It is insulting to assume that rural people all take part in the same leisure pursuits and that they all think the same way about them
THIS RURAL way of life thing, you don't think it could be a scam, do you? Here at The Irish Timesconcerns are growing that our demographics have been stretched to breaking point by the number of factions the population is being asked not just to support, but to staff.
Between the anti-blood sports people and the anti-anti-bloodthirsty people and the anti-civil partnership people (tough luck, lads) and the anti-anti civil partnership people and the old favourites like the farmers, the developers, the trade unions, the small business people, the big business people, the teachers, the gardaí, the doctors, the nurses and the journalists and the unemployed, there comes a time when you have to ask yourself if there are enough people on the island to keep all these groups going?
There has to be a lot of overlap, when you think about it.
It is all a bit reminiscent of those famous lines: “Out of Ireland have I come/More pressure groups than you could shake a stick at, little room.” Ah, Yeats. Poets are a more low-key grouping, and so of course are Protestants. Don’t talk to me about Protestants. Or pensioners. Or any of the quiet, sneaky, well-behaved pressure groups (not the poets, obviously) that erupt and make a show of you when you least expect it.
And now on top of everything else the Government has been accused of launching an attack on the rural way of life and on rural people. This attack has taken the shape of a ban on stag hunting and a move against puppy farms. Yes, it certainly was vicious. Are they, asked a gentlemen who was heard on the radio show Livelinelast week, trying to take the blood out of us altogether?
Surely we can all unite in agreement on the fact that we are world-class haters, totally paranoid and have a natural talent for outrage? We are so gifted in the arts of opposition that our parliamentary opposition is bound to be frightful, whether it is composed of Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil. Asking an Irish political party to be in Opposition is like asking sherpas to think about climbing – culturally, it is a mistake. A talent that comes so easily to a people – and in fact must be given by God – should never be tamed, or bound by pesky institutional structures.
Let our natural animosity to everything – but particularly to each other – roam free. Run, beauty, run like the wind! However that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about the sub-groups that are set against each other in so many of the debates about Irish life, and we are going to wonder whether all these sub-groups are in fact made up of the same people, roughly speaking.
Take this so-called attack on so-called rural people for a start. On a small, underpopulated island is it realistic to talk about rural people in this way?
Not only is it insulting to assume that rural people all take part in the same leisure pursuits, and that they all think the same way about them, it’s also a lot more complicated than that.
Surely a lot of our so-called rural people commute to our larger cities every day, work there, shop there and often socialise there. Surely a lot of our so-called urban people are from the countryside, or small towns, and live quite happily in the cities, whilst staying in touch with family and friends in the home place.
These country people who migrated to the cities have no intention of ever leaving them (in fact they are running them) and the closest the more prosperous of them will come to a permanent return is eventually to build a holiday home in the townland they were born in.
At the house-warming party, to which they have invited all their old neighbours, their eyes will fill with tears. Then they will rush back to the city. Their teenagers will come down to the holiday home less and less.
In the meantime during the summer and other school holidays this same rural townland swells with other so-called city people with younger kids and less money coming home to their country roots.
The shops and pubs of the countryside swell with the children of emigrants – and the emigrants themselves. The clear English and American voices of the children are one thing, but the childhood of their parents was quite another. This is the national and international hinterland of rural Ireland.
And this is quite without considering the many non-rural Irish people and foreigners who have gone to live in rural areas of Ireland and are happy and welcome there but who, as we all know, do not count at all, in any way whatsoever, when it comes to public debate.
And it is also without admitting for an instant that in this pastoral idyll that is under such vicious attack from ignorant city dwellers whose main occupations are driving and watching television, just as they are for the rest of us.
Next week we shall return to the fascinating question of why there are not now, and never have been, homosexual people outside the cities of Dublin and Cork.