An Irishman's Diary

DURING my early years as a parent, nearly a decade ago now, I used to worry about the children’s choice of Halloween costumes. There was one year, for example, when my daughter went to the school party as an angel – no problem there – while her little brother dressed as a devil.

And amused as I was at how they spanned the entire spectrum of good and evil, I was also concerned that my son might be succumbing to an idea, popular among young men, that being interesting means being dangerous. He was four at the time.

But in the intervening years, like most people, I have become brutalised by modern Halloween. So when, a few days ago, I asked my third and youngest child (aged seven) what he was dressing as this year, and he told me “a zombie vampire murderer”, it wasn’t so much the costume that concerned me as the semantic confusion.

“Is that a zombie who murders vampires, or a vampire-zombie who murders people in general?” I inquired mildly.

He thought about this a moment, before dismissing the issue as unimportant (“Meh!”). And when the morning came, I just gave his ensemble an indulgent smile. Then I sighed yet again at the thought of how quickly they grow up as, leaving for school, he waved goodbye to me with his hatchet.

LOOKING BACK on my own childhood Halloweens, it’s tempting to think they were, compared with today’s, much more innocent. But strictly speaking, the opposite is true. However gory the outfits are now, after all, we live in an age when nobody believes in zombies or vampires any more.

In fact – to skip to the adult section of the fancy-dress store for a moment – most of us don’t believe in the existence of raunchy, suspender-wearing nurses either. So when people dress up as these things, we know it’s only a game.

In the Halloweens of my youth, there was – for one thing – less dressing up. But in any case the emphasis then was on actually performing mischief. And while most of what we did might be described as harmless, this would only be true in the looser Irish sense of that word.

Sure, nobody ever died or was seriously injured (I hope) in the pranks we were licensed to perform at this time of year. Even so, the more extreme stunts did sometimes border on vandalism. They would not have been considered harmless by the narrower criteria of, say, the insurance industry.

If you had enough time on your hands now, you could probably worry about the desensitising effect of 21st-century Halloween and its images. But strange as it may be to say in a context where my local supermarket now puts flesh-crawling ghouls in the fruit and vegetable section, the modern event still seems like a sanitised version of the original.

I KNOW it’s not really ours any more. I know it’s a bitter irony that a festival brought to the US by poor Irish and Scottish immigrants has now been repackaged by the Yanks and sold back to us at a mark-up. And yet, despite that, I still derive childish enjoyment from the fact that our neighbours in England are now being forced to celebrate Halloween too.

For centuries, the English were notoriously impervious to Irish culture, even as they dominated it. Their indifference is most obvious in language. English is the most promiscuous tongue on earth, penetrating everywhere and picking up all sorts of interesting infections in the process.

You might think that prolonged exposure to (and millions of immigrants from) a country famous for talking might have had a big influence on it. But on the contrary, English has barely a handful of Irish loan-words. So it must have been a small thing, by comparison, for our former rulers to ignore Halloween and to devote this time of year instead to preparations for Guy Fawkes Night.

As yet another illustration of England’s epic lack of interest in things Irish, that report yesterday about who fired the first shots of our Civil War was telling. Not the revelation that British army gunners may have been used by Michael Collins.

I mean, rather, the reported belief of one Lance Bombardier Percy Creek, who claimed to have fired the shots, that the people he was aiming at inside the Four Courts were Black and Tans.

Oh dear. It might be unfair to expect Percy to have grasped all the fine points of Irish politics, circa 1922. Still, it should have been a court-martial offence for a bombardier to miss the point that widely.

Anyway, I know it’s not very mature of me. But it seems a small revenge for their centuries of neglect that our former colonial overlords are now having Halloween forced upon them. This time we’ve borrowed the artillery from our new colonial overlords, the Americans, who are shelling the English with pumpkins, plutonium-enriched barm bracks, and monkey nuts.

Inside the remaining pockets of resistance, all the Guy Fawkes effigies must be prematurely on fire. And if there’s a modern-day Percy Creek peering out through the smoke, he probably thinks it’s the Tans he’s fighting, again. Which is an understandable mistake, these days at least, since the forces ranged against him are officially Black and Orange.