The past is ourselves

THE bus into the centre of Dublin, at the beginning of the evening, this time of year, is like a precious, golden barque sailing along the streets. The atmosphere inside is all expectation. The girls and boys who live in the suburbs have finally finished primping in their bathrooms and got themselves to bus stops, and now they're leaning against their friends, their innocent hands in their laps, hair gleaming, eyes bright, work and family forgotten, heading into town to sense each other out, and to drink and dance.

The girls are all done up the way teenagers are done up these days - as if they had made no effort at all. No polyester palazzo pants for them. They wear little rough jumpers. Clumpy boots and shoes. Nobbly skirts. Deliberately ill-made wisps of things that make them look as if they threw on what they found in the bottom of a press. Child-clothes out of which their bodies have already grown.

This is a calculated fashion statement. It is also exactly the way we really dressed, pattering along the quiet roads of Ireland to our National Schools, decades and decades ago.

As the years roll towards the end of the decade, the end of the century and the end of a millennium, what used to be the realities of the past are on offer, a la carte. Bits and pieces of the past are turning up, re-cycled, as if they are being sorted, now, being re-arranged for the next passage in our lives.

The Christmas season is perfectly appropriate to retro style and to deeper retrospection. Christmas is never about the future. At best, it is about the absolute present - about being utterly absorbed in the here and now, gas children are when Santa takes them on his knee, or the paper falls to the floor and a perfect present is revealed, or when they check where they left the bit of Christmas cake and stand there breathless with the realisation that the reindeer did come through the sitting-room, and they did eat the snack that was left for them.

Adults can't be like that, though they might long to be. They cannot anymore just be enchanted. They have to work on it. But they remember enchantment, and so they look back, and they re-cycle the best bits and pieces, and make a net of them to draw magic down once more. And to ward off the bad. A warm and shining house, and a welcoming flame in the window, and smells of good food, and promises of abundance - these things don't make sense except as defensive statements, made by people who remember a bad past as well as a good one. Each festive gesture is saying to the dark and the cold and the silence that is always ready to invade: "You can't harm me. I'm safe from you.

These two pasts - the irrecoverably magic one, and the one full of fear - break the surface of the present in the most unexpected ways. Unlikely aspects of the past turn out to have a meaning in the present, or at least to be suitable to re-packaging in the present. The widespread affection for the Victorian hymns on the Faith Of Our Fathers CD might perhaps have been recognised earlier than it was. What other songs did all the middle-aged people, at the fag-end of a party, know all the words to? But maybe their new role had to wait until the fight had gone out of conservative Roman Catholic social teaching. The lyrics of the Faith Of Our Fathers hymn itself would sound altogether different if the argument about divorce was still raging. But though the hymns' revival has been greeted with delight, a revival is a two-edged thing. It can be a stage in a process of decay. There is something decisively enfeebling about taking a hymn away from a committed congregation and putting it on the concert stage. Old-style fervour becomes theme-park nostalgia.

The hymns of Irish Catholicism, once so robust, have become acceptably effeminate at the end of the 20th century. They belong now with little pots of home-made jam in gingham covers and muslin pot-pourris put together by nuns, the twee things they sell in heritage centre shops. Who regrets the passing of their power? But can they have any enduring strength if they no longer have power?

The opposite happened to Irish step-dancing. It was effeminate, not in its traditional, battering-on-a-door-laid-on-the-ground mode, but in its decorous Gaelic League mode. It was a cultural orphan, despised by the gritty inheritors of the real thing, and ignored by the style-setters in our Americanised popular culture. Then all of a sudden, with Riverdance, it was re-minted, proposed as a new kind of "real thing", proffered as "Irish culture" and found to be acceptable as such to a mass audience.

It used to be a prideful experience to watch the intricate dances of a despised peasantry. It used to be an experience beyond words, to watch an ordinary man shrug his upper body with ostentatious casualness while under him, thundering on the boards, his legs and feet made amazing and powerful patterns. What a thing was made from the resources of the resourceless - from physical strength, and the sound of a fiddle!

The virtuosity of the Riverdance professionals is quite another thing - a Royalettes thing, a Las Vegas thing. Nonetheless, step-dancing, of all things, is going to lead the physical expression of Irishness into the next millennium. It was lying there on the floor of the past, and the clever Eurovision people took it and showbizzed it, and guessed correctly that the masses trust showbiz whereas they're wary of "heritage", and they have given this particular mode of expressiveness a quite new vigour.

Before the Famine, the Irish danced. They, danced in cabins and in the space where two lanes met and in the kitchens of public houses. Now, purged of what there was of desperation and defiance in the native culture, Ireland dances again through its surrogates up there on the Riverdance stages.

Dance is safe, because it doesn't use words. Whatever it says, it says nothing. It is all very well for other nations, who agree on a myth of their best and worst pasts. They can pine for cottages with hollyhocks and duck-ponds, or golden farmsteads with great jars of olive-oil and aromatic hams hanging in orderly outbuildings. Their nostalgia industries stand on secure ground. They know what they dread, because they suffered modern war. How are we Irish to know what's safe to revive?

How are we to identify an enemy that does not identify us with armed nationalism? The riches and happinesses and great achievements of our long past are lost behind the break in our language. We have only thee 19th century to play with, and it was not such a good century for us. Not at all. And the early-20th century gets us into all kinds of trouble. Mild adult education classes have split this year over Michael Collins. 1922 is not the past. It is boiling inside people.

The past lasted until yesterday. The backward glances of the memoirs of the middle-aged - now beginning to accumulate, in these last years of the millennium - flinch away from what they see. They see pained children. To School Through the Fields has its' place for ever, but its fields have been supplanted at the centre of the account of Irish childhood by the lanes of Limerick where Frank McCourt's little twin brothers died - not by accident, but because the society they were born into didn't want them within it: it hardly wanted the destitute to live.

If this country were on the couch the therapist would be saying to it "we have a lot to work through, here". Outwardly, we stride towards the millennium with confidence. Europrigs, almost, with the success of our Presidency and our butter-wouldn't-melt-in-our-mouth Maastricht-ready economy.

There has never been a Christmas with so many dinky new dwellings, so many jobs for young people with computer skills, so many customers with money to spare for the Faith of Our Fathers album or the Riverdance video or the cheerful little garments that our girls and boys think nothing of buying for one wear with the money they earn at their part-time jobs.

Underneath all this, the past heaves and sighs. Maybe it will all be sanitised in the end after all the pain comes out, all the wounds are cleaned, and begin to heal. Meanwhile, we tart up this bit of the past, gasp at the revelation of this other bit, ignore that bit of it altogether. Christmas is the safest, best-policed exercise in nostalgia there is. Outside it, nostalgia in this Republic comes booby-trapped. Behind our loving family circles are the ghostly circles of all the people who aren't here. They're in Springfield, Massachusetts and Sydney and the Bay Area and in the sad Irish clubs in the suburbs of English cities. Absent friends. The past can come back harmlessly, in Fair Isle jumpers and T-strap shoes. Or it can blow up in your face.