From ancient legends to modern drama, the Irish psyche still flirts with the supernatural
IS THERE an underlying Irish culture which has survived secularisation and the spread of American influence?
Of course there is. I’m just not sure how to define it.
I have been involved in several projects over the years, speaking to visiting groups, some from America, working on creative writing projects or sometimes leading discussions with them on the particular political problems of Northern Ireland.
They are always surprised by this place. They see us as we do not necessarily see ourselves. I think they see us as quaint and a bit mystical.
They want to visit dolmens and old stone circles. They ask if I have ever heard the banshee, somehow imagining that the tales we tease and amuse them with are fundamental to our world view.
While we tell ourselves that they are not.
Often in the creative writing groups we ask people to produce a story, play, poem or essay in response to what they have learnt and the places they have visited. Many of them write stories about fairies and ancient sages.
I tell them that we don’t tend to bump into a lot of fairies or wizards in Belfast or even up Errigal. But still the stories come, say about a young American woman who falls in love with an Irish freedom fighter who is the seventh son of a seventh son.
Or about a curse handed down through the generations to reach as far from Galway or Cork as Boston or Philadelphia.
And are they so wrong?
My father was born in Donegal in 1914. His mother was an Irish speaker from the Fanad peninsula, which, in her youth, was bleak and remote. It was also, as today, starkly beautiful if anyone in that harsh environment had time then to notice.
Even today, if you talk to a Donegal hill farmer or builder’s merchant about the glory of the western sunset he’ll think you’re a bit soft in the head.
Once, when I was making a radio documentary about the fairies I asked my father if he knew anything of that culture and he just scoffed at the very idea.
And that perspective seems verified in a new novel by Garrett Carr, The Boy From The Sea (Picador).
The narrator on the first page, speaking for the people of a Donegal seaside town, probably Killybegs, says, “We weren’t given to spirituality and if we had superstitious feelings we stayed quiet about them.”
Yet academics were writing their papers and books about how that old faith in - and fear of - na daoine maithe, had formed us, how its roots were deeper than Christianity, how sickly babies were left out in the night for the fairies to take them back and return the healthy ones they’d stolen.
Two recent plays that I have read also deal with the idea that a strain of dark spiritual wariness still runs like a barely subterranean stream through Irish culture.
Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats is about that tension between a life surrounded by magic and the opportunity of a life based on business and pragmatism.
The daughter of a wild tinker woman has been deserted by her lover who wants to marry the daughter of a local business man.
Her life is surrounded by death augurs, myth and madness.
He seeks a future free of all that but in the end only chaos will come.
Conor McPherson’s play The Weir has a similar division of perspective in it.
A group of men in the pub are telling yarns about ghostly happenings. One of them has brought Valerie, to show her around. He is renting a house to her and tactlessly one of the men tells a story about happenings in that house that the others fear will unnerve her.
Yet the stories unfold, each more bizarre and worrying than the one before, until Valerie, the modern woman, discloses her own story and it tops them all.
Both these plays seem to be asking if Ireland is really free of the old fear of the dark and both seem to be saying that it is not.
Of course we could accuse these dramatists of just playing to the market, trusting that we all like a ghost story, but why do we like a ghost story if we don’t believe in ghosts? A story about robots or aliens won’t send us nervous and fretful to our beds. I would defy anyone to read McPherson’s The Weir and not feel a chill.
But then what is so Irish about that? Maybe just that a worry about dark forces is closer to the surface, not so deeply subterranean as elsewhere.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book:
How To Fix Northern Ireland
is published by Atlantic Books
