Learning to Love Ireland

by Althea Farren

  There was no sense of urgency. He’d managed without reading and writing for fifty years.

  I wasn’t able to use the resources available at the VEC in Gorey since I was away all day in Enniscorthy, so I compiled most of my own reading material and exercises. Sometimes this took longer than I’d bargained for. And it wasn’t much fun going out in the pouring rain in winter to deliver a lesson. There wasn’t enough time to prepare dinner on lesson evenings – I’d have to sort it out when I got home afterwards, by which time Larry and I were starving.

  When Fergal told me that he’d been in a bank queue the previous week and had recognised the words ‘statement’ and ‘customers’, his face lit up.

  ‘I understand what that’s about,’ he said, looking surprised and pleased after finishing my article on giant pandas. ‘I never used to know what I was reading about. It was just a jumble of words.’

  The storey about the pandas was intesting. Dublin zoo has lots of animals. They have red pandas their but not giant pandas.

  He’d written three sentences on his own.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I was looking forward to the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2008, but needed to clarify a couple of things that I found puzzling. If this was a European competition, why was Israel competing? And what about the strange voting system? Could the best song win, or was it simply a question of political alliances? Serbia’s ‘Molitva’ sung by Marija Šerifović deserved to win in 2007, anyway, I thought.

  Eurovision actually had nothing to do with the EU, I discovered. It was a contest for countries whose national television broadcasters were members of the European Broadcasting Union.

  The current voting system was known as a ‘positional voting system’. Each country involved awarded a set of points to its favourite songs – the highest score being 12 points. For years, apparently, there had been controversy about the practice of voting for one’s friends and neighbours. This was known as ‘friendly voting’, ‘bloc voting’ or ‘vote rigging’. (Zimbabweans were no strangers to vote rigging, naturally.) There were ‘conspiracy’ theorists and ‘cultural’ theorists. The conspiracy theorists held that there were three large voting blocs; that the impact of these had become more evident in the last few years and that the voting system was a farce. The cultural theorists believed that voting patterns were probably based on such characteristics as the same religion and language and shared tastes.

  Ireland had the highest number of wins in the history of Eurovision – we’d won the contest seven times.

  Would we proudly carry the tricolour and bring the laurels back to Ireland in 2008?

  Our hopes were to be centred on Dustin the Turkey, a glove puppet and intermittently ‘fowl-mouthed’ popular entertainer of children, singing the ungrammatically titled ‘Irelande Douze Pointe’. His act was considered by his fans to be a witty parody of the contest – an amusing spoof. Unfortunately, the audience in Belgrade (where Eurovision 2008 was being held) just didn’t ‘get it’. Dustin failed to progress past the first semi-final stage and Ireland suffered the indignity of its entry being booed.

  This was not surprising, since such lyrics as:

  Eastern Europe, we love you

  Do you like Irish stew?

  Or goulash as it is to you?

  weren’t exactly up to the standard of past winners such as ABBA’s Waterloo, Céline Dion’s Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi or Eimear Quinn’s The Voice.

  In an incisive article in the Sunday Independent of 25 May 2008 Pat Fitzgerald wrote: ‘What we thought was a brilliant, post-modern deconstruction of kitsch culture, the rest of Europe saw as a beak in a shopping trolley wheezing something unintelligible, while two female prison guards in bondage gear weaved about...’ Larissa Nolan, writing in the same paper, commented: ‘Some things are so bad, they’re good. Dustin the Turkey’s pathetic, amateur and cringe-inducingly godawful entry in last week’s Eurovision, however, was not one of them... It made us look like the thick Paddy stereotype that we have been trying to shake off for decades...’

  The various columnists were a lot more amusing than Dustin.

  Three weeks later we gave the EU and our own government a hefty kick up the butt by returning a ‘No’ vote on the Lisbon Treaty.

  Larry and I had made a genuine effort to read the text, but it was so tedious that we gave up after a few pages. Instead we read summaries and listened to discussions about its important features. Someone made the point that if you’re buying a house, you don’t necessarily read all the small print yourself – you engage a lawyer to act on your behalf and in your best interests...

  By rejecting the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland prevented the European Union from setting in motion the provisions that would enable it to deal more effectively with issues such as globalisation, climate change, energy security, sustainable development, cross-border crime and immigration. Europe, understandably, was not impressed, since the Treaty was the fruit of what Time Magazine called ‘seven years of interminable negotiations’.

  Why did the Irish people vote ‘No’?

  Åine Kerr also writing in the Independent (12 June 2008) argued that the principal question posed by the ‘Yes’ campaign centred on the concept of trust.

  ‘Do you trust those who argue that three-year-olds will be detained, teenagers could be conscripted into a European Army or the European Court of Justice will have the power to insist that Ireland legalise abortion...?

  ...Or do you trust five political parties who hold 96% of the Dáil seats, the umbrella group of ICTU (Irish Congress of Trade Unions) representing 600,000 workers, IBEC (Irish Business and Employers Confederation) representing over 7,000 employers and negotiations involving 26 other states...?’

  The pro-treaty campaigners argued that the European Union would be good for ‘future job creation, future direct investment and future trade links just as it has been over these past 35 years’. The treaty was, said Åine Kerr, ‘a cleaning up exercise, aimed at improving efficiencies and reducing the multiple layers of bureaucracy. It had no one major headline act...’

  Larry and I believed that Ireland’s guaranteed access to the world’s largest market with its combined GDP of nearly €13 trillion was, in itself, sufficient reason to vote ‘Yes’.

  The ‘No’ campaigners insisted that Ireland would be dangerously disadvantaged if we did not oppose the Lisbon Treaty. We must refuse to be bullied by the rest of Europe, particularly by the larger member states like Germany and France. If we voted ‘No’ we would safeguard our neutrality, protect our tax system and retain our Irish identity. We must avoid the introduction of European legislation here – it was imperative that we defend our sovereignty. The Treaty would undermine workers’ rights. It would also open the door to conscription, abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage.

  Ultimately, urged the ‘No’ campaign, it was our duty as responsible citizens to vote ‘No’ if we didn’t understand the issues. By voting ‘No’, we would be rejecting the treaty on behalf of all the ‘ordinary men and women’ in the other 26 countries who had been denied the right to vote themselves. We would thus be championing the cause of democracy. Having rejected the Treaty, we must send our government back to Europe to negotiate a better deal.

  The government and the ‘Yes’ campaigners were surprisingly blasé considering Ireland’s initial rejection of the Treaty of Nice in June 2001. They took it for granted that the Irish people would trust their elected leaders and vote ‘sensibly’. That was their mistake. They didn’t do enough to counter the damaging disinformation being peddled by the ‘No’ campaign and they failed to appreciate the extent of the electorate’s anger and disillusionment. They were being punished for the economic downturn, for problems in the Health Service, for the embarrassing revelations of corruption uncovered by the Mahon Tribunal and for not having read and digested every word of the unintelligible Treaty themselves. The prime minister, Taoiseach Brian Cowen, and Charlie McCreevy, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services,
both admitted with reckless honesty that they had not actually read the document from cover to cover.

  A poll published in the Irish Independent on Saturday 21 June indicated that 22% of those who voted ‘No’ did so because they ‘did not know enough about the Treaty and would not vote for something they were not familiar with’.

  Larry and I agreed with those who felt that if people didn’t understand the issues, they shouldn’t vote at all. It was irresponsible to vote ‘No’ for this reason.

  In the second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in October 2009, Ireland voted ‘Yes’. Pat Cox (President of the European Parliament from 2002 to 2004), had predicted the change in attitude. In an interview with Der Spiegel, he said that the Irish people had been ‘profoundly shocked by the speed and depth of the economic crisis’ and that ‘a cold shower of economic reality’ was influencing public opinion. The electorate had also been mollified by the legal pledges Brian Cowen had sought and won. At a summit in Brussels in June 2009, the EU provided guarantees to Ireland that it would remain independent in determining tax policies, military neutrality and abortion law.

  Hungarian academic and MEP, George Schopflin, commented that ‘referenda offer power without responsibility’. He maintained that they ‘provided an opportunity for ad hoc coalitions that never have to worry about the outcome’. Ironically, the far right and the far left who could never govern together were able to ‘operate as spoilers’. This was the case, he said, in the Lisbon Treaty vote where ‘right-wing Catholics made common cause with left-wingers suspicious of Europe’.

  In spite of their government’s efforts to intimidate them, hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans exercise their right to vote each time an ‘election’ is held. Although they know that ZANU (PF) will rig the results, casting a vote for the opposition MDC is the only means they have of expressing their dissatisfaction with the Mugabe regime.

  I voted in the elections of 2000 and 2002. But in 2005, my name had mysteriously disappeared from the list of eligible voters. Since the voters’ roll is never made available for inspection (not even to the director of elections of an opposition party), it’s impossible to rectify errors or omissions in advance of an election.

  We’re in the queue waiting to vote. There are armed policemen outside the school hall. I know they know I’ll be voting for the MDC – not many white people would vote for ZANU (PF). I feel angry, defiant and determined. We run the gauntlet of scowling election officials and more armed policemen as we inch forward. Finally we make our way into the hall. We approach the first desk where an officer checks for our names on her list.

  Mine isn’t there so I can’t vote, she says. I’m furious. I ask to speak to the person in charge. He’s at the far end of the room. There are others queuing at his desk – both black and white – they, too, have been disenfranchised. He’s polite, he’s sorry, but he can’t help me. I must send a request to be reinstated to the Department of the Registrar General in Harare along with certified copies of my birth certificate, marriage certificate and passport. And now, would I please go outside...

  Meanwhile, they’ve ascertained that Larry’s name is on their list. The next step is the checking of his hands for traces of ink. (He may be fraudulently attempting to vote a second time.) He puts his hands, first the right and then the left, into the scanning machine which looks a bit like a hand-dryer. When the operator of the scanner has confirmed that the result is negative, Larry is directed to move on to the next station where he is instructed to place his thumbs and fingers separately on the inked surface of a pad. He is to roll them carefully so that each is evenly coated. (He won’t be able to vote again now.) At the next desk, he is given a ballot paper. He goes into a booth, watched by police and election monitors and places his X on the paper. He folds it, holds it up, waits for an acknowledgement, and then pushes it into the slot of the opaque ballot box. He exits through the side door of the hall and joins me outside where I’m standing under a tree simmering with impotent rage.

  The whole rigmarole is a ridiculous façade, of course. After the ballot boxes have been stuffed with ZANU (PF) ‘votes’, the ballot papers will be counted in secret. Then the election officers (all of whom are ZANU (PF), anyway) will announce whatever result suits them.

  When Larry and I voted in Gorey for the first time, we were greeted at the door of the polling station by an unarmed policeman, shown to a classroom where we had our names checked against the register and then invited to vote.

  No queues.

  No scanners.

  No ink.

  No sense of menace.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The early spring sunshine lured our neighbours out of their houses at last, and onto the benches around the courtyard. It had been a long cold winter.

  The warmth lifted everyone’s mood. The sky was bright blue. Not a cloud anywhere. The smokers leaned back to exhale, lifting their faces upwards like sunflowers. Gerry was putting seed into his bird-feeders. He loved the little birds, but wasn’t so keen on the crows or the jackdaws. He was also our resident gardening expert. He would tell us what mix of compost and potting soil to use and where to buy the most effective slug and snail pellets. His flowers inspired the rest of us, but, no matter how hard we tried, his were always bigger, brighter and more spectacular than ours.

  We were a mix of Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere people. Gerry and Susan were farmers also from Zimbabwe; Louise was from New Zealand and Cynthia from South Africa.

  South Africans, Zimbabweans, Aussies and Kiwis tended to stick together. I used to ask Sean and Brian why they didn’t socialise more with the ‘locals’ in the UK. They’d laugh and say: ‘You won’t believe how difficult that is, Mum...’ I thought they were being lazy. But I’d realised since we’d been in Ireland that it was easier to mix with people of the same tribe – those whose interests and culture were similar to yours.

  A Polish girl said much the same thing on a radio programme recently. It had taken her a long time to make Irish friends. Most of her colleagues were polite but reserved, and didn’t readily admit outsiders to their social circle.

  We exchanged pleasantries with our Irish neighbours at Tara Close, but hadn’t progressed much beyond that same ‘lovely day’ we were talking about when we first arrived.

  ‘I just don’t know who I am, any more,’ Louise had said a few weeks before. Her sense of dislocation was acute. She knew there was no point in yearning for her old familiar life. She would never go back to New Zealand.

  I’d read about Nuala O’Faolain’s famous interview with Marian Finucane on radio. I knew that Nuala had died less than a month afterwards of cancer, having made the decision not to undergo chemotherapy treatment. Her book Are You Somebody? had sat for months in my bookcase with other 50 cent ‘finds’ from charity shops before I made the connection.

  From page one her voice spoke to me. It was the voice of someone who was trying to make sense of herself and of her life. It was the voice of someone who felt that she had wasted too much time trying to become herself.

  Comments about Nuala and her effect on others kept cropping up in newspapers and on the radio and TV. Typical was Christina Reihill’s remark in the Irish Independent (8 February 2009): ‘Nuala O’Faolain’s autobiography Are You Somebody? landed in my hands like a rope pulling me through a swamp, when it was published...’

  It is often painful coming to terms with who we are. We all want to be loved and we all want to be acknowledged. We all want our voices heard. Nuala said that she needed not simply to speak. She needed to ‘howl’.

  Wouldn’t we all like to howl sometimes?

  An email from a friend, once headmaster of a large school, and now retired and living in Cape Town, reinforced what Nuala had said:

  Although, like you and Larry, I’ve had to leave Zim, still being on the African continent has made the adjustment for me much easier as the life-style, weather and social life are not all that different. Delia has quite a lot of family here i
ncluding her mother and both her daughters and they’ve all helped to settle us comfortably.

  I know just how hard it is to make new friends as you get older. The thing that upset me most was that hardly anyone knew me when I walked about in the shopping mall. It’s probably an ego thing, but I must say I miss being ‘someone’.

  In Ireland, very few people spoke to us of anything that really mattered to them.

  In Zimbabwe it had been so different.

  In 2001 Larry, Glyn and I had published Voices of Zimbabwe, the book we’d written together after Mugabe’s government-run farm invasions had wrecked so many lives. We’d hoped to make some sense of the chaos and the anguish by articulating differing and conflicting points of view and also to raise the profile of the rapidly escalating crisis.

  A friend who’d read the book asked me to listen to her neighbour’s story. Priscilla, a black nurse, believed that if her experiences were recorded, she might feel less angry and helpless, and even come to terms with her rage. While working at a rural hospital some years before, she had seen terrible things – the sort of things most of us could barely imagine. I wrote down her account of how the people in her remote village in the bush had been harassed by Rhodesian soldiers and terrorised by guerrillas during the ‘liberation struggle’ in the 1970s. She told me that she had been forced to watch a young woman being tortured by black ‘freedom fighters’...

  Her name was Vimbai, which means Trust in God. They forced her to lie naked on her back, spread-eagled in front of the silent people. Close by, several of them were tending a fire, raking the burning coals into a glowing, red heap. Vimbai was whimpering in terror, begging for mercy. We were transfixed with fear and horror, as we knew what they were going to do to her...