Molly McCloskey, whose new novel raises questions about Irishness, asks if our identity is being blurred by a picture-postcard idyll?
What brought me, finally, was a film about Brendan Behan I saw in 1988 in a small cinema in Portland, Oregon. It wasn't so much the myth of Behan - arms flung open in that iconic pose - that attracted me as the (equally iconic) clusters of old men: stick figures in dark suits and peaked caps. Drinking Guinness. I was 24 and wanted to be somewhere old and grainy and real-seeming; somewhere exotic and safe at the same time; in black-and-white, perhaps. When I got to Ireland a few months later, that was what I found. Somehow, the country was still in black-and-white.
Henry James, on landing in England, remarked that "England should be as English as, for my entertainment, she took the trouble to be". What amazed me was how utterly like Ireland Ireland seemed. It was all the coffee table books I'd ever seen; it was the warm, fuzzy feeling I got when the kindly purple-nosed man on the ferry called me luv as he helped me disembark. Ireland felt not so much like a place to be as a place one had been. (Even if one had never been here). It felt like a place I could trust - not in the sense of leaving my bag unattended but in much deeper and more abstract way.
My plan was to travel the coastal perimeter of the island and wind up back in Dublin in about a month's time, at which point I would head home to the US. I arrived in Sligo riding shotgun in the van of a Donegal farmer. The gorse was flaming on the hillsides as we headed down the slope towards town. He wanted me to kiss him when he dropped me off. I didn't see why not. He was harmless - if rather grizzled and smelly - and I was here for an adventure. I held my breath and kissed his cheek and stepped out of the van and into the next 10 years of my life.
In 1989, in Sligo, the phone numbers were a quaint five digits. There were no pilates classes and nobody bothered with seatbelts. People who gave out about smokers were themselves given out about, and closing time was a concept one regarded in inverted commas, though inverted commas themselves had yet to make their appearance. Condoms were illegal without a prescription, a fact that seemed almost funny, like those ancient statutes in places such as Alabama outlawing oral sex. Lots of people were on the dole - a term that to Americans had an almost lyrical quality to it (nothing like the stigma that attached itself to "welfare"), as though being on the dole was just one of those charming things the Irish did, like singing in pubs and using hilarious roundabout ways of saying simple things.
I took a job for the summer at a restaurant in Rosses Point. After work I listened to Mary Black in my swirly-carpeted house, smoking in the dank kitchen (which also had swirly carpet) and feeling plugged in to the throbbing heart of Ireland because I was having a liaison with someone from RTÉ, the full name of which I couldn't yet properly pronounce.
The years passed, though not in that kitchen and not with that man. By 1996, I was living in a cottage in north Sligo. No television, no central heating. I collected firewood from the beach each day. Sometimes I woke up to bovine faces staring blankly in my bedroom window. I loved my life, a little too much, perhaps, and in 1999 finally managed to shoehorn myself out of that cottage.
The move to Dublin was jarring. It wasn't just the end of my rural idyll, it was that I'd stepped smack into the New Ireland. I was amazed by the concentration of luxury cars, by how fast everybody walked and how little time they had and how so many young Irish women - skinny and blonde and inexplicably tan - looked like they were from Palm Springs.
The city seemed a vast building site and I noticed how as soon as a building I'd passed every day had been knocked, I would be unable to conjure it in my mind. I, who had been staring at the same field for the last four years, wondered how such a rapidly changing landscape might be affecting me, not to mention my fellow city-dwellers.
By that time, features were appearing in The Irish Times with headlines such as "Who are we?" and "What has happened to us?" - articles that expressed shock and dismay at the side of Irishness that had begun to reveal itself. The young, it seemed, aspired to little beyond being discovered by Louis Walsh, while their parents liked to shop as much as -
Quelle horreur! - Americans did (though they had yet to fully embrace the joys of inching SUVs down clogged city
streets).
Perhaps because I came here initially as a tourist, one of the things that all these changes made me wonder was: how was Bord Failte coping? What kind of adjustment was required to sell the new prosperous Ireland to potential visitors when so many of the country's traditional selling points - those "pockets of the pre-modern", as it was somewhere put - were disappearing. After all, hadn't the word "unchanging" been synonymous with Ireland?
I started to imagine the kind of fiction I might write that could take these questions as its subject. I began visiting heritage centres and reading about the strategies of Bord Failte and the heritage marketing group Heritage Island as well as the critiques of those strategies. The favourite phrase to emerge from my reading was from a report on what tourists hope for from "the Irish experience". Apparently, foreigners expect the Irish to display an "ethnically specific verbal dexterity". (One can imagine a hassled traveller in Dublin Airport, cornered by someone with a clipboard, putting it just so.)
Anyway, it turned out that Bord Fáilte had been busy turning history - in the form of heritage - into a carefully streamlined product, developing "storylines" to help tourists discover the "real Ireland". A report commissioned in 1990 by Bord Failte from Ventures Consultancy stated that "historic importance is not in itself a justification for large-scale investment", the clear implication being that a capacity to generate income through tourism is a justification.
The danger of this (reactive) approach, as Colm Lincoln of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development points out in an essay on urban heritage in Tourism in Ireland: a Critical Analysis (CUP) is that Ireland's heritage "will only be seen as worthy of protection in as far as it fits our perception of what incoming tourists expect to find".
And what about the people? For better or worse, the Irish people are part of the tourism "product" in the way that, say, German people are not part of their national product but Sri Lankan people are. Were the Irish worried about their "Irishness" being commodified? Indeed, did they regard their Irishness in inverted commas? Did they feel pressured - while discussing their day at Microsoft - to display an ethnically specific verbal dexterity? (This morning, I woke up to a Vodafone ad in which two young Irish women say things such as "Loser!" [rising inflection on the second syllable] and "It's like . . . €5 cheaper?" [Valley-girl pause between "like" and "five"; a statement voiced as question]. It occurred to me that if the Government wants to preserve ethnically specific verbal dexterity, it may have to begin subsidising it.)
One Easter weekend I went to the restored Dunbrody Emigrant Ship in New Ross and listened to actors telling tales of the Famine and their passage to America. But there was nothing that I could detect, in the presentation or in the visitor's centre and gift shop, that attempted to communicate to visitors - foreign or Irish - the horror of it all. The cheery brochure said: "Purchase a passenger contract ticket and follow in the footsteps of a group of Famine Emigrants bound for New York". It all felt insufficiently serious (in a way that the Famine Museum at Strokestown didn't). It was a "day out", and wasn't trying to be much more and that seemed a noteworthy change in the way the Irish were presenting the experience and the history of the Famine.
The topic thatall these topics - Irish identity, the heritage industry, the accelerated pace of life - seemed to swirl around was that of memory. I wanted to see how the issues they raised might play themselves out in the lives of one family living in contemporary Dublin.
My novel, Protection, focuses on a husband and wife, both of whose careers involve them in these questions. Gillian runs a "Deceleration" clinic in Meath. There she teaches the lost art of doing one thing at a time and runs workshops on how to disregard unnecessary information. Her husband, Damien, has overseen the creation of a 1950s heritage village called Kill, a place in which witty, convivial conversation is staged and the Irish language has been reduced to a bingo game. Sheep are herded up and down the street for no reason at all other than the charm-value of the spectacle, and the elderly are seated at strategic points on stone walls to look like, well, elderly people seated on stone walls.
There was something else I discovered in my researches. It was that the odd feeling of "recognition" I'd had on first stepping off the ferry - that feeling I'd taken as confirmation that this was where I belonged - is a well-documented phenomenon. Stephanie Rains, a lecturer at Dun Laoghaire in cultural theory, has written that tourists to Ireland - even if they do not have Irish roots - feel a sense of spiritual homecoming because Ireland functions as "an archetypal home, to which even the first visit is a return".