Much of the best of British is Irish, from literature to art to pop music - and vice versa
IN 1983, Seamus Heaney published a poem in the form of a political pamphlet called An Open Letter. It was prompted by his unwanted inclusion in the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry: "be advised/ My passport's green./ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast The Queen."
Heaney's protest was rather genial and good-natured. And, as he happily confessed later to Dennis O'Driscoll, it was replete with ironies. Heaney actually worked for a short time in the British passport office in London. When he wrote the poem, his passport had been green for only a decade.
He had first got one in 1958 to go on the Derry diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes and it had placed him under the protection of "her majesty".
And he did end up raising his glass to the Queen: he had lunch with her at Buckingham Palace in the wake of the Belfast Agreement.
These ironies amount, perhaps, to a classic case of having one's cake and eating it. In almost every sphere of cultural life, Irish artists have been very happy, on the one hand to wave their green passports and on the other to take full advantage of the English language, English audiences, English publishers, theatres, galleries and media.
But what's wrong with having your cake and eating it? The point about culture is that it feeds on contradictions, paradoxes and ambiguities. The tangled history of Ireland and Britain provides a feast of these delicacies.
Domination, brutality and bitterness may be the context for the cultural engagement between the islands, but that engagement has long been richly productive.
Samuel Beckett famously responded to the question "Vous êtes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?" with the laconic "au contraire". Contrariness and contradiction are everywhere in this relationship, but not since the Tudor conquest has it been possible to define Irish and British cultures as simple opposites.
Let's take two widely separated examples: English comedy and English pop music. Strip out the Irish - Farquhar, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw - and there really is no tradition of English stage comedy from the 18th century onwards worth talking about.
Strip out the descendants of Irish immigrants - from Lennon and McCartney and Dusty Springfield (Mary O'Brien) to Johnny Rotten (Lydon) and Morrissey - and English pop music is a much poorer thing.
Even without the direct contribution of the Irish in England, Ireland is an important context for much of English classical literature. Large parts of the archetypal English poem, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, were written in Co Cork. Shakespearean scholars increasingly focus on the Elizabethan wars of conquest in Ireland as the crucible in which the so-called Golden Age was forged - pretty much in the way the Vietnam War is the backdrop to almost all American culture in the 1960s.
Two of the most "English" of writers - the Restoration dramatist William Congreve and the author of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, were born in Ireland. (Dr Johnson recorded of Congreve that "it was said by himself that he owed his nativity to England, and by everybody else that he was born in Ireland".)
The great Romantic poet Percy Shelley turns up in Ireland in 1812 urging a revolt against the union and the emancipation of Catholics.
Anthony Trollope started writing when he was working in Ireland as a post office official and much of his early work is set here. The Brontë sisters were so greatly influenced by their Irish father that it would not be much of a stretch to call them Anglo-Irish.
But the relationship works the other way around, too. Whether anyone likes it or not, English has been the primary medium of Irish cultural expression for centuries, and the Irish were fortunate in being colonised by a people with a damn good language.
To go back to Heaney, for example, his inspiration may have lain partly in WB Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, but he has always acknowledged his debt to Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins. His gift of a translation of Beowulf (the equivalent of an English poet translating the Táin) is an acknowledgement of that debt to Englishness.
Just as the Irish successfully inserted themselves into English culture, Ireland has often been a canvas for English-born artists. Such painters as Hughie O'Donoghue (born in Manchester) and Barrie Cooke (born in Cheshire) are now inextricably part of Irish art. The Abbey Theatre was established by an Englishwoman, Annie Horniman, and has had three English-born artistic directors. The Gate was created by two Englishmen: Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir.
MacLiammóir, indeed, is the great exemplar of the fluidity of identity in the Irish-British cultural relationship. He was taken for decades for the perfect Irish performer, speaking the most beautiful Irish. He was actually Alfred Willmore, born in Kensal Green in London, with no Irish connections whatsoever. (His antecedents were probably London Jewish.) He came to Ireland first when he was 18, decided to be "born" in the Cork suburb of Blackrock, and invented himself as a great Gael. And why not? Chancing your arm, making it up, disappearing into a cloud of contradictions - these are the joys of the Anglo-Irish cultural relationship.
The other pleasure is hovering. Elizabeth Bowen confessed to feeling most at home in the middle of the Irish Sea, and that applies in different ways to many artists, from Jonathan Swift to Martin McDonagh and from Iris Murdoch to Francis Bacon. In this case at least, it is a sea of possibilities.