by John Waters
A Dáil committee, set up in the wake of the affair in an attempt to establish whether there had been any wrongdoing associated with the delayed warrant, found no evidence of outside interference with the AG’s office. There had been no involvement by the Catholic Church. The matter of Reynolds’s alleged misleading of the Dáil emerged as being the consequence of nothing more sinister than chaos. No letter had been sent by any cleric to any politician. The foundations of the State remained unrocked. It was all crap, pure crap. But by then it was too late: Reynolds had resigned and, in the shemozzle that followed, a change of government had occurred, with the Labour Party shifting beds to join a rainbow coalition with Fine Gael and Democratic Left.
In due course it became clear that the Reynolds government had been brought down by a series of misunderstandings arising from an opportunistic campaign by a nest of unelected advisers, and that this campaign was driven by a media vendetta in pursuit less of facts than of the scalps of various people associated with Fianna Fáil.
Reynolds was a smart businessman and an exceptional politician. He played a key role in establishing the groundwork for the settlement of the Northern conflict and presided over a key period in the stabilization of the Irish economy following the disastrous 1980s. But he provoked in a new breed of commentator and politician an almost visceral dislike, based on snobbery and ignorance of the reality of the Irish personality and the complex nature of the journey we had made from poverty to prosperity.
Had he not thrown in the towel, he might well have led the country for another decade, applying his usual horse sense to national affairs. It is inconceivable that a man of such commonsensical outlook on reality would have presided, as his successor Bertie Ahern did, over the descent into madness that supplanted Irish economic policy in the early years of the third millennium.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the past two decades has been the fact that, beset by pseudo-bohemian snobbery and small-town prejudice, Albert Reynolds threw in the towel and walked away.
The long and the short of it, as Albert himself might put it, is that he was forced out on the basis of allegations that subsequently failed to stack up. Had he stood his ground and allowed the Labour Party to walk, he might have saved his leadership and his government – and ultimately, perhaps, saved his country from the ruin that would begin to engulf it about a decade later.
16 Shane MacGowan
Perhaps nobody, in all the history of traffic between the two islands controversially known as ‘the British Isles’, has done as much to make the native Irish feel inadequate as a shambling songster called Shane MacGowan. With his band, The Pogues, MacGowan, a young London-Irishman claiming connections to County Tipperary, did something with Irish music that was unforgivable.
In fairness, MacGowan did his best to camouflage himself in a way that would undersell his arrival, and avoid provoking the congenital ire and resentment of the native. His gap-toothed grin and incoherent speech patterns seemed designed to counterbalance his capacity to hear Irish music as it had never been heard before and to render it anew for a generation of Irish people who immediately began to kick themselves in the realization that they should have been able to do this for themselves. Were it not for his unprepossessing appearance and self-effacing mode of nonmusical communication, MacGowan might well have provoked homicidal fits of jealousy among the indigenous population.
For when an intelligent and unprejudiced Irishman heard The Pogues, he was immediately struck by a sense of inadequacy that made him want to cry. (Strangely, women did not seem to feel the same thing, perhaps because they felt less of a responsibility to define, by Joyce’s stern injunction, the uncreated conscience of their race.)
The music of The Pogues was in one sense pure formula: traditional Irish ballads put through the punk mangler, a straightforward forced collision of incongruous elements. Perhaps an uninitiated ear might hear the music and not be moved by anything other than a deep existential laughter, an urge to dance, or just to jump up and down. But this was a luxury unavailable to the Irish, for we knew what this was. It was our culture as it might have been if it hadn’t been interrupted. It was something from the parallel zone of Irish possibility, something that seemed blissfully to be unaware of how history had actually happened and was proceeding on the basis of this glorious ignorance.
MacGowan, from a slight distance, had been able to hear and identify something in the music from which we had grown up trying to escape – a tradition that we, the insiders, could approach only with great caution, because it attracted and repelled us in almost equal measure. The preciousness and exaggerated reverence with which the native music of Ireland had come to be regarded by those seeking to effect a reconsecration of indigenous virtue had provoked in the young an uneasy scepticism that, by its very nature, made them feel both guilty and free. Surrounded by the mythic balladry of their fathers, the post-Emergency Irish had rushed headlong into the arms of David Bowie and Johnny Rotten, pausing only to barf discreetly on account of a rumbling distaste for what had been emerging as an ‘authentic’ musical version of the native soul. The mawkish, sickly-sweet balladry of the be-sweatered jolly Paddies and the puritanical purism of the custodians of the indigenous ‘tradition’ were the inevitable consequence of the execution of Pearse, the unavoidable pay-off from the insularism of Rev. R.S. Devane.
In a healthy society, any undue solemnity towards the artefacts and baggage of the past is, as appropriate, lightly or roundly mocked by the young. This challenge is what keeps a culture honest. But in a society in which the question of culture foreshadows matters of life and death, the necessary contempt of the young is suppressed out of a fear of causing undue offence. In Ireland, unable to square the circle, we of the liberated young of late twentieth-century Ireland found new outlets of self-exploration, shaking off the sentimental yoke of a culture that reduced everything to victimhood. But still we could not entirely walk away.
Our attitudes and policies towards the ballad revolution of the 1960s had been characterized by both an involuntary affection and a distaste born of the grim passion it invoked among our elders. It touched on something at once laughable and sacred. Our rebellion against its earnestness was countered by an involuntary awe at its indisputable if tattered dignity. This stuff, we knew, had been road-tested under conditions of great privation and desperation, and it still travelled with a lifted heart and a grin of something not too far off exultation.
But this also troubled us. The pain in the music could not help coming to the surface, sometimes in the form of a sentimentality that seemed to ooze like an inadequate self-understanding struggling to find the right key. It disturbed us, and yet we could not bring ourselves to mock it. There was something here that reminded us of something, even if we could not bear to listen long enough to work out what it might be. This music, perhaps more than anything else in the culture we had inherited, provoked in us a capacity for self-recognition that the culture we now inhabited, though ostensibly of our own creation, or at least of our co-option, did not enable us to approach. We possessed neither enough love nor enough hatred to do with the music what The Pogues did. But, the moment we heard it, we knew what it was. The last thing any of us had imagined was that the leaden, desperate ejaculations of our drunken uncles might be turned into gold.
For here was a music that simultaneously expressed both our attachment to a slightly false version of ourselves and an ironic repugnance of it. As though insisting on some undefined ethic of rigour and clarity, it reached into the heart of the music, wrenched the sentimentalist heart out of it and cast it away. It was at once a celebration and a refusal, a kick and a kiss. It was a soundtrack for the neurosis born of the post-independence failure of Irish culture to find a way of jump-starting itself – but also, for the same reasons, a living, leaping, soaring blurt of the spirit that had become suppressed. It was a deconstruction of something recognizable as having been put together in slightly the wrong way – the clue that much more than t
his was fundamentally wrong. The Pogues offered a rejection, but only of the superficial presentation, the sugar coating. The deeper qualities were subjected to a firm and passionate embrace, pulled together and kicked onstage. The music conveyed an unmistakable sense of nostalgia, but also a rage that seemed to announce itself as deriving from the overall tragedy of Irish history. There was mockery, too, but of a gentle kind that seemed to comprehend the extent of the pathos to be dealt with. It had both pride and the awareness of a received loathing. It celebrated and mocked at the same time. It did not choose between allegiance and disdain, but crammed them both into the same mix.
Shane MacGowan, by virtue of both his intimacy with and ‘outsiderness’ in Ireland, had access to the culture of his ancestors but was not hidebound by the characteristics which caused the natives to become struck down by cultural paralysis. Removed by a generation and a stretch of water, The Pogues had been enabled to achieve a degree of detachment which gave them a vantage point on Irish culture that the insiders could not achieve. This slight distance from the clammy embrace of the culture allowed them to understand something that baffled the indigenous population. On hearing the results, we were jerked into a new sense of ourselves, but also visited by new feelings of inadequacy. How had we missed this? What else were we missing? And who was this bastard MacGowan to be showing us up in this way?
17 John McGahern
‘Real life,’ John McGahern once observed, ‘is too thin to be art.’ He was talking about the necessity to reimagine reality before it can be turned into fiction. His novels contained elements of autobiography, but they were not autobiographical. Yet, his final book, written at the very end of his life, was his own autobiography, Memoir. Among its many interesting insights is the confirmation it provides of what had previously been a woolly impression concerning the extent of McGahern’s reworking of the detail of his own life into his stories.
It could plausibly be argued that Memoir was McGahern’s single literary mistake. By chronicling the literal reality from which he had forged so much of his fiction, it exposes the undercarriage of his imagination to a scrutiny that may ultimately risk damage to his reputation in the eyes of future generations unencumbered by the present-day deference to certain artists by virtue of the scale of their reputations. Before the publication of Memoir, McGahern’s other books had a total life of their own, set free from literal connections by the nature of the fictional contract. After Memoir, they become something else – not fact, but no longer quite fiction either. By setting down the raw material from which his essential life-perspectives were forged, McGahern left a hostage to fortune: an apparently faithful record of factual events for literary critics and academics to pore over.
Because of the deference problem, it has not been remarked upon that there is something extremely odd about Memoir. Although dominated by McGahern’s memories of his parents – the mother who died when he was a child and the father with whom he carried on a disturbed relationship into adulthood – Memoir has a feeling of being artistically incomplete. Several times in the book McGahern states that he never understood his father, Frank McGahern, a Garda sergeant cast as a brooding, violent presence in the lives of his wife and children. Actually, it’s clear that the young McGahern disliked, perhaps even hated, his father, and that this dislike or hatred was not in any degree dissipated by the writing of Memoir. There is no moment of grace between father and son that might be deemed the cathartic moment of the book. At no point does the author seem to reflect on this in a detached manner. It is as though he is utterly unaware of it.
There are many ethical issues arising from the modern fad for biography-as-art. The fashioning of literal literature out of the raw reality of real human lives, especially of those – generally males – who become so blackened in the reporting as to leave in the world only a negative impression, is a deeply dubious phenomenon. The modern view is that anyone has a right to tell his own story: the truth must out, and let the consequences take care of themselves. This is ‘art’, after all.
But there is also a question of justice. Usually it is the case that individuals damaged by such literatures are, by virtue of being deceased, in no position to rebut any of the charges. No human being can claim to have a monopoly on the truth about another. But no human being exists only in the perspective of another. Even when relationships are fraught, there are always two sides to the story. It is a heavy responsibility, then, when a writer decides to put on record what may turn out to be the sole account of the existence of another – named – human being.
John McGahern’s reputation as one of the English language’s greatest novelists is well deserved. He is correctly regarded as a giant of fiction writing, an astute observer of the subtext and nuance of human communication, with a poet’s eye for the human dilemma at the point of contact with reality. But the artist has a duty to tear his vision from the prism of a culture and see clearly into the lies a society may be insisting upon telling for all kinds of warped reasons. Memoir raises the awkward possibility that, in certain respects, John McGahern was unable to do this.
Since the aftermath of the Famines of the 1840s, Irish society has been run by the diktats of an ideology that elevated the mother to the status of put-upon Madonna, and reduced the father to that of brooding menace on the periphery of family life. This crude act of social engineering was effected by the Catholic Church, for the purpose of controlling the somewhat licentious appetites of the Irish and preventing a repetition of the calamity that their libertine habits had caused to befall them. After independence, this initiative gained a new impetus. In a society that had been traumatized twice – by famine and by civil war – the Church usurped the power of the civil authority and assumed, in effect, the role of moral government, recruiting the mother in the home as its agent of control, and with her assistance reducing the father to a barely tolerated provider devoid of moral authority. This resulted in a crude caricature of masculinity that became normalized in Irish society to the point of invisibility: the silent, passive-aggressive father and the saintly, martyred mother. Adding outrage to injury, having banished the father to the fields or the fair, the culture then laughably interpreted the rage born of his marginalization as the roar of the oppressor.
Such stereotypes abound in the work of John McGahern – for example Mahoney in The Dark and Moran in Amongst Women – seething, pent-up beasts whose emotional retardation is rarely examined but merely exists, like the hawthorns or the meadow blowing in the breeze. In their own way, then, these stories add to the accumulation of prejudice concerning the psychology of the Irish male: creating a further sense that silence or violence is his primary mode of expression.
This stereotype has been deeply damaging in Irish culture, and continues to have baneful consequences for men in a society that, despite being 50 per cent male, appears to have no capacity to articulate the reality of male experience.
To be fair, McGahern would have been the first to repudiate the idea that he had a role as a social historian. He once told the Guardian that he was suspicious of all ideologies: ‘Joyce called them those big words which make us unhappy. I think they have very little to do with life and everything to do with the struggle for power.’
Yes, but this surely places an added burden on the artist to be alert to the way ideologies can infect reality and inflict great pain on human beings. To simply say that one is not interested in ideology is to say that life can somehow remain immune to its effects. This is a cop-out greatly favoured by artists and writers in today’s Ireland.
The reception of Memoir was universally and unambiguously glowing, and to a considerable extent deservedly. But it was striking that these reviews, and indeed virtually all the commentary that has attended McGahern’s life and work, appeared oblivious of the extent to which the writer had harmonized with the discordances of a deeply damaged culture. In the wake of his death in 2006 there was, for example, much of the usual guff about McGahern’s depiction of the ‘patriar
chal reality of Irish society’. By this analysis, Moran in Amongst Women (seemingly more than loosely based on McGahern’s father) is the tyrant king who rules over all within his gaze. Just as it is clear from Memoir that McGahern had little interest in the roots or nature of his father’s demons, so also is it obvious that in his writing of fiction he accepted at face value many of the flimsiest myths of his society. But, caught between the hyper-visible power of the Church and the invisible power of an undeclared matriarchy, Moran’s rage was really the rage of the impotent.
Memoir suggests that the explanation for McGahern’s myopia was that he himself had not yet begun to see into the total truth of his own father. Whether he should have written the book or not is beside the point: more interesting is what all this tells us about how a culture manages to recruit the wounded among its spokespersons to preserve a convenient version of itself long after this has become outdated or even irrelevant. Writers, who should be challenging and dissenting, very often contribute to the malign weave of a culture by virtue of a failure properly to interrogate their own experiences and backstories. For who, if not the artist, will describe things other than as they seem?
18 Mike Murphy
There has been a tendency, since the meltdown of the Irish economy in mid-2008, to look backwards for reference points to the 1980s. Some commentators have been trying to depict the 1980s as a dark and forbidding landscape, much in the way that, a generation ago, people tried to present the 1950s as having happened in black-and-white. This is bad history and completely unfair to a time when, by virtue of innocence, lack of expectation and long familiarity with hardship, the effects of financial privation were not accorded the repetitive, gnawing emphasis they are today.
