CULTURE: EAMON DELANEYreviews Our Man in Hibernia: Ireland, the Irish and MeBy Charlie Connelly, Little, Brown, pp309. £12.99.
JOHN LYDON, the former Sex Pistol, has been talking again about his fondness for Ireland and the summers he spent at his grandparents’ house in Cork as a child. The Londoner is intensely proud of his Irish stock – as are Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who remembers a childhood of bacon and cabbage and eating Silvermints back in Charlestown, Co Mayo, and Morrissey and the Smiths, who have a similar Manchester Irish heritage. How ironic, and how subversive of conventional ideas of nationality, that these icons of popular British culture should be so comfortable with their Irish heritage while adding to, and even reinventing, modern Englishness. The world of overlapping ethnicities is always interesting, and none more so than the seemingly contradictory one of Irish-Englishness (or is it the other way around?).
I longed for more of that from this book. Charlie Connelly is English of Irish parents, and came here to live and experience our culture, but there is little about his own background. He does refer to Charlestown, however, and the famous series of articles entitled No-One Shouted Stop, by John Healy, late of this newspaper, which described the decimation of a small town by emigration. In this way Connelly perhaps takes a more erudite interest than many casual observers. Travelling around Ireland, he explains historical events, all the while bringing us up to date with a personal odyssey as he searches for traces of his forefathers, particularly a John Connelly who left Ireland in 1842, never to return. Connelly poignantly retraces the steps he would have taken to the emigrant boat in Cork. He re-imagines the journey his ancestor would have on landing in England, coming through the East End of London and taking up roots in the new country, just across the water but so far away.
The blurb on the book’s jacket claims that “if you think you know Ireland, this book will make you think again”, but this is an exaggeration. The book very much conforms to a traveller’s view of the country. The impulse is interesting: intrigued by the way modern Irishness had become popular, and even sexy, in the late 1990s, he decides to live here for two years. But “contrasting the cliched shamrock-strewn image with the reality of life in modern Ireland” has surely been well done before. Indeed, there is probably not enough actual mundane reality, but then would anyone really want to read that? There is, for example, little about Dublin, where, as he says, so much of the population now resides – a lopsided consequence of the Celtic Tiger – and what there is is mostly a long rehash of the 1916 Rising (yawn) instead of a focus on a modern, multicultural nation.
His forays around the country, however, cross-referenced with mini histories and snippets about England, are very diverting, and he writes with a friendly and engaging style. He visits the Aran Islands; Youghal, which he lauds; and Moneygall, where an association is claimed with Barack Obama, He also enrolls in Irish classes, although, like many of us, he soon gives up. Here he meets Jude, an Irish-American, and together they make some frank observations about the Irish character.
Connelly also gets into the heart of our thriving GAA scene and extols the magic of both local club football and the bigger fare taking place at Croke Park. He contrasts all this with some powerful investigations into the poverty of the Irish past and the conditions that drove people into often lonely exile.
A visit to Knock shrine arouses a gentle English scepticism – and some repetition. He sees a Liverpool FC clock next to the religious statues, looking a “little incongruous”; only a page later the old Knock church “looks faintly incongruous” in front of a concrete plaza. Incongruities abound.
But, in general, this is a-big hearted, curious book that moves along like an amiable coach ride. Although similar, in many ways, to accounts like McCarthy's Bar, by Pete McCarthy, and Lawrence Donegan's No News at Throat Lake, it offers something more valuable in the way it explores the aching nostalgia and strangeness of exile. In this respect I was reminded of Timothy O'Grady's I Could Read the Sky, which is very good company indeed.
Eamon Delaney's most recent book, Breaking the Mould: A Story of Art and Ireland,was published last year by New Island
