Need to recover richness of our tradition

Daniel Corkery wrote of the calamity of the death of a language for our people and its collective memory. But there is an equal calamity in the loss and false interpretation of an Irish Catholic cultural identity.

As a people, and since Vatican II, we seem to embrace with ease the adman's Ireland while blithely bypassing Christian Ireland, except to use it as a backdrop for a fashion shoot. Our past has become merely fodder for consumerism.

In our fractured, cultural inferiority, as the editor of the Leader newspaper, D.P. Moran, put it in 1900, we "turned our backs on the woof of national tradition, which we have cast from us and would not see restored". By casting that "woof", we reduced it to self-hatred and self-contempt. This has continued and is nowhere more apparent in recent times than in our dealings with religion. There has been an explosion of bile and hostility towards the Catholic faith, to priests and religious, and it has little to do with the sins of the few.

Writing in 1836, Disraeli said of the Irish, "they hate our decorous liberty, our pure religion". In the 1990s, many middle-class Irish Catholics seemingly opt for Disraeli's "pure" religion in their choice of schools for their upwardly mobile children, while distancing themselves from what Disraeli also described as the "uncertain and superstitious race". We were a race which treasured a Catholic education, as Jews and Muslims treasure theirs.

But nowadays, once austere monasteries offer weekends, and other Catholic religious institutions offer courses in the interpretation of dreams. While in the re-ordering of churches much is made of architecture, little importance is attached to what is familiar to the people. It is forgotten who in the past paid for the stained-glass windows, whose greatgrandfather put a pound towards a church seat, and the sense of belonging that follows such things is ignored.

In an era of dizzying transience, the centrality of the tabernacle seems to be the only unchanging thing. I suppose we should be grateful for that. It is forgotten that as much as it is a building and institution, the church records our history, including our births, deaths and marriages.

I like to reflect on the richness of our tradition, which is totally in keeping with Vatican II, but seems to be rejected these days. I am reminded of such as the late Seosamh O Heanai singing Caoineadh na dTri Muire. The third verse goes An e sin an maicin a d'iompar me tri raithe? Ochon agus ochon o!/No and e sin an maicin a rugadh insa stabla? Ochon agus ochon o!/No and e sin an maicin a hoileadh in ucht Mhaire? Ochon and ochon o!?/Eist, a mhathair, is na bi craite. Ochon and ochon o!.

It is a playful, questioning, lamenting of the people. Theological and comforting. It comes out of an Irish experience that has known pain, the comfort of faith, and a sense of mystery. It could be sung to the mother of a dead child, an AIDS victim, or on Good Friday. For instance, contrast Ecce Lignum Crucis" with "The Old Rugged Cross" where Good Friday ceremonies are concerned. The latter is neutral and would be more at home among a few reformed hillbillies in a John Wayne film, compared to the beauty and poignancy of the former.

Nostalgia? It is not nostalgic to recognise what was good and sift it out, particularly as bonded groups and families disintegrate in the uncertainty of modern life, where the Tower of Ivory has become the Tower of Babel.

If Douglas Hyde were alive, with his great respect for rural and folk culture, he would have a Mass on TnaG, a case in point. Indeed, the absence of Mass on this channel perfectly illustrates the fractured culture that permits language and music to be prized, but excludes the faith of the people responsible for that language and culture. It is easier, of course, to embrace a neo-paganism, with the sensual appeal of water, earth, fire, simplicity, and presumed innocence. Then a look at the great sacrificial hole in the rocks of Mayo might suggest something else about those pagan days.

Mercy, respect for life unborn and dying, for the struggle of the poor, the suffering of the maimed and oppressed is deep in the roots of Irish Christianity. But for many in contemporary Irish life it is a far more pleasing prospect to hug a tree than to deal with the complexity of modern life.

But Riverdance Ireland is no more a defining cypher for this country that was an authoritarian crozier-wielding Ireland borrowing the trappings of a reluctantly withdrawing empire. Between those extremes we may find the real identity of Corkery's Ireland, in all its integrity, Christian and otherwise, absorbing the complexity of the modern world and putting on it our unique stamp. Simply dismissing or revising our Christian history won't do.

Putting a gloss of pantheism on consumerism is not enough. There were no drugs, alienation, or video nasties in Nazareth, but we must try and link the safety, peace and care of that place with concern for the victims of the former.

In order to recover ourselves, and also to translate Vatican II for the Irish situation, we need to go back to the rock face of our own culture - to the prayers and poems of our dispossessed poets, and to our music. We need an integrity of culture that bonds with our fractured past. It is in the great moulded dolmens of history and faith that we will renew the essential mystery and identity that we are in danger of discarding. If we are truly ecumenical we can say aloud, on radio and TV, words like "Mass", "grace", and even "Angelus". We can hear with respect the words "loyal", "order", "Orange", "monarch". These are not sectarian words. Whom did it offend that the title of William Conor's painting had to be changed from On the Way to Mass in Connemara, to Going to Church? Need we revise history and language for a real meeting of hearts?

I finish with an ancient prayer, Coigilt na Tine, (Banking the Fire). With the powers that were granted to Patrick I bank this fire,/May the angels keep it in, no enemy scatter it./ May God be the roof of our house/For all within/and all without/Christ's swords on the door/till tomorrow's light.

How completely relevant that is, with all the robberies and violations on our homes and hearts. Let us gather up the fragments and learn to go forward in the renewed faith of our fathers, and with love for our fellows. In the calamity of losing our language let us not also lose that other thread of our identity, become unfocused, and be, in Daniel Corkery's words, "a quaking sod of national and religious consciousness, ambivalent, confused, ashamed and broken".

Mary Gallagher is a mother, housewife, and shopkeeper.