Europe Day falls next Wednesday. With a treaty referendum and a Eurovision looming, and Euro-emotions running high, a selection of Irish people reflect on their – and our – relationship with the continent, its culture and its institutions
John Banville, Author
When I see a car with one of those “I Ireland” signs displayed in the back window I want to inquire of the folks within what they understand that ardent legend to signify. Do they love all of Ireland, in its entirety? Would they say they love the Ringsend sewerage works, for example? The Omagh bombers? Anglo Irish Bank? Almost any beach around the coastline at the end of a busy summer Sunday when the day trippers have gone home, leaving memorials of their visit strewn all over the sand?
Surely not. Rather, what is being declared is a love for the essence of Ireland, for the spirit of the place, whatever that may be.
It is hard to imagine, especially in these times, anyone flourishing an “I Europe” notice. Yet some of us, hardy souls that we are, still cling to the ideal of a unified, peaceful continent as conceived by visionaries such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman at the end of the second World War, a war that had left a large part of Europe in ruins.
It may seem, nowadays, a deluded dream to think of a United States of Europe stretching from the Dingle peninsula to the steppes of Russia and even beyond, but the wistful beauty of that vision endures.
Years ago a reviewer, writing about one of my books, suggested that in my work I was endeavouring to “open a window on Europe”. I was rash enough to mention this to my friend the late John McGahern, to which, with one of his most feral grins, John retorted, “Oh, yes – and I’m trying to slam it shut!’
Thereafter, whenever the topic of Europe came up between us, we used to have fun imagining a cartoon – by Martyn Turner, no doubt – showing the two of us locked in a fierce struggle, me trying to pull up the European sash and John trying to pull it down.
Compared with our own compact little country, Europe is an amorphous mass. Could there really be a unified, uniform, centralised EU that would include, say, Finland and Sicily, the Netherlands and Spain – or, indeed, Germany and Ireland?
Yet when I visit Helsinki or Palermo, Amsterdam or Madrid, when I am in Berlin or Dublin, I am more conscious of the similarities than the differences. Am I deluded? Am I indulging in wishful thinking? If so, I prefer the delusion and the fervent dream to a reality proposed by hard-headed Little Irelanders who blithely connived at the political, financial and spiritual calamities that befell us in recent decades.
When I was growing up in Wexford in the 1950s there was a late-night chip shop in the town that we used to frequent regularly. In those days, in that place, there were not many establishments that stayed open after midnight, and the chipper, though a poky and less than fragrant hole-in-the-wall, was for us a beacon of light in a dark time.
The proprietor, in an immemorial moment of romantic inspiration, had pinned to the back wall, above the seething fryer, a large rectangular poster showing in lavish colour a snow-clad Mont Blanc rearing upwards in sparkling sunshine against an impossibly blue sky. In those mean surroundings it was an incongruous fantasy of blue and white and gold, yet while we waited for our orders to be filled we would gaze up at it, rapt and wistful, lost in a vague dream of all the sunlit elsewheres we might one day get to visit.
Silly, of course. Europe is as much the slums of Naples as it is Mont Blanc’s magnificent crag. No doubt I am as muddle-headed in my notions of Europe as is the driver with an “I Ireland” sign in his back window. But let him keep to his dream, and I shall keep to mine.
Johnny Logan, Eurovision winner and singer-songwriter
In the 1980s, when I was taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest, communication was more difficult and travel was more expensive; Europe was a lot less accessible to us. The Eurovision was one TV show for the whole of Europe; in the 1960s, when it was put together, it was a way for the whole of Europe to get to know each other.
Because of the success I had in 1980 and in 1987, Europe was much more receptive to me. The sort of Eurovision prejudice that was here and especially in England didn’t exist in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. So I switched my contract to Sony Germany in 1987 and worked very hard at establishing myself as a live artist in those countries and, later, in Scandinavia.
I won the Eurovision three times, but those were only three weeks of my life, and there were many years when I had to do an awful lot of work to make it a success.
You have to work harder to make it in a different country, and I still am: this week I’m playing one night in Finland and the next in Hamburg. I haven’t played much in Ireland over the past 20 years, but it’s not by choice. I’d love to be playing more at home; it’s just the way things have gone.
But advances in technology and travel have changed things. I’m not sure whether we’re more part of Europe, but we’re closer. Through all that, I’ve become much more aware of my identity as an Irishman. It’s becoming real to the Irish people that it’s okay to be Europeans, but we really need to be Irish first; we can’t lose who we are as people to become European.
I’m still very much thought of as one of the faces of Ireland in parts of Europe, and that’s a very positive thing. I’ve never thought of it as a responsibility; I’ve always thought of it as an honour.
Arthur Beesley, European Correspondent, The Irish Times
Another day, another tale of woe. A while ago I ran into a Spanish colleague, a hardworking fellow whose hands are practically chained to his laptop. “How goes it?” I asked. “Not bad considering my paper closed last Friday,” he said.
Welcome to Brussels, crucible of the raging debt scare, crossroads of a continent in acute economic distress. The disease is advancing. To be Irish here is to be but one of many in the sick bay.
The Spaniards are teetering on the brink of a bailout; this spells trouble for the Italians, and the French are fearful. The Austrians have lost a triple-A credit rating, the Dutch government just fell apart, the Belgians are in cutback city and the Greeks are in the default zone.
When it was Tiger time in Dublin, the Portuguese were told to follow the starry Irish path to modernity and wealth. Six months after Ireland stumbled into the arms of the troika, the Portuguese did the same.
So we’re not the only ones in a mess. If it is easy enough to say that the banking disaster has tarnished Ireland’s sheen in Europe, quite a few others have lost their gloss too.
Things may well be dandy for the Germans and our Nordic friends. But they are an exclusive band. Britain is in its second recession in three years. Its recovery from the first was the weakest for 100 years.
This is the worst economic crisis in Europe since the second World War, one that still threatens a currency used by more than 300 million people. Often enough Ireland has been to the fore in the drama, the intrigue on Merrion Street a big global story.
At the same time, there is a ready hearing for the narrative of Ireland as the success story of the bailout policy. It is as if the entire saga has been whittled down into three tidy subplots: monumental screw-up; capitulation; and recovery.
More than once, reporters from other countries have put it to me that Ireland’s salvation has already been achieved. “The crisis is over now, yes?” The first response is to think these people are obviously not reading the newspapers. The second is the realisation that they’re actually writing the papers.
Carl Dolan, Policy officer with Transparency International, in Brussels, and guitarist with the band Toy Division
I have come to think about my nationality in much the same way that I think about my hair: an enduring, unremarkable and rapidly diminishing aspect of who I am. It requires less and less upkeep these days, and I tend to notice it only when other people do.
Living in Brussels, this may seem odd. Shopworn national stereotypes are among the main currencies in this town. All the tourist-tat shops around the Grand Place sell a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Do it like a European” and a veritable Kama Sutra of cliched cartoons of cavorting Finns, French and Portuguese. (The Irish couple are, predictably, sozzled and dysfunctional.)
Occasionally, of course, it is tempting to play the professional Irishman in an attempt to mitigate the latest bout of feckless or irresponsible behaviour, or to ham up a mysterious soulful Celticness in an attempt to woo some impressionable young thing. But when you see the Greeks and Spanish and even the Poles up to the same kind of codology then it’s hard to take any of it seriously.
No, the most eye-opening thing about Brussels is not the polyglot diversity of it all but how much the people who have ended up there have in common. Most strikingly, everyone is looking for a way out or up. If people take their nationality seriously at all, it is as a springboard for their ambitions.
Funnily enough, it’s the frivolous stuff that becomes more important as the years go on. It seems to me that the very quintessence of Irishness is that common lore of children’s TV programmes such as Bosco and Wanderley Wagon and arcane cultural rituals such as the Rose of Tralee that come flooding back whenever I meet up with my Irish peers. In an environment where everyone speaks half a dozen languages, we all need a private code.
When I first arrived in Brussels more than four years ago, to be Irish was essentially to have all the advantages of being a native English speaker without the drawbacks sometimes associated with being British or American. I’ll never forget the relief and joy with which a party of Greeks discovered my nationality.
All this has survived the economic meltdown. Despite our efforts to align ourselves with an Atlantic alliance of overblown financial exuberance, I get the sense that the euro-folk realised our hearts weren’t really in it. Mystifyingly, to be Irish is still to get the benefit of the doubt and to be blessed with the best intentions. The characteristic I care least about may well turn out to be my greatest asset.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Paris Correspondent, The Irish Times
The late Garret FitzGerald, a former taoiseach, once said that the survival of a small nation depended on sensitivity to its neighbours. This raises a paradox. On one level, Ireland is undeniably an outward-looking place. We travel, emigrate, devour imported culture and pay attention to the outside world.
And yet it’s not quite a panoramic view. As the focus is disproportionately on the English-speaking world, one of the biggest blindspots is the place where Ireland’s interests are arguably most closely bound up: Europe.
Of course, huge numbers of Irish people live on the continent and move easily between cultures every day. Trade is booming, two-way travel has never been easier and Irish people proclaim themselves enthusiastic Europeans. And yet it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s something slightly illusory about all of this, given that in Irish daily life the continent is at a remove that belies its proximity and importance. The anglophone influence is so deeply embedded, as chief inspiration for everything from TV shows to public policy, that it seems to go largely unnoticed.
France may be one of Ireland’s biggest trading partners, but the figures are so low relative to its size and potential that France, remarkably, is still in effect an emerging market for the Irish. We have one of the lowest take-up rates of the Erasmus student-exchange programme and show little interest in languages. None of this is unique to Ireland, but the paradox, as Prof Michael Cronin of DCU has argued, is that speaking a world language might have narrowed, not broadened, our world view.
“Do we want more Europe or less Europe?” Nicolas Sarkozy often asks. He means the EU and he means politics. But in its broader cultural sense, Ireland could sometimes do with a bit more Europe.
Helen O’Connell, Sculptor
Growing up in Ireland, mainland Europe was something to aspire to, to escape to. I think my generation had a strong but unconscious sense of being a peripheral island people on the edge of Europe. I certainly never considered myself European.
Europeans were a more sophisticated people. They dressed well and sat in cafes around squares in dappled sunshine. They lived in apartments, ate well, didn’t drink themselves to disgrace and were generally better-looking. I imagined they discussed philosophy in their artistically adorned buildings.
At that tender age I vowed to myself that I would make a beeline for the mainland at the first opportunity.
Many years later I find myself married to an Italian and voluntarily deciding to live in Ireland. Having lived in Italy for a while and spent time in various European countries, I have come to realise that most of our fellow Europeans are similarly beset by the usual myriad of social and political problems, albeit with an uneven distribution of sunshine.
Derek Scally, Berlin correspondent, The Irish Times
Learning a foreign language is like losing weight: for the person in question it can be a life-changing experience, but if you talk too much about it you risk annoying everyone around you.
What often gets overlooked is that the real point of learning a language is not to acquire a linguistic tool but to understand what makes another people think, what makes them tick. Why is this important on Europe Day? The euro crisis, that’s why.
While the experts pore over our continent’s economic fate, the complex crisis has seen many nonexperts fall back on simplistic national cliches to understand what’s going on: the lazy Greeks, the heartless Germans, the feckless Irish.
This populist narrative is appealing, yet it falls apart when you visit Berlin, Barcelona or Budapest. Talk to the locals – ideally in their own language – and you’ll soon be struck by how much we still have in common. For one thing, in this crisis, everyone in Europe feels they are being asked to pay for someone else’s party.
Anyone who speaks only one European language is at a disadvantage at a time like this, reliant on others to interpret what people are saying and why. This interpretation may be done with the best of intentions, but not always. In this crisis there’s been a lot of spin, too, reviving old prejudices to play European peoples off against one other.
Yet the language barrier is only as big as you make it. Here’s an idea for the Irish army heading to Poland next month. After the matches in Poznan and Gdansk, you should part company with “the lads”; you can see them when you get back to Ireland. Cast off your English-language security blanket, head off on your own and make an effort to meet the locals. A chat over a beer with locals on Poznan’s old town square is as European as any bailout fund or fiscal treaty.
At a difficult time like this it is understandable to want to retreat, pull up the national drawbridge and rely on what you hear about others rather than going out to make up your own mind.
Yet, in times of adversity, the Irish have always got out into the world to turn things around for themselves. The lesson they learned was that you can expect to be understood if you get out there and make an effort to understand others. Europe is what we make it. Europe is us, not them.
Fr Brian O’Sullivan, Former rector of the Augustinian International College, Santa Monica, Rome
I studied in Rome as a young Augustinian seminarian in the days before Ireland joined the EU. It was my first time outside Ireland. I felt privileged to have got out of Ireland for part of my education. For me, that was a time of cultural opening and awakening, something that was worth carrying back to Ireland when I was finished. Leaving Ireland and coming to Rome also meant having to learn three languages: Italian, Spanish and French.
Those same considerations apply to young Irish people today. Being part of the European Union, the ease of travel back and forth across the continent, coming much more into contact with different languages and different cultures has meant for a better education for them.
Mind you, sometimes I think there is too much “Europe” in today’s Ireland when it comes to following EU rules, regulations and norms. It seems we have lost a certain amount of our independence, but realistically we simply could not have survived without being part of Europe.
From a religious viewpoint, I think the European experience has to some extent sped up the process of the secularisation of Ireland. I think the Irish church still has a lot to learn in this regard. There was a time when the church hand-fed people, but today people are not prepared to take that. The church has lost some of its authority in Ireland, and it needs to understand and adapt to that new reality.
Paddy Agnew, Rome correspondent, The Irish Times
It would be nice to say that for the 27 years that one has lived outside Ireland but still inside the EU, one has always felt part of the collective European picture. Nice but rarely true. When we moved to Italy, in the mid-1980s, officials in Rome offices would regularly dispute with you, questioning whether Ireland really was a member of the “community”.
Living in Italy, there are times when you feel closer to ancient Rome than to modern Brussels. Not that this is a bad thing. At times, it seems that the only tangible sign of “Europa” is the euro. Even those huge signs, attributing this or that project to EU funding, that seem to pop up like mushrooms around the Irish road system are much less in evidence in Italy. Not all Italian local-government authorities, especially those in the mezzogiorno (the south), are as well informed about EU funding as their Irish counterparts.
Then, too, figures in Italian public life are fond of making enthusiastic reference to “Europa”, often holding the EU up as the institution that sets the democratic bar. Yet, being Italy, that pro-EU enthusiasm does not mean EU norms are always respected: rubbish collection in Naples, milk quotas in northern Italy, the handling of boat-people immigrants in Sicily and the excessively slow working of the Italian justice system are just the more obvious Italian lacunae, regularly criticised by the Brussels bean counters.
Italy, for all that it is a founder member of the EU, remains a splendidly separate, idiosyncratic, provincial and warm reality. Some day soon, I must travel to Europe to see what that looks like, too.
Sheila Pratschke, Director of the Irish Cultural Centre, Paris
We use the mantra so often that we’re good Europeans, but I think we should perhaps question ourselves about that. It’s very easy to hop over Europe, even in terms of going on holiday. I wasn’t aware of how much I did it myself until I came here.
Europe is going through such an interesting stage, trying to unite and come together in certain ways, but still so incredibly, diversely rich, both culturally and linguistically.
Of course the linguistic challenge can be difficult, but I think it’s something that would benefit us enormously if we engaged more closely with it.
On a day-to-day basis, Ireland and its culture don’t impinge on French people’s imagination in a huge, meaningful way, but there is a reservoir of good feeling towards the country. There’s an awareness that Ireland has changed throughout the second half of the 20th century, notably, but the affection for the idea of a green, unspoilt land, encapsulated in a west-of-Ireland landscape, remains very strong.
Synge is extremely well known in Paris, I find. His works have been on different curricula, and he translates very well into French, so there’s a feeling of familiarity when talking about Synge which I don’t find with other significantly Irish artists, such as Yeats.
One area in which Ireland could learn a lot from France is how the state sees culture. Here, artistic activity and heritage are at the heart of education. They’re at the heart of what French people know makes France great, and are inseparable from everything else. I think Ireland is behind in that respect. With the crisis, there is almost an unthinking acceptance that the arts must be cut. It’s easy to cut, because it doesn’t provide a return on investment that is measurable in the same way as other activities.
I have been in France for almost six years, and I have found that the more I have come to understand and love this country, the more my feeling for Ireland has grown. People fear that their cultural identity will be ground down if they become absorbed into a bigger entity, yet it seems to me that it’s almost the opposite that happens: the more you learn and live with other people, the more you discover yourself and your own culture.
