Patriotism is embarrassing fig leaf for Irish leaders

The everyday reality of Irish people's lives belies the simplicity of politicians' call on them to show patriotism

PATRIOTISM, EH? It's a funny old rock- and-roll word, so out of fashion now that it sounds almost as archaic as the term groovy. Last week brought us the burial of a British soldier in his hometown of Westport, and six of his uniformed colleagues carrying the dead man's coffin. It brought us the opening of the refurbished Pearse Museum in Rathfarnham - an opening performed by Martin Mansergh TD with a great deal of charm.

It brought us the victory of boxer Katie Taylor in the Women's World Championship in China. (You go, girl!) It brought us a few fleeting close-ups of a fast-moving gravy train, Fás, which has the employers' organisations, the trade unions and some government appointees on its board in pretty well equal numbers. And it brought us record traffic jams in Newry, as shoppers from the republic sought shelter on foreign soil.

Please circle the item on the above list which seems to you the most unpatriotic. It's the cross-Border shopping, obviously. For years the pensioner population has been disgracing itself by using the free travel to go up North by train and schlep huge boxes of washing powder and dog food and alcohol and Gala apples (see Eamonn Byrne's letter in Saturday's Irish Times) back to the land which had shaken off the dread yoke of Albion a couple of decades before they were born.

But now shopping in the North has become a mass movement. On Saturday there were traffic jams from what used to be the Border - or is it still the Border, it's kind of hard to tell? - to Newry itself. Our spies told us that, leaving Dublin registrations out of it altogether because they were too numerous to count, Laois, Kilkenny, Wexford and Wicklow vehicles were startlingly well represented. The trains from Dublin to Belfast are uncomfortably busy every weekend, apparently. Even the first train on a Saturday is pretty well packed.

Naturally all this will have to stopped. The term patriotism is being thrown around, as Marian Finucane memorably put it on her radio programme yesterday, like snuff at a wake. Once we were told that we had to die for Ireland. Now we have to shop for it. It is hard to say which admonition is more unlikely to be obeyed.

The politicians of independent Ireland have never understood our relationship to England. Of course we've never understood it either - we just live it. Patriotism is always simple and frequently irrational. Everyday life is complicated, but makes a kind of sense. In Westport a local boy was laid to rest, killed in Afghanistan as part of an occupying army, buried on an island the north section of which was occupied by the same army, with startling levels of violence ensuing.

In Rathfarnham Pearse's school, St Enda's, was revealed to be, despite the best efforts of the Office of Public Works and a spectacular central heating system, a granite mansion on a wind-swept knoll. A nicely restored dormitory showed just how spartan conditions must have been for the little boys who attended it. Indeed some of the memories of those boys, tastefully enshrined now in accompanying labels, said as much.

Despite Pearse's idealism about reforming the education system of his time no modern child would be asked to endure St Enda's. In the restored school there is a picture of an extraordinarily attractive St Bridget, and one truly awful picture, by a Miss Elvery, depicting Ireland as a baby sitting on his mother's knee. A young man later told Miss Elvery that it was this picture that had encouraged him to go out and die for Ireland, which could only lead the most objective viewer to think he would have been much better off going to look at some Jack Yeats instead.

Back in the land of the living, the weekend brought your average Josephine the normal cultural experiences of modern Ireland. On Friday she was amazed by the amount of adults who watch the Late Late Show's Toy Show.

On Saturday she had to drive past lines of men and boys who were descending on the RDS in Dublin to attend the Top Gearextravaganza. Top Gearis a British television phenomenon, fronted by three quintessentially English blokes. These men have been taken to the bosom of all car-loving Irish males with an enthusiasm that has astonished even Jeremy Clarkson.

On Saturday night the whole household was brought to a standstill so that we could watch Ruth Lorenzo being thrown out of X Factor.

X Factoris another British television phenomenon, with one Irish judge, one Irish finalist, and it is presented by Dermot O'Leary, who is London Irish.

On Sunday we read about Sunderland's 4-1 defeat to Bolton, and were sad. Another Irish manager on the edge. Josephine had a quick look at the headlines on Gordon Ramsay's extra-marital activities which have cheered us all up so much over the last seven days. She managed to perform all these activities while wearing clothes sold to her by British retailers, and Josephine hasn't even been North yet.

Patriotism was once thought a beautiful thing, by those who could afford it. Then it was said to be the last refuge of the scoundrel, by those who could afford to be witty about it. But poor patriotism has never fallen so low as it is now - an embarrassing fig-leaf for Irish leaders who haven't an idea to call their own.