Taking the Mick – Frank McNally on racial epithets, dogs of war, and Kipling’s romanticised Irish

The furore over a certain British army regiment and its nickname reminded me of a classic scene in The Godfather, where the Corleones’ legal adviser Tom Hagen visits Hollywood director Jack Woltz asking a favour for a friend of the Mob.

Perceiving a threat behind the request, Woltz unleashes a string of offensive racial epithets, all on a generally Italian theme: “Johnny Fontane will never get that movie! I don’t care how many dago guinea wop greaseball goombahs come out of the woodwork!”

When Hagen replies “I’m German-Irish”, Woltz continues, with barely a pause: “Well, let me tell you something my kraut-mick friend . . .”

In the face of this United Nations General Assembly of ethnic insult, Hagen keeps his head. Unfortunately, in a famous follow-up scene, that’s more than can be said for the director’s racehorse.

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It was a dog rather than a horse that, according to the London Times, “stole the show” during the Irish Guards’ (aka “the Micks”) jubilee parade.

Whereas some horses were visibly tetchy, the regiment’s two-year-old wolfhound, known to everyone as “Seamus”, proved himself officer material, winning applause for the “calm execution of his duties”.

The dog’ name will have had a certain resonance for Pink Floyd fans. On the band’s 1972 song, also called Seamus, the eponymous hero provides backing vocals to David Gilmour’s country blues number, yelping and howling in almost perfect harmony.

That dog was apparently borrowed from another 1970s rock star Steve Marriot, of the Small Faces and Humble Pie. And despite his vocal excellence, the song still divides opinion among Pink Floyd fans. Then again, divisiveness is always a risk given the breed in question: a Border Collie.

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It was partly because of the British military and Big House associations of the Wolfhound that some founders of the Irish State preferred a different type of dog to epitomise the national spirit. Their choice was the Blue Terrier, later the Kerry Blue, a smaller but feistier breed.

Enthusiasts included a famous Mick – Collins – and a future minister for justice, Gerry Boland (brother of Harry). At a 1920 Blue Terrier competition, competing for a cup donated by a British army officer, entrants included a “Trotsky”, a “Markavich” (sic), and a “Dawn of Freedom”.

More prosaically but combining his roles as revolutionary and man of numbers, Collins’s entry then was: “Convict 224″. Mind you, a different dog of the same name also appears in newspaper archives for 1917, owned by a “Mr Clarke”. And that can hardly have been a terrier unless it was unusually fast. It was competing in the Greyhound coursing championships at Clonmel.

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The Irish Guards veteran who, on BBC’s jubilee commentary, tried to persuade listeners that “Micks” was not an insult, quoted Lawrence of Arabia when he praised the regiment’s “fantastic mix of guard’s discipline [and] irrational tenth”.

But he may also have been channelling Rudyard Kipling, whose son died while serving in the Guards and who went on to write the regimental history. Kipling too was an admirer of the “fantastic mix/Micks”. But he was also rather conflicted about the Irish, and at times seemed to believe in their irrational tenth as their irrational nine-tenths.

His thoughts on Home Rule were summed up in a humorously racist short story of 1891, entitled Namgay Doola. It tells of a mysteriously red-haired Tibetan family whose patriarch, otherwise of a pillar of the community, causes outrage by cutting the tail off his neighbour’s (sacred) cow in a feud.

Investigating on behalf of the local monarch, the narrator finds that Namgay Doola is the offspring of a long-lost Irish solider, Tim Doolan: hence his red-hair, numerous children, and a tendency to maim cattle. The monarch is advised never to give the man control of land, which he will only misrule, but instead to put him in charge of the army, a role in which he is sure to excel.

This was a cornerstone of Kipling’s worldview. He shamelessly romanticised the fighting Irish, especially if they were fighting for England.

But in his First world war poem The Irish Guards, recalling the Battle of Fontenoy (where confusingly, the Irish wore red while defeating the also red-coated English on behalf of the French), he even subverts the usual colonial stereotype by presenting Ireland as a force of consistency in a changing world:

“The fashion’s all for khaki now,/But once through France we went/Full dressed in scarlet Army cloth,/The English – left at Ghent./They’re fighting on our side today/But before they changed their clothes,/The half of Europe knew our fame,/As all of Ireland knows.

“Old days! The wild geese are flying,/Head to the storm as they faced it before/For where there are Irish there’s bound to be fighting/And when there’s no fighting it’s Ireland no more!”