Increasingly, the older I get, I can’t help but see nationalism as an ugly thing, a negative thing, a hateful thing. Not so much an innocent love of where you’re from but, more, a disdain of where you’re not from.
What I always remember is the national anthem. The tradition in Irish social clubs in England was that a night of dancing, where there was a band present, would always end with the national anthem, The Soldier’s Song. The first drum beats of Amhrán na bhFiann would begin and the chairs would be pushed back. The entire room would come to attention. Fathers, mothers, children. Those who’d left Ireland in their thousands and their families. The city outside an English one but the room inside an Irish one. This wasn’t nationalism. This wasn’t even patriotism. This wasn’t some kind of Irish chauvinism wrapped in a cheap tricolour.
Increasingly, the older I get, I can’t help but see nationalism as an ugly thing, a negative thing, a hateful thing. Not so much an innocent love of where you’re from but, more, a disdain of where you’re not from.
Nationalism as a snarling thing. A mean and spiteful thing. This room of people standing to attention for the national anthem was not like this. This was more of a statement. A quiet, dignified statement. There was pride there, for sure, Irishness and an open celebration of it. But this was birthplace not as empty achievement but as insistence. A stubborn insistence on being who they were from a generation abandoned. From a generation forced to be Irish outside of Ireland. The immigrant Irish.
I was chatting with a group of people recently who are all aged around their late sixties, early seventies. They are all from this part of rural Ireland where I live. There were five of them. It came up in conversation that every one of them had a sister or brother living abroad. It hadn’t really struck me before. This is an area that is now celebrated for its natural beauty. But, as they say around here, you can’t eat scenery. It has historically been a depopulated area because so many left. It has historically been an attractive option for alternative lifestyle searchers from across Europe because abandoned properties abounded. It has a largely unchanged landscape because there was no one around to change it. And beyond all of the picturesque beauty and the colourful life of the newcomers lay this story of emigration.
There’s a remote area where I often go walking. I’ve been going there since I was a kid. It sweeps down to the sea and there is a spot I can sit where it is just me and the Atlantic, the odd seal, and a couple of tumbling, joyful choughs. Its special and I’m lucky to keep finding it. Yet, I always notice the old potato drills and wander did they save them or not. I’m always aware of those who tried to eke an existence out of this place. Those five people reminded me that this story of people gone is not lost in the distant past. There are people around me, people I might pass in the street say, or nod hello to in the pub, whose lives are shaped by this story. This story of Ireland and emigration.
What it also reinforces in me is the belief that the Irish lives that started here didn’t end when they left here. They took their Irishness with them. They stayed Irish. They insisted on it. Which makes the closed idea of flag waving nationalism all the more nonsensical. All that spiteful fury over something that makes no sense. For Irishness, by its very nature, is not confined by the parameters of the nation. It is a human thing. A real thing. Not something that exists behind a megaphone or at the end of flag or behind the keyboards of a twitter account.
Each one of those people had a sister or brother in London or New York. In Birmingham or Boston. That is what being Irish has meant for so long. That is what being Irish means.
Nationalism denies that. It portrays the nation as some insular, settled, unchanging thing and nothing could be further from the truth. It is so often so true that those who talk most about being Irish are those who know least about what it means.
Nationalism? It’s just a kind of civil war, isn’t it? Hating so much of what you purport to love. I’ll always stand for The Soldier’s Song, though, just so in my mind at least I’m always standing with those in that social club. The Irish outside of Ireland.
