Last night the Princess asked her parents why there were pictures of the judge everywhere (she meant the Taoiseach – separation of powers is a mystery to the Princess, she regards the executive and judiciary as interchangeable). She spends a lot more time pounding the mean streets of the city and she likes to read everything and election posters are unavoidable. We explained that there were a number of elections looming. The local elections where we would vote for people to run Dublin and the European elections where we would vote for people to.. um…go to Brussels and Strasbourg. “And,” added Mr. Waffle, “don’t forget the by-election.” I consider myself very literate in these matters but I am having trouble working out whom they want me to vote for and for which position. It’s all very exciting though. The other night a young fella came knocking at our door urging us to vote Green in general and more specifically for him. Following a brief chat we established that he had been lectured by a former classmate of mine and our friend, the Dutch Mama when he was at college. Is it any wonder that there is a statistic that something like 90% of Irish people know their local T.D. personally?
Ireland
More from the birth announcements
Recently, at the end of two announcements where boys were given relatively innocuous names (well, Riley and Zach, if you must know, my standards are slipping) the children’s thrilled etc. parents have seen fit to finish the announcements as follows: “A caddy for Daddy!!” In both cases, two exclamation marks were called for. What is this new and sinister development? Is it in some way related to the fact that you can now play straight through Ireland from North to South given that the greater part of the island of Ireland is now made up of golf courses?
Socialising
Last weekend, the Princess went to a birthday party in one of Dublin’s more exciting suburbs. It boasts horses in front gardens (this is not a good thing in Dublin, you’ll have to trust me here) and, if you type this suburb + shooting into Google, then you get 26,100 results. However, she emerged unscathed.
That evening her father and I went to dinner at the houses of friends who live in a rather different Dublin suburb. For the hell of it, I typed “much nicer suburb + shooting” into Google and it reproachfully asked me whether I meant “much nicer suburb + shopping”.
Meanwhile, Mr. Waffle got a call from the childminder asking whether she could take the children to a party at the house of a little (francophone, North African) boy they regularly played with in the park. He said yes and I probably would have too but I had some qualms subsequently. This is the problem with having two working parents. While I was perfectly happy to drop the Princess off to gangland shooting suburb as the birthday girl was a classmate whom I had met, I was uneasy about them all going to a strange house where I didn’t know the child or his mother even though their childminder stayed with them the entire time. Sigh.
We also got invited to lunch by friends – she is French and he is Irish and her parents (who do not speak a great deal of English) were staying for a week and I think that they felt that it might be useful to have some other French speakers and French speaking children about. All very pleasant – they are French farmers from deepest darkest Brittany and I was fascinated to hear that his parents were native Breton speakers and hers spoke a local dialect but, of course, they all learnt French French at school. While both our friend’s parents understand dialect and Breton respectively, our friend understands neither. It has to be said that the policy of the French state seems to be a little hostile to languages other than French within its borders. My husband, who knows everything, told me that as recently as the first world war only one in five Frenchmen spoke French. Well, they’ve fixed that then.
Startling
I was at mass with my mother in Cork last week. The local catholic church, in a touching display of ecumenicism which I am sure would be crushed by the catholic hierarchy had they the faintest idea that it was happening, invites a protestant vicar to attend mass every week.
Last Sunday, the vicar read the Gospel and gave the sermon. I had by this point accustomed myself to his presence but since he kicked off with the words “My wife and I..” he succeeded in jolting his catholic congregation wide awake. These are not words you hear from a catholic priest.
It was vocation Sunday (the irony of having a Protestant vicar preach to a catholic congregation on vocation Sunday might not, I suspect appeal to the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but let us draw a veil over that) so there was a lot of talk of good shepherds.
The vicar told us of his former parish in West Cork and his parishioner, Trevor. Trevor was a good shepherd. He loved his cows. OK, sorry, a good dairy farmer. One day he saw one of the hired hands belting a cow and he fired the hired hand on the spot. Clear analogy, we are with you vicar, your words are only slightly undermined by the visible amusement of your catholic counterpart who had until that story been sitting nodding sagely as you told us of the wisdom of Billy Graham.
At the end of mass, the priest stood up to say a couple of words. Firstly, he thanked the spectacular choir who had come in from the Cork choral festival; secondly he told us that the church was 3 million in the red as the trustees had put all their money in AIB shares and this faith in capitalism turned out to be misplaced hence the need for a collection basked; finally he remarked that we might have seen him laughing during the sermon. He explained that he was a farmer’s son from West Cork. “And,” said he, “Protestant cows and Catholic cows are clearly treated very differently in that part of the world; we’d often give a cow an old belt to move it along.” I don’t know whether this ecumenicism lark will ever really take off.
Yoof
I met some young people the other day. I don’t really meet many teenagers. They were pleasant but slightly alarming. I don’t think I was at all as confident and articulate at 16.
R (16) told me about his motorbike and showed me a picture on his phone. Someone on his estate died in a motorbike accident last week: “he wasn’t wearing a helmet, it happens”.
R is the product of a brief union. He has five step-brothers and sisters from his mother’s second marriage and several more from his father’s first marriage. He also has a baby sister from his father’s third marriage to a woman from Cameroon. Modern Ireland in microcosm. When he leaves school he wants to join the British army. Not the Irish army because they only go on peacekeeping missions.
R’s friend H asked me what I was going to do about teenage pregnancy rates. “Nothing” I said and then ventured “actually, I think that Ireland has a quite a low rate for teenage pregnancy“. “Not in my school” she said whipping out her mobile phone to show me her 15 year old friend’s scan.
I feel very middle aged now, I can tell you.
The English
The English are class obsessed. I went to hear an “inspirational” Englishman speak about his experiences. He announced to the audience that he was “working class” that his grandfather had been a barman and that it was through the transformational power of education that he was able to enter the venue as a speaker rather than “a servant”.
While Ireland may not be a classless society, it’s a lot closer to that than England is. I think I can confidently say that no Irish person considers that it is embarassing to have relatives engaged in pretty much any job (ok, nobody wants a cat burglar in the family, but you know what I mean). It doesn’t matter what your grandfather did for a living. It doesn’t matter what anyone’s grandfather did for a living.
I thought his use of the word “servant” was interesting too. I wouldn’t consider the waiters or those doing the cloakrooms to be servants. I wouldn’t regard it as their destiny to stay in the same position for ever either. Servants has the whiff of indentured and servility about it. I don’t like it. Maybe it’s just the difference between the colonising and the colonised. All that said, education can be transformative; for everyone.
