Connect: 'You are all very pompous, Irish pretending to be English," Maria Plunkett reportedly told a posse of stag-hunters last Tuesday. The conveniently recorded encounter, during which Plunkett brandished an ancient shotgun at horse-mounted members of the Ward Union Stag Hunt, took place between Trim and Dunshaughlin in Co Meath.
The hunters had encroached on land owned by Plunkett, a Brazilian who is married to Edward Plunkett. He is also known as "Lord Dunsany" and she as "Lady Dunsany". Plunkett's remark raises knotty questions of class, morality, land and nationality. A century ago, such questions were seething and divisive but are usually ignored in contemporary, "post-nationalist" Ireland.
It's the "Irish pretending to be English" that's most intriguing. First, though, depending on which side you support on hunting (indeed, on bloodsports in general) you will either welcome or reject Plunkett's intervention. Many people, probably a majority nowadays, believe, albeit with varying degrees of intensity, that any landlord or landlady preventing hunting deserves support.
Others, of course - though dwindling in number if not intensity - argue that hunting is a rural tradition and resent attempts to curb and ban it. However, a person who, in a republic, uses an aristocratic title and accuses others of being "very pompous, Irish pretending to be English" is sure to attract accusations of hypocrisy - of displaying a kettle-calling-the- pot-black mentality.
It all adds up to bizarre alignments. Maria Plunkett was reportedly alerted by two hunt saboteurs who called to her door. Hunt saboteurs are often class warriors too - though these two may or may not have been. Anyway, whatever their larger politics, on the question of hunting (perhaps their behaviour shows further evidence of single-issue politics) they sought aristocratic alignment.
In England, where sabotaging hunts became, for both sides, a bitter and violent business, hunters typically saw themselves as belonging to a superior social class than the saboteurs. For their part, the saboteurs believed they constituted a superior moral class. The Dunsany encounter complicates this matrix of class and morality by adding assumptions about land and nationality.
It's knotty indeed. Does Plunkett's remark imply that the English (all or just a section of them) are pompous or is it just Irish people pretending to be English who are pompous? If the former, it's a slur on England for breeding pompous people; if the latter, it's a slur on Ireland for still breeding people so inauthentic that they know no better than to ape their former imperial dominators.
Perhaps most damning of all (though it's surely unlikely Plunkett intended such a meaning), the remark implies the mere Irish should not attempt to get above themselves by trying to be like the matchless English. Anyway, a century ago, such abject upstarts were referred to as "shoneens" and "shoneenism" used to be seen as a variant of "West Britonism".
But the retention of aristocratic titles, originally conferred by British monarchs, is also, especially since this part of Ireland is a republic, widely considered as evidence of West Britonism. Thus, in the Dunsany encounter, many observers will see one variant of West Britonism accusing another of aping what it continues to ape itself. Knottier and knottier.
Then there's the subject of hunting.
"I don't like hunting but I have no problem with people doing whatever they want to do on their own land," Plunkett reportedly said. So, it was primarily a landowning issue for her, in which the matter of hunting was secondary. People, she implied, though she wouldn't do so herself, should be free to hunt on their own land.
Like most families, the Plunketts of Dunsany have produced notable and forgettable characters. Oliver Plunkett, the saint and martyr; Horace Plunkett, who introduced co-operative farming to Ireland; and Edward Plunkett, the writer, who for a time was friendly with Augusta Gregory and W.B. Yeats (Oliver Gogarty reckoned Yeats envied Plunkett's title!), are among the notables.
Edward, the writer (who died in 1957) and was the grandfather of Maria's husband (also Edward) was a keen hunter. Born in England, he was an Eton, Sandhurst and Coldstream Guards man who fought in the Boer War and was always devoted to the British crown. Indeed, while supporting that side, he was wounded during the 1916 Rising in Dublin.
Times change, of course. It's unlikely that Edward, the writer who was a keen hunter, bothered too much about permission to cross the lands of Africans when he went "big game" (some game!) hunting. The antique gun which, according to Plunkett, has "not been used for 150 years", could not be, if she's correct, one used by Edward to kill African beasts for sport.
Still, even though "trophies" of Edward's hunting are displayed in Dunsany Castle, at least his granddaughter-in-law doesn't like hunting. That, for most people, represents progress. It also tells you just how much times have changed when, in Ireland, the press presents hunting as more centrally the issue than landowning, even though this is not true for the landowner.
A knotty one, riddled with PR but not without humour.