Irishmen sometimes refer to the Atlantic Ocean as a lake of tears. Because so many of them have crossed it to the U.S., the Irish are seldom far from the thoughts of Americans. This is particularly true right now. For months, something not unlike civil war has been simmering in Ulster. This is the week of Eire's national elections. If that were not enough, June 16 is Bloomsday. It is a good time to reflect on the ways and woes of the Irish, and TIME asked Novelist Wilfrid Sheed to do so. Sheed is only part Irish (on his father's family's side). But as an English Catholic schoolboy and an American writer of quality (Square's Progress, The Blacking Factory and Pennsylvania Gothic), he has had the opportunity and inclination to observe the Irish, fondly and sharply, for years.
THE only thing that all Irishmen agree about is that you're wrong. In fact, even that statement would probably fetch you a fight in any decent Dublin pub. So before a word is said about the Irish character, let it be stated that very few Irishmen have it. The Irish character, if the truth be told, is a silly joke played on the English, and is only kept around for the sake of the tourists.
Gaelic folk legend is a long chain of deceptions and false appearances—gods turning into dwarfs, dwarfs turning into cats and, above all, beautiful women turning into death-dealing hags. The outcome of these tales was that the gods were usually razzed, the lowly were usually razzed too, and sex was made to look grotesque. Not so different from other people's legends perhaps, except in their very high quotient of mockery; but Ireland's history, or rather the lack of it, has decreed a strange long life to them. The gods turned eventually into English landlords, and later into American tourists; sex remained an object of death and terror; and the put-on was confirmed as the basic Irish style.
Irony is the first resort of the oporessed. Operating out of two languages, Gaelic and English, the lads found they could shoot up a smoke screen of Irish bulls and blarney that no colonial officer could penetrate. Forbidden to write patriotic songs, they wrote love poems to a girl that sounded suspiciously like Eire, hate poems couched as hymns and generally got things so snarled up that they even have to watch each other. (The best Irish talkers have eyes like terriers'.) Gulliver's Travels, the Anglo-Irish classic, is the high point of the two traditions: a folk tale of giants and dwarfs and transformations, and a good ironic belt at English politics. The stage Irishman, or rollicking boyo, which developed later, is really a put-on that lost its way.
Backbiting Capital of the World