In the mid-1990s Seosamh O Cuaig and I were filming a programme for TG4 in the State of Minnesota. It concerned an 1880 shipload of emigrants from Conamara.<\/p>\n
In the city of St. Paul we were told that the term \u2018Connemara\u2019 was a century-old Minnesota synonym for lazy. This was curious, because nobody in the 19th<\/sup> century could survive on the rocky garranta\u00ed<\/em> of Conamara without hard, relentless physical work. There was no dole.<\/p>\n We learned that the \u2018Connemara\u2019 slander originated in 1880 when a Catholic Bishop, John Ireland, publicly blamed his financial troubles on a group of fisher-families from this area. He had taken them from their rocky fields and canvas currachs in the West of Ireland, and settled the oldest and youngest members of the families, against their will, miles from the city on the vast prairies.<\/p>\n They were instructed to become farmers. For the fit and young of the same families the bishop organized jobs in the city of St. Paul. Then came the worst winter in living history with temperatures thirty below.<\/p>\n The plight of those raw prairie dwellers was so desperate that they became the subject of national debate in the American Press. The Bishop, responding to WASP criticism, said they were too lazy to work. His criticisms were widely reported.<\/p>\n Naturally his urban flock and his separated brethren \u2013 the Freemasons of Morris County \u2013 did not doubt his word. But the Conamara immigrants, being neither literate or English speakers, could not defend themselves in that language, had no access to the print media.<\/p>\n In Spring the Bishop relented, the \u2018Connemaras\u2019 were delivered back to the city of St. Paul \u2013 which was where they had thought they were going in the first place. They made a success of their lives, one of them eventually becoming mayor of the city.<\/p>\n At least one Conamara family persevered on the prairie \u2013 that of Leara\u00ed \u00d3 Flathartha \u2013 and also thrived.\u00a0 Nevertheless the slander of \u2018laziness\u2019 had persisted to this day, mainly because the immigrants could not defend themselves in English.<\/p>\n \u2018But,\u2019 as Seosamh O Cuaig grimly said to me during the course of making the film, \u2018I can read and I can write, in English\u2019 Therefore we intensified our researches and the film eventually showed how these people had been used as scapegoats for the failed ambitions of the colonizing Bishop, a Republican and an entrepeneur. Helped by a laicised Bishop Shannon we detailed his predecessor\u2019s personal ownership of the railway land awarded to him for the purposes of Catholic settlement. It seemed clear that as time was running out on his contract, Bishop Ireland used these poor people simply to buy time and fulfil his undertakings to his friends in the Railway company.<\/p>\n So fraught were his financial dealings that after he died his sister, a Mother Superior, destroyed all of the personal papers that related to the incident. But the mud stuck. Two Irish-American Minnesota lawyers happily told us, on film, that their Limerick-born father had emphasized to them: \u2018Make sure people know you are from Limerick, not from Conamara.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018the cash crop\u2019<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Nearly a century after the Minnesota mess, in 1973 in Conamara I had recorded a vox populi<\/em> with youngsters attending the Irish Summer Colleges in Conamara. All townies, they unanimously dismissed the place as consisting of nothing but rocks, with no attractions whatsoever. The locals, according to a few, were lazy.<\/p>\n How could they have made this judgment in three weeks? Presumably they had brought that bit of baggage with them from their suburban homes. Luckily, they know a little better now and there certainly is no local resentment to the Summer College industry.<\/p>\n Business is business and the modern students are referred to locally by the affectionate term ‘the cash crop\u2019. Nevertheless, from Marx with his term \u2018rural idiocy\u2019 to Garret Fitzgerald\u2019s opposition to Knock Airport; from John D. Sheridan\u2019s bucolic \u2018Thomasheen James\u2019 to stand-up comics today, there is something universal in this urban contempt for rural-dwelling \u2018culchies\u2019.<\/p>\n The painter Michael FarrelI would jokingly ask sculptor Eddie Delaney and myself: \u2018Are you two still rotting away in Connemara?\u2019 The perception is based sometimes on ignorance, sometimes on fear of the wild men of the West.<\/p>\n A film editor whom I brought to Conamara years ago confessed to me that his ventures beyond the Pale had hitherto never brought him further than Leixlip \u2013 fifteen miles from Dublin.<\/p>\n Over the years, and quite separately, I remember two old friends of mine, a journalist and an actress, saying they felt threatened in the company of people in South Conamara. In forty years I have never felt thus threatened. My friends could not explain why they felt that way. I can only speculate on the reasons.<\/p>\n Dancing at the Crossroads <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n First, there may be resentment at the imposition of obligatory Irish on the monoglot English-speaking population of the island. This State policy was a Dublin invention but the resentment it engendered was directed at the imagined native speakers in their ghettoes in the West, as well as at soft targets like the writer Peig Sayers, and former Taoiseach (prime minister) and President \u00c9amon de Valera, universally known as \u2018Dev\u2019.<\/p>\n The latter\u2019s quite admirable ambitions for human beings on this island were regularly ridiculed. Incidentally, what precisely is wrong with good-looking girls and athletic young men, small local industry, and the human activity of dancing which Dev advocated?<\/p>\n Whatever his faults, Dev was way ahead of E. F Schumacher\u2019s \u2018Small is Beautiful\u2019 philosophy. The small linguistic communities of the Gaeltachta\u00ed may in the past have been a material source of resentment in that the grants the natives received were positively discriminatory and favoured Irish-speaking households. But they did not get electricity until 1956!<\/p>\n The pure and simple truth of the resentment, according to research by Mairtin O Cath\u00e1in, published in the Galway Advertiser<\/em>, is, as Wilde said, rarely pure and never simple. O Cath\u00e1in showed that substantial Gaeltacht grants \u2013 not the petty ones based on linguistic facility but the serious ones for business and enterprise \u2013\u00a0 actually benefit more the fictional \u2018gaeltacht\u2019 residents of booming suburbs such as Bearna, Moycullen, Knocknacarra and Claregalway than the actual Irish-speaking families in small villages like Cill Chiar\u00e5n or Carna.<\/p>\n Garnering votes from such dense English-speaking suburbs once guaranteed Fianna F\u00e1il success in elections to such quangos as the Board of Udar\u00e5s na Gaeltachta<\/em>. Indeed one of that party\u2019s proud successes was a man from Claregalway who could speak no Irish whatsoever!<\/p>\n This is the pragmatic reason why the outrageously fictional extension of \u2018the gaeltacht\u2019, invented by Fine Gael\u2019s Patrick Lindsay more than fifty years ago, could be maintained by Fianna F\u00e1il\u2019s clever directors of elections. The result is that the only community for which Irish is the first language gets a minimum of the kudos and all of the brickbats for speaking Irish.<\/p>\n The above Mr. Lindsay actually spent his retirement as my neighbour in Conamara. He once said publicly and in my presence that he was attracted to the place by its \u2018touch of savagery.\u2019 Despite his unconscious racism, the locals drank happily with him in T\u00ed Michael Jack\u2019s pub.<\/p>\n One can be sure that the modern version of W.B.Yeats’s freckled fisherman in Connemara cloth going to a place \u2018where stone is dark under froth\u2019 is no Irish speaker at all. He probably has a pad in Ballyconneely, Connemara where three-quarters of the houses belong to weekend visitors from Dublin and environs.<\/p>\n Then there is the neo-liberal urbanite\u2019s association of the Irish language and rural life with poverty and idiocy. There is the canard that, as in the nineteenth century, incest flourished because the roads were bad and that this resulted in a population of malformed retards.<\/p>\n But a medical doctor\u2019s RHA survey of Leitir Meall\u00e1in in 1891 \u2013 which I possess \u2013\u00a0 described this community as the healthiest and handsomest he had ever seen. The endless parade of bright and beautiful young native speakers on TG4 for more than the past decade should by now have given the lie to that perception.<\/p>\n \u2018Going to the Source\u2019<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n But a lie that\u2019s big enough \u2013 as Goebbels proved \u2013 becomes the conventional wisdom. Years ago I attended a Temple Bar debate in Dublin where Dr. Terence Browne of Trinity College and Fintan O\u2019Toole of the Irish Times<\/em> locked horns. In the course of it Terence Browne referred to Irish as a dead language. Fintan did not disagree.<\/p>\n I had just driven up from my B\u00e9al an Daingin post office, where the staff and customers all joked and did their business in Irish. I mentioned this as evidence that the rumours of the demise of Irish might be exaggerated, and asked Terence how he could support his impression. His dismissive answer was couched in analogies to ‘dead’ Latin.<\/p>\n I concluded this was not personally researched, and a second hand opinion derived from the conventional East coast urban wisdom, i.e. that Irish was a suspect badge of the unholy trinity of nationalism, Catholicism and Provo-ism. \u00a0I did not have the nerve to remind this fine scholar to take his own academic advice and \u2018go to the source\u2019, before dismissing the language.<\/p>\n The source of my own experience is over forty years living and working in the only bilingual community in Ireland, whose tradition is neither narrow nor insular: it knows Boston better than Enda Kenny, and all the main cities of England better than Bertie Ahern \u2013 in other words, Conamara is made up of men and women of the world.<\/p>\n Long before Sir Anthony O\u2019 Reilly said Ireland was a great place to tog out in, but that the real game was \u2018elsewhere\u2019, the people of Conamara and rural Ireland in general were forced to explore that \u2018elsewhere\u2019. And it was not to play the gentleman\u2019s game of rugby, but to survive their abandonment by the entrepreneurial class from whom O\u2019Reilly sprang.<\/p>\n In the time I have lived in Conamara most of my work has been devoted to countering this subconscious racism, trying to persuade Irish urbanites \u2013 including its professional gaeilgeoirs – that my rural neighbours are not lazy thugs, but the hardest-working people I ever encountered; not \u2018thick\u2019, but the most coherent and smart, bilingual community in this island.<\/p>\n At a practical level, every family in Conamara could build their own house and make any repairs necessary, grow their own food, build a boat, excavate their own fuel, subtly negotiate the traps of central bureaucracy, and be on first name terms with their local and national public representatives. Such skills are pretty thin on the ground in suburbia and, when global warming intensifies, my neighbours are the kind of people from whom I will certainly be seeking survival advice.<\/p>\n Reference Group Theory<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Years ago in Canada I learned the principle of reference group theory. It is better known as the pecking order, establishing who we are in relation to the echelons above and below us. Thus, Toronto English speakers look down on the French of Quebec. They both look down on the Scots of Nova Scotia who in turn look down on the Irish of Newfoundland or \u2018Newfies\u2019.<\/p>\n In the US the WASPS looked down on the Irish Catholics, who looked down on the Italian Catholics. And everybody agreed that all a Polack fish was competent to do was drown. At the bottom of the heap were the Blacks and then the aboriginal native Americans.<\/p>\n It was social benchmarking, each group maintaining its pecking order. Conamara is not entirely free of this. I have heard a man from An Spid\u00e9al expressing doubts about the degree of civilization of people twenty miles west of him.<\/p>\n Reference group theory is not just financially and socially alive in a class-ridden society such as ours. It has deep roots in our insecurities. It emerged in Kerryman jokes, yummy mummies and SUVs, the DART accent, Ross O\u2019Carroll Kelly and especially the terms \u2018culchies\u2019 and \u2018knackers\u2019 It is accepted as part of the natural order.<\/p>\n But we are essentially social animals and have depended for our evolutionary survival not on our individual natures being red in tooth and claw, but on the social behaviour called cooperation which is designed to keep the more ugly parts of our nature under control.<\/p>\n No bypasses or rat-runs<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It is a poor reflection of Western civilization that, before and since Hiroshima, the animal species most actively practising cooperation is the ant. The ruthless competitor, the profiteer at all cost, those CEOs who show a paper profit by getting rid of as many employees as possible are still our heroes, no matter how often they have revealed their feet of clay.<\/p>\n Is this an argument against Market values and modern Progress? Yes, if progress and the oil that lubricates the so-called free market and our modern lifestyle mean the death of community and consequent lack of empathy with our neighbour, quite apart from the distant deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, together with the destroyed lives of 30,000 decent young Americans. Not to mention the imminent decay of our planet.<\/p>\n Is there any point anymore in pleading for non-consumptive lifestyles \u2013 not to mention understanding, tolerance, respect, love your neighbour, kiss a Traveller for Christ?\u00a0 Did the warnings of Mountjoy prison ex-Governor John Lonergan, or homeless children’s protector Fr. Peter McVerry have any effect?<\/p>\n Did Bono and Geldof and all the NGOs make us deaf to the fact that Charity begins at home? The corporations and advertisers who make so much money from our insecurities, fears and petty snobberies have set us on a material and metaphysical road which has no bypasses or rat-runs or backwaters.<\/p>\n There may be no escape from our unsustainable lifestyles and topsy-turvy values until the sea levels rise, oil runs out, the tankers grind to a stop and clean water is $100 a barrel. It will end in tears. Perhaps sooner than we think. But I am an optimist. That\u2019s why I long ago embraced the rural life, planted trees for my six children and ten grandchildren and cut wood for my stove.<\/p>\n I believe that despite all the spin-doctoring, truth will out, that we are all now aware of our responsibilities, all travellers on the road to God-knows-where, tourists in the departure lounge, mice sailing on a ship of cheese. But I\u2019m also realistic enough to remember Dorothy Parker’s words:<\/p>\n \u2018O life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea \/ And love is a thing that can never go wrong \/ And I\u2019m Queen Marie of Romania.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n Do you think this piece is valuable? If so, you might consider providing us with financial support via Patreon<\/a>, or simply pay us a small sum directly using PayPal: admin@cassandravoices.com. Thanks for supporting independent journalism. Subscribe for free to our monthly newsletter here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Featured Image is of Dara Beag O Fatharta.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the mid-1990s Seosamh O Cuaig and I were filming a programme for TG4 in the State of Minnesota. It concerned an 1880 shipload of emigrants from Conamara. In the city of St. Paul we were told that the term \u2018Connemara\u2019 was a century-old Minnesota synonym for lazy. This was curious, because nobody in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":4440,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,1],"tags":[204],"class_list":["post-4432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","category-uncategorized","tag-2019july"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}