Just recently the entire country was stirred to its depths by the gift of the bull named Roy to the island of Arranmore off the coast of Donegal. On the corner of every street and in the corner of every pub there was a gleam in the eye as the story of Roy was told and retold.
The bright blonde muscular majesty of Roy was extolled as he made his regal way by boat to his island harem of 36 bovine beauties. Such was the depth of the response in the Irish mind that it is clear a chord had been struck. Here was a great animal myth of regeneration and rebirth played out for all to witness.
Of course, the bull, symbol of power, is a central figure in Irish myth, part of our stories of nationhood and identity. And Roy in his own way was undoubtedly telling us something about ourselves and where we have come from. Appropriately, as Roy took possession of Arranmore, a lone piper piped Let Éireann Remember.
Roy's mythical status is made clearer if we turn to our greatest writer, Joyce, and his Ulysses. In one of the most extraordinary chapters in this extraordinary novel, a group of medical students are carousing in the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, "Horne's House" as Joyce calls it, in honour of its master, Andrew Horne. The whole chapter is packed with images of fertility, gestation and parturition as in the wards upstairs Mrs Mina Purefoy labours to give birth and at the same time deliver the chapter.
In the midst of all this, the riotous tale is told of "an Irish bull in an English chinashop", a bull "with an emerald ring set in his nose" sent to Ireland by "farmer Nicholas, the bravest cattle dealer of them all".
Farmer Nicholas dispatches the bull to Ireland with a slap, a blessing and the command to do all his "cousin german the Lord Harry tells you", of which more later.
Like Roy, this gold-coated bull has a profound effect on the nation, particularly its females. Such is his beauty and sweetness of breath that the women of the island "leaving doughballs and rollingpins, followed after him hanging his bulliness in daisychains". The bull's charms are such that "maid, wife, abbess and widow to this day affirm that they would rather any time of the month whisper in his ear in the dark of a cowhouse or get a lick on the nape from his long holy tongue than lie with the finest strapping young ravisher in the four fields of all Ireland." They dress him in shift and petticoat, clip his forelock, rub oil all over him and build him stables "at every turn of the road" with gold mangers full of the best hay "so that he could doss and dung to his heart's content".
By this time, the Lord Harry's bull is known "as the father of the faithful" and has grown so fat he can hardly walk. The island's "dames and damsels" bring him his feed held in their aprons, for which bounty he rears on his hindlegs to show them the mystery of his "bulliness".
The bull will have nothing but green grass (green is the only colour to his mind!) and erects a sign saying only green grass is to be grown. Obstreperously he roams the land uprooting all other crops sown by Lord Harry's orders. This breeds bad blood between Lord Harry and farmer Nicholas, with Lord Harry calling him "all the old Nicks in the world".
"I'll make the animal smell hell," Lord Harry promises. However, one evening as Lord Harry is preparing himself for a boat race (he has spade oars for himself, but the others must row with pitchforks) he finds in the mirror that he bears a remarkable likeness to a bull.
Sure enough, studying his pedigree he finds he is a "left-handed descendant" of the Romans' champion bull, "Bos Bovum, which is good bog Latin for boss of the show." He starts to feed from a trough and sets himself to learning the bull tongue. He can, however, only manage the first person singular, which he writes up everywhere with a piece of chalk. In no time he and "the bull of Ireland were as fast friends as the arse and the shirt". In despair, the men of the island "seeing the women were so ungrate . . . spread three sheets to the wind" and sail for America. Thus ends Joyce's parable.
The tale has been glossed in the following way. Farmer Nicholas is none other than Pope Hadrian IV (Nicholas Brakespear) who issued the papal bull allowing the English King, Henry II, or Joyce's Lord Harry, to invade Ireland. The bull becomes a symbol of the Irish church whose every whim is spoiled and indulged.
History runs on until the quarrel between farmer Nicholas, now intended as the papacy in general, and Lord Harry, now none other than Henry VIII. It is indeed he who discovers his own likeness to and "sinister" descendance from Bos Bovum, to pronounce himself John Bull, boss of all the bulls, Irish and papal bulls. This story of Irish bulls, English bulls and papal bulls ends in the stream of wearied Irishmen emigrating to America.
And this load of bull is presumably what Joyce meant by "forging the uncreated conscience of my race".
The profound appeal to the Irish imagination of the bull Roy's fertilising mission to Arranmore can now be read in its deeper significance as a mythical echo of the nation's inception and development, its divisions, quarrels and losses.
One hopes that Roy's establishment on Arranmore will be blessed with more pacific offspring.
One also wonders what Joyce would have made of it.