Jingoistic

I used to want to be an actor. Actually maybe that’s not necessarily true. I think I just wanted to show off. Acting was something that let me do that but Stand Up Comedy probably suited me better because I was on stage on my own, not sharing the spotlight with anyone. We’ve discussed my enormous ego before I’m sure.

Anyway, between the times I started school and reached the end of my first (and only) year in college I had taken part in an assortment of amateur productions you would expect from institutes relying on funding from Fianna Fail led governments. Production values aside, it was something that gave me a lot of pleasure and to an extent it was something I was good at.

I have played the biggest roles you could imagine a young Irish boy would ever dare dream of. Over the years I have portrayed, with conviction matched only by the greatest student of The Method, three of the biggest characters you can imagine.

My big break came as the saviour of all our souls. Jesus Christ. Not the nativity, I did the gritty one. The Easter play. I was originally cast as St. Peter but I guess the director saw something in me and moved me up to the big role. I was a bit miffed at first because my dad had made me the sword that Peter uses to chop off the roman soldiers ear and everything. I guess when you are good you are good (or perhaps that should be when you’re good you’re God.) I took the lead role and my thirst for fame and adoration began.

From the King of Kings to the King of Rock n Roll. My portrayal of Elvis Aaron Presley was truly a site to behold. With my chubby face with drawn on sideburns (I couldn’t quite grow them thick enough) to my passable (if intermittent) Memphis accent I embodied all that the man stood for. That I didn’t win Best Actor at the M.A.D. festival was an outrage. Ironically I lost to a man playing Jesus.


The third role of a lifetime, and essentially the reason I’m writing this piece was Padraig Pearse. Non Irish readers will probably not recognise. He is a significant figure in Irish History. A leader in the 1916 rising, he read out the Declaration of Independence for the Irish Republic on the steps of the General Post Office. He was executed for his part in the attempted usurping of British Rule. I had to act out all of this in front of all the Mammies and Daddies when I was 11.

The reason I remembered this is because last week I paid a visit to Kilmainham Gaol. I had some visitors from the U. K. and they wanted to do some touristy stuff. I took them to the Guinness Storehouse, Trinity College, the Museum of Modern Art, St Patrick’s Cathedral and various establishments with a licence to sell alcohol.

I wasn’t really planning on taking them to the Gaol for fear it might be a bit anti-British for them. Three of them were English. They suggested it to me in fact and being the good host off we went. They really enjoyed it. It was an excellent tour even if some of it was (to quote our tour guide Ruairi) “grim stuff folks.”

For me it was a refresher course in all the stuff I knew from history class. A reminder of all the cruelty and violence that had gone on along the streets and footpaths of the city I have spent most of my life. I have never been nationalistic in anyway but this tour made me very aware of my Irishness.

Calm down. I’m not about to take up arms and go and ‘fight for the cause.’ That’s not something I’d ever believe in. I’m a man of words not action, a lover not a fighter, a pacifist, a hippy. I am also aware that, while the world would be a better place if everyone saw things my way, not everyone does.

What I mean by being aware of my Irishness is that it awoke something in me that hadn’t been there for a long time. A sense of pride in where I came from. All these people who were willing to risk and sacrifice their life in order to establish the country I call home. That is something to be grateful for.

And if you are going to be grateful for something you need to think about what it is that you appreciate it. Over the years, for such a small country, Ireland has punched well above its weight internationally. Whether in sport, music, film or most famously literature, for a country with a population of around five million, Ireland has consistently shone.

G.B.Shaw, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney have all won Nobel Prizes for Literature. Synge and O Casey have written some of the most interesting plays of the last 100 years. Oscar Wilde one of the greatest wits of all time, creator of some of the greatest literary pieces and the quickest retorts. James Joyce is universally accepted as one of the greatest and most complex writers of all time.

Bands like U2 and the Corrs aren’t really my cup of tea but there is no doubting their impact on an international stage. Snow Patrol, Bell X1 and Damien Rice have all made inroads in to the U.S. Music scene.

Bands like these and Thin Lizzy led by Crumlin native Phil Lynnott have no doubt encouraged thousands of Irish people to take a chance, pick up a guitar and form a band. Ireland has a successful and thriving live music scene even if it has lost a lot of support from music labels. In a time of myspace and itunes independent music is the way forward for Irish Bands anyway.

And let us not forget that we have won the Eurovision Song contest on a record seven occasions. (Am I the only one proud of that fact?)

Our achievements in sport are not to be scoffed at either. Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly, Barry McGuigan, Sonia O Sullivan, Bernard O’Shea, Eamon Coughlan, Derbhla O’Rourke, our Rugby team and on occasion our soccer team (but always our fans) have been fantastic ambassadors for our country.

I do need to mention something. The one time I felt most proud of an Irish sporting accomplishment was in 1996. The surge of pride I felt as I saw the tricolour raised and ‘Amhran na bhFhiann’ played as an Irish woman accepted the first of her three Olympic Gold medals. That woman was Michelle De Bruin.

The controversy surrounding her amazing performances that summer later tempered my national pride.
I may have been a 20 year old man but I felt like a child who just been told there is no such thing as Santa. De Bruin was later given a 4 year suspension from swimming for providing a tainted urine sample.

There are probably two things I should point out before someone get the wrong idea that i have suddenly become patriotic or jingoistic. I haven't.

Just because of newly discovered national pride that does not mean I will be standing for the national anthem. It is a song. I don’t stand for ‘Saturday Night’ by Whigfield or ‘Billy Don’t Lose My Number’ by Phil Collins either.

The second thing is the political hotbed of Northern Ireland. The six Ulster counties have never been part of my home country in my lifetime. Northern Ireland, United Ireland it makes no difference to me. If the majority of the people that live there ever want to create a united Ireland then great. If not, fine.

There are a lot of reasons to be proud of being Irish. I appreciate the welcome it affords me when I go away. People are always happy to hear you are Irish and are quick to share a joke with you.

I do hate the stereotype of the Guinness and whiskey swilling, cabbage eating, begorrah spouting leprechaun. The portrayal of the thick Irish bog hopper is something that has always gotten on my last nerve and in my desire to see that squashed I have perhaps forgotten all the good things that it is to be Irish.