Exiles often brought the names of their home places to Belmullet, Wisconsin, Dublin, Ohio, or the Clare Valley in Australia, writes Fintan O'Toole
Up to a few weeks ago, the Prospect Playhouse on Grand Cayman island was playing host to the Cayman Drama Society production of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa. On stage, they built a passable reconstruction of a 1930s Donegal cottage. The local actors did their best with Irish accents. The audiences tried to enter the world of the poor Irish women whose world was on the brink of destruction by outside forces of which they know little.
Friel's play is about many things, but one of them is displacement. Its central characters, the Mundy sisters, are the little victims of big economic changes. Two of them end up sleeping rough in London. One dies of exposure. The other breathes her last in a grim hospice for the destitute in Southwark. The collapse of a sense of place, the implosion of the familiar reality of their own townland, leaves them in a world where, as the narrator of the play puts it at the end, "everything is simultaneously actual and illusory".
There is something surreal about the notion of this tragic Irish story being played out on the Caymans while another kind of Cayman story was about to be staged in Dublin. While they were trying to make sense of our stories, we were waiting to hear how their secrets could make sense of our reality. And surrealism is the entirely appropriate mode. Among other things, the Ansbacher scam is about the way Irish reality, for many of the people who have controlled it, has been a bizarre fiction.
One of the more amusing little details in the Ansbacher report, for example, is the mental habit of associating the Cayman islands with Irish islands. When the Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust was first established in 1971, its two wholly- owned subsidiaries on Grand Cayman were called Ireland's Eye Limited and Blasket Limited. About the same time, Sir George Mahon, director of Guinness and Mahon had a Cayman account in the name of Dursey Limited.
There is something almost charming about this. Displaced Irish exiles often brought the names of their home places with them to Belmullet, Wisconsin, Dublin, Ohio, or the Clare Valley in Australia. It made them feel a bit less lonely, I suppose.
Did the bankers have similar thoughts when they were sending their money all the way to the Caribbean? Did they worry that their money might feel lonely out there on what one Ansbacher client, the architect Sam Stephenson, called "a kind of lump of sand in the middle of the Pacific".
Did they think the money might not really feel that it was in foreign parts if the island was called Blasket rather than Cayman? What they were doing, in fact, was taking a real sense of displacement and making it fictional. Irish people knew all about offshore, because vast numbers of them, even in late 1980s when the scam was at its height, had to live offshore, in England or America. A section of Irish society, though, was able to play with this reality, to make it a profitable little joke.
There were real non-residents, people for whom their country had no place. And there were, in the phrase that entered our language through the DIRT inquiry, "bogus non-residents". Ansbacher was a richer refinement of this latter concept, through which the money pretended to be offshore but was really here. Huge, emotionally laden notions like home and abroad, here and there, were turned into a cynical mockery.
One of the weird aspects of their ability to do this and still see themselves as self-righteous Irish patriots is the way these people thought of themselves, even as they were salting away more money than most Irish people would ever see in a lifetime, as a part of the poor Irish masses ravaged by emigration.
There is, for example, a fascinating outburst in the evidence to the inspectors of Thomas Smith, a company director who spoke on behalf of Ansbacher client, Michael Shanley. Michael Shanley left Drumshanbo, Co Leitrim, at the age of 15 and made his fortune on the buildings. He was, said Mr Smith, forced to go to England "the way that most people from Cavan and Leitrim and all those counties had to go in the 1950s . . . Nobody is really interested in these people except for the type of thing we are talking about today." It would be better "if they gave the money that they are spending on the inspectorate and the tribunals over to some of these homeless people in England".
The outburst is strange, because Michael Shanley ended up, not homeless, but very rich. It does, though, illuminate a bizarre kind of sentimental self-righteousness that runs through the mentality of much of the Irish ruling class. Because "we" have suffered through emigration, "we" are a poor homeless people with no place in the world, so it doesn't matter if we park our money away from home. And if, on a trip to the Cayman islands to sort out our affairs, we happen to see Dancing at Lughnasa at the Prospect Playhouse, we can shed a tear for the fate of our fellow homeless Irish.