By
noeleenm on August 30th, 2006
One thing our ongoing flood plain campaign has definitely done for the core group at the heart of it is to reforge many of the old bonds that have been loosened by television, cars, and insurance in a changing Ireland…
Television has killed off the art of conversation in many homes, and it has certainly mortally wounded the tradition of visiting neighbours to pass the long nights of winter. Cars mean that we don’t meet each other in the street as often, and many’s the community event insurance costs have now put out of reach.
Our campaign has meant a lot of calling on neighbours, organising fund-raising events (although we couldn’t put a float in our local St. Patrick’s Day Parade because no company would insure us for a remotely affordable sum), and memories of what our community in Little Bray used to be like are coming up by default…
At our last committee meeting somebody said how great it would be if we could use the People’s Park – in the heart of our neighbourhood, beside the Dargle River – for a fund-raising concert, and we all agreed, sadly, that it was out of the question. Insurance costs would be simply too high to afford, and society has changed so much that we can no longer take a chance that no one will sue if they trip, are accidentally knocked, or even get a chill from the evening air.
It’s appalling, but a very established fact of life in Ireland now, and it has put a lot of people off organising community events who wouldn’t ever have worried about this aspect in the past.
“Do you remember…?”, started someone, and we were off…
When we were children growing up in this community, live concerts were held every Saturday night in the People’s Park, organised by local people. They were amateur events, like those held all over Ireland in village halls, and the fact that we knew most of the ’stars’ very well in their everyday roles made it all the more fun.
An amazing amount of talent was there – singers, musicians (including a very good fiddler, Sean Fox, who also played the saw, to us children’s amazement), and even a drag artist – now a very respectable pillar of society in our community.
On the other side of the river – in Big Bray, where my parents grew up – a lady called Daisy Ward used to collect money from neighbours for weeks at a time, and would then organise a ’social’, which was a supper dance. She was a great organiser, and because the ’social’ took place in a hall, and the ‘band’ (usually an accordeon player, fiddler, and a singer) was a local one, it wasn’t nearly as expensive as the same kind of affair held in a hotel. It was affordable, and I bet very few people attending grand balls in expensive hotels enjoyed themselves half so much as that working class community to which my parents belonged on their saved for night out.
One of our neighbours, May Butler, has kept up this tradition in a different way. May, who loves live shows, has organised coach loads of local people – mostly widows – to attend shows in the Gaiety, the Olympia, the Point, the Concert Hall, and, while those popular community-based shows were running, the finals of the ‘Tops of the Town’.
May was telling me recently that she has just received an invitation from Ireland’s National Concert Hall to attend their 25th Anniversary Gala Concert on September 10th. It’s a well-earned ‘thank-you’ from this prestigious (and sensible!) body for the thousands of patrons May has brought along to the Concert Hall over the last quarter of a century.
“I just love live shows”, she explained, and that’s obvious when she tells you how, on arriving home, she gets a drink of water from the kitchen, and goes to bed, where she replays the show over again in all its colour and light and music in her head.
But it isn’t just the show. When May talks about other widows, particularly, telling her how they’d just spend night after night sitting at home in front of the television if it wasn’t for her organisational abilities, you realise much of it is about community.
May fills 54 seater buses, who pick up her regulars from all around the town, and the anticipation (and gossip, one suspects!) going in, and the reliving of the programme coming home, is as much a part of the night’s fun as the show itself.
If an elderly patron lives alone, May and another lady will walk her to her home while the bus waits, and they’ll remain while doors are unlocked and lights are switched on before leaving.
There are lots of amateur theatre companies in our town still – and thank God for them – along with choirs, choral societies, etc., and we have a very good professional theatre in the town, too.
But none of them touch that kind of neighbourhood base…
I was reminded of this difference between semi-professional and neighbourhood organic when, following on the singing of our new flood protest song by a local friend of our campaign – Vincent Fottrell – on Bray and on Innishowen Donegal community radio, I was reading about the commemoration of the New Orlean’s flood in that recovering city.
A Gospel choir called ‘Shades of Grace’, formed originally to help heal racial divides, is singing there again. They say the strong community spirit typified by this choir will mean New Orleans will never die.
Music has to be part of the glue, but people who go out there and form community, for whatever reason (May says it’s because she doesn’t like going to concerts on her own!), surely make it ‘extra strength’.
Posted in Ireland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on August 29th, 2006
Ireland is an island. And it’s bound to the east by another island before reaching mainland Europe. To the west is the Atlantic Ocean.
All these things I have known since I was a child, but sometimes it takes a casual remark by someone from outside Ireland to bring home the difference that makes to our way of travelling from our island home.
One such occasion was when Melo and Colombia, Italian friends with whom I’ve stayed in Bergamo quite often, were explaining why they hadn’t yet taken up my repeated invitation to visit Ireland, although two of their three children have done so. The Brembilla family usually holiday in their camper, travelling all over the European continent.
“We’d have to take a ferry to Portsmouth, then drive across England – driving on the left! – then take another ferry to Ireland, and then drive all over your country on the left, too!”, explained Melo in the Spanish language that we share, but with a totally Italian shrug of shoulders and upturned palms.
Driving on the opposite side of the road is a problem we understand. I vividly remember a friend telling me how she had driven safely all over France for two weeks holidays, never once forgetting she had to stay on the right, and then was almost killed when she drove off the ferry at Rosslare – heading into the path of a juggernaut coming towards her.
But, as we’re used to having to cross at least one sea – or ocean – to go anywhere other than Ireland, this hadn’t struck me as a problem. Last night I was reminded of what is normality for mainlanders, though, when Magda was checking prices for going home for Christmas. The cheapest flights still available to her home town of Poznan were working out at over 500 euro for the dates she wanted to travel. In the middle of the discussion, she threw in some remark about: “I couldn’t face the bus…”
Now, in Ireland, you get the bus to Dublin, Galway, Cork Kilkenny, or even far-away Donegal, but you do not get the bus to another country.
Our nearest neighbours – England, Scotland and Wales – were visited by boat or, as people became more wealthy and air travel cheaper, by plane. The same was true of travel to America, while travelling to anywhere on mainland Europe necessitated as much time on boats as it did on buses or trains.
“Bus…?”, I queried, in amazement. “You can get a bus from Poland to Ireland?!”
“Oh, yes”, said Magda, looking at me pityingly. “It’s much cheaper, and it’s the way I came here the first time.”
When I unlocked my jaw, she went on to explain that she had come on a bus belonging to Polonia Tours. (I had learned when checking up on Polish voting patterns that Polonia means Polish people living abroad.) EuroLines also carries passengers all over Europe, including to Ireland.
From Poland to Ireland, the journey by bus was scheduled for 34 hrs. It took 40 hrs. because of queueing at some borders and on motorways. But the only time they had to travel by ferry was from England to Ireland. The Euro Tunnel, or Chunnel, completed in 1994 from France to England means that John Bull is no longer really an ‘island’.
It was a long and tiring journey, said Magda, and since then she has always travelled by plane, but it was very cheap, and was quite a common way for people to travel from country to country before air travel prices dropped so spectacularly over the last years.
When she talked about visiting Greece or Austria or France by bus, it made perfect sense, as I visualised the map. Poles might perhaps decide to visit Denmark by crossing the Baltic Sea, but it isn’t even necessary: they can go by land via Germany.
I was simply thinking with an islander’s mentality… Because boats are our equivalent of mainlanders’ long haul buses.
Europeans who couldn’t afford to travel by plane took a bus to other countries. Irish people who couldn’t afford to fly went by boat.
Few of those who went looking for work in England and Scotland travelled on comfortable passenger ships. They sailed on the mail boats, or, even more cheaply and uncomfortably, on the cattle ships.
Those who went to America during the time of the Famine travelled in such appalling conditions – and in such bad health starting out – that these vessels were known as ‘coffin ships’. And boats were used to transport ‘convicts’ – sometimes children convicted of stealing food, often Irishmen convicted of fighting for their country’s freedom – to places like Botany Bay in New South Wales, and Van Diemens Land (Tasmania).
According to the National Archives: “During the 62 years of transportation from Ireland to Australia, some 30,000 men and 9,000 women were sent as convicts to Australia for a minimum period of seven years…”
Wicklow Gaol, in Wicklow town, is now a museum that commemorates the people – adults and children – who were held there, many of them transported to New South Wales between 1796 and the 1850’s.
The museum’s official website Wicklow’s Historic Gaol notes that: “Over 600 Irishmen who were involved in the 1798 Rebellion were transported. Of that number, approximately 105 were Wicklowmen, the highest number of men from any county.”
“The earliest recorded prisoner was Fr. Owen Mc Fee, a seventy two year old priest, who was convicted of saying Mass in the County contrary to the law. He was sentenced to transportation to a British colony in America in 1716.”
I generally take visitors to Ireland to this ‘gaol’, and invariably have to hold back tears as I read again the stories of the Irish men and women, but particularly the children, held there.
The other museum that reduced me to this state of utter sadness was the museum at Cobh in Co. Cork that commemorates emigration from Ireland.
“From 1848 – 1950 over 6 million adults and children emigrated from Ireland – over 2.5 million departed from Cobh, making it the single most important port of emigration”, says Cobh Heritage.
“This exodus from Ireland was largely as a result of poverty, crop failures, the land system and a lack of opportunity.” During the Famine it reached unprecedented proportions.
And as late as 1912, around 120 Irish emigrants travelled 3rd class – or ’steerage’ – on the ill fated Titanic. Few survived.
The fact that we are an island has shaped our history and our culture in many ways. I wonder what Ireland would be like today if we could have emigrated by bus…?
Posted in Ireland, Poland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on August 26th, 2006
Yesterday I had intended to write about patriotism, and what that word means to us who live in democratic states, especially following a ‘discussion’ between Magda, Wojtek and myself about attitudes to voting. If I tell you that I found myself quoting: “All it needs for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing”, and John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, you can guess which side I was on…
It led, particularly with Wojtek (rumblings from Magda in the background about ‘what did my country ever do for me…’), into a discussion as to whether Polish emigrants can vote in elections in Poland, without returning to their native soil to do so. Neither of our Poles seemed very sure, and I found it difficult to get an answer today when I tried to check it on the internet. Eventually I found a November 2004 discussion paper by Orla Ellis of Trinity College in Dublin, and Jan Fidrmuc of Brunel University on the ‘Voice of the Diaspora: an Analysis of Migrant Voting Behaviour’ which says that both the Czech Republic and Poland allow their citizens to vote abroad, provided they register in advance. The voter must present in person, though – voting by post or by proxy is not allowed.
“Those who permanently live abroad must register with the embassy or consulate in the country of their permanent residence. Those with permanent residence in the home country, on the other hand, can vote when abroad upon presenting a voter’s card issued by the municipal
council in their district of permanent residence.”
Granted, this paper was written following the elections of 2001. I do not know if the same conditions applied also in the 2005 elections, much less whether they will apply in 2009.
…But imagine the difference it would make to an election in any country with huge numbers of emigrants – like Poland – if every emigrant voted to register his or her protest at being forced to live outside their own countries because of economic necessity?
Magda tells me she misses her home badly, but she cannot afford to live there. It seems to me that she is throwing away the chance to change that if she doesn’t use every opportunity to vote for that change in Poland.
Yet, strangely enough, it was the economic hardship visited upon the poor in Poland that brought up the first story of her country in which I have heard Magda express what I would call ‘patriotism’.
I had been explaining why all week I had been caught up in PR for our flood campaign, despite feeling most unwell with flu-like symptoms: yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the last major flood in our community.
We had two live radio interviews during the week, one on a local community station in Donegal at the northernmost tip of Ireland, and one on our local radio station – East Coast. I talked about the floods and our community’s memories of them, and Vincent Fottrell, a man with a great voice for ballads, who lives way above the flood basin in Bray, sang our new protest song.
Magda had picked up some of the interview, and began to tell me about the village in southern Poland where her family has a little country house.
Major flooding took place in July 1997 in Southern Poland from the Odra and Vistula rivers, resulting in enormous economic damage, and, worse, in the loss of 55 lives during the floods, followed by many more suicides.
In July 2001, 30 people died in central and southern Poland, and a further four in the north.
They were the two biggest floods, causing the greatest loss of life, but Magda tells me that every year in between (in 3 days of flooding in June of this year 500 people were evacuated from their homes), the little villages around their country house are flooded.
“They are poor people”, she said, with real anguish, “and they have very, very little, but every year that little is taken away again.”
I hope that next time elections come round, Magda – and thousands of Polish people like her – will vote out the governments that allow this to happen, as I will in our country in the next election.
Meanwhile, I remembered the words of one of Ireland’s great patriots – James Connolly, who was executed after the 1916 Rising, tied to a chair because his wounds from the fight were so bad as to prevent him standing. He earned the name ‘patriot’.
Yet he said of his country: “Ireland without her people is nothing to me.”
Perhaps the thoughts of the neglected poor of the flood basins of southern Poland will yet bring Magda, the patriot, to the polling station.
Posted in Ireland, Poland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on August 23rd, 2006
I complained recently to Wojtek that, despite having two Polish people living in our house at present, I still don’t know a lot about Poland today.
During the time of Lech Walesa, Solidarity, and Pope John Paul II, we knew almost as much in Ireland about Polish politics as we did about our own. Then, when the heady days of liberation were over, and particularly since the death of the first non-Italian Pope in four centuries, we seem to hear little about political life in Poland, despite the huge number of Poles living here.
Tell me about Poland today”, I asked. He thought for a moment.
“We say that Polish people have three attributes – a sense of pride, a sense of humour, and a sense of the absurd.”
I have often noticed Wojtek’s sense of humour. He has that dry, low chuckle type of humour, with an occasional splutter when caught off guard, that marks most people who like to make other people laugh.
But I hadn’t really noticed their sense of pride in their nation.
Dong Kwang used to become candescent when talking about his beloved South Korea. Gint, while roundly condemning the ruling forces in Latvia, was lavish in his praise of his nation’s beauty and honour and chivalry.
And many of the young people who went before them would have talked about their countries in the same way
But Wojtek and Magda, despite both being fluent in English, don’t…
For once, I refrained from an argument, and asked instead what he meant by ‘a sense of the absurd’, which I always associate with humour.
He thought for a minute and then said:Â ”Poland’s President and Prime Minister are twins. Is that not absurd?”
He was referring, it seems, to the concentration of power such a close relationship between the two most powerful people in the land puts in the hands of one family.
“And their surname”, he added, “is Kaczynski, and they are small men who…” He waddled, and then explained: “The Polish word for a duck is Kaczka.”
“They are not very popular…”, I hazarded. “No”, he replied, glumly. “In the last elections, young people didn’t go out and vote. This is what the older people put in.”
“And will young people turn out in the next elections then?”
“Oh, yes… We have learned our lesson.”
Magda, when I talked to her later about it, didn’t agree.
“There’s no point in going out to vote. They are all the same.â€
It’s an attitude that’s unfortunately prevalent among many young people in Ireland towards voting also. But at our most cynical – apart from the fact that many brave Irish and Polish men and women have died to earn the right for us to vote – it is surely better to vote for the people we believe will do the least harm, in order to stop those who will do most damage getting into power.
I asked Magda if things were much worse since Lech Walesa was no longer President.
She scoffed. “He is still called President, and he still thinks he is President. He will not even give the hand to the new presidents. He is proud. He is not good.â€
I was shocked.
“He was a folk hero hereâ€, I told Wojtek later. “What happened in your country was like watching what was happening in South Africa. Lech Walesa was almost as big a figure here as Nelson Mandela. Everybody watched and cheered when the Solidarity movement became powerful enough to knock Soviet rule in Poland. The word ‘solidarity’ became part of our language in a different way. We talk still about being ‘in solidarity with’ a people or a cause. Before we talked about ‘showing solidarity’ but it was a quite mild expression, now it’s imbued with commitment.â€
When Wojtek had finished correcting my pronunciation of Lech Walesa (‘Lech’ ends with a very guttural sound and ‘Walesa’ has some sort of accent over the ‘l’ so it’s pronounced ‘Vawesa’), he went on say that he disagrees with Magda about the one time leader of the Solidarity movement.
“A President is always a President – the title is for life in Poland. And he was a great leader for Solidarity. He will go down in history that way. But he should not have become President. He is not a very well educated man and he should have stayed with what he did best which was to be a leader, to inspire big groups of people.â€
“The Peter principle…â€, I reflected. When Wojtek looked enquiringly at me, I explained that, in business, the Peter principle refers to promoting someone beyond their capabilities.
“Let’s say that I make an excellent area manager, but, if I’m promoted to being a provincial manager the job is beyond me. So I become ineffective.â€
He nodded glumly, and was leaving the kitchen, without his usual bounce, when another thought occurred.
“Do you know that in the last elections, the name of the main opposition candidate was Donald? People said they should just change the national emblem to a duck in a sailor outfit…”
A sense of the absurd…? Obviously. A sense of humour…? Without a doubt. …But a sense of pride…?
Listening to ‘my’ Poles, I think the youth of this once proud land have temporarily misplaced it.
Posted in Ireland, Poland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on August 21st, 2006
I have always hated dusting – unless the dust is heavy enough to notice, and then there’s a great satisfaction in seeing it replaced by polished, shining surfaces.
My mother, on the other hand, like all women of her generation, dusted whether there was any dust there or not. With no washing machine, no vacuum cleaner, tables that had to be scrubbed with brillo, and linoleum that had to be washed and polished by hand, she kept our house spotless while rearing six children, and taking in ‘lodgers’ in the summertime.
When, in her 75th year, she had a mild stroke whose legacy was to make her topple over easily, unable to save herself from a fall, dusting suddenly featured large in my schedule. And the ’souvenirs from Ireland’, bought by her grand-children with their pennies on any holiday or school trip they made, became the bane of my life.
I didn’t have to do all the housekeeping on my own, of course. We had home help – kind, generous women – for part of each working day, and all the family rallied round, so that there was always someone with our parents while I was at work.
…But they had a lot more to do than dusting. The following year, in the uncanny way they had always replicated each others illnesses, our Dad had a stroke that did a lot more damage, and then another… A year later, he was dead, leaving grieving sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and the woman with whom he had shared his life.
None of us believed she would long outlast him, but somehow she went on for another six years, until only her vivid eyes and her sweet smile lit up an almost transparent face.
Increasingly, she was confined to a sturdy armed chair, with her feet propped up on a pouffe. And, despite her failing eyesight, I knew she deserved more than to be surrounded by dusty ornaments.
So the souvenirs were dusted on a regular basis, as I cursed under my breath.
At the beginning, I balked.
“Can’t we put some of them away, and just take them out in turn?”, I asked. “No”, she said, the matriarch reasserting herself. “The children picked them out and spent their pocket-money to bring them back to us. They like to see them…”
Eventually I saw the sense of it, as she was permanently surrounded by children of all ages. When she was confined to her room upstairs, chairs were simply moved there and we camped around the bed for meals. When her – and our father’s – room was moved downstairs, visitors sat patiently in the kitchen till she woke and was escorted, like a Queen, out to sit in the big chair among them, to be loved.
The souvenirs represented all of that…
Yet, after her death, I invited all of the family to choose whatever souvenirs they wished – the little things they had brought her as children – apart from the more solid things she had bequeathed them, and explained that anything else was being put away. I loved my mother dearly, and the longer I lived with her during her illness, the more I appreciated her courage and wisdom and humour, but dusting souvenirs from Ireland wasn’t how I proposed to remember her.
She’s probably tsking in Heaven yet…
The rest of the family were happy with the arrangement, encouraging me to rearrange the house to suit my freelance journalist lifestyle. …And then I found myself collecting postcards.
Our kitchen notice board is full of postcards from different countries. They’re easier to dust than souvenirs, and they’re grouped in just one particular place. Unlike my mother, I generally take down the older cards, when the notice board becomes too full, although some, for either sentimental or ‘really different’ value, stay longer.Â
There are other differences, too. Most of my mother’s souvenirs would have come from Ireland, with the occasional exotic souvenir from Wales or Scotland, in particular. People then didn’t travel abroad so much.
Â
Right now my kitchen notice board has cards from Lapland (where Frances and Kevin visited a hotel made entirely of ice), Korea (a memory of Dong Kwang since he left the house a week ago), Egypt, Australia, the Chemin de St.-Jaques de Compostelle (the French part of the Camino de Santiago, from one of my favourite holidays), Sydney Australia, the Canary Islands, Isole Tremiti off the Italian coast, Vilnius in Lithuania, Scotland, and a blazing stretch of colour in the tulip fields of the Netherlands.
The other difference is that most of my family and friends travel abroad so frequently now that most of them have given up sending postcards at all. It’s simply too time consuming on a short trip to a country you may well now visit quite regularly – like the United States or Spain or Portugal or even the countries of Eastern Europe. Only really different trips (like Lapland) or with particular sentimental value (an American friend who sent me a postcard from the town from which he’d first written to me when we were both still in our teens) are remembered by them.
But my house family, who live with this notice board, and like its colour, send (or demand while they are still here!) postcards of their own countries, or sometimes of the countries they visit.
That’s how the tulip fields of Holland happen to be up there, since Elke’s visit en route to her home in Italy.
The vivid colours of those tulip fields came into my head on Saturday night, as a group of us lingered on over wine and beer and candles, following our fundraising barbeque.
On both Friday and Saturday nights we had held fund-raisers – one in a pub and the other in a tranquil garden by the river – and at both of them a young Dutch woman had sung a mellow mixture of jazz and blues.
Loe, pronounced Lou, but whose full name is something like Ghzlouch van Leiken, was happy to tell us about a country that is close to us, and which most of us have visited at least once, but about which we found we knew surprisingly little – other than stereotypes.
“We made her take her little wooden clogs off before we came out tonight”, teased Adrian.
And I told her about our postcard.
“You know that tulips aren’t really from the Netherlands”, she said. (We had by now established that ‘the Netherlands’, rather than ‘Holland’ is the correct way to refer to her country, which led to a whole other discussion about William of Orange, which we won’t go into here.)
We peered at her. It was like saying that shamrocks aren’t from Ireland…
“Tulips are from Turkey”, she supplied, nodding at our disbelief. “They were introduced into the Netherlands in the 17th century, and became such a status symbol that people traded in them like the stock exchange.”
Today, in sobriety, I looked up Loe’s story on the internet and found one very ‘flowery’ (ouch!), but very complete, version of the history of the tulip at Ancient Worlds, and another much simpler one at Holland.nl/uk/.
Tulip bulbs were bought and sold for prices equivalent to the value of the lovely old houses along the canals. According to AncientWorlds.com: “One brewer swapped his entire brewery for a single bulb. Houses were mortgaged and family jewels pawned.”
But, in the spring of 1637, a “number of powerful traders” became worried about the tulip trading at much more than its actual worth, and sold all their stock, flooding the market.
The resulting ‘Tulip Crash’ caused bankruptcies, suicides, and, according to holland.nl/uk/ (do they not know you’re supposed to call it ‘the Netherlands’?), resulted in the government introducing special trading restrictions on the flower.
It gives the phrase ‘the humble shamrock’ a whole other meaning…
…But I truly believe my mother’s little ’souvenirs of Ireland’ were worth far, far more.
Posted in Ireland, Netherlands | 2 Comments »
By
noeleenm on August 17th, 2006
I meant to write a post on books yesterday – because a friend, Colette, had recommended a new one to me; because Elke had e-mailed me to say that she had finally solved her constant problem of buying books on her travels and then not being able to carry them home :); and simply because I love books.
Instead I found myself writing lyrics for a protest song.
Friday week, 25th August, will be the 20th anniversary of ‘Hurricane Charlie’ and the floods that devastated our community in Little Bray. It was the second flood to have invaded our home (we were flooded also in ‘65), and, for older people in our community, it was their third.
Following the ‘86 flood, we were promised flood protection works by the Irish Government to prevent, or at least minimise, future flooding. Instead, the Dargle river was returned to its pre-flood conditions – and then ignored.
As anyone who has been following this blog will know, our community is now in the middle of a huge battle to prevent high density development on the flood plain downriver from our home. It’s a strange way to commemorate an anniversary of floods that cost over £10 million in our small community in ‘86, while the necessary flood protection works would have cost £2 million at the time.
A framed poem was on display for a long time in Comhaltas Ceolteoiri Eireann’s HQ in Monkstown in Dublin. Written by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, it starts with the lines: “We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams…” Lines further down in the poem probably reflect why it is displayed in the home of Irish culture – “And three, with a new song’s measure, Can trample an Empire down.”
Tyrants have always been afraid of the power of music and the words that can accompany it. Ireland’s fight for freedom has consistently been echoed in song and music, with references to Ireland generally hidden behind the name of a woman – Roisin Dubh or Dark Rosaleen.
In the United States, also, protest songs have marked all the great fights, especially those for Civil Rights for American negroes. ‘We shall overcome…’, sung with sincerity, can still bring up the small hairs on the back of the neck for most people. And Negro spirituals echo all the heartbreak and betrayal – and battered hope – of an entire people.
Negroes in the United States, and elsewhere, were not discriminated against because of the colour of their skin. The colour of their skin was used as an excuse to discriminate against people who were poor and powerless.
It was the people who were poorest and most helpless who suffered most in the floods caused by Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of the levees around New Orleans on 29th August last year, just four days after the anniversary of our own flood. Those people were mostly negro.
This was disaster on a terrifying scale, and we – in our campaign – have been castigated by pointing out similarities to our situation. But how many deaths of the old and the poor and the disabled does it take to make a disaster?
New Orleans differed from us in magnitude, but there were huge similarities also. Environmentalists had warned of the danger of neglecting the maintenance of the levees that protected the city. Our Government and our local Town Council have been warned of the danger of neglecting the Dargle River for 20 years now.
Environmentalists also warned of the danger of allowing developers build around the levees of New Orleans. We are fighting a high density structure on our flood plain.
A documentary by Spike Lee on the New Orlean’s disaster – ‘When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts’ – will be shown in the States on 29th August, the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Interviewed about his documentary, Lee said: “The devastation here was not brought on solely by Mother Nature. People in charge were not doing their job.”
As I said, the similarities are striking…
But perhaps it was New Orleans and the floods and the Mississippi and the raw deal meted out to so many negroes and the way that was often expressed in song that made me choose ‘Ol Man River’ as the air to which to write our protest song.
John Doyle from our campaign’s core group, and Vincent Fottrell, our guest singer, will premiere the protest song at a fund-raising ‘gig’ we’re holding tomorrow night in a local pub, Katie Gallagher’s. John has already cursed me roundly for choosing such a difficult air for the lyrics, but I think the more he sings it, the more he feels it fits…
But writing about the flood campaign, and protest songs, has again taken me away from what I meant to write about this time – books.
Colette, who has recently joined a book club, has highly recommended ‘The Red Tent’ by Anita Diamant, which she says she would never have thought of reading if it hadn’t been picked as their book for this month. It tells the story of women’s lives in Israel in Biblical times, as recounted by Dinah, the daughter of Jacop. Imaginative… I can’t wait to see if I agree with Colette.
Elke almost had to apply for a bank loan to take home to Italy the books she had bought while living with us in Ireland – especially as she was going home via Holland! Luckily for Elke, but unluckily for her mother and sister, she was meeting her family there, so she struggled on board the plane in Dublin with an enormous bag full of books which she then distributed between her Mum, her sister and herself: they all went back to Italy lopsided.
Now she’s in Scotland and started out with virtuous ‘I’ve joined the local library’ murmurings, but this has now transposed to ‘I’ll send each book home by post as I read it…’ Hah!
…And I came across a description the other day of how completely I lose myself in a book when I settle down to read that it was uncanny.
It was in one of the ‘alphabet’ series of crime novels (’P for Peril’, I think?) by Sue Grafton, and the funny thing is I don’t particularly like this series at all. I just had nothing else to read.
…But the words captured exactly that almost dreamlike quality of slipping into another world completely when we read.
Words are a powerful potion, as many an Empire has discovered.
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By
noeleenm on August 14th, 2006
On Friday, Dong Kwang told me another magical tale about his land, incidentally causing me to be dead late for work. This young Korean’s stories have been good for my knowledge of Asian history, although I almost always have to look them up on the internet as well because a) I don’t have enough background knowledge of Asia to absorb these stories in isolation; b) I have a totally unreliable memory for facts and figures; and c) it’s very difficult to get Korean names straight when you’re trying to listen in English.
I’m not the only one afflicted by this latter problem, either. This morning I checked several sites on the web trying to ensure that I had understood Dong Kwang’s story correctly. Some, like the on-line (translated to English) Korean Times, and The Korea Society, refer to the dynasty that existed in Korea for 600 years before they were annexed by the Japanese in 1910 as the Choson Dynasty: I’ve also seen it spelled as Chosun, translated as ‘Land of the Morning Calm’. But one of my favourite resources, Wikipedia, always calls it the Josean Dynasty. All seem to agree that it is also known as the Yi Dynasty…
What started Dong Kwang’s story was that he had come across a report in an on-line Korean newspaper that a journalist claims to have found the sword with which the last Queen of Korea was murdered in 1895 by Japanese assassins. When I asked where it had been found, and why was she murdered anyway, the questions led to a lesson in Korean history.
The Japanese occupation of Korea, in case you’re as ignorant as I was, mainly refers to the period from 1910, when Korea was annexed by Japan as a colony, to the end of World War II in 1945, when a defeated Japan had to give up all of its occupied territories.
According to http://media.graniteschools.org/Curriculum/korea/history.htm: “Koreans were not allowed to speak their own language or to learn about their history during this time in an effort to obliterate the Korean culture. Japan plundered land and food. On March 1, 1919 many Koreans were killed or put in prison nationwide as they protested the colonial rule. Koreans remember this day as a symbol of their patriotism.â€
Those 35 years, however, were simply the worst years of a very bad time for Korea. For centuries, Korea fought to maintain its independence from Japan to the east, and from China and Manchuria to the west and north. In the Orient, Korea’s position seemed to have been that of Belgium in Europe: it was the cockpit of the Far East, constantly fought in and over by its powerful neighbours.
Dong Kwang had already told us about a great folk hero, Admiral Yi Sun-shin, who had destroyed the Japanese navy in a series of great sea battles in the sixteenth century, preserving its sovereignty for a further 300 years, but there was no Yi Sun-shin to preserve them when in 1894 Japan fought China for control of Korea in the first Sino-Japanese war.
There was another, unlikely, ‘hero’ in Korea then, however, whom the Japanese feared…
Min Ja-yeong had married the Crown Prince Gojong (also spelled Kojong…), while they were both still children, and Gojong’s father, Daewon-gun, still ruled. At 16, she became Queen Min, when Gojong was crowned as the 26th king of the Choson dynasty.
She was an amazing woman for her time and place, according to both Dong Kwang and to Wikipedia’s Empress_Myeongseong_of_Korea, among other sources. She disdained the social life that Korean women of her time were expected to lead, and instead spent her time “reading books reserved for men, teaching herself philosophy, history, science, politics and religion.â€
“This tradition of scholarship is characteristic of Min women to this dayâ€, concludes Wikipedia.
Her father-in-law saw her as a threat, and tried to neutralise her power after her baby son died by having Gojong take a concubine who bore him a healthy boy. The baby was promptly named Prince Successor. Min retaliated by having Daewon-gun impeached, stating that Gojong, now 22, should take over the throne properly, and Daewon-gun was forced to retire. The concubine and her son were also banished: you didn’t mess with Min…
Dong Kwang phrased it differently: “The King was stupid. The Queen was very, very intelligent. So the Japanese decided to kill her.â€
The story of the assassination of Queen Min has become part of Korean legend, although it is well rooted in fact. On 8th October, 1895, the palace was invaded by a group of assassins who brutally slaughtered the Queen: this is accepted by everyone. That there was Japanese involvement, with the support of her father-in-law, is accepted also, although Japanese historians deny that there was direct knowledge of the affair by the Japanese Government. Legend says that she was put to death by being viciously attacked with a sword (which is why finding such a sword would have been a huge scoop), and that three women were mistakenly murdered first, because the assassins weren’t sure which was the Queen. Other sources say that she was shot, and that her body was burned. All agree that she was raped and mutilated…
During her relatively short life (she was only in her forties when she was assassinated), she had developed a vision for Korea, which her husband had learned to share: he had also learned to love her.
It seems as if Dong Kwang may have been a bit harsh in his judgement of Gojong. The King was deliberately uneducated, because his father and his backers wanted to simply manipulate him. He wasn’t as intelligent and far-seeing as Min, either, but he had the sense in later years to work closely with her for the good of Korea.
And, when she died, despite signing away a lot of Korea’s power to Japan in a state of mourning where he couldn’t even try to rule, he made some wise and courageous choices.
In 1897, again according to Wikipedia, he proclaimed Korea an Empire to defend it against Japanese aggression. He used Russian and Chinese interests in Korea to defend against Japan also, and, when Russia was defeated in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), and Korea became a Protectorate of Japan, losing its rights as an independent nation, he sent representatives to the Hague Peace Convention of 1907 “to tell the world of the crimes of Japanese imperialism in Korea. Although the Korean representatives were blocked by the Japanese delegates, they did not give up, and later held interviews with newspapers. As a result, an enraged Meiji forced Gojong to abdicate in favour of his son, Sunjong.â€
Sunjong’s reign as Emperor only lasted three years anyway, because in 1910, Korea became a colony of Japan, the beginning of those terrible 35 years in which Korea was looted of its people, its lands, and its books – including a famous book of the history of Korea, stolen from its then only university, and finally found in a Buddhist temple in Japan, according to Dong Kwang.
Queen Min’s story was probably too recent to have been recorded in that history book, but it has certainly lived on among her people. She seems to be to Korea what Eva Peron was to Argentina, to some a saint, and to some a sinner, because of her assumption of power against the traditional male power figure of Daewon-gun.
Certainly to Dong Kwang she is an icon.
The turning point in Gojong’s submission to the Japanese during his period of mourning, turning him from helpless puppet into defiant patriot, may well have been when his father and the Japanese wanted him to sign a document post-humously stripping Min of her title of Empress.
Again, according to Wikipedia, Gojong, “a man who had always been used by others and never used his own voice for his own causes, was noted by scholars as having said, ‘I would rather slit my wrists and let them bleed than disgrace the woman who saved this kingdom.
Posted in Korea | 1 Comment »
By
noeleenm on August 11th, 2006
Our house feels like a railway station – or an airport terminal – at the moment, with people coming and going. Yesterday Grazine went home to Lithuania on holidays for two weeks, and tomorrow Magda goes home to Poland for ten days.
Grazine spends so little time at home that you wouldn’t expect to miss her, but her warm hug of goodbye made me realise that I’d miss even her fleeting visits! When Eddie comes with her to the house, there are cheerful greetings all around (usually a bright ‘Good Morning’ from Eddie, not matter what time of the day or night it happens to be!), and he then follows his beloved, teasing her with: “Quick, quick, Grazine!”, until he hurries her back out again!
Even Eddie was grounded though last week, when his fifteen year old daughter, Kamilla, came to visit. They ate in our house together several times, and so we had the chance to get to know Kamilla a little.
She speaks Lithuanian (”I’m forgetting it, though, because I was only five when we left there”), Swedish (which is where she went next to live with her mother), English (extremely well and with a quite British accent), and Dutch, as they now live in Holland. Not unnaturally, she ended up translating between Eddie and Grazine, and the rest of us, while telling us about life in Holland – which she’s still getting used to. She wants to be a vet, and showed us pictures of her two little dogs on her mobile phone. Of course, I responded by showing her photos of Pal.
I already knew what Kamilla looked like because her adoring Dad carries a photo of her around with him in his wallet, but her confident charm and her excellent English took me by surprise. On the last night of her stay in Ireland, though, Eddie and Grazine appeared in the house alone, and Eddie explained that she was in his apartment, packing, and that she was ‘angry’ with him.
“Why?”, I queried, thinking that this was some traumatic outcome of saying goodbye to the father who was no longer married to her mother. They both looked at me in silence for a moment, then Grazine pointed to her pierced ears, and to mine. Eddie pointed to his tongue, and shrugged. Even indulgent dads draw the line at tongue piercing for fifteen year olds, it seems!
I’m sure, much as Grazine is looking forward to seeing her family again, she’ll carry Eddie’s ‘Quick, Quick!’ in her heart and her head till she returns to Ireland again. Magda is more straightforwardly homesick, although these bright nights she is out and about quite a lot with her friends here.
“I’m always like this when I come to a new house first”, she explained, “but I’ll settle down soon.” I’m very glad to see her going out and enjoying herself (”the winter will be long enough”, as my mother used to say), but I teased her, telling her she is getting ‘as bad as’ her compatriot, Wojtek, who absolutely loves dancing, and who – when he isn’t working nights – heads out with a large number of friends to either a house party or a disco.
Last week I found the door to the back porch, and thus to the side passage where the clothes line lives, open the other morning, and followed the trail to bid ‘good morning’ to whoever was up and about. I found Wojtek, still in his pyjamas, with his walkman plugged in, standing beside his basket of laundry and dancing to the beat flowing into his ears. He reminded me of Balou the Bear in ‘Jungle Book’: all he needed was the grass skirt!
Because both Wojtek and Magda’s English is fluent, and because they seem to have no trouble in adapting to life here, despite Magda’s homesickness, I was surprised on Tuesday morning to hear a piece on RTE radio’s ‘Morning Ireland’ about a scheme run by the Government of Ireland to repatriate Polish people who have become destitute here.
It followed an Irish Times article, published on Monday, which said that the number of Polish people availing of the scheme this year in Ireland was 217 to mid-July. In 2004, the figure for the entire year was 52.
According to journalist Conor Lally, who wrote the article: “Many nationals from accession states have come to Ireland since 2004 with limited savings. A significant proportion do not speak English and have found it difficult to find employment. Anecdotal evidence now emerging has indicated that many have become homeless, particularly in Dublin.”
The ‘Morning Ireland’ interview followed the story with news of a new scheme being launched in Poland at the end of August by the business community in Wroclaw (Silesia) to encourage Poles to return home to work. As they pointed out, salaries here are sometimes four times that of Poland, but the cost of living in Dublin is also four times that of Wroclaw.
Apparently, there has been something of a stigma surrounding emigration from Poland (as there is in Latvia), and, until now, it has been a taboo subject, both at Government level and in the media.
Now the business community are sensibly speaking out, acknowledging the problems but smashing the myths that grow up around any taboo subject. A representative from the group who are launching the ‘return home’ initiative dismissed the perception that there is a shortage of doctors in Poland, for instance:  he said they are still turning out too many doctors there for the posts available, but that there is a shortage of construction workers.
He went on to point out that it is good for young graduates to travel and gain experience abroad, and said that they are not asking people not to leave Poland, but simply to look at the alternative business in Poland presents.
According to the Irish Times, Ireland offers the repatriation scheme to “any citizen of EU accession states, and certain other ’special-case’ EU nationals, who find themselves destitute during their time in Ireland.”
“The take-up for the free repatriation scheme by Slovaks, Hungarians and Latvians, while still relatively small in number, has also increased substantially this year.”
In our house we’re bucking the trend, for Latvians, at least.
Gint phoned last week to say that he is having a wonderful time at home (”the girls are like h-o-o-n-e-y!”), but that he is probably coming back a week or two earlier than planned. His sister’s boyfriend wants to come to Ireland for a couple of months (he’ll be staying with other Latvian friends) and has asked Gint to come with him.
“I’ll probably be back around 5th/6th September”, he informed me.
Welcome home, Gint – to a changing house and a changing Ireland.
Posted in Ireland, Lithuania, Poland | 3 Comments »
By
noeleenm on August 9th, 2006
We’re again changing partners in a steadily changing Ireland…
At the end of this month, Dong Kwang will leave our house. He has already left it behind in many ways since he met up with his Chinese girlfriend, Duyi. They are at the stage of wanting to be constantly together, and, even when physically present in our house, wanting only to be alone together. It’s the most natural thing in the world, but it doesn’t work in a ‘family’ house: it’s time to move on.
This ‘time for birds to fly the nest’ is something I haven’t really experienced before, but it must happen to parents all over Ireland nowadays. When I was growing up it was unheard of for single people in Ireland to live anywhere, other than their family home, unless they moved to another town or country, usually searching for work. Now that has changed, and it’s probably all to the good. Nobody really learns to look after him or herself until they’ve lived in a place where nobody else will pick up after them, where they either cook or starve, and where they learn about the cost of living.
But some parents still see it as a rejection, or, if they believe that it is wrong for a couple to sleep together before marriage, they are upset if that is the reason for moving on. Only last year a woman I know very well was extremely upset because her son was moving out to live with his girlfriend, without getting married. (In fact, the relationship broke up, and he’s now back home again because he couldn’t afford to pay the rent on his own, but he’s learned to pick up his dirty socks…)
At the other end of the spectrum, there are parents in Ireland now who seem happy to have the boyfriend or girlfriend move in as well, feeling, as one friend put it: “They’ll sleep together anyway. I’d rather my daughter is safe under my roof.”
Who can say who is right or wrong, only choose what is honest and good for our own homes, and our own loved ones, in an Ireland where moral values are having to be re-evaluated by all of us every day.
For me, if a young man or woman is in their twenties, they should have reached the maturity of making responsible choices about sexuality: I am quite happy to discuss relationships with them, the sexual aspect included, but I am not the moral guardian of these young adults. I am responsible, though, for how relationships impinge on the sense of ‘home’ within our house, and the comfort of those who live in it.
Our house is not made up of separate apartments. It is made up of bedrooms, one large kitchen, and one large living room. There quite simply isn’t enough space or privacy for a couple to develop a relationship in the middle of them, without everybody else feeling ‘in the way’. It’s a house where young men and women go through all the grooming rituals (half an hour in the shower leaving the bathroom reeking of cologne) before heading off to meet friends, sometimes with a romantic interest, sometimes not. It’s a house where people wander about in their pyjamas, with tousled hair, and make sleepy conversation over breakfast or supper. It’s a house in which we eat and drink together to welcome someone, to wish goodbye, or to celebrate a birthday. It’s a house to which we bring individual friends – as guests – in mutual respect.
Coming to a decision about the parting of the ways has been difficult. I am especially aware that I have the greater power here, and therefore the greater responsibility to make a decision that is fair to both of us. I hope that I have done that this time. Dong Kwang’s heart is already in another place, and it’s time for him to follow it. But I will miss my gentle Korean, and his stories of a land that is still magical and different, even in a changing Ireland.
Posted in House Family, Ireland, Korea | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on August 7th, 2006
There’s a wonderful song written by Paul Brady about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and even more beautifully sung by Dolores Keane. Called ‘The Island’, the opening words of its chorus were echoing in my head as I wrote my last post:
‘But Hey! Don’t listen to me!
This wasn’t meant to be no sad song
We’ve heard too much of that before…’
I had set out to write a celebration of ‘teachers’, but somehow found myself writing about the terrible abuses committed on innocent children in industrial schools in Ireland from the ’30s through the ’60s. It’s a story that has to be remembered: if we forget these children, we betray them all over again.
But the other side of that story needs to be told, too – the story of the many men and women, religious and lay, who taught generations of Irish children, inside and outside ‘institutions’, with dedication and kindliness.
And, as I wrote most of my last post about abuse by members of religious orders in industrial schools, let’s concentrate on the enormous contribution by the Catholic Church to education in Ireland.
Firstly education was closely associated with religion in Ireland from its Golden Age (sixth to ninth centuries) when monasteries sprang up all over Ireland, and were renowned seats of learning not only for the Irish themselves, but for the students who came from mainland Europe during its Dark Ages. It was during this period that Ireland gained its reputation as The Island of Saints and Scholars.
When the Normans invaded Ireland, the hope back in England would have been that Irish culture would be consumed into that of England. Instead, the Normans became ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’, and had to be severely reprimanded for taking up Irish customs and dress – and even our language.
There was no difference in religion, though, between the two islands until, in the mid-16th century, Henry VIII began to see Protestantism as a way out of a marriage he no longer wanted to Catherine of Aragon. The Church of England came into being, with Henry as its Head, and now it was no longer just the culture of Ireland, but the religion of most of its population, that England wanted to change.
The Penal Laws started to come into force in the late 17th century, and were in effect in Ireland for roughly 100 years. Their aim was to repress the Roman Catholic Church and replace it with the Church of Ireland, with the English monarch as its head. Catholicism and patriotism in Ireland became almost inextricably linked as a result.
Church of Ireland schools were set up all over Ireland, with the aim of teaching Irish children to become little English Protestants. It was quite probably seen as a way of ‘improving’ the Irish, as well as a way of conquering us.
To quote from Irish-society.org: “As late as 1825″, the Protestant hierarchy petitioned the King, saying “amongst the ways to convert and civilise the Deluded People, the most necessary have always been thought to be that a sufficient number of English Protestant Schools be erected, wherein the Children of the Irish Natives should be instructed in the English Tongue and in the Fundamental Principles of the True Religion”.’
The response of the Irish people was to set up Hedge Schools, where the Irish language, history and culture – and the Catholic religion – were all taught. The schools got their name from the fact that very often classes were taught, literally, behind hedges, as these schools were against the English law, as was the celebration of Mass or even the presence of a priest. Mass was celebrated on rocks out in lonely glens, with sentries posted to watch out for the English soldiers. Priests were smuggled in women’s long dresses and shawls among their people to celebrate Mass, baptisms and funerals.
But the men who taught so dangerously in the Hedge Schools had, naturally, to be paid, and many Irish families didn’t have the money to send their children even to these schools.
In 1728 a woman called Nano Nagle was born to a wealthy Catholic family in County Cork – the year the Disenfranchising Law, forbidding Catholics to vote, was passed. Nano and her sister started their education in the hedge schools, but, because of their family’s wealth, they later moved to Paris to finish their education there.
In 1752, Nano – by now a wealthy woman in her own right – opened the first of many schools for poor Catholic girls in her native Cork, and twenty three years later she founded the Presentation Sisters to consolidate and expand her work of education among the poor.
Edmund Ignatius Rice was born in County Kilkenny ten years after Nano opened her first school, and he also received his primary education in the local hedge school. He went on to a commercial academy, and to become apprenticed to his uncle as a chandler. As a businessman he became a great success, but his personal life was marred with tragedy when his wife of just three years died after a tragic accident, having given birth to a handicapped daughter.
It became a turning point in his life, causing Edmund to sell off his business interests and start on a road to providing education for poor Catholic boys that eventually led him to found the Presentation Brothers (he was a great admirer of the work of Nano Nagle) and the Christian Brothers.
Sixteen years after Edmund Rice’s birth, the third of the great Catholic educators of the poor was born in Dublin. Catherine McAuley was born in 1778 into a capital city at the heart of the Pale, at a time when it was socially unacceptable, more than dangerous, to be a Catholic there.
Her father, who was the great religious and philantropic, influence in her life, died when she was still a child, but, at the age of 40, she was left a large fortune by a childless couple that she had befriended. She used her fortune to set up an educational system in Dublin for poor Catholic girls, with no intention at the beginning of starting a religious community, mainly it seems because she felt the then cloistered nature of a nun’s life would not allow her and her lay helpers to be in touch with the poor of Dublin in the way that she envisaged.
Neither lay nor religious society could accept a community of lay women living and working together at that time, and the Archbishop of Dublin got special permission from Rome to set up an order whose religious would be permitted to move among the poor. They became the Sisters of Mercy.
These three great teaching orders were set up in a time when the teachers within them were quite likely to be imprisoned for their work, yet it was when they became a respected part of the by then independent Irish State that some, and again I emphasise it was only some, of the members of the Mercy Order of nuns and the Christian Brothers began to abuse the very people their founders had set them up to serve – the poorest and the most vulnerable of society – in the Magdalene laundries and the Christian Brother run schools.
It seems as if ‘respectability’ almost destroyed these Orders in a way in which persecution never could, but, hopefully, the ‘winnowing’ that has taken place in them – and the change in their status in society in Ireland – will mean that today’s nuns and brothers will recapture the vision and dedication of their amazing founders.
Posted in Ireland | No Comments »