What the Two Irelands Have to Teach Us

Ann and I have just returned from three weeks on the island of Ireland -- wonderful weeks among wonderful people. We come home with great memories and sobering lessons to be learned.

Yes, it’s green – The Emerald Isle, more verdant than our Emerald City despite fewer trees -- its tidy pastures delineated with hedge rows in the north, stone walls in the south.

Yes, it has bewitching ruins of castles and towers and abbeys.

Yes, it has vales and loughs, strands and cliffs, fast running streams and salmon. (Above: Lough Leane, Killarney, County Kerry. Below: The Cullenough at Ennistymon, County Clare.)

And yes, the Irish live up to the stereotype of voluble, funny, and pub-loving; they value smiles and wit and their pint of Guinness. 

No, she's not Irish; 100% Swedish

But look and listen carefully, dig a little deeper, and valuable, moral lessons emerge – for us, for now.

First, Persistence: after the Romans left Britain in 400, Ireland became the bastion of Christianity and learning.  Irish monks were the missionaries who helped Charlemagne light his Dark Ages. The Irish were to be trodden down for the next 800 years by Anglo-Normans, by Henry VIII’s new Anglicans, by Charles I’s “planters”, by William’s Protestant rentiers, by planted Scotch Presbyterian capitalists, and by a potato virus. Yet the culture has been kept alive, not just to survive but to thrive and through the most successful diaspora in history, to spread the culture and its values throughout the western world.

Second, Sectarianism: sectarian identity politics is a hardening of community arteries that kills. The civil war of 1919-1921 was a war over a glass half-full, a war in which Irishmen seeking independence step-by-step killed and were killed by Irishmen seeking independence quickly. It was a vicious sectarian war of refusing compromise, of not listening to one another, of terrorism, assassination, and assault. Over 2,300 were killed and thousands of more injured. 

The Silent Stormont

Sectarianism infects Northern Ireland today. The Stormont, their parliament, has not convened for two years because Unionists refuse to sit with the majority Sinn Fein; Westminster must govern the so-called independent, 4^th country of the United Kingdom.

      

One of hundreds of gates between Unionist and
Nationalist neighbors

The gates of the 20’ high “peace walls” that separate Protestant Unionist from their Catholic Nationalist neighbors are closed and locked each night at six. Orangemen still flaunt their identity by flying the Union Jack in profusion and by organizing marches through Catholic neighborhoods to commemorate a 17^th C battle. 

Meanwhile, the Nationalists flaunt their victimhood through murals to their martyrs of The Troubles. 

The Special Powers Act enabled arrest and incarceration on suspicion, suspension of habeas corpus, search and seizure without warrant, suspension of the press, and so on; the SPA is still on the books. 

The violence of “The Troubles” may have been suspended through the patient mediation of Bill Clinton and George Mitchell and the battle-fatigue of Jerry Adams and Ian Paisley, but the underlying sectarian-identity politics of distrust and disdain fester. 

The other side of the sectarian lesson is what the Republic has built by working to rid itself of sect and to become a secular society. It has loosed the grip of the authoritarian church, rid itself of publicly-funded parochial schools, mandated school uniforms to erase class, protected abortion rights and approved gay marriage, reduced income inequality through progressive, step-flat taxation, made coalition government work (and produce a huge budget surplus), and welcomed foreign direct investment and immigrants (100,000 last year on a population base of 5½ million) with minimal dislocation and resentment. The Republic’s GDP/person is higher than ours and the highest in the EU.

Third lesson: Community: Ireland is a communal culture built on four solid legs – family, home, pub, and the GAA.

·       Family means loyalty, sharing, caring vertically, i.e., generationally, and horizontally, i.e., across legions of aunts, uncles, cousins, and seconds. Celebrating, caring for one another, and grieving together.

Home dinner with Paula and sister Helene'

Home is treasured; The Republic's home ownership rate @ 71% exceeds the average of the EU and that of the US. Homes are neat and well- kept. We never saw junk and cluttered yards. Graffiti and homeless sleeping on streets is rarely seen.

At end of day, people from all walks repair to the pub for a pint and a “chat”. A chat is a real conversation -- listening, trading news and views, arguing good naturedly. After dinner, folks return to the pub maybe once a week to enjoy, perhaps to make or dance to music with their neighbors. The pub is the beating heart of the community.

It doesn't look like it, but 9-year-old Grace is 
teaching me Women's Irish Football.

The GAA: fourteen hundred clubs make up the Gaelic Athletic Association. Ballyshannon, for example, a town of 2,300, supports 400+ members from 8 to 80 playing handball and rounders for adult recreation and exercise, and Irish football, hurling, and camogie for club, town, and county honors. The All-Irish football and hurling championships are the national sports’ super bowls, played in Dublin’s Croke Park before crowds of 80,000-plus. It’s all amateur: no paid players, no millionaire coaches, no arrogant owners, no professional money machine.  

So, what do these two Irelands – the dysfunctional Northern and successful Republic -- have to teach us?

To me, the lessons are clear. Don’t give up on the idea of America. Reduce sectarianism and restore civility. Demand and help create a pragmatic government that works. Build on shared interests and shared commitment to the American experiment a fair, tolerant, welcoming space in which each person can work to realize his or her or their aspirations.

We should aspire to live up to the apt and lovely Irish saying, “There are no strangers here, only friends you have not yet met.” [1]

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[1] This popular saying is persistently mis-attributed to the national-treasure poet, playwright, and author William Butler Yeats. There is no evidence that Yeats ever said, wrote, or published those words. But as our friend Sean Buckley likes to say, “never let truth interfere with a good story.”