What are the great Irish qualities?
Sweeping generalizations tend to obscure as much as they illuminate, but no one would argue that the Irish are not lovers of language and music. Four Irishmen have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, an astonishing number from a country of less than five million.
What might be generally agreed are the great qualities of the Irish?
1. Lovers of language and literature
1923 – Nobel Prize for Literature William Butler Yeats
1925 – Nobel Prize for Literature George Bernard Shaw
1969 – Nobel Prize for Literature Samuel Barclay Beckett
1995 – Nobel Prize for Literature Seamus Justin Heaney
2. Scholarship and learning
In medieval times, Ireland was knows as the land of saints and scholars. The Book of Kells, sometimes known as the Book of Columba, is a 9th century illuminated manuscript that is unequaled, a masterwork of Western calligraphy. See too, Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, a non-fiction historical book which argues the case for the Irish people‘s critical role in preserving Western Civilization from utter destruction by the Germanic tribes.
But a journey through modern Ireland, a land changed by the rise, then decline of the so-called Celtic Tiger, a traveler would be struck for the reverence with which learning and scholarship are admired and respected by all sections of society.
3. A sense of humor
The Irish have that great and rare quality of being able to laugh at themselves, as well as a defined sense of humor that covers the entire spectrum of comedy. There is a great sense of the macabre and black humor. e.g. On a gable wall in Belfast, among the street murals that recorded the recent struggle, a wit had scrawled under one of the Protestant mantras, No Pope Here – lucky old Pope. Frank Carson, the Belfast born comedian specializes in jokes like, “I don’t think my wife likes me very much, when I had a heart attack she wrote for an ambulance” or “I phoned British Telecom, I said ‘I want to report a nuisance caller’, he said ‘Not you again’.”
One of my own favorites is this. Two Englishmen were driving in the middle of the Irish countryside and were lost. After a few miles, they stopped and asked an old farmer, who was leaning over the farm gate, staring into space. “We need to get to Dublin quickly, can you tell us the way?” “I could”, he says, “but if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”
But a visit to Ireland will have an outsider soon aware of the humor in the everyday speech wherever they go.
4. Courage
I once met the Chief Law Minister of the State of Karnartaka, in his private chambers within the Parliament Building in Bangalore. He was an impressive man, over seventy years old. As a young man, he had attended Harvard Law School, and he stood in front of me dressed as a peasant, in Kurta pajamas, his Brahmin thread prominently displayed. He said that he’d always admired the Irish, that the Welsh and the Scots had quickly caved in and capitulated to English domination, whereas the Irish, irrespective of the cost, over many centuries had never given up, and eventually prevailed. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was born on the other side, so to speak, on the Ulster Protestant side, the so-called Loyalists – although why we should owe allegiance to a family of Germans on the English throne, always escaped me.)
5. Warm-heartedness
In ancient times, the measure of a man was in no small manner, assessed by hospitality towards strangers. The Irish are welcoming and warm-hearted to strangers to this day. An interesting aspect of this was seen in the Hunger Strikes that the Irish initially employed against the English and which were subsequently copied by others, notably, Mahatama Gandhi. The ancient Celtic world was governed by a set of unwritten rules. One of them said that if you have a grievance against a neighbor, say, for example, a neighboring farmer had taken one of your cows. The aggrieved party would go and sit at the gate of his neighbor and refuse all food. To have a starving man on your doorstep was more than any Celt could bear, so negotiation would follow and a peaceful end of the dispute would result.
During those dreadful times in Belfast, when ‘tit for tat’ murders were committed, my grandfather, a Protestant, was protected by his Catholic customers, and on one or two occasions, was hidden in their homes, until the armed men who were looking for a Protestant to kill went away. This is the other side of the terrible cruelties which both sides inflicted on each other during the ongoing Troubles that, thank God, seem to have ended, and not before time.
6. The heart and mind of a Poet
The Russians are great lovers of poetry and virtually every Russian you meet can quote Pushkin, their great national poet. But the Irish speak it as the following story from Seamus Heaney shows. A teacher friend knew that two boys in the class were copying each others work, but he couldn’t prove who was the copier and who was the copiee. He set a composition on The Swallow, and after a few minutes he asked to see their work. He read, first sentence, “The Swallow is a migratory bird.” Second sentence, “He have a roundy head.” And, as the great man Seamus said, the first sentence is a model of correct form, fact and grammar, and in the second, a poet is speaking. Let’s hope we never lose our capacity for ’roundy heads’.
7. Music
You can travel the world and people wherever you go have heard of Irish music, from the traditional to the modern.
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