AT a lunch hosted by Guinness, I recently met an energetic, outward looking entrepreneur who was to do something for Ireland in Europe. He had plans to export the communal Irish living room and open an Irish pub, somewhere close to Nuremberg, which is already served by something like 13 Irish pubs in its environs.
He was aiming for authenticity and had gone to a lot of trouble to get the right blend of rugged fun and spiritual mayhem for which the Irish pub has become famous.
With a good grounding in Irish history and a precise intuition for the effect which Ireland and its imagery of round towers and rebellion has on the mid European imagination, he was determined to fit his pub out with church furniture.
From a very distant memory of church pews, I tried to warn him that they were not very comfortable to sit on for long periods. But he then proudly told me that he had already acquired a set of antique oak pews for a knockdown price of £200 each from a disused Catholic church in Dublin. Before he could transport them to Germany, however, the hierarchy had insisted that they would have to be deconsecrated, a process which involved a priest going around with a hammer and chisel, prizing off a little brass cross from the back of each pew.
It struck me as a huge irony to think that Irish churches were now in the process of being converted into Irish pubs, that history was being turned on its head and we were conquering the hearts and minds of Europe's heathens once more like the saints and scholars. Instead of bibles we are now armed with novels, films, literature, guitars, church furniture and Kerrygold butter.
I was thrown back to Tom Murphy's novel The Seduction of Morality, in which a country pub is actually called the "church" and where the patrons observed all the protocol of sanctity and silences in a church. This is what the young entrepreneur is exporting to Germany. The coughing during the offering. With it too, he is knowingly marking the end of Ireland. It is the end of Ireland as an isolated Catholic island drifting out into the Atlantic and the beginning of Ireland as the snug of Europe.
We knew it was coming. Back in the 1970s, every school child was writing essays about the EEC, desperately trying to think of some demerits that would balance up the argument. We might forfeit our identity, our language, our religion, our fisheries and become bland, generic Continental types. Our hair would go blonde and we'd start devouring Wurst for breakfast. We'd be walking around with a French stick under the oxter singing Oom pa pa, oom pa pa.
Instead, Europe has allowed us to develop a unique identity which we sometimes didn't really want to have. All the Punch caricatures and the rebellion held us back and gave us a lingering attitude of servility. While we knew our heritage and our history made us different, we still basically thought foreigners were better.
We had nothing to lose in Europe. In the same way that Germans more recently coined the slogan "foreigners, don't leave us alone with the Germans", we knew that we had to be rescued from ourselves. Like Germany, we probably had most to gain. It meant a lot more than the Naas bypass.
It meant bypassing a lot of our traumatic history. It allowed us step out of the close waltz with Britain and dance with new partners. I have always thought that Ireland's literature was something that was to be read not so much by ourselves but by an international audience. Our writers seemed to be squealing to an international tribunal. As Declan Kiberd puts it, our literature "was meant to be overheard".
ABOVE all, I feel that our entry into Europe has had the most profound effect on Northern Ireland and our thinking in relation to Britain. It has allowed us to move steadily away from the insecurity and provincialism of the Republic into a more generous and open attitude.
In fact, up to the time that we joined the EEC the people in Ireland constantly praised themselves by hammering home the myths of independence while we really despised our identity underneath. We wanted to belong to other places. Country music, rock and roll, Manchester United, anything that moved us away from the stifling post colonial atmosphere of the 1950s and gave us a bit of room to breathe.
Just look at the Dallas style architecture which has sprung up all across the country. Anything but the thatched Famine cottages which were reserved for tourists. When a German film crew recently brought me to the remains of a 19th century deserted village in Achill and asked me to comment, I was able to point to another village nearby which had been deserted in the 1950s.
Many of those who did not emigrate would hardly even admit to being Irish. I remember the oppressive condition which the writer Colm Toibin called "Fecking off to England". I remember Carnaby Street in London as a sort of Mecca we all wanted to get to. Everything started somewhere else. While Irish heritage such as the language was being promoted as a viable alternative at home, things like Irish traditional music were treated a bit like psoriasis until we discovered Europe.
We knew that the Irish language would never work in neon.
Joining Europe was a big boost, like joining a self assertiveness group. I remember arriving in Berlin just as Ireland was awarded full membership. One day I was queuing up with Turks, Greeks and Yugoslavs at the Arbeitsamt. Next day I was skipping the queue and being singled out for special treatment, officials bending over backwards to pronounce the Irish version of my name correctly while showing the usual contempt towards the rest of the "Guest Workers". I remember being invited to parties, weddings, christenings because we were Irish. The following week was probably the band from Guatemala or the Greek dancers.
I remember one fellow Irishman trying to work out what Germans really thought of the Irish and innocently remarking that we were treated not like Germans, but not quite like Turks either. We were just slightly crazy. In fact the first recorded mention of the Irish in ancient German folklore described us as half man, half camel. I'm not joking.
Now we are right little Europeans. The best Europeans of the lot, leaving our hoof prints all over the Continent. What has changed is that Europer that kind of globalism that is associated with Europe, also needed room to breathe. Europeans need countries like Ireland, Portugal and Greece as much as we need Europe. Living in Germany, where owning a tin whistle in the 1970s was almost equivalent to owning a credit card, it is clear how much these peripheral cultures mean.
In turn, the Irish can easily laugh at the concept of Eurocracy. As yet, the Irish feel no threat from globalism or the totalitarian aspects of Europe. We wouldn't really be truly Irish without it. We now realise that it was only when we had become part of that global pool that we could eventually be relaxed about our own image again. We have nothing to fear from losing our currency. Even if that treasured concept of the nation state, for which we fought so bard, outlives its usefulness and comes to a natural end, Ireland has come away with an enduring trade mark. If nationalism is the culture of unfinished nations, something borne out of insecurity, then Europe has allowed us to see ourselves as a finished product and to stop being obsessed with the issue of our nationhood. What seems more likely at times is that our identity and nationhood will become a series of cultural products and brand names: Everybody from Berlin to Bucharest singing "do you have to let it linger".
This has all come into more clear focus recently while I was working as visiting lecturer in Irish Studies at the University of Bucharest, doing a kind of one man "L'imaginaire Irlandais" funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and the British Council. Teaching Irish literature abroad gave me a chance to assess the real impact of Irish culture on Europe. It allowed me to see Europe from both ends.
BEING in Romania was like going back to the 1950s, long before we were in Europe, when Ireland was still a horse and cart country, blessed by unshakeable faith and morals. Like the Germans who once came to Ireland and remarked how honest we were, owning up to the number of cakes we ate in Bewleys, I found myself thinking that Romanians are so honest, so law abiding, so eager to be thought of as part of Europe. Right now, Romania is filling in its EU entry form and I can't help thinking how the Berlin Wall really gave Ireland a huge advantage and allowed us to slip into the EU ahead of the big queue.
Travelling around Romania reminded me in many ways of my own childhood in Ireland in the 1950s. There are parts of Moldavia which seemed to come straight from the Connemara Gaeltacht. Even the window displays in Eastern Europe, and the lingering gruffness of waiters, reminded me of Ireland in the 1950s where you could hardly get a meal. I remember being in shops here where the shop assistants showed their resentment at my mother pulling out jumpers to look at them without purchasing any. Even now in Romania, groups of writers and artists congregate in cafes and bars as they did during the time of Flann O'Brien. And Romania has such a wonderful train system that runs on time, to all kinds of places as remote as Clifden, something we steadily dismantled after independence.
Right now, Romanians have begun to think of their position in Europe. In terms of resources, they have far more potential than Ireland ever had. But they have to work out the ghosts of the past first. All the stuff of Irish history and Irish literature seems relevant to them as they come through a kind of post colonial era of their own. You can see that, like Ireland, the country and its assets have to be shared out among the first generation of opportunists, before it will eventually become a more democratic country, before it becomes Europe ready. And while they are still tentatively trying to assert their own identity, for themselves as much as for an international audience, they also feel that only Europe can ultimately rescue them.