(5 of 5)
The young Irish today have other things on their minds. For the first time, England has been pushed out of the light, by modern travel, and the European connection can be made. There is strong sentiment for joining the Common Market.
Pessimism may be the last part of the heritage to go. The Irish are leary of hope look at where it got them in the past! But no one under 50 takes refuge in the Patriot Game any more, that truculent dirge over Ireland's glorious failures.
The church that the angry Ulstermen fear so much is a good deal more adaptable than they admit. As soon as the English eased the fierce penal laws in the 1800s, it made its quiet peace with them, and by the 1916 rebellion was a definite anti-revolutionary force. In the '20s, it excommunicated Eamon de Valera for his part in the bloodshed, only to turn up shortly thereafter in full partnership with him.
The Irish will probably go on cursing the clergy anyway, or defending them against curses, long after the occasion has passed. Anticlericalism is too good and old a sport to abandon entirely, and the most devout indulge in it the most gleefully. The Irish bishops ("the 26 Popes") have drawn their covered wagons up around divorce and the Pill. Book censorship gets feebler all the time, and is now at about the same mean level it was in the U.S. ten years ago. The young clergy are far less tempted by politics than their elders—or by clanking displays of power. "They should put the hierarchy and the politicians on one side" one of them told Paul O'Dwyer recently, "and everyone else on the other."
"Who would want to live in this rotten country?" the Irish still ask you. But the lip quivers a trifle (get an Irishman to actually laugh and he concedes a point to you). They are not leaving the way they were; or else they're leaving and coming back, trained and with a stake. To keep the place lively, the government has announced some eyecatching tax breaks for writers and artists. After all, they say to the English, "our ancestors were great scholars while yours were still running around in blue paint." Perhaps the next dream of the ahistorical Irish, besides the usual one of flooding the world with poets, priests and bums, is to become a cultural sanctuary—after other people have returned to wearing blue paint.