Cassandra Voices

Tag: ‘don’t

  • Kneecap – Don’t Look Back in Ongar

    Out with the old, in with the new. In the same month that Don’t Look Back in Ongar (2024), the final (27th) instalment of the Ross O’Carroll Kelly fictional autobiography was published, the Irish-language musical comedy Kneecap (2024) quickly became the year’s highest-grossing cinema release.

    The differences between these two are more than apparent: the ROCK books and newspaper column have given us a satirical history of the south Dublin elite as the country bounces between booms and busts over more than 20 years, while Kneecap is the semi-biographical contemporary story of two working-class Belfast boys who team up with a schoolteacher to form Kneecap, the Irish-language rap group. But it’s also possible to imagine a baton being passed along here, especially when we regard the books and the film in terms of the linguistic shitscape that is modern Ireland.

    In the semi-fictional universe of ROCK, the contortions of the English language are the greatest source of comedy, the most pertinent commentary on class and gender difference, and the clearest exposition of Irish culture as being in a state of perpetual colonial aftermath. The bizarre renderings of various accents in ROCK, along with highly convoluted slang, its very narrow field of cultural references, and the characters’ sponge-like acquisition of Americanisms, are a turn-off for many. But they are flattering for readers who, by understanding the linguistic nuances, become themselves the objects of satire.

    Kneecap is more patently ‘about’ language. In the film itself and in the band’s music and branding (Kneecap is a band in the real world), language is described in the clearest terms as a political issue. The use of Irish, especially in the northern context, is an anti-colonial act – the campaign for the passing of Irish Language Act of 2022 in the British parliament forms the background to the story. Each word is a bullet fired for freedom, according to the mantra of the die-hard pre-ceasefire philosophy of one protagonist’s father (played by Michael Fassbender, who played Bobby Sands in Hunger some years ago). Alongside the fluently delivered postcolonial critique of language and empire, the film also plays on more subtle conflicts of personal battles fought with language – one protagonist whose parents have raised him in Irish and now refuse to speak it to him, another who refuses to speak English when detained by police, and another who hides his Irish-language musical activity from his language-activist partner.

    Cultural Divide

    These mutual misunderstandings will put ROCK readers in mind of the language barrier that is raised between Ross and his own son, Ronan, who has been raised in Finglas and speaks with a working-class Dublin accent. Now Ronan works in the highest government circles for his grandfather (Ross’s father), the Trump-adjacent Taoiseach. Father and son both speak English, and Ronan always understands Ross, but Ross often just does not get what his son is saying to him:

    ‘I shouldn’t be tedding you this, Rosser.’
    ‘You might as well tell me? I probably won’t understand it anyway.’
    ‘The Gubderminth ren ourra muddy.’
    ‘They what?’
    ‘Thee ren ourra muddy.’
    ‘No, it’s not catching.’
    ‘Thee.’
    ‘They.’
    ‘Ren.’
    ‘Ran.’
    ‘Ourra.’
    ‘Out of.’
    ‘Muddy.’
    ‘Oh, muddy! Okay, I get you.’

    The joke is partly Ross’s low intelligence, which is what he is referring to at the start when he says he probably won’t understand. Ross is completely ignorant, near-illiterate and unable to focus on anything requiring mental exertion. But he is firm in his self-identity and in the cultural values that count (rugby, private schools, luxury consumption, machismo, etc.). The joke is also of course based on class caricatures, and the working-class characters are treated with as much Swiftian mercilessness as anyone else.

    More than Swift, however, the contortion of English in the mouth of Ronan resembles the Joycean madness that descends on the language, on all languages, in Finnegans Wake in particular. When Ronan speaks, the Attorney General becomes the ‘Attordeney Generdoddle’ – and the reader finds themselves in the position of Ross, trying to transform this hibernicized monstrosity back into something comprehensible, back into the language of power. The ROCK books are full of these linguistic breakdowns and anomalies, of characters talking past each other, of language acting as a pick with which to dig even deeper into one’s own trench. The world of the ROCK books, like the language that is spoken in them, is chaotic, controlled by the wrong people, and full of injustices in every chapter. This dark portrait of Ireland, like the best satire, is delivered as a prolonged, stupid, sick, and yet funny, joke.

    Naoise Ó Cairealláin with Michael Fassbender in Kneecap.

    Labour of Resistance

    While the do-nothings in the south live free of the British yoke, the Belfast crowd are working hard at the labour of resistance. Education, self-motivation, organising are all positive attributes in Kneecap, which goes some way toward explaining the heavy emphasis on drug-taking hedonism that runs throughout, a careful counter to the characterisation of moralising busybody do-gooder that in other times and contexts has stuck so well to militant gaeilgeoirí. Indeed, when Irish does occasionally appear in earlier ROCK instalments, it tends to reek of worthiness, a tool for virtue-signalling southerners for whom gaelscoileanna are little more than feeder schools for the elite private institutions.

    That there is something important and vital at stake is absolutely clear in Kneecap. The achievement of bringing so many people to see an Irish-language film, both within the island and without, is enormous. The band and the film itself combine masterfully punkish attitudinizing and youth-coolness on the one hand, and mainstream institutional endorsement on the other. The Kneecap thing is slickly done and, with money from TG4, Northern Ireland Screen, Coimisiún na Meán and Screen Ireland, plus public endorsements from people such as Elton John and Cillian Murphy, and positive coverage everywhere from the Guardian to the LA Times, they will bring the Irish language and the reasons why it should be spoken to more eyes and ears than perhaps anyone has ever achieved. They also show no sign of toning down their solidarity with Palestine, which will surely hurt their chances when it comes to the Oscars, now that the film has secured the Irish nomination.

    Joyce jokes in A Portrait of the Artist that the best English in the world is to be heard in Lower Drumcondra. Ross O’Carroll Kelly would be dismayed to hear this, given that it is on the northside, but he would also have to admit that he is no judge. In fact, he might not even understand the statement, whether joke or not. Being in judgement about language, having an opinion of any kind, is a sophisticated thing in the ROCK universe. In a way, this is a kind of guarantor that the language that does get spoken there has a kind of spontaneous purity, as it flows with so little friction. In Kneecap, the characters can only dream of being so mindlessly expressive. When we look ahead to the process of unification that is surely underway at this stage, the unionist-nationalist divide will occupy much of our attention, but other, vast cultural gaps run through the island, as the difference between this book and this film illustrates.

  • ‘Don’t let me stop you from going for a swim’

    Picture this scene. Next to a Martello tower, a grimy concrete shelter below which a motley crew, ranging from whooping lads to fragile ladies, make their way, often daily, into the ocean at Seapoint, Dublin. Some swim significant distances – measured in buoys and other landmarks – others simply ‘take the waters’. There are New Irish here, while native Dubliners mix easily with country friends, in the collective gasp before wading in.

    I have visited the sea most days so far this winter. It is the dread of the cold, not the cold itself that holds the most fear. Once enclosed by the water my limbs thrash a course, and I am no longer conscious of the temperature. That is as long as I go in every day. If I leave it for any length, the cold will sting, even in the summer months.

    Is this a sport I wonder? There is no zero sum game of winners and losers. No match reports. No fandom. But there is conviviality, life affirmation, fitness and even a boost to the immune system I have been told. But something deeper motivates my immersions, and any health benefits are tangential.

    I am dreading the months of January, February and March. It is hard to contemplate temperatures that will have dropped a further three or four degrees to eight degrees.[i] Remarkably, the average sea temperatures in December is higher than in May, when the difference between air and water could be fifteen degrees. This month the water is often warmer than the air, although you lose heat a lot quicker without your clothes on.

    Also this month the solstice coincides with a full moon. I have no idea if this has a symbolic significance. What I do know is that swimming with a crowd during a full moon is great craic. I have attended these lantern-lit gatherings for the past two months, and am hoping to brave it again on the 21st. One trick to stave off hypothermia is to bring along a hot water bottle to pour over extremities afterwards, making sure to avoid giving yourself a scalding.

    I have just started wearing protective gloves – which I found on the street – into the water. It makes quite a difference to my hands on the twenty-five minute cycle home. I am thinking of acquiring booties that I see other people wear, but that would involve a financial investment in this lowest maintenance of sports. Really all you need are togs, towel and a good dollop of madness.

    I take pleasure in seeing an array of birdlife by the seashore: there are the usual suspects of gulls and cormorants – which I now see are colonising the River Dodder near where I live as fish numbers decline in the sea – but also Brent Geese along with Waders some of which make their way from Iceland, so I guess they find our waters positively balmy! It is shocking to hear that shards of plastic are affecting these migrants’ welfare.[ii]

    Most days I take a picture from the same spot overlooking the Poolbeg stacks. I do wonder about posting these on social media, but I have available to me the superb technology of a telephone, which takes fine pictures of sky, sea and land converging. Obviously in the process I am selling the platform of an irresponsible multinational, but cannot the same be said of any author whose book is on display in a chain store? I just want to convey the beauty of my city and its hinterland, and how we should treasure the wildlife, and examine carefully issues like the emissions coming from that eerie incinerator by the stacks.

    This summer my mother died. Losing a parent is generally a seismic life experience. I think my dedication to the swimming has had something to do with that. Cycling to and from Seapoint I pass by places I associate with her. It is sad, but I don’t want to avoid it.

    When my mother went into a hospice I immediately returned from the UK where I had been working. The following day she said: ‘don’t let me stop you from going for a swim’, much to our amusement. Two days later she passed away.

    The other landmark near where I swim is Dun Laoghaire pier. It is so much a part of the geography of this place that it seems timeless, but it was built on the initiative of a private citizen, Richard Toucher, a Norwegian sailor who settled in Dublin, passing away in 1841. He provided, at great personal expense, most of the granite for the building of the harbour. This philanthropic enterprise saved many lives, and now provides a bit of shelter as we swim at Seapoint, where it can still get quite choppy.

    This is an extract from one of his letters:

    I write not for fame, but for utility. It is my aim rather to be understood than admired. To elegance of composition I aspire not. But I have some nautical experience…and…the idea of an Asylum Port at Dunleary is ever first in my thoughts.

    The Merchants, Ship Owners and Ship-Masters of Whitehaven, Workington, Maryport, Harrington and Parton, are also preparing a petition to be presented to His Grace The Duke of Richmond, praying his aid and support for the erection of this much wanted pier at Dunleary. This I am not astonished at, when I reflect how many of their relatives have been lost on the coast of our Bay, the numbers of widows and fatherless children that are left to bemoan that this pier had not long since been built, which would have saved to them what was in this life most valuable.

    For his troubles Richard Toucher died a bankrupt.[iii] We recall his great legacy today, this Cassandra Voice, who devoted his fortune to the continuing benefit of others.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

    [i] ‘Dublin Sea Temperature’, Global Sea Temperature, https://www.seatemperature.org/europe/ireland/dublin.htm, accessed 13/12/18.

    [ii] Tim O’Brien, ‘Plastic shards from Dún Laoghaire spill found in Donabate’, Irish Times, 12th of November, 2018.

    [iii] Tom Conlon, ‘Richard Toutcher – the case for a memorial’, Dún Laoghaire Harbour Bicentenary, January 23rd, 2018. http://dlharbour200.ie/richard-toutcher-the-case-for-a-memorial/, accessed 13/11/18.