As Gibraltar is showing Kevin Myers now: this carnivore "identity" is a truly baffling beast indeed, not least in how it finds refuge in garbled parodies of itself. Outsiders gaze, uncomprehendingly, at manifestations of tribal self on St Patricks' Day in New York, or on July 12th in Belfast, or on the recent State funerals for IRA men executed 80 years ago; but for those who participate in such rites, they are compelling expressions of group pride.
Maybe all such declarations of identity are foolish, vain things, though they seem to be part of the human condition, at least in this epoch. Yet there are some expressions of a greater self which defy the understanding of outsiders; and none more so than that of Gibraltareans.
I have met only a couple of Gibraltareans ever. They were both affable, charming men, who seemed thoroughly Spanish in their easy-going manner and their astounding ability to stay up all night. Yet their attachment to their "Britishness" was as vehement and as passionate as anything one might find on the Shankill Road, though hours of conversation did not really reveal what that "Britishness" meant to them.
British shops
They were inordinately, irrationally proud that shops in Gibraltar were British, looked British, sold British goods, as if that were a measure of their Britishness, of their national virtue. But did not Grafton Street resemble any comparable street in Manchester, Nottingham, Bristol? They were able to brush these observations off with the assurance that, whereas in Ireland the omnipresence of British outlets was merely a sign of British commercial enterprise, in Gibraltar it proved how British the colony remained.
Now, this was simply absurd. Gibraltar has the enormous good fortune to be geographically attached to one of the most richly endowed civilisations in the world. Irish people, rightly, take a pride in their traditional music, and the way it has been preserved, almost uniquely in north-western Europe, as a popular art form: but it does not compare with the ubiquity, complexity, richness and vigour of Spanish music. The same must be said about Spanish dance, which has an intellectual rigour and a sexual flamboyance which are simply absent from the chaste spectrum of Irish jigs, reels and polkas.
Usually, if a nation is gifted in one cultural area, it is not so in another. As if in negative compensation for our musical traditions, Irish cuisine - for example - is usually deplorable, often non-existent, and almost entirely without regional variation. There are no traditional, locally made sausages, cheeses or dishes for different parts of the country, no customary ways of killing and preparing wildlife or fish.
Indeed, if there is one thing which defines Irish culinary culture, it is a neglect of local food sources: did we not for so long ignore or export our pike and eels, our monkfish, lobster and turbot? And the banquets at the Galway oyster festival carefully exclude the bivalve they celebrate simply because most Galway people would never touch them.
Culinary traditions
In Spain, the reverse is true. Spain has a cuisine as diverse as that of France, and possibly even more so. Spain is where Moor met Phoenician, Iberian met Jew, Berber met Visigoth, and vastly complex culinary traditions resulted, which are cherished to this day. There is almost no raw foodstuff, from either the new world or the old, which the Spanish have not used as the basis for a regional or national delicacy: the range of Spanish dishes is simply breathtaking, the sophistication and complexity of even their peasant cuisine are astounding.
Yet my Gibraltarian friends, who look Spanish and speak Spanish-accented English, poured scorn on Spanish food as being inferior to most British foods. Truly, there is no answer to such an extravagantly absurd denial of the obvious truth. We are dealing here with a sense of identity which depends on a vast, if unconscious, rejection of an independently verifiable reality.
But of course, such an "independently verifiable reality" forms little or no part of this bizarre conjunction of the loyalties that go into the making of national identity. However risible the Gibraltarian attachment to the Union Jack-bedecked pastiche of "Britishness", complete with bobbies, might appear, it is apparently essential to the Gibraltarians' sense of self. So they live alongside one of the most vibrant cultures in the world, which has produced some of the greatest art and architecture of the 20th century, and yet has some of the most sublime and perfectly preserved medieval cities in the world; and they reject it all for Union Jack kitsch.
Defining values
That is not their weakness. It is the weakness of mankind, though admittedly in their case perhaps the most exaggerated form known to civilisation. We long to belong, to have values which define us from our neighbours. What makes a Kilkenny man from one side of the Suir feel so different from, on occasion even superior to, the Waterford man across the river? Identity binds, and identity cripples. It empowers lynch mobs, and disables the individually strong. It fetishises tiny dissimilarities, and it elevates and reveres the absurd, the concocted. You don't have to go to Gibraltar and the bobbies' helmets; take the kilt, which was once a piece of hokum got up to smooth the vanities of the Scottish, and which is now revered by soldiers in Scotland, the North and the Republic.
It is a terror of this carnivore called national identity which caused the European Union to come about. We should not laugh at Gibraltar's claims to Britishness, but merely see in those claims a reflection of all our blood-soaked national vanities.