OPINION:A demoralised Fianna Fáil shows no appetite to resist its minnow bedfellows on the issue, writes KEVIN O'CONNOR
WHEN I “returned” to this country in the early 70s, I had reason to ponder what made us different. So much that greeted me was ramshackle, from dysfunctional public services to Amish roads to the tragicomedy of a Dáil that seemed, in every sense, to have dumped on the revolutionaries who created it. A day there and one realised that mediocrity ruled. (Of course it did – the best and brightest had gone abroad for generations, leaving the sinking ship to the rats.)
Two areas, however, gave me hope that Ireland might be different from England and might retain some hope of a different, better life. One was literature, which in time did fulfil its promise, with Friel and Heaney, hung upside-down like Northern owls, cooing their somnolent songs into world consciousness.
The other area was hunting and horses. Dabbling in both – and I emphasise dabbling – gave me great pleasure, and helped me feel the pulse of a people to whom I belonged, but from whom I had become estranged.
Now hunting is threatened, though literature thrives.
We all know the arguments for and against stag hunting. Just as hard cases make for bad law, pictures of wounded stags make for emotive reactions, as do radio accounts of urban motorists confronted with an image as iconic, beautiful and terrifying as the stag at bay.
I have seen those stags at bay careering down country lanes and sweeping across ditches in majestic parabolas of nature. I have seen them, bellies heaving, heads raised and nostrils flaring, looking for their escape. But I have also seen them flaking after five miles and then, disappointed at no horse and hound behind, waiting for the pack to catch up. And – though I do not expect to be believed on this – I have seen the hounds surround and lick the stag, as the stag was led, somewhat unwillingly, back into the trailer from which it was released hours earlier.
Nothing I say will change those opposed to stag hunting. Let me merely, and merrily, relive some of the excitement of hunting on horseback. The camaraderie, the risks, the exhilaration of being on a horse in the countryside, trusting the animal to look after, in my case, a rather fearful and inept rider, are unique.
I cannot justify it to a modern, urban readership, any more than I can explain why modern football and hurling are war by other means, refined from our early barbarism to acceptable spectacle.
But I grew up in Limerick, where blood was spilled on the local GAA ground most Sundays by players reverting to origins and swinging hurleys at each others’ heads.
As children, we trooped to the railway station afterwards, to see more blood in running battles, especially when Tipperary and Cork were in a Munster final.
Of course, people will be in denial about this, just as they deny that rugby fills the wards of St Michael’s in Dublin and Stoke Manville in England with young men who will spend most of their lives in wheelchairs. Go to any provincial match and see them in their sad places of honour, blanket-wrapped war veterans, taken out for the day to look at what crippled them.
Similarly, in years of hunting, I never saw a fox killed, though many ran fast along the hoar frost and doubled back against the hounds, who were “belling” and making music on the scent, following their nose and not their eyesight. Otherwise, the hounds would have seen the fox and doubled back themselves.
Of course, that was mostly drag-hunting, over a scent laid by linseed or carcass, enough to give a “pipe-opener” to man and beast. All that, too, will be at risk, once the ban on stag hunting is enforced.
Outlaw stag in March, fox and hounds thereafter, in the relentless run of urban over rural. Thus shall we follow England, where to make a cheap gibe, parliament heeds not the wail of fledgling, aborted infants but the notional cry of the fox, as imagined by legions of urban Labour MPs.
England has found a compromise in drag-hunting, where no animal is killed and horse, rider and hounds have a day out.
As an aside, when the great rural public in Britain opposed the ban, planeloads of Irish hunters went over to swell the numbers, knowing that political correctness knows no national boundaries.
On one march, they joined about a million countryfolk. As in the massive protest against the war in Iraq, the Mother of Parliaments ignored its constituents.
The country Irish were there, knowing probably better than natives that a Commons majority is impervious to reason or emotion once set on a legislative course. And suspecting, too, as ever, in the best of post-colonial reflexes, what an English parliament did yesterday, a supine Irish one will do tomorrow – in this case, next March.
Which would be a pity, not just because it’s another example of green ignorance gone rabid, but also because in a world where power is fragile, a demoralised Fianna Fáil shows no appetite to resist its minnow bedfellows.
Kevin O’Connor, who hunted with the Clare Hunt, is a freelance journalist.
John Waters is on leave