Ireland’s players and fans will sing tomorrow in a manner betraying neither enthusiasm nor loyalty to the words
OBSERVING FROM a little distance the growing excitement about Ireland’s progress in the Rugby World Cup, I sense the imminent renewal of a particular area of national soul-searching.
Should Ireland beat Wales in tomorrow’s quarter-final, we will be into uncharted territory in more ways than one. For the first time, Ireland will be on the cusp of striding a global stage at the highest level without a proper anthem to serenade the endeavour.
Although the Irish national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann, is also sung at home matches, the burden of stirring the nation and its team through song will be borne tomorrow by Ireland's Call, composed by the Derry songwriter Phil Coulter, which was adopted as the rugby anthem in 1995 as a way to bypass issues of sectarian and national division.
Watching the faces of the Irish fans tomorrow, it will as usual be hard to suppress the suspicion that Ireland's Call is regarded more or less in accordance with its inspiration: as a stop-gap evasion of everything an anthem is supposed to represent – a quasi-Irish solution to a two-nation problem. Both team members and supporters will open and close their mouths in a manner betraying neither enthusiasm for, familiarity with nor loyalty to the words and music they will find themselves rendering. The Welsh, on the other hand, will belt out Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau– Ancient Land of My Fathers – with gusto, pride and something approaching bellicosity.
Ireland's Callis what it is: a sporting song designed to tiptoe around the awkward politics of a sundered nation. Musically, it is as pedestrian as it is lyrically formulaic: "Hearts of steel/And heads unbowing/Vowing never to be broken/We will fight, until/We can fight no more/From the four proud provinces of Ireland".
Anthems tend either to be hymns to monarchs or patriotic calls to arms, and, while Ireland's Callseems to tick the patriotic boxes, it is too self-evidently a prevarication to be convincing. The word "fight" is thrown in as a nod to anthemic convention, but it fools nobody.
The “national” rugby team, by virtue of being an all-Ireland phenomenon, raises questions we normally succeed in avoiding. Not least among these is the rather bracing question: what is Ireland anyway? The rugby team, like the Republic’s soccer team, plays in green jerseys and is followed by hordes of green-swaddled supporters, but this, though seemingly coherent from the outside, is rather less so from within. Though headquartered in Dublin, the “national” rugby team emanates from an entity without any political or nationalistic existence.
For us “down here”, the anthem problem is like the problem with virtually all elements of our national iconography and symbolism. The continuing geographical division, with all its consequences, has closed off from us any possibility of a shared remembering of our historical journey. In the Republic, questions relating to our struggle for national self-realisation have become deeply problematic as a result of the “Troubles”, and we lack the will or imagination to tease them out in public. Less than five years from the centenary of our founding revolution, we haven’t the faintest idea how to mark the occasion. Even the broaching of such issues is widely regarded as a reactionary activity.
Our "official" national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann, is among that bundle of cultural heirlooms that have become problematic as a result of the unresolved and for now irresolvable issues concerning the asymmetry between our politics and our geography. Apart from its identification with one side of the core tribal divide, a standard objection to the anthem relates to its militaristic tone: "We're children of a fighting race/That never yet has known disgrace/And as we march, the foe to face/We'll chant a soldier's song".
But, beyond its ostensible associations, Amhrán na bhFiannis unexceptionable when compared to other anthems. Indeed, its rousing invocation to battle bears strong similarities, in word and spirit, to the Welsh anthem: "In valley green, on towering crag/Our fathers fought before us/And conquered 'neath the same old flag/That's proudly floating o'er us". The Welsh anthem, however, mixes militarism with broader cultural content, making mention also of the national language and the Welsh nation's "poets and minstrels and famed men".
Had we travelled uninterrupted from our baptismal conflicts to the present, we might today be able to utter the words of Amhrán na bhFiannwithout difficulty or even undue thought. But there is now far too much self-awareness and discomfort for its rousing lyrics to be uttered in the way equivalent words can be belted out by other peoples.
When I was growing up, Amhrán na bhFiannwas the exclamation mark at the end of virtually every notable public fixture but, nowadays, events tend to peter out in a haze of uncertainty. For all intents and purposes, we no longer have a functional national anthem, one that can be sung on all occasions, and joined in on the basis of Irishness rather than allegiance to a particular version of history. This may not have manifested itself as a significant issue until now. But one of the byproducts of a victory tomorrow is that we may not be able to avoid it for much longer.