An Irishman's Diary

In the aftermath of a certain football match this week, I got talking to a man called Gerry Kearns about what it means to be Irish.

Luton-Irish himself, it's a subject he's spent a lot of time pondering, most recently in his capacity as professor of geography at NUI Maynooth. Indeed, he just last week delivered his inaugural lecture there: on the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s and what we can learn from it today. You may wonder, as I did, why a professor of geography would be talking about the 1840s and Young Ireland. But of course, in this country, everything is political. Besides, Kearns's speciality is "historical geography". And as his lecture title – People, Past, and Place: The Geographical Imagination of Young Ireland– suggests, this isn't always about lines on a map.

The central theme of his talk was that the Young Irelanders (so named, mockingly at first, by the supposedly wiser Old Irelanders, including Daniel O’Connell) were well on the way to defining what a real Irish republic would involve when catastrophe – in the form of the Famine – intervened, postponing their work for the next 166 years, and counting.

Their keynote ideas included Thomas Davis’s insistence on a fully secular state in which Protestants (including him) could share the nationalist ambition of a free, united Ireland; and James Fintan Lalor’s argument that the economic system of the 1840s – particularly the organisation of property – was itself a product of colonialism and would have to be dismantled as part of liberation.

Unfortunately, both ideas were submerged in the disaster that unfolded from 1847 on, whereafter they were replaced by the emergency mantras of “Brits out” and “labour must wait”. These prerogatives have dominated Irish politics ever since, says Kearns, even down to the current economic crisis and the unthinking consensus that the State must “pay its bills without asking whose bills they are and why they were contracted”.

BUT ALSO CRUCIAL to what the Young Irelanders stood for was what Kearns calls the “ironic nationalism” of James Clarence Mangan. Mangan was the poetic wing of the YI movement. And although he was troubled man – prone to depression, an alcoholic, an opium user – he was also hugely influential among his generation.

His work was romantic and patriotic. Yet its patriotism never insisted on the superiority, moral of otherwise, of the Irish race. On the contrary, Mangan rejected ideas of ethnic purity and he didn’t want to counteract the anti-Irishness of his era by being a chauvinist himself. Fluent in several languages, he was internationalist in outlook. And his writing had a reflective, often playful quality that later made him a hero – unusually among Irish writers – of James Joyce. Sometimes, as in “A Vision of Connacht in the Thirteenth Century”, Mangan viewed Ireland as if from a abroad (in that case Germany). And even when dealing with the argument between Ireland and England, he might depersonalise it by placing it somewhere radically different, as in the comic poem “To The Ingleezee Khafir, Calling Himself Djaun Bool Djenkinzun”.

This affects to be a translation of a rant-in-verse from an elderly Muslim (hence the mock-Arab spelling) who has been offended by the bigotry of one John Bull Jenkinson. In fact, it was all Mangan’s own work, an oblique response to English religious and racial intolerance towards “Iran”, (for which read “Erin”).

Essentially, Mangan believed in cherishing one’s own locality, but never at the expense of anybody else’s. Sad to say, he was himself engulfed in the calamity that befell 1840s Ireland. Having spent his last days in destitution, he died from cholera in 1849, aged only 46.

IT’S ARGUABLE THAT, forgotten as most of his poetry now is, Mangan’s idea of Irishness, at least, has triumphed. It certainly seemed so at Lansdowne Road on Tuesday, when ironic nationalism – simultaneously modest and self-confident – was the prevailing mood.

If he’d been there, and had recovered from the shock of being alive again after 160 years, Mangan would surely have enjoyed the spectacle of 50,000 supporters cheering raucously for the men in green, some of whom have English accents, and all of whom are managed by an Italian (born on St Patrick’ Day, admittedly) who speaks neither of the official languages very well. The poet might also have approved, in passing, the cheer given to our new President who, although very much an elder, often quotes the Young Irelanders in his own crusade for the “unfinished republic”. And polyglot and internationalist that he was, Mangan might now be planning a trip to Poland and the Ukraine next year, where green-shirted fans will celebrate their difference in no expectation of our technically-limited heroes actually winning anything.

For a resurrected Mangan, there would perhaps have been only one blot on the events at Lansdowne: a reminder of where it had all gone wrong for the original Young Ireland. I refer to the moment – it came late in the game, as it usually does – when, winning or losing, the home fans drop the more ephemeral chants in favour of something that expresses a deeper sense of what it means to be Irish. They found it on Tuesday night, as they always do these days, in the Fields of Athenry.