A share of high spirits

TheLastStraw: The outgoing Mexican ambassador painted a very poetic picture of Ireland during the week (Opinion page, Wednesday) as he said goodbye after a three-year stay.

We could only be flattered by his vision of the collective Irish persona as a "tall, skinny, hardy silhouette . . . a gutsy figure that reached high but was looking at the ground". Certainly, this is the silhouette that I aspire to, and if I breathe in and turn the light off while looking at the mirror, I'm almost there.

Of course, Mr Agustín Basave was expressing a deeper truth about the Irish psyche, and he had other things to say too. He's not the first person to suggest we are misplaced Mediterraneans, but given his Latin credentials, he'd know what he's talking about.

Only a Mediterranean temperament can explain why we are so much in denial about the Irish climate that whenever it rains again after a couple of dry days, we feel personally betrayed. We stare at the sky in disgust and wonder: "How could this happen?" Then we buy a new umbrella, because we have no idea where the last one is, convinced as we were that we'd never need it again.

Using a neat financial metaphor, the ambassador says it was a privilege to live in the country with the world's "greatest per capita literary GNP". (Which reminds me: I heard a Guinness spokesman on radio recently remark that while stout sales here are slipping, the product remains an important part of the Irish consumer's "drinks portfolio". This could give the old-fashioned pub-crawl a whole new meaning: "First we went to Mulligan's, where we invested heavily in Guinness (currently trading at $96 a barrel). Then we moved to the Palace where, diversifying, we bought shares in Jameson. Later, somewhere in Temple Bar, we acquired a small interest in a start-up cocktail. On the way home, we experienced sudden volatility in the midriff sector, at which point we divested ourselves of the entire portfolio in the doorway of the Irish Stock Exchange). But I digress. Mr Basave also leaves Ireland with the impression that, despite our tragic past, "most people here are rather happy". Either this is a diplomatic hint that we spend a lot of money on our drinks portfolio, or it's a controversial view. Based on the evidence of the letters pages and radio talk shows, everyone with an opinion in this country is miserable. Maybe Mr Basave means the silent majority. But I sense that, on the contrary, the national mood is one of unease, and our only certainty is that things will turn out badly in the end. This would explain why the collective Irish persona is "looking at the ground". Many of us are convinced there's an open manhole up ahead.

SPEAKING OF SAD farewells, the great Irish dance impresario Margaret Kelly died this week aged 94. I'd never heard of her until then, but I was impressed by the obituary in the Daily Telegraph, which described her rise from humble origins (born Dublin, raised Liverpool) to found the famous Bluebell Dancers at the Folies Bergère, and eventually become a knight of France's Legion d'Honneur. "Despite her accent," the Telegraph noted, "\ was a figure of Parisian society." Like Ireland, Ms Kelly had a tragic past. She was abandoned by her parents, and suffered poor health before moving to England, where she was struck down with the Liverpool accent from which she never recovered. Over average height herself (five feet, seven inches), her troupe provided an outlet for young women who had poise and beauty but were too tall (typically five feet, 11 inches) for ballet. And although she insisted on her dancers' respectability, when the market demanded that they shed the upper half of their clothing portfolios, she reluctantly agreed.

The high-kicking routines "bordered on vulgarity", according to the Telegraph, but this was never a problem in Paris. In the relationship between respectability and vulgarity, Paris is like the Clones to Belturbet road: you can cross the border repeatedly without even noticing, and nobody thinks any worse of you for it. Anyway, whatever about the rest of us, Margaret Kelly had Latin spirit: she was still doing the cancan as a party piece into her late 60s.

There was me thinking that Ireland's contribution to popular dance began during the 1994 Eurovision, whereas we obviously have one of the world's greatest per capita popular dance GNPs. Yes, the Bluebell girls were multinational. But they also conformed to Mr Basave's image of the collective Irish persona. They had tall, skinny, hardy silhouettes. They reached high. And if they weren't looking at the ground while dancing, it was probably only because Margaret Kelly trained it out of them.