We tell our story
Olivia O Leary, Writer and Broadcaster, writes about how we tell our story and communicate across the generations.
In 1938, a 21 year old Irishwoman arrived in Capetown, in South Africa.
Proudly, she presented her green passport embossed with the Irish harp. It was refused. Many hours later the woman, my mother, was allowed to disembark. That incident, sixteen years after the Irish Free State came into existence, indicates what an uphill battle this new country had to establish itself in the eyes of the world.
However, while it lacked wealth and influence, it had something else going for it: an ability to tell its own story. In a country with an oral tradition, the storyteller or seanachai had an honoured position over the centuries, passing on the wealth of legends and literature. Ireland has told that story differently over the years, and in its two different languages, but what its singers and writers have in common is an acute sense of place and of being at home with the natural world.
The poets will tell you that it all began with Amergin, the Milesian poet said to have founded Celtic Ireland. Setting foot on Irish soil, this is the song he sang:
Am wind on sea
Am wave swelling
Am ocean’s voice
(Paddy Bushe’s translation of Coiscéim Aimhirghin)
That notion of being at one with nature surfaces in Ireland’s Christian liturgy too It is echoed in the traditional St. Patrick’s Breastplate prayer, also known as ‘The Deer’s Cry’
I arise today through the strength of heaven
Light of sun, radiance of moon
Splendour of fire, speed of lightning
Swiftness of wind, depth of the sea
Stability of earth, firmness of rock .
(The Deer’s Cry: From the Pilgrim lyrics © Bucks Music Group Ltd)
Locale matters in Ireland. In the national imagination there is a map which has been coloured in by writers: Yeats’s Sligo, Kate O’Brien’s Limerick, Colm Toibin’s Wexford, Moya Cannon’s Donegal, Frank O’Connor’s Cork, Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan and James Joyce’s Dublin. Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley have made Bellaghy and Belfast part of that national imagination, effortlessly bypassing borders and passports. An island which encompasses two cultural identities, one Irish and one British, needs imaginative flexibility and Ireland is learning, as Heaney put it, ‘that there is nothing extraordinary about the challenge to be in two minds. (Redress of Poetry, Faber page 202)
Then there is the music
The great Irish folk singer, Frank Harte, said once: ‘Those in power write the history, those who suffer write the songs’. People who have nothing still have their songs, and the songs are the wealth they bring to other countries.
The greatest soft power of the United States is its international domination of popular music and that music was fed by African, Latin American, Jewish and Irish rhythms and tunes. The Irish who emigrated to America before and since the Great Famine brought Irish traditional songs like ‘Siuil a Run’ which emerged in Wisconsin as ‘I’ll sell my Rod, I’ll Sell my Reel’. The tune of the Irish ballad, ‘The Bard of Armagh’ became the Texas song, ‘The Streets of Laredo’. It also inspired the New Orleans jazz classic made famous by Louis Armstrong, ‘The St. James Infirmary’. The Everly Brothers recorded a song called ‘Down in the Willow Garden’ also known as ‘ Rose Connolly’, believed to be the same song as listed in Edward Bunting’s ‘The Ancient music of Ireland ‘published in the nineteenth century and very like our popular song, ‘The Sally Gardens’. There is even a theory that while a British drinking song was what the ‘ The Star Spangled Banner’ was based on, the original tune is said to come from the 18th century Irish harpist Turlough O Carolan’s ‘Bumper Squire Jones .’
We in our turn fell in love with America’s country and western music.. Farm hands on bicycles in the fifties sang ‘Yippi-iaay, Yippi-i-ooo’ as they brought cattle along the Irish country roads to the tune of ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. The thriving Irish country and western scene ensures that America’s great cowboy dream is kept alive in rural Ireland. But America enriched us in practical ways too. In tough times, the money sent back by emigrant Irish workers supported hearth and home for their families. And then there was The Parcel from America.
My American cousins sent us beach clothes, sporting clothes, boating clothes - all designed for a country where it was sunny in summer and you didn’t have to swim in the rain and people could afford all these different outfits instead of having the same clothes for everything. And the colours! Yellows and reds and blues like something out of a child’s storybook, instead of our muted greens and browns and greys. We had a phrase for such bounty. When anyone had enjoyed an evening where there had been the best of food and drink in the most comfortable and up to date surroundings, we’d say: ‘It was like America at home!’
What’s more we didn’t just have cousins who sent us parcels. We had American friends who cared about us: friends who shared our music and our language and who because of centuries of emigration from all parts of this island, including from the north, had a particular understanding of the complexities involved in bringing peace to Ireland. History will be kind to all those whose efforts resulted in the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, among them the people and politicians of the United States whose generous attention and endless patience helped bring to an end three decades of violent struggle.
Ireland has come a long way
Now we are a country welcoming immigrants and seeing their music and culture enriching and expanding our own. The once isolated backward state has become a thriving member of the European Union. A new generation takes for granted a peaceful island. An older generation is grateful for it. Ireland’s actors, film-makers, writers, and musicians are recognised on an ever wider international stage.
Ireland is also a freer place in which to live. That a country known for its conservatism could have become such a liberal modern state may have come as a surprise. It owed much to the fact we are a small country where family matters, and where we talk to one another. Grandchildren talk to their grandparents. We communicate across the generations.
We tell our story.
Olivia O Leary
Writer and Broadcaster
Marking the 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington D.C. on St Patrick's Day, 17 March 2023.