"The start of summer and the Bealtaine festival were marked with ancient Celtic ceremonies and rituals at Tara at the weekend," this newspaper reported last Monday. That's good. What sort of ancient Celtic ceremonies? Drinking four flagons of cider, throwing bottles at the referee, urinating into a stranger's pocket, singing a few verses of Kevin Barry and then beating the living daylights out a few Rangers' fans, aye Jimmy?
What? Not that sort of Celtic, no? The other sort? The next sentence of the report brings the matter into a clearer focus. "This evening women and men from around the globe will dress in their native spiritual costumes and bring the festivities to a close."
Native spiritual costumes, eh? What have they in mind? Not the old dog collar or wimple, I take it, or even the mitre and crozier, but something other than those: something more Celtic, perhaps? But what does that mean? Is like those druids for P-Celts one sees in the Welsh Eistedfodd, a sort of Pu Plux Plan, but without the burning crosses and the lynchings? Or is it something a little more Hibernian, the Killarney Hilton version of Irish mythology, blokes with long red hair and piercing blue eyes, wearing urine-coloured kilts and wielding fancy shields with excerpts from the Book of Kells on them?
"Celtic marriage"
It really was a desperate shame that I wasn't in Tara that night to see the Irish version of our native spiritual costume - a Sister of Mercy walloping an unmarried mother, perhaps, or a Christian Brother lifting a boy off the ground by his ear - and as great a pity too that I didn't see the marriage of Lakota Chief Jeffrey White Horse and Mary Elizabeth Thunder, "a Native American couple who chose Tara and a Celtic marriage ceremony".
There we go again. A Celtic marriage on top of all these other ancient Celtic ceremonies, begob. One wonders: where did they keep these ancient Irish ceremonies and traditional spiritual costumes going all these centuries? Years and years I've been about the place, but never did I see a native spiritual costume or attend a Celtic marriage ceremony. Did the organisers of this thoroughly Bealtaine festival find their native threads and their wedding rites in the same lumber room in which the Catholic Church found all those "folk Masses" a few years ago, with comely colleens dancing a winsome jig of welcome through the nave during the consecration? Yes indeed, great days, with the congregation reeling out and vomiting beside the church gates.
"Universal being"
Ah, and here comes Adi Vkara, a female chief in Fiji, who was also at Tara on May Day. "I am a universal being," she told our intrepid reporter modestly, "and I love Ireland. Your land is sacred, it talks." It does indeed, Adi. It talks of heroin amd smack, it talks of police officers who drunkenly drive into civilians and kill them, and then leave them to die in the gutter, and are not even imprisoned but return to work. It talks of serial abuse of children, and it talks of attacks on people of dusky complexion - rather like you, I imagine, my dear - in the centre of Dublin. A word of advice, Adi. When these lads come at you with half-bricks in their hands or broken bottles, please, please, don't be telling them you're a universal being, and that Ireland is sacred, it talks. Don't try it, okay? Trust me on this.
Colleen, "based in England", is a regular visitor to Ireland. "We consider Tara to be a sacred centre . We hope to have a better understanding of each other and for that wisdom and understanding to be sent out from here." A worthy sentiment, Colleen. (Have you, by the way, got sisters called Shannon and Kerry? Just curious.) And you are right about Tara, Colleen: it is a special place. From its summit, you can make out most of the meat-packing plants where ancient carcases were packaged as fresh, prime beef in some of the greatest frauds in the history of the European Community and which cost the Irish taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds. A lovely place, Tara.
Political correctness
It's not that these probably decent and certainly harmless people come here with their naive wistfulness. They're welcome. It takes all sorts. But what would these enthusiasts for linguistic political correctness make of a white Englishman calling himself Native English (And Proud Of It) to distinguish himself from the later and darker incomers who have arrived in his land? Would they sympathise with him renaming himself Aethelraed the Fen-dweller to emphasise the authenticity of his ethnic Englishness? And how easy would they feel if ancient Anglo-Saxon virtues and simple Anglo-Saxon rites began to be extolled in our neighbouring isle? Is sauce for the Celtic gander not also sauce for the Germanic gander?
But that aside, is it not strange that so many of us nearly burst with pride at hearing UFO-watchers (who probably know as much about this country as they know about particle physics) announcing on a hilltop in Meath with stars in their eyes and a sob in their throat that Ireland is a truly mystical place, that the Irish the people have a magical relationship with nature, that we are closer to our roots, in touch with our inner selves and so on? Really? As in Darndale? Ballymun? Foxrock? Stillorgan? Boodleville, Carrickmines?