Our relationship with our neighbour can still affect Irish behaviour in the most bizarre ways
FOR ME, as for many Irish people, there is a special kind of pleasure in watching England at the World Cup. It is not a crudely Anglophobic delight in our neighbour’s inevitable misfortunes. It is, rather, the pleasure of having an each-way bet on the outcome. If England are blindingly brilliant (ha!), we can be all grown up about it and take pleasure in the success of the boys from next door, who play, after all, for the clubs that most of us support. And if they are comically inept, English humiliation fills our souls with a profound glow of wellbeing.
Anglophobic schadenfreude is always there for us. It is like the old family dog that farts and dribbles. We would, rationally, like to be rid of it, but we know we will miss it when it’s gone.
A warm Sunday afternoon drinking cold German beer and watching English hubris deflate like a balloon at a children’s party is indeed one of the great pleasures of Irish life. But if things had been different – if England had been half as good as they think they are, and thus the best team in the world – most of us would have found a way to take pleasure in that too. We’d have burnished our family connections to Manchester and Liverpool, London and Birmingham. England would never have been “us”, but we’d have been glad to go along for the ride.
All of this is trivial. But that same each-way bet is characteristic of the ambiguity of the larger Irish relationship to England. There’s the 800 years of oppression, the inferiority complex, the lingering sense of grievance. And there’s the long, utterly intertwined history of migration and connection. There’s the other England that gave generations of Irish people the chance of a job, an education, a relatively free sexuality, a safety valve.
It seems to me that it’s this ambivalence, rather than old-fashioned Anglophobia, that keeps the Anglo-Irish relationship from being what it ought to be by now – normal. The normality ought to flow from objective changes on both sides. Agreement on Northern Ireland is a transformation – never more obvious than in David Cameron’s forthright response to the Saville report on Bloody Sunday. Anti-Irish racism in England is greatly diminished. Even in the face of economic collapse, the Irish themselves have largely overcome the historic inferiority complex that manifested itself in insistent Anglophobia.
An event such as the announcement of a state visit by Queen Elizabeth therefore ought to be a matter for mild curiosity or benign indifference. And yet, even now, it touches one of those twitchy, tender nerves that remain inert most of the time. Some of the reflex action expresses itself as a disdain for monarchy – a contempt which I happily share. But let’s be honest. When did a disdain for monarchy stop us slavering over Princess Grace or King Baudouin of the Belgians or, come to that, Pope John Paul? The problem with Elizabeth isn’t that she’s a queen, but that she’s a very British queen. It’s that old nervous tic brought on by memories of Mother England.
Nor is this reflex just a colourful curiosity, a harmless genetic quirk like freckles or joined-up eyebrows. It can still affect Irish behaviour in the most bizarre ways. Charles Haughey’s demented need to imagine himself as an English squire fed into his corruption. A reluctance to shed the institutional forms inherited from Westminster and Whitehall still stifles Irish political and administrative culture.
Most weirdly of all, the mania of our feudal property-developing class was fuelled by a hunger to show the English that we were all grown up and that we’re as good them anyway. Sean Dunne told us that his insanely expensive project would turn Ballsbridge into the new Knightsbridge. Irish property developers outbid Saudi sheiks for trophy English buildings such as the Savoy hotel in London and flew the Tricolour from their roofs, like the Russians capturing the Reichstag.
They didn’t just buy the “island of Ireland” in the artificial archipelago off Dubai, but made sure they got “England” too. Almost every one of them would have combusted spontaneously upon receipt of an invitation to the royal box at Ascot. (If Fergie had not been so dumb, she could have made a fortune selling access to minor royals to Fianna Fáil-supporting, fervently nationalistic developers.)
We need to get over this stuff – not for the sake of the English but for our own. England is no longer very good at watering the seeds of our collective neuroses. Being nearly as broke as we are, it has nothing left to be condescending about. Being crap at so many things, from football to deep-water oil wells, it is also useless at feeding our inferiority complex. And it doesn’t even fulfil its old function of giving us someone to blame when we screw up. Even foaming Anglophobes know that this time it’s all the fault of Lehman Brothers.
