by Frank Gannon
“The tinkers,” he said, “I wouldn’t fook with them.”
I went back into the pub. There were two people there, a bartender and a youngish guy in a sort of rugby shirt and slacks. I sat down and ordered a Guinness and listened to their conversation. They were both local people. The young man, Kevin, commuted to Dublin, where he worked in construction. The old bartender’s name was Sean. They were talking about the tinkers. Like so many other Irish people I’d met, they let me slip seamlessly into their conversation. I asked them who the tinkers were.
“They’re outsiders,” said Sean. “They’ve never really caught on.”
“They don’t have a home,” Kevin said. “That’s the big thing with them. They don’t have a place. They take everything with them. Because they don’t have a place, they don’t respect anybody else’s place.”
I felt sorry for the tinkers, but I could see that sympathy wasn’t the correct reaction.
Sean was proud to say that he never served tinkers. He said that a tinker once offered him a hundred pounds, but he still refused to serve him. Kevin found that difficult to believe.
“You’d serve a fucking monkey if he had a hundred pounds.”
“Monkeys,” said Sean, shaking his bald head, “but not tinkers.”
But the tinkers were coming and it was time to shut down. Kevin said goodbye and left in a hurry. I walked to the door with Sean, who locked the pub door and stood outside, watching the street. Outside every store and pub, there was a man standing.
I walked up the street to Bridie Levins’s place. I noticed I was walking pretty fast. I passed the boy with the sling. He looked at me.
“Don’t fook with them,” he said. I went home. Gary Cooper didn’t have to deal with tinkers.
The tinkers are sometimes called “travelers.” They are a very small minority in Ireland. No one knows for certain just how many tinkers exist in Ireland, but there are about twenty-five thousand. They are not just a loosely organized group of disenfranchised people. They have a language (sometimes called Gammon, Shelta, or simply “the Cant”) and a distinct culture, and they have been around a long time, since the twelfth century, according to some sources.
“Tinkering” itself, repairing metal things like spoons and wheels, is not something you can make a living at in Ireland, so they do other things to get by. A lot of people, like the pub owner I talked to, don’t even like to talk to tinkers. Ireland is one of the friendliest places on earth, but the tinker is a true pariah.
No one knows how exactly the tinkers started living the way they live. Some people told me that the tinkers are the descendants of people who lost their land during the potato famine.
They live on the road in encampments. There is no plumbing or electricity, of course, and most of them are constantly on the move. They are not above applying for public assistance, although some people told me that the government relief agencies have certain “tinker hours” when they will see these people. Even Irish people on the dole, it seems, don’t like to be in the same room with tinkers.
This is, as you might figure, a very rough existence. It is estimated that 80 percent of the tinkers are less than twenty-five years of age.
I finally saw some tinkers when I was in Ireland. They were passing through on a country road outside Athlone and someone pointed them out to me. They looked very sad to me. There were a lot of children and one or two old men with white beards. I said, aloud, to no one in particular, “I feel sorry for them.” The man I was standing next to looked shocked at my sentiments.
“Don’t be sorry for them,” he said. “They’re the wrong ones for that.”
Because Ireland has been “owned” by somebody else for much of its history, it may be that the unfortunate human quality of hating the oppressed group has never had a chance to get started. Whatever the cause, the Irish people as a whole are the friendliest people I’ve ever encountered.
I speak from a severely limited context. I grew up around Philadelphia, “The City of Brotherly Love.” I have never had a moment in my life where I felt for even a nanosecond that “The City of Brotherly Love” didn’t begin and end with quotation marks.
Because the first impressions of life form the background for what is to follow, I have always felt that I could say, no matter where I was, “This place is friendlier than Philadelphia.”
Everyone has heard of Philadelphia’s storied crabbiness. These stories are not apocryphal. When they had an Easter Egg hunt between games at a Phillies doubleheader, people really did boo the little kids who didn’t find eggs. Mike Schmidt’s nine-year-old son was, after the discovery of his identity, actually booed by the other kids at the schoolbus stop when his dad came to get him on a rainy day. A guy dressed like the Atlanta Falcons mascot was beaten senseless at a Monday night football game (afterward, an onlooker said, memorably, “He was asking for it”).
I have my own minor horror stories. I asked a waiter for catsup and was asked “Why?” I once asked a guy at a Philly food stand, “Can I get a Coke?” I was told, “If you have money and you give it to me, yes, you can have a Coke.”
Since my first impressions of the world were formed in the Philadelphia area, I tend to think, These people are nicer than the people I’m used to. No matter where I am (if, of course, I’m not in the greater Philadelphia area), I think that.
All of the time we were in Ireland we never saw any good old American rudeness. I saw a couple of loud drunken arguments, and they were curt with the tinkers, but, in general, everybody seemed to obey the rules of decency.
That’s why it’s too bad about England.
SEVEN
Unfortunately England
We drove south from the Cliffs of Moher and came upon a little town named Milltown Malbay. We decided to stop there because we wanted to get something to eat.
Milltown Malbay looks like a typical small Irish town (after we had seen our twentieth Irish town we realized that, on the surface, almost all little Irish towns look pretty similar). The stores are all freshly painted. (That is an actual local ordinance in many of the towns. If you own a little store you have to paint it every year.)
There is, in every little Irish town, the following: a pub, a drugstore, a grocery store, a couple of bed and breakfasts, and a Catholic church. The church is by far the most impressive building in the town.
We walked up and down the street and finally decided to visit the pub. This is an easy thing to decide in Ireland. We ordered two Guinnesses. I took a sip and was startled by how good it was. I buy Guinness in America once in a while, but I now realized that the brew doesn’t make it across the ocean in its full glory.
I took another sip. Again, fabulous. I could see why Guinness had its position in Irish culture. It deserved it. But while I was in Ireland I discovered the dark side of the lovely brown liquid. I normally weigh a little over two hundred pounds. I’m a pretty big guy. I’m sixty-two and I weighed 190 in high school. I weighed myself the day before I left for Ireland. I weighed 200. With my Doctor Atkins Guinness diet, I gained a pound and a half every day. I discovered that I weighed 225 after seventeen days there. If I stayed in Ireland for six months straight, I could begin a new career in sumo.
When we were back in America we had planned to go down to the mouth of the Shannon and see Loop Head. It had a cool name, and there is supposed to be a legendary city there under the water. But if we went north we would be driving along Galway Bay, and we were told that was beautiful. So, we decided that we would just continue whichever way we were facing. This is a good method of Irish decision-making. Saint Patrick was supposedly buried at the spot a horse chose to stop. We didn’t have a horse, so we went with the “whichever way we’re facing” method, got into the Punta, and drove out of Milltown Malbay.
After about ten minutes we figured out that we were going north.
We looked at our map and decided that we should spend the night in a little coastal town named Clifden. The drive there was amazing. Galway Ba
y is one of the most beautiful areas in Ireland: mountains, streams, sheep, and cattle, and here and there, a guy cutting turf. It’s like the Platonic ideal of “Irish.” Every time we rounded a curve there was another painting in front of us. We just kept taking pictures, because the scenery became more and more amazing as we approached the town.
We were pretty beat, so we decided to spend the night outside Clifden. We parked at a bed and breakfast. There are many, many bed and breakfasts in Ireland, so many that there are several organizations and a rating system. Kathleen and Michael Conneely owned the one we stayed at. They were so friendly it seemed as if we were staying with a family instead of renting a room. This is the way to see Ireland. At the end of our trip, when we stayed in a Hilton in Dublin, it seemed as if we were back in America.
The people who own the bed and breakfast actually live there, so your room might have a picture of their kids on the wall. The bed might creak a bit and the sink in the bathroom might be cracked, but it always seemed infinitely better than a room with a minibar and “modern art” on the walls and an array of little plastic vials, envelopes, and bottles in the bathroom.
After checking in with the Conneelys, we drove into Clifden with the sun settling into the Atlantic Ocean. It looked like the sort of thing you put at the end of a movie, and we thought this day was just about finished. We went to the pub and had a huge meal: mussels and lamb and several pint glasses. Suddenly it seemed too early to turn in.
We walked the streets of Clifden looking for loud and overt Irishness. We found it at E. J. Kings, a nice-sized pub filled with a lot of loud Irish people listening to loud Irish music while they drank Guinness and yelled occasionally in each other’s ears.
The music sounded like what is called, in Georgia, “traditional country.” As I drank, it sounded better and better.
Everyone was smoking and talking. I quit smoking a few years ago, but it is nearly impossible to stand around with a bunch of Irish people and not get in a conversation, and that leads (me at least) inevitably to butt-land. When the band was between sets we talked about Irish politics, American politics, Irish and American theater and movies, books, college, and even money.
Around one-thirty, the place was still packed. Something I asked changed the tone of a conversation I was having with a young guy from Clifden. I asked him about the town. He told me, but as he told me, his tone changed, and I discovered something that never completely leaves the Irish mind.
He told me that Clifden exported a lot of crops. Then his voice got a little more precise.
“They exported a lot of corn during the potato famine.”
Those English
This wasn’t an unusual conversation. As I went around in Ireland, I found that the wound in an Irish person’s mind is there because of the neighbor across the Irish Sea. These are ancient wounds in the Irish psyche, but they are real, and, if the people I met in Ireland are representative, the many many years haven’t healed them. To understand anything about Ireland, one has to be aware of England’s role in the sad Irish story that never seems to end.
In the movie Trainspotting, a Scottish kid complains about “being colonized by wankers.” The wankers were easy on Scotland. England is, to this day, the big black cloud of Irish history. Daniel O’Connell, in 1827, put the English thing this way:
“Accursed be the day…when invaders first touched our shores. They came to a nation famous for its love of learning, its piety, its heroism…[and]…doomed Ireland to seven hundred years of oppression.”
Ireland has a long, sad history with England. Every Irish kid who reads about it becomes another Irish mind with a little ugly area marked “England.” No matter how it is sliced it’s pretty grim. Basically, for much of its history, Ireland has been England’s little island of slaves.
This is an ancient beef. How far back can you go? America is struggling now with the idea of reparations for the descendants of slaves, but first, to be accurate, they’d have to take care of the Native Americans. In the “Ireland and England thing,” you can go back to at least medieval times and find England mercilessly beating up on its neighbor island.
The basic ugly situation is this: England “colonized” Ireland by force, and created a woeful state of affairs wherein the Irish people who lived in Ireland didn’t legally “own” their own country. The country was England’s, and they “rented” it out to Ireland. Ireland “belonged” to England, basically, because England said so and England has a better army.
If Ireland were a building, this might have “worked.” As Ireland is a country that was literally stolen from itself, it created quite a bit of what one Irishman called “collective cognitive dissonance,” among other things.
These facts seem to be central to the Irish mind, at least the Irish mind as I’ve encountered it: England has caused great, unjustified, immoral, grievous, and totally unnecessary suffering to the people of Ireland, and has done this for centuries.
This is pretty much a given in the Irish consciousness. The widely circulated Irish Notes for Teachers calls the Irish “a race that has survived a millennium of grievous struggle and persecution.” For a lot of Irish people, and a lot of Irish-Americans, that pretty well sums it up.
The Irish, as you might figure, didn’t submit meekly to the English. There were dozens of rebellions small and large, but England always won, and Ireland went deeper into oppression. The pattern was oppression, rebellion, English victory followed by increased oppression, rebellion, and so forth. Rinse, repeat.
After every rebellion there were always those saying the equivalent of “Ireland’s freedom must be watered with our blood in order to grow.” There were always more Irishmen willing to die for the next unsuccessful rebellion.
Among first-generation Irish-Americans, my introduction to “British Studies” was typical. The first thing I remember my parents telling me about England was that England had treated their Old Country in a very cruel manner. I was about six when they first told me that. I didn’t know anything about the “Old” Country; I didn’t know where the “Old” Country was. How did it get to be “Old”? Do you wear out countries and then change them?
I didn’t know the capital of the country was Dublin. I thought, until my big brother straightened me out, that Ireland was a part of New Jersey. I knew nothing about Ireland, but I knew that the English guys were the bad guys.
There is an old joke that is so well-known in Ireland that you can’t tell it because everyone has heard it. It’s not a funny joke. It’s a painful joke. Here it is:
God is in heaven. He seems to be very busy, and Saint Michael the Archangel comes up to him and asks him what he’s doing.
“I’m making this little planet. It’s called ‘Earth.’ Everything is going to be balanced there. There’ll be North America and South America. North America will be rich and South America will be poor. On the whole planet everything is going to be balanced.”
Saint Michael sees a little green dot in the Atlantic and asks God, “What’s that?”
God says, “That’s a little place called ‘Ireland.’ It’s going to be the most beautiful place in the world. It’s going to be very, very green, with lots of rivers and lakes and streams and little hills and mountains. And the people there are going to live in peace and harmony. And they are all going to be the people in the world who have the nicest life and the most beautiful land.”
“How is that going to be balanced?”
“Wait till you see the neighbors I’m giving them.”
This is, of course, a little rough on England. When I was growing up I would look at David Niven (who seemed to be in every movie when I was a kid) and think, “If they’re all like this little guy with the mustache, they can’t be that bad.” And Cary Grant? He’s English and I like him. Who wouldn’t? This guy is charming and has a self-deprecating sense of humor and very good manners. How bad can he be?
If they are all people like David Niven and Cary Grant, why do my parents th
ink that the English are monsters? By the time of The Avengers, with the beautiful Mrs. Peel and the funny Mr. Steed, I was pretty sure that England wasn’t, as my dad put it, “a cesspool of iniquity.”
But my dad had history on his side, and as I got older, the more I read, the more angry I got at the land of Niven and Grant and Mrs. Peel. It is irrational to hold a grudge against an entire nation because of something done centuries ago. Still, when you read the history of English-Irish relations, you can see that the collective Irish mind is less than thrilled by England. In very compressed form, this is the sad history. When every new Irish schoolkid comes across it, another Irish mind is less than thrilled:
It is startling to discover that Ireland was first “given” to England by Pope Adrian IV, who officially handed it over to Henry II in 1155. (This is all the more startling when you consider how much Ireland has suffered because of its Catholicism. To the English way of thinking, Ireland “provoked” a lot of hostility by supporting Catholic causes throughout modern history. But if you want to put the blame on one guy, it’s Pope Adrian.)
How did Pope Adrian “have” Ireland to “give”? Constantine was the Roman emperor who made Christianity the empire’s official religion. According to something called the “Donation of Constantine,” Constantine “gave” the Catholic Church a whole lot of countries, Ireland included. So the pope, the head of the Catholic Church, could give these countries to anyone he wanted. He “gave” Henry II the emerald isle in 1155.
Unfortunately, the Donation of Constantine later turned out to be a forgery. Everyone chose to ignore that fact. From 1155 on, the king of England “owned” Ireland. He could do what he wanted with it.
There were, however, some strings attached. The pope gave Henry the country under the stipulation that he would convert Ireland’s hordes to Christianity. Since this was centuries after Saint Patrick, Ireland was already a Christian country. The pope apparently either didn’t know or chose to ignore that. (Otherwise, why the stipulation? How could he not have known? He didn’t get the paper that day?)