and — in turn — his great-grandson, John Bingham, was created the first Baron Clanmorris on 30 July 1800. Mark that date, and consider the politics. This Bingham was M.P. for Tuam, one of the rottenest of two-seater boroughs:

Tuam, 3150 inhabitants; electors, a Sovereign and 12 Burgesses — a venal and rotten borough under the patronage of Mr. Bingham.

 For £8,000 cash he sold those two votes for an Irish peerage — and for supporting the Union.

Three generations on, we arrive at the 5th Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook (also a John, no great imagination at work here), who was an aide-de-camp to the Viceroy of India, and came home to be a J.P. in County Down and Galway. The sixth Baron was an Arthur (some originality at last), who served in the Boer War, went out to be  aide-de-camp to the Governor-General of New Zealand, and was a captain in the First World War. And so we arrive at the seventh Baron, the subject of this demolition job.

Of my nation? What ish my nation?

So, reviewing the career of this Anglo-Irish succession — 1801 and all that followed, let us try to find room in our hearts for Stella Rimington’s punch-line:

… the book is very readable for its main character: novelist, patriot and moderate man in a world of extremes.

Incomprehension

Good fences make good neighbors

Robert Frost, of course, hence the spelling:

There where it is we do not need the wall: 
He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
My apple trees will never get across 
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.

As is generally accepted, the proverb goes far further back than Frost in 1914. Benjamin Franklin had it in Poor Richard’s Almanack, in the form:

Love your neighbor; yet don’t pull down your hedge.

Clearly it was a well-worn axiom, even then.

Or, as Dominic Behan — ambiguously — had it:

The sea, oh the sea is the gradh geal mo croide
Long may it stay between England and me
It’s a sure guarantee that some hour we’ll be free
Oh! thank God we’re surrounded by water.

Somehow that was transported (like much else) to Newfoundland, where Joan Morrissey gave it new life:

The whole point of the relationship of the Celt and the Saxon is mutual incomprehension. It is a gaping chasm dividing the nearest of neighbours. A couple of the Great Moments of Anglo-Irish history were:

• Queen Elizabeth I being verbally lambasted (in Irish) by Shane O’Neill (6th January 1562):

John Onell the Frenshman who had don much myschief the sommer past in Ireland cometh by save condytt into England and was receved gentelly in the courte in his saffron shorte the twelveth day at night. He accuseth the erle of Sussex of great crymes, crueltie, breache of promyse, putting to death of divers contrary to promyse and saue conduytt, pilling and polling etc.

O’Neill and his party were the subject of much chatter at Court. They were so unlike us, my dear. The version given on electricscotland.com is strong on romantic imagination, if nothing else:

Few scenes could be more picturesque than this visit of the great Ulster chieftain to the capital of his unknown sovereign. As he came striding down the streets of London on his way to the Palace, attended by his train of gallowglasse armed with the battleaxe, his was indeed a figure to strike the imagination. Like the great golden eagle from far-off Donegal, when seen among homely surroundings, Shane the Proud impressed those who gazed at him as being indeed a king of men. He stalked into the Court, his saffron mantle sweeping round and round him, his hair curling on his back and clipped short below the eyes, which gleamed from under it with a grey lustre. Behind him followed his gallowglasse, their heads bare, their fair hair flowing on their shoulders, their linen vests dyed with saffron, with long and open sleeves, surcharged with shirts of mail which reached to their knees, a wolf-skin flung across their shoulders, and short, broad battle-axes in their hands.

The redoubtable chief had no reason to be dissatisfied with his reception. The Council, the peers, bishops, aldermen, dignitaries of all kinds, were present in state, and the assembly included ambassadors from the King of Sweden and the Duke of Savoy.

O’Neill, later that same year, sweetened the occasion by sending Elizabeth, through Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a present of two horses, two hawks, and two Irish wolfdogs.

• Then early in September 1593, Gráinne Ní Mháille (a.k.a. Grace O’Malley), de facto (leaving aside any legalistic details) lord of Umhall Uachtarach, came to Greenwich to make her complaints.

Let’s hear it from Mary O’Dowd, writing for the Dictionary of National Biography:

On her husband’s death, O’Malley, according to her own account, ‘gathered together all her own followers and with 1000 head of cows and mares’ went to live in Carraighowley Castle, co. Mayo, on part of her late husband’s territory, where she continued to ‘maintain herself and her people by sea and land’ . She may initially have established friendly relations with the new president of Connaught, Sir Richard Bingham, but she and her sons soon fell out with his regime. Owen was killed by the president’s brother George Bingham in 1586 and O’Malley was imprisoned and threatened with death. Theobald was maintained in the president’s household for some time as a pledge.

O’Malley was implicated in the Burke rebellions of 1586 and 1588 by Sir Richard Bingham, who accused her of drawing Scottish mercenary soldiers into co. Mayo. Her actions suggest, however, that she was primarily concerned to protect the interests of her immediate family and particularly those of Theobald. By 1591 Theobald had emerged as the leading Burke and the strongest contender for the position of MacWilliam but despite submitting to the government he was still regarded with suspicion. Her son’s arrest precipitated O’Malley’s visit to Elizabeth I in the summer of 1593. A remarkable aspect of O’Malley’s petitions was that she acted as spokesperson for the men in her family. She asked the queen for the release of her son and of her brother, who had also been arrested by Bingham. She also requested that her two sons and two other male members of the Burke family be given letters patent for their lands. As a widow under English common law, O’Malley also laid claim to dower from the land of the O’Malleys and of the O’Flahertys. In a much quoted passage she explained that a widow under Gaelic law had no right to her husband’s land. The royal visit was a success from O’Malley’s point of view. Bingham was ordered by Elizabeth to release Theobald and to grant O’Malley maintenance from her husbands’ lands. As a demonstration of loyalty, O’Malley claimed that she had ‘procured all her sons, cousins and followers of the O’Malleys’, with a number of galleys (some newly built on her return from London) to assist the Elizabethan forces in the Mayo area . The Irish administration was, none the less, slow to implement the queen’s instructions and in 1595 O’Malley made another visit to London, renewing her requests for herself and her male relatives.

There are umpteen accounts of the meeting of O’Malley and Elizabeth — the number of them alone testifies to the strangeness of the occasion, of two worlds colliding. Here is E. Owens Blackburne, doing one of those mid-Victorian (1877) shelf-fillers,  in Illustrious Irishwomen: Being Memoirs of Some of the Most Noted Irishwomen:

Tradition says that Grainne O’Mailly and her retinue performed the entire journey by sea, and sailed up the Thames to the Tower Gate. In this case tradition does not seem to be far wrong, for her little son, Theobald, or Toby, who was born during the journey, was called, Tioboid-na-Lung, or “Theobald of the Ship.”

The meeting of the two royal ladies must have been a strange sight, — the light-haired, light-eyed, fair-faced and rather shrewish-looking Elizabeth, and the swarthy, black-eyed, and black-haired Queen of Connaught. That the latter and her retainers were not attired in the then prevailing mode is pretty certain; but it may also be positively stated that, whatever was the fashion of their habiliments, the texture and workmanship would have borne comparison with any to be found at the Court. For in Ireland, from the earliest ages, skilled needlework was held in the highest esteem.

There are many traditional accounts of this memorable interview, but the chief and best result of it was that it consolidated the treaty already made between Grainne and Elizabeth. At the same time the Irish chieftainess although expressing herself grateful for the protection afforded by the English Government did not cede one inch of her royal dignity. The English Queen offered to create her a countess ; to which Grainne replied that she could not do so, as they were both equal in rank. But she said she would accept a title for her little son Toby, who had been born on the passage from Ireland. Accordingly, the infant was brought into Court, and then and there created Viscount Mayo ; from whom the present noble family of the Earls of Mayo is descended.

When the Irish chieftainess arrived at the English Court, she described herself as “Grainne O’Mailly, daughter of Doodarro O’Mailly, sometime chief of the country called Upper Owle O’Mailly, now called the Barony of Murasky.” This statement rather puzzled Elizabeth, who knew that Grainne was a married woman, until it was explained to her that it was customary amongst the Irish for the women to retain their maiden names after marriage.

They haven’t gone away, you know

The cultural differences extend well into the 21st century. Hence the Celt (who has a more intimate experience of the pained relationship) views the Saxon with amused contempt; while the return glance — when it is deigned to be afforded — remains devoid of real understanding.

The whole thing was writ small and neatly summed by a letter on The Guardian website, reproduced in the Saturday Review section. It’s from a regular contributor to the Books pages, poet, and publisher. The topic is Hilary Mantel’s London Review of Books article:

Given Cameron’s role in this affair, it’s difficult for an Irish person not to take some unwonted pride in a recent speech by much-maligned Irish poet-president Michael D Higgins; Joyce, Beckett, Marx, Sartre, de Beauvoir were all name-checked by a career politician who has read their works.

BillyMills

Divided loyalties: being Hiberno-English

A long while since (5th September 2008, since you didn’t ask), Malcolm put up a post on being Anglo-Irish. For some reason, that still attracts a fair number of “hits”. This, then, may be the logical  counter-part.

J’ai deux amours

Josephine Baker famously had two loves:

J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris.

If Freda McDonald — barely two generations from slavery — had a hard life, growing up in St Louis, she found fame, fortune and a distinguished personal history as Josephine Baker in her adopted France.

Therein lies the rub

In this 21st century, many of us have two identities: one on the birth certificate, and one in the life we live. There’s little particularly “new” in this:

• Arthur Wellesley got himself born in what is now the Merrion Hotel, Dublin — but is the archetypal English Iron Duke;
• David Lloyd-George arrived in the world in the Manchester suburbs, but is forever “the Welsh Wizard”;
• Éamon de Valera originated in New York, but re-made an Ireland in his own image;

— and so on.

Malcolm’s eldest has a surfeit of air-miles and is quadri-lingual in English and American, Tottenham and Noo Joisey. Even daughter number 2, the Earth Mother, manages to switch effortlessly between south Saxon RP and narrow-vowelled Anglian North Yorkshire.

Your nationalism quiz

Yesterday’s

Times

,

at its fullest fluffy Murdochian populism, was rattling on:

A new version of the Life in the United Kingdom handbook, published yesterday, aims to prepare would-be Britons for the citizenship test. The guide focuses on history, tradition and what it means to be British and has ditched more mundane sections on the practicalities of life in the UK …

The 180-page guide, costing £12.99 is unashamedly patriotic, with a red, white and blue cover and pictures of the Queen and of crowds waving the Union flag at the Last Night of the Proms and on the Mall. Sir Winston Churchill is pictured alongside quotes from his wartime speeches but only two post-war prime ministers receive separate biographies: Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher.

The new edition finds a place for Monty Python, Morcambe and Wise and Torvill and Dean, but migrants will also be expected to know about important figures of English literature including Sir Kingsley Amis, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and J.K.Rowling.

Pass the sick-bag, Alice.

On the other hand, the side-bar was a Commentary by Matthew Syed, and it went a way to re-entering normality. Syed refers back to background:

My father arrived on these shores in 1966 as a Muslim, Pakistani, and harbouring deep suspicions about British cultural assumptions. Almost half a century later, he is a monarchist, Radio 4 aficionado and just about the most patriotic Brit I know. With the exception of his Christianity, to which he converted, Britishness is perhaps the most important and cherished affiliation of his life.

My maternal grandfather, who died last week at 98, lived a very different life to my father. Born in the Rhondda Valley at the outset of the Great War, he worked down the pits from 14 then spent a lifetime serving others, first at a home for deprived children and then as warden of an old people’s home. the one thing he shared with dad was a deep love of nation, but he interpreted Britishness in a fundamentally different way.

Not deep. Not philosophical. But neither, reading between the lines of that Times piece, is Life in the United Kingdom [£12.99 at all good bookshops, or around £7.99 if you're Brit enough to order on-line — a nationality test in itself]. Syed scores by being domestic, humane, direct, down to earth — even dignified, in the best sense. All the good things the official line seems to miss.

For an example, today’s Clare in the Community (Harry Venning’s unfailingly reliable weekly cartoon for the Guardian‘s Society section) is an instant education in ‘Britishness’, and — unlike the nostrums in Life in the United Kingdom — transcends the regional cultural divides that Syed glosses in that final phrase above:

What are little boys made of?

Everyone differs: we are an unregimented, frequently-bolshie and mutually-incompatible lot, each with our peculiar passions. What is it that makes Malcolm’s academic and professorial Little Brother traipse out fortnightly to stand with perhaps 5,000 other stalwarts and watch Notts County? The heterogeneousness is an essential part of belonging anywhere on this archipelago.

Unlike Syed, Malcolm was denied personal knowledge of either of his grandfathers: one tends his plot eternally in Doullens Communal Cemetery Extension No. 2; the other died of miner’s lung around the time the (first) Great Slump arrived. Did either of those have a deep love of nation, an overwhelming sense of being “British”?

As for the royalist thing, Malcolm recalls (and can date) 15th February, 1952. He doesn’t remember the funeral of George VI — apart from the oddest early-adopter, television hadn’t penetrated north Norfolk. He does know it was a day of national mourning, and so a Friday off school. Dear Old Dad spent much of the day double-digging the long vegetable garden, and none too chuffed. When pre-adolescent Malcolm murmured a triteness about it being “Sad about the King”, the parental snort was followed by “Why, what did he ever do for me?”

Was that the germ of a young republican?

Two loves? Well, two affections.

For Malcolm neither north Norfolk nor dirty Dublin quite amount to “‘loves”. The former has changed, not wholly for the better, over the years as the have-yotties and weekenders made the coast a transplant of Camden Town — Hampstead-by-the-Sea is further south, at Southwold. Dublin has changed even more, though there remain vestiges of the old scruffiness. West Cork has gone the way of the gentrified English coast. Once away from the “gold coast”, the rest of County Down is not wholly spoiled — but could one transplant and enjoy living there?

Despite all the confusions, that double pull recurs and endures. After all, when GCE English History and English Literature immediately leads into the Irish Leaving Certificate, a cultural trauma persists for life.

Par eux toujours,
Mon coeur est ravi.

Form line of attack!

Trying to come to terms with a bit of Czech, Malcolm hit on this:

Moje kamarádka se, naproti tomu, byla dobrým teroristou, protože byla dobrá v plnění rozkazů.
My friend, on the other hand, she was a good terrorist because she was very good at following orders.

Somehow that incongruity fitted the extraordinary ‘performance’ of Euro-minister David Lidlington, under scrutiny by Andrew Neil, on the BBC1 Sunday Politics. It was only when John Rentoul put up the transcript the whole disaster became evident.

So allow Malcolm to switch his metaphors in mid-stream, and revert to something nearer home: the wooden heads walls of Old England.

Action stations!

It began quite amiably (Cap’n Neil is at his best when the cannonade is loaded but the battery not yet run out):

Andrew Neil: David Lidington, the Tories led the yes to Europe campaign in the 1975 European Referendum. A Tory Prime Minister signed our accession to Europe, the Single European Act and Maastricht. Did David Cameron’s speech represent a break with the past?

David Lidington MP: No. What David Cameron’s speech was about was the recognition of the fact that change — and dramatic change — is already taking place in Europe and Europe’s going to change further. The speech was not just about the situation of the UK vis a vis the rest of Europe, it’s about how the whole of Europe needs to respond to the challenges of global competitiveness, democratic accountability and getting the relationship right between the eurozone and the others.

Wow! At first hearing, that almost convinces. It’s not as if the main crisis is UKIP rolling up the soft-Tory vote (and more by disaffection on gay-marriage, grammar-schools and such like), which is scaring the excrement out of the marginal Tory MPs. Well, is it?

Engage the enemy more closely!

Anyway, that was merely Neil’s bow-chaser finding his range. Once the target was close enough, the broadside:

AN: Now less than two years ago junior Tories in the government, including your own parliamentary secretary had to resign because they voted for a referendum. What changed?
DL: What that debate and that vote was about, in October 2011, was over whether there should be a referendum when the future of Europe was very far from clear. What the prime minister is talking about is having a referendum in the UK to settle matters to get the consent of the British people at the end of a process of European negotiation and reform. It’s two completely different questions.
AN: Well is it really? I mean in 2011 your – let’s just look at what you said. You said, ‘When I go round the constituency at political and non-political events, this is the last thing on their minds a referendum.’ You said, ‘they’re more concerned about jobs.’ I ask you again, what’s changed?
DL: It’s still the case that whether you look anecdotally in my constituency or whether you look at the opinion polls that Europe ranks below issues like jobs and the economy in people’s minds, but what has change –
AN: I understand that, but these people were fired because they wanted a referendum and you’re now giving them a referendum.

The simplest questions (“What has changed?”) are the most difficult — and Lidlington has to fluff this one, effectively three times.

England expects that every man will do his duty

Then Neil goes for the hard-pounding on the terms of the negotiation:

AN: Well let me see if I can help you. This is what the last Conservative manifesto said. ‘A Conservative government will negotiate on three specific guarantees. On the Charter of Fundamental Rights, on criminal justice and on social and employment legislation.’ You wanted these to come back to Westminster. Let’s say you add in protection for the City of London from new regulations from Brussels. Is that the bare minimum?
DL: You’ll have to wait and see for our manifesto exactly what is going to be in there.

This is clever stuff. Lidlington offers a tacit but unqualified “yes”. Anything less than that 2010 commitment and the Balubas go AWOL, and joining the UKIP marauders. Let’s be honest, even with those impossibles achieved, the true eurosceptic will still be off with the mutineers.

Malcolmian aside:

Balubas came to have a particular meaning in Irish politics, particularly so when Seán Lemass, having finally succeeded Éamon de Valera, was seeking to bring his party into the second half of the Twentieth Century

In November 196o, an Irish platoon in the Congo crisis were surrounded by the Baluba tribe. In that Czech expression, there’s the notion that terrorism needs close obedience to orders. In the Congo there was endless bloody terrorism, and the only orders in effect were those constraining the poor blooded infantry.

Nine of the eleven soldiers of that platoon were killed. Their bodies repatriated. O’Connell Street was packed for the courtege on its way out to Glasnevin. Yes, Malcolm was there.

Hence, the ‘Balubas’ became a term for the wild culchies who came up from the bog lands to torment the Fianna Fáil leadership.

And if you don’t recognise a “culchie” is, ask any Dubliner.

Finally, Neil holes Lidlington below the water-line:

AN: Let me show you another thing the Prime Minister said. He wants the EU to think again about its aspirations to ever-closer union. Now, this is what the Treaty of Rome in ’57 said. It’s the founding document. ‘Determined to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe.’ Now, it beggars belief, doesn’t it, that the rest of Europe is going to overturn that founding principle?

Prepare to pick up survivors!

The whole Cameron case, as defended by Lidlington founders on that:

• Macmillan accepted the ‘ever-closer union’ concept at the first application for membership.
• Heath was something of an enthusiast.
• Wilson worked around it.
• As did Thatcher. Indeed, she was hot for economic union, particularly if it gave the UK’s quaternary sector access to the European market in finance, management, insurance and derivatives.
• Major carried on regardless: it wasn’t an important issue.
• Blair was, as always, insouciant.

Suddenly, after half a century, it becomes the make-or-break issue.

And we know that Cameron, the Tory financiers and backers in the City cannot accept a break.

Nice one, Mister Ed!

The weekly corrida de toros (always a lot of bull, but today a bit of horse) of Dave and Ed was a nice one today. Only the true die-hard thought Cameron did the business. Even the ranks of ConHome could scarce forbear to fleer:

[Miliband] probably won the exchanges on points, despite Cameron having the better of the arguments.  The Prime Minister all but used the “R” word, alluding to consulting the public and gaining the “full-hearted consent of the British people”.  His insistence that a Conservative Government would want to take powers back from Brussels, and that a Labour Government would give more away, was right.  But my sense is that to the lay voter hinting that you want a referendum in future while arguing that you don’t want one now looks muddled.

That’s Paul Goodman who, despite Malcolm’s partisan sniping is good — and getting better:

Downing Street must be anxious about women’s votes.  From the Tory backbenches, John Glen raised the gain which the Government’s proposed pension reforms will bring to some women, and Mary Macleod plugged childcare: I may be wrong, but both questions had the smell of the Whips’ Office about them. Laura Sandys asked about the great horsemeat scandal.  Cue the Rebekah Brooks jokes.

Edible equines

That’s another chewy matter, currently being digested across the media, including Slugger O’Toole, where Pete Baker has opened his Boucherie Chevaline. Not surprisingly, it’s a bizarre goulash of serious concern and dismal punning:

• One of the few, very, very, few, successful native industries Ireland could boast of was its meat industry, specifically beef. Following the Irish economic collapse it was about the only economic success story Ireland could point to. This will absolutely devastate it.
• I was just checking my burgers in the fridge there……Aaaannnnd they’re off!!!

For different reasons, Malcolm likes both of those … and had to participate, in part recollecting an earlier post here:

I know two things about a horse
And one of them is rather coarse.

Even so, the presence of real meat (beef, horse, or whatever) in burgers is the least of his worries. It’s not the meat that concerns him: like the 99.9% of known germs slaughtered by household cleaners … the problem lies with the other and unknown bits.

One small wrinkle: the Irish tests which revealed the horse DNA date from two months since. What’s been happening since? Why does it become public only now?

Back to the bear pit

Miliband’s smirk at PMQs must have registered all the way to Brighton: he was winning, and he knew it.

Inevitably the Tory (and other) commentators are getting antsy. Hence the demands for a definitive statement of the Labour position, usually expressed in the whinge: Miliband must commit NOW! To which must go the answer: No chance!

Simon Jenkins (in the Guardian) tried, rather tortuously, to reel in his sprat:

From the moment in 2003 that Gordon Brown stopped Tony Blair joining the euro, Cameron’s speech was waiting to happen. The evolving euro would sooner or later need a tight political corset to enforce fiscal, budgetary and monetary union. Britain and other states would not join this, and would therefore need to negotiate their relationship with this euro-specific regime. Labour’s Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, both party to Brown’s victory over Blair, know this well. There need be no disagreement.

No disagreement? Come, come: that’s not the nature of British adversarial politics.

James Forsyth, Speccie-lating away, would like to see a Tory ploy in the whole thing:

Those close to Cameron are arguing that Miliband has now shut the door to Labour offering a referendum, putting Labour on the wrong side of public opinion. They believe that once Cameron has actually delivered his speech, the atmosphere will change and Miliband will have to say what he would do.

Oddly enough, Benedict Brogan got the message:

On a succession of vital topics raised in the interview, Mr Miliband said he couldn’t answer because we are too far out from an election: we will have to wait for the manifesto.

One has to read the rest of that, in the context of the tormented Torygraph, fully to realise Brogan’s frustrated pain that Miliband is not to be hooked. The full beef is hoarsely delivered by David Hughes:

Labour is marching on the spot, going nowhere fast. While the party’s policy review is churning away, Miliband appears to think that he and his front bench can confine themselves to lobbing bricks at the Tories and leaving it at that.

Is that wise? At the last general election Labour won just 8.6 million votes – that’s just a smidgen more than Michael Foot got when facing Margaret Thatcher in 1983 in what is generally regarded as Labour’s most abject post-war electoral performance. That suggests there’s a big job of work to do rebuilding the party, thrashing out a credible post-Blairite position. Instead, Ed Miliband seems content to coast, apparently seduced by Labour’s opinion poll lead into believing the next election is in the bag.

Big mistake.

Which amounts to a genteel version of those pointless and repetitive demonstrators’ chants:

— Wha’ d’we want?
— A target to hit!
— When d’we wan’ it?
— Now!

A problem made in and by the Tory party to eviscerate itself

The bottom line has to be there is no European crisis. Thanks to a steady steer from Angela Merkel, the worst of the €-mess seems to be passed. Ireland is selling bonds again. The appalling Berlusconi is polling at 20-25% and won’t be coming back. Greece and Spain are bleeding; but still only walking wounded. François Hollande has opened his second front (albeit in Mali); and dragged Cameron part-way into the mire: nice one, Frankie!

Only Cameron’s Britain seems to have conniptions; and so — after six months of dither — we may be able to read Cameron’s lips. As Miliband summed it:

The biggest change that we need in Europe is a move from austerity to growth and jobs, but the Prime Minister has absolutely nothing to say about that. This is the reality: the reason the Prime Minister is changing his mind has nothing to do with the national interest. It is because he has lost control of his party. He thinks that his problems on Europe will end on Friday, but they are only just beginning.

The Cameron speech, now on Friday, is:

• not about Britain — though it may include a “shopping list” of unrealisable aims,
• not about a referendum — though Cameron will do his best to imply just that,
• not about Europe, for Cameron and his government have rendered themselves impotent side-liners.

No: it is essentially about:

• fabricating some semblance of Tory unity until the 2015 election (any hopes for the Euro elections of 2014 must already be written off);
• fending off UKIP and Tory back-benchers’ night-stalkers — if Tory policy on Europe came as a stick of seaside rock, the six letters through the stick would read F-A-R-A-G-E;
• The referendum, which Cameron flinched away from before, has now become the last hope: that (not 10% or whatever in the polls) is a measure of how successful UKIP has been.

Bated breath?

Last Monday Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, gave a bald assessment of just how desperate Cameron’s position is:

… he has set out how we might get that referendum on Europe after the next election, but there is a series of ifs:

• If he wins the next election alone (in other words doesn’t have to get this past Nick Clegg)
• If he can persuade other European countries, particularly Germany that they need and want treaty change
• If Britain can then get what it wants in negotiations
• If he thinks he can then win a referendum

If all that happens, well then, yes, there will be a referendum which he thinks will approve a new better settlement for Europe.

But his difficulty in giving that big speech on Europe in about a week’s time is what if he’s wrong on any one of those ifs?

There’s as much chance of all that coming to pass as Mrs Brooks’s ex-policehorse, Raisa, doing a Lazarus out of the Tesco’s chiller.

Bilbo on Boa Island

Malcolm spent thirty-six hours while a hacking,wracking, rancid cough developed into the full-blown streaming head-cold. This meant much of the Saturday press passed him by.

So, this Sunday morning, sniffling over coffee and marmalade, he ignored the trivial newsy stuff and concentrated on the real meat: the supplements.

And, as a further consequence, in short order he read:

• Douglas Kennedy, in The Times [£], on Mark Binelli’s The Last Days of Detroit;

and

• Michael Viney in the Irish Times on a The Flora of County Fermanagh.

One so dystopian it underlines Malcolm’s settled intention never to go near Motown: the other … well, try this from Viney himself:

The landscape of Fermanagh, it occurred to me, would be Ireland’s best refuge for hobbits, if we had them. The heights of the county are frowning and wild, it’s true, and even quite scary at the windy clefts of Cuilcagh’s summit, or under the Cliffs of Magho. Great limestone caves and swallow holes speak of unexplored tunnels to alien lands: Donegal, Leitrim, Cavan, hemming the Shire on three sides, and closing it off from the sea.

In the rain shadow of all this, however, is the intimate, drumlin landscape of grottoes, gorges, woods and hundreds of hushed, reedy lakes.

Even the great expanse of Lough Erne, an ideal playground for hobbits when young, is full of little islands for modest, measured lives.

Malcolm has always conceived Hobbiton in rural Worcestershire, around Tolkien’s own home in Evesham, now transliterated to Waikato Valley of New Zealand’s Northern Island. Yet, on one of the few balmy summer days that bless the Lakelands, Viney’s conceit would figure.

After all: Derrin/Doirín, Pollnagollum and Slawin/Sleamhain may also exist in an alternative, happier, healthier universe.

What’s in a name?

… That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet’s soliloquy, (II, ii, 44-45), of course and now so clichéed as to need an occasional reference for respectability.

And then there’s the vexed question of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland. In English, this is “Northern Ireland”  — though the most northernly part of Ireland is Malin Head, which is in Donegal — and so, in the parlance, paradoxically in the “South”. Nor, of course, is a Northern Irishman exclusively an “Ulsterman” — because Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan are in the ancient province of Ulaidh, but are not in Northern Ireland.

My passport’s green

Even among the northern (missing capital deliberately so — see more on this below) Irish there is no agreement on what one is: British? Irish? Northern Irish? Ulster Scots? When Penguin Books included Seamus Heaney with Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon, in the The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, he was the one who famously objected:

Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised
My passport’s green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.

He made up for it, though, at Dublin Castle in May 2011.

The People with No Name

That is the title of a fine book by Patrick Griffin, in Malcolm’s view the best account of the Ulster protestant diaspora who occupied and extended the Western frontier of the American colonies. It is subtitled: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764.

The opening paragraph of that book illustrates the nominal confusions with a variety of names:

BETWEEN 1718 and 1775, more than 100,000 men and women journeyed from the Irish province of Ulster to the American colonies. Their migration represented the single largest movement of any group from the British Isles to British North America during the eighteenth century. In a first wave beginning in 1718 and cresting in 1729, these people outnumbered all others sailing across the Atlantic, with the notable exception of those bound to the New World in slave ships. By sheer force of numbers, this earliest generation of migrants had a profound influence on the great transformations of the age. Even before they left Ulster, they contributed to the triumph of the Protestant cause in Ireland, paving the way for an unprecedented extension of English power into the kingdom. They also figured prominently in the British transatlantic trading system by producing linen, one of the most important commodities exchanged throughout the empire. Sailing when they did, Ulster’s Presbyterian migrants played a formative role in the transition from an English to a British Atlantic. Before their migration, Puritans and adventurers leaving England during the seventeenth century for the North American mainland and the Caribbean dominated the transatlantic world. After men and women from Ulster boarded ships for America, the cultural parameters of the Atlantic broadened, as they and thousands of land-hungry voyagers from the labor-rich peripheries of the British Isles sought their fortunes in a vast, underpopulated New World. In America, Ulster’s men and women again had a hand in a number of defining developments of the period, including the displacement of the continent’s indigenous peoples, the extension of the frontier, the growth of ethnic diversity, and the outbreak of religious revivals. In the abstract, therefore, the group contributed to the forces and processes that dwarfed the individual but yoked together disparate regions into a broad Atlantic system.

The editor of Gaelscéal, Ciarán Dunbar, has picked up Griffin’s essential thesis, inverted it, and now puts up a ruminative thread on Slugger O’Toole:

Whilst working on Gaelscéal on Tuesday last I realized that I did not know the correct Irish term for ‘Northern Irish,’ so I quickly checked focal.ie, the ‘National Terminology Database’ for Irish.

That was a fruitless journey for they had no such term, I requested they provide one.

The term was one I have strangely never needed in Irish and I have never thought about it to date.

On the day, we simply used the English term in single speech marks.

That night I heard two terms used on TG4, ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’, agus ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’, both translating into English as  ‘Northern Irish’ but with a subtle difference in meaning in Irish which the English doesn’t capture.

One implies a mere geographical distinction, the other, perhaps, a clear political distinction.

A meaningless distinction for most but one could argue that constitutional  future of the Northern Ireland state rests on this distinction, whether the Northern Irish are ‘Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh’ or ‘Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha’ at the end of the day.

Malcolm queries whether English cannot capture precisely the distinction between Tuaisceart-Éireannaigh, and Éireannaigh Thuaisceartacha by doing what he did above: capitalising or not the “n” of “northern”.

Proconsul

Beyond that, the thread provided Malcolm with a bit of further diversion, the Latin version of wikipedia. Yes, indeed: there is one — even if somewhat abbreviated for the present. And here is its definitive statement on the topic:

Hibernia Septentrionalis, quondam (H)ultonia (Anglice: Northern Ireland, Hibernice: Tuaisceart Éireann) est provincia in Hibernia et Regno Britanniarum. Caput est Belfastium et dux gubernationis est Petrus Robinson; ille est dux factionis civilis qui appellatur Factio Unionistarum Democratica. Successit Reverendum Ioannem Paisley, qui abdicavit in Iunio 2008. Proconsul est Martinus McGuinness. Ille est membrum factionis civilis Sinn Fein (Latine: Nos Ipsi), olim dux Exercitus Republicani Hibernici.

Apart from stroking Malcolm’s self-esteem (that even after half-a-century, his TCD Latin, ever so rusty, can still cope), there were several amusements in that.

One was Máirtín Mag Aonghusa transmogrified from the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland into the far more concise, even poetic, ‘proconsul’. Which instantly directed Malcolm’s butterfly mind to Kipling:

The overfaithful sword returns the user
His heart’s desire at price of his heart’s blood.
The clamour of the arrogant accuser
Wastes that one hour we needed to make good
This was foretold of old at our outgoing;
This we accepted who have squandered, knowing,
The strength and glory of our reputations
At the day’s need, as it were dross, to guard
The tender and new-dedicate foundations
Against the sea we fear — not man’s award.

The subject there was originally Sir Alfred Milner, who was the British High Commissioner in South Africa during the Boer War. The “Oh, gosh!” thing is, stripping from one context to the other, the elevation of  Máirtín to ‘proconsul’ almost works.

“Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”

Moving swiftly on, there is the conceit of Petrus Robinson, dux Factionis Unionistarum Democraticae (3rd declension, feminine: genitive case!). Thus rendering the DUP into Latin gives us the acronym FUD:

generally a strategic attempt to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information. An individual firm, for example, might use FUD to invite unfavorable opinions and speculation about a competitor’s product; to increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers; or to maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival.

In the case of the DUP, precisely.

Browne study

Bishop Michael Browne of Galway would almost qualify as a “not-so-great and not-so-good” had not “Bill” done a previous, and better hatchet-job:

Michael Browne was catholic bishop of Galway in from 1937 to 1976 and seemed to exemplify everything that was wrong with the church… He was among those who led the hierarchy’s objections toNoël Browne’s mother and child health scheme. He supported a boycott of protestant businesses in Co. Wexford during a dispute over a protestant woman married to a catholic man who refused to educate her children at the local catholic school. He described Trinity College Dublin as “a centre for atheist and communist propaganda”. He forced the segregation of the sexes on Galway beaches. He seemed so perpetually angry that his episcopal signature — “† Michael” – was popularly rendered as “Cross Michael”. He supervised the construction of a grandiose new cathedral in Galway that local wits dubbed the “Taj Micheáil” (pronounced Meehaul).

That post also involves the late Brian Trevaskis, a perverse and interesting character who was a feature of TCD, overlapping Malcolm’s time.

The Fethard-on-Sea business was nasty in the extreme, and contributed mightily to the sectarian prejudices of Northern Protestants well after the original episode. Tim Fanning’s The Fethard-on-Sea Boycott is probably the fullest account. A summary of the main events is on Gareth Russell’s blog.

Anyone of a fair mind (and even other) would surely recognise that Browne was off-piste in oh-so-many ways. Or, “The Irish bishop stands on ceremony and sits on everybody,”as Seán O Faoláin put it. However, let’s pass on all that.

Going through the motions

Once upon a shitty time, when Galway hadn’t made much effort to filter its effluents, that was the experience of swimming in Galway Bay. To be strictly honest, across the city and county, there remain ample opportunities for improving water-quality. In 2007 it was cryptosporidium. In 2008 it was levels of lead. In 2011 it was oily waste. In 2012, e-coli.

Anyway, allegedly Bishop Browne liked to swim. Unencumbered by swimming costume. And to air himself in the Galwegian sunshine thereafter. Doubtless among males of similar disposition. He had a sign put up on the beach at Salthill, prohibiting women therefrom.

Elsewhere Bishop Browne was very much against any mixing of the sexes, even clothed, on beaches:

“Everywhere has changed in my life time”, [Christie Moore] says. “I remember Galway winning three-in-a-row; the Bishop of Galway banning “mixed bathing” — the dirty minded bollocks; Des Kelly and The Capitol being Number 1 in The Irish Charts; when there was only one De Danann; Michael D presenting me with a platinum disc; Moving Hearts falling asunder in St.Patrick’s Hall, and reforming two hours later in The Skeff.”

Out of the strange came forth sweetness

Which isn’t quite how Judges 14:14 has it, nor (as is better known in every British kitchen to the present day) how it appears on the Tate & Lyle golden syrup tin. Yet it has a relevance here.

Bishop Browne’s prurience was the contrarian inspiration for an early Seamus Heaney poem, Girls Bathing, Galway 1965:

The swell foams where they float and crawl,
A catherine-wheel of arm and hand.
Each head bobs curtly as a football.
The yelps are faint here on the strand.

No milk-limbed Venus ever rose
Miraculous on this western shore;
A pirate queen in battle clothes
Is our sterner myth. The breakers pour

Themselves into themselves, the years
Shuttle through space invisibly.
Where crests unfurl like creamy beer
The queen’s clothes melt into the sea

And generations sighing in
The salt suds where the wave has crashed
Labour in fear of flesh and sin
For the time has been accomplished

As through the swallows in swimsuits,
Brown-legged, smooth-shouldered and bare-backed
They wade ashore with skips and shouts.
So Venus comes, matter-of-fact.

That now appears by the Galway Bay Hotel, opposite the beach — still ‘the Ladies’ Beach’ — on the Salthill Promenade, one of half-a-dozen bronze plaques celebrating poems along the Cúirt Literary Trail.

The poem seems  superficially a slight thing, almost a piece of juvenilia. That’s Heaney’s deception: it anticipates so much of what Heaney’s later work would become. It is highly complex in its allusions and, appropriately in this context, in its undertow.

The incident is, on one level, from Marie and Seamus’s honeymoon.

The form is almost a ballad: quatrains of four-stresses to the line. There is the characteristic Heaney conflation of past and present, the classic and the work-a-day: So Venus comes, matter-of-fact. The implied visual references include Botticelli’s Nascita di Venere and St Catherine with her wheel: that, along with in fear of flesh and sin, must imply continuing martyring of women in Browne’s gynophobia.

Strange meeting

There is is the nod to Irish tradition and history: the pirate queen in battle clothes is Gráinne Ní Mháille/Grace O’Malley/Granuaile/The Sea-Queen of Connacht.

Gráinne, another woman of strength, is depicted in the frontispiece to Anthologia Hibernica, no humble suppliant. She had been summoned  in  September 1593, to Greenwich to  encounter Elizabeth I. The Queen acquiesced with all of Grace’s demands — to the profound disgust of Richard Bingham, Lord President of Connacht, who regarded her as nurse to all rebellions in the province for this forty years.

All that without the implicit physical sexuality: Brown-legged, smooth-shouldered and bare-backed.

Bishop Browne knew not what he had provoked.