Saturday afternoon, to a sunny pub garden in north London’s Belsize Park. Ireland versus France is on – I am not yet aware of the trouncing that lies in wait. The camera pans along to the Irish rugby team as they sing Amhrán na bhFiann and then Ireland’s Call. Something stands out to an English friend of mine, who was regrettably supporting France. “Why do they all look Australian?” he says. And he was right. Aside from the ones who are actually from the southern hemisphere, the emergent look of the Irish international player is a short-sides haircut with a soft allusion to a mullet. Facial hair is commonplace too. This, if you do not know, was once a uniquely antipodean aesthetic.
Ireland is under some reverse act of Australian colonisation. It is to be expected – as our country, long defined by emigration, sends its sons and daughters in their thousands to the southern hemisphere. After a few years, most of them make it back to the small island on Europe’s rainy western periphery. And with them they bring the look and feel of Bondi Beach or Melbourne. The effect is unmistakable – this is the Australianisation of the young Irish man. Even Paul Mescal has fallen for the unholy mullet-moustache diptych.
In this, an important reminder: Ireland’s national identity is surprisingly deracinated. By St Patrick’s Day, we will be bored with chatter about Irishness, and how emigrants spread the culture across America’s east coast – from Boston to Philadelphia, and into London’s Kilburn, Camden and Hackney. It is true, in a narrow sense: the Irish diaspora is a vector for Ireland’s values and character across the world. But this misses the bigger picture. Our national personality is not solely the product of this one-way exchange. Many émigrés return, and when they do they bring with them the parts of the world they have returned from. That most of our rugby team looks as though they were forged in the Australian outback is evidence enough of this. The Anglo-Irish lilt of the London-Irish, and this writer, is another example.
On Sunday afternoon I received a text from a friend, far braver and more admirable than me, who is reporting for a British paper in Kyiv. “Undefeated,” the text reads, “even in a war zone.” His messages are not about the spirit of Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines but instead they accompany a picture of a bar: O’Brien’s Irish Pub on a street corner in Ukraine’s beleaguered capital (below the English sign “O’Brien’s” is rendered in Cyrillic). “So much for the Irish soft-power crisis,” we joke. I looked up the menu online: herring and potatoes, shrimp and ginger sauce, goulash, Irish stew, something vaguely named “Ukrainian plate”. In the Irish bars across the world, we have first-hand proof of Ireland’s strangely global identity. I cannot imagine feeling more like a citizen of nowhere – in Theresa May’s overly-hated phrase – than in an O’Brien’s in Kyiv.
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“Romanitas” is a Latin term better understood as “Roman-ness”. And for a long time historians held the naive belief that the city of Rome was solely responsible for exporting Romanitas across its vast and thin empire, some 2,000 years ago; that Rome was a singular vector for what it meant to be a Roman. But the huge trading infrastructure of the Mediterranean at the time complicates an otherwise simple story. Amphorae from Carthage in north Africa can be found in Italy; metals from the eastern frontier are scattered across the western half of the empire; eventually Emperor Trajan from Spain, not Italy, took the reins of power in Rome. It forces the question: who was really telling whom how to be Roman?
We can ask the same of Ireland. And these adventures in globalisation happened long before the emergence of technical structures such as the European Economic Community. Our most famous literary protagonist is Leopold Bloom, a Jewish man who wanders our capital city under the contours of an Ancient Greek story, conceived by James Joyce writing in Trieste. WB Yeats spoke of Innisfree’s “purple glow” from Chiswick in London. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was originally written in French. Fast forward to the late 20th century and we have Oasis – two brothers born in Manchester to a mother from Mayo, a protrusion of the Mancunian working class and rural sensibilities of western Ireland. Shane MacGowan of The Pogues and Johnny Marr of The Smiths are also products of the long-running Anglo-Irish cultural exchange. So, who is really telling whom what it is to be Irish?
St Patrick’s Day celebrations are under way. Chicago will dye its river a lurid green, and O’Brien’s bars in far-flung cities alien to our own will fill with expats. Somewhere, someone will play Dropkick Murphys. But we should not forget that Ireland’s national identity is absorbent and mimetic, as dependent on global inputs as our outputs. Far from a parochial and inward-looking Celtic countenance, Ireland is a globalised and cosmopolitan enterprise. Citizens of nowhere, or everywhere, perhaps.
