A breach of social etiquette will result in your being discussed immediately after you leave the group in which you committed the offence. For example, if you remove your knickers while standing at the bar, wipe the sweat from your brow with them and, finally, blow your nose in them, no one will pass a comment, giving the impression to any nearby tourist that we are all as cool as cucumbers about these things. However, the second you leave the room pandemonium will break out, with everyone exchanging loud exclamations of outrage, offence and incredulity. You should begin each of your exclamations with the phrase ‘Did you see that?’ The worst social condemnation will take place behind a person’s back and out of earshot, so it is essentially punishment that can grow and develop in the offender’s imagination. What people might say about us when we are absent controls our present behaviour. Most of the time it is very effective.
Round Rules
It is important not to drink on your own because that is the only unambiguous evidence of having a drinking problem in Ireland. It is best to drink with a group of friends, colleagues or complete strangers in a large circle known as a round. If your friends don’t turn up or leave early, you can always join another round. In a round, the members take turns buying drinks for everyone else in the circle. This involves standing at the bar for long periods of time, followed by carrying back to the table (in one go) five pints, eight shorts with accompanying mixers, two large bottles of cider with accompanying glasses of ice and three glasses of wine, one white and two red. You can hold the six packets of Tayto between your teeth. No self-respecting Irish person uses a tray. Feck that!
There are five kinds of people in a round. You can choose which type you want to be. First, there is the first-round buyer, who is usually up first to the bar. They get things started by saying, ‘Well, what is everyone having?’ This type takes generosity to an extreme. Furthermore, they are likely to become violent if opposed. They are either rich or an alcoholic or both. The second kind of round member that you can be is the round avoider, also known as ‘that tight bastard’, who orders last, if at all. They hope that the other members will be comatose by the time the round gets around to them. This person will nominally offer to buy drinks in the opening round in the confidence that the violent first-round buyer will actively resist. The encounter usually goes as follows:
Mick [first-round buyer, rubbing his hands together and hovering about the seated group]: Well? What are ye all having?
Paddy [round avoider, wedged into the most inaccessible corner of the table]: Ah no, Mick. Sit down. You are always paying for the drinks. It’s my turn. I’ll go. [He shouldn’t move even an eyebrow.]
Mick: No. No. Paddy, I’ll get these. I’ll get the ball rolling. You stay where you are. Don’t worry yourself.
Paddy: No. I insist. It’s my shout. Oh, okay. Go on so!
Mick: I’ll get fifteen bags of Tayto with that because we’ll need the soakage.
Mick [muttering to himself on the way to the counter]: Tight bastard.
There are several tactics that the round avoider can use. These range from claiming to have a bad back, which prevents them from standing at the bar, to having paralysed fingers, preventing them from carrying drinks or opening their wallet. In general, it is expected that the round avoider will be as imaginative as possible in order not to gratuitously offend. Finally, when they are absolutely certain that the barman has closed the bar because he has already refused drinks to several violently drunk patrons, they should loudly volunteer to buy a round. Returning empty-handed to the table, they should claim to be very depressed by the outcome and promise to buy the first drink on the next occasion.
The third type of round member is the round partners, also known as ‘not those two again’, a group of two, which, for the purposes of the round, should be identified as one. If you are a round partner, you should identify yourself from the beginning by saying, ‘I’m with him or her’, whereby you mean that you form a single economic unit, one of whom has left their wallet at home because the other one has the money. These round partnerships are legitimate social ties more binding than marriage. Couples become formally recognised when they come out and admit to being ‘with each other’ for the sake of a round. A round partner, whose other half has already bought a round, is usually allowed to skip their turn if they are not economically autonomous.
In very large rounds there may be several sub-rounds forming, or rounds within rounds. Each sub-round may contain its own first-round buyer, round partners and round avoider. In some rounds, there will be sub-rounds within sub-rounds.
The fourth round member type is called the normal round member, who quietly buys their round when it is their turn. There are many counties in Ireland where the normal round member is now extinct. Normal round members have been driven out by an increase in the population of a new species, the reluctant round member, which is related to the round avoider. The reluctant round member is more robust than the normal round member and resists as much as possible any trip to the counter, even to buy Taytos. They usually give in but only after a great deal of palaver. There was a successful television campaign against the round in general, because it can be depressing to witness so much ducking and diving on the part of the reluctant round member.
How to Cry into Your Pint
If you feel like a good cry, go to the pub and try the traditional practice of crying into your pint. If you have any nostalgia, it should be for a time when you were even more miserable than you are now. To help with your crying, there is a canon of misery literature you can bring to the pub with you. Frank McCourt has popularised the misery genre with Angela’s Ashes. While he has a genius for hyperbole, he is not my favourite Irish misery-guts writer. His weakness is that he tries for misery. Real misery in Irish writing should come naturally. This happens on those rare occasions of genius when the writer has an innate talent for misfortune. My favourite Irish misery book is Peig, narrated by Peig Sayers. In this book, misery flows like a stream between the rocks of misfortune, eventually flowing into a lake of pure grief. I like Peig (I am probably the only person in the history of Ireland that has ever used that phrase) for several important sociological reasons. First, it was a mandatory Irish text on the Leaving Certificate syllabus. In other words, we had to read it. It was what anthropologists call a rite of passage. In anthropology we love rites of passage and Peig has all the features of the most tortuous. While American students were planning their prom night, we were sitting at home in the candlelight crying over a translation from the Irish that made as little sense as the original.
For those of you who are privileged not to know, Peig is an ethnographic account of the life of a woman, straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Kerry. In a way, she should be my role model because, in effect, she wrote the first account of how to be Irish. The high point of her book, and of her life, occurs when she throws a turnip at someone. She married, moved to the Blasket Islands where everyone around her died (she had that effect) and where most of her innumerable children blew off a cliff (my translation wasn’t very reliable). The first rule of being Irish is that you have to have suffered reading Peig in any language. In school, affecting apathy to Peig was not just a badge of honour that would get you into trouble with your Irish teacher; it would also get you out of being sent to the Gaeltacht, the Irish language reservations, during the summer holidays. I also admired Peig because it was carefully crafted to produce incompetence in the Irish language after a mere thirteen years of reading.
Every year now I go to her grave just to dance on it (traditional style only) in revenge for the abject misery that that book caused me. Then I go to the local pub for a cry into my pint. If Peig had died young, Ireland would be a different place. We owe her our identity. Enduring Peig in school is the sine non qua of Irishness. However, following a singular and rash outbreak of liberalism within the otherwise reliably conservative Department of Education, Peig is now an optional book on the Irish language syllabus.
Therefore, it has lost both its iconic power and its role in our cultural formation. I worry for future generations of Irish people who no longer have to read this. I asked someone currently at school if she was reading Peig for her Leaving Certificate Irish examination. She told me that, actually, like, she thought that Peig was, like, a cow, like, and that she actually wouldn’t be reading it, like. I asked her if she thought that Peig was the biography of an actual cow. She said, ‘Not a cow with, like, milk but, like, a cow cow.’
Future Leaving Certificate Irish classes will be different from those of my generation. They won’t really be Irish. They won’t have anything to cry about. If you have not read Peig at school, do not despair of becoming Irish. There are acceptable alternatives, that we allow under strict conditions, to reading that ethnography. You can nail your hand to the bar counter or beat yourself around the head with a shillelagh. Has reading Peig affected me? Of course it has. But at least it gives me something to cry about.
How to Be Normal
Whatever culture you live in, it’s important to be a normal member of that society. In Ireland we all want to be normal. I overheard the following conversation between two women, who were having a few quiet pints together in the pub, which illustrates our desire to fit in. The first woman, commenting on a mutual acquaintance, said, ‘It wouldn’t matter to me if she were a midget as long as she tried to be a normal circus midget. I don’t mean a midget in a normal circus. I mean a normal midget in a normal circus.’
After a reflective pause, the second woman responded, ‘With your one I wouldn’t be surprised to see her applying to Fossett’s for the job of circus midget and she actually five foot eight.’
‘Of course, then she would be bitching to us when she wasn’t given the job,’ the first concluded philosophically.
* * *
The pub is the best place to come to terms with the fact that life keeps changing in Ireland. A blow-in friend, Rob,3 got a pure shite conversation underway in a pub in Schull with an observation on what he thought was the most important change in Ireland over the last ten years. This was the fact that ‘The man who was pretending to be a woman calling out bingo numbers on national television seems to have turned back into a man again. What is going on?’ Could this mean that we are becoming more conventional or does it mean that transvestites are now passé amongst our bingo audience?
One of the most disappointing changes to affect pub life in Ireland is the liberalisation of closing hours. Because most pubs can now legally stay open late into the night, it is much more difficult to engage in the exciting experience of the lock-in.
When pubs had to legally close at eleven, it was customary to arrive at the remoter pubs at midnight so that you could be locked in with the rest of the customers. With the reform of opening hours, this practice of locking in is rare now and only occurs, if at all, as a nostalgic ritual. While most people who frequent pubs at night believe that the extension of opening hours is a good thing, from an anthropological point of view I regret the passing of an important tradition that produced a shared social bond amongst those breaking the law.
The practice of circumventing formal pub hours has a long history in Ireland. The closing of pubs on certain days and at specific hours usually only increases the desire for the unavailable drinks. It is still common to see people running around the streets in a panic on Good Friday, gasping for an illegal drink, despite their own stockpiles at home. Everyone knows that a legal drink is not the same thing. Because the pub is supposed to be closed, being locked in produces a special social bond amongst the customers not available during normal opening hours. This bond was not lessened by the fact that the practice of locking in took place every night in the same pubs at exactly the same time. The lock-in would sometimes be delayed until the last tourist had left the premises because tourists will usually ‘get out now’ once they have been told to do so by the barman. Once the last tourist was out, the door would be bolted, the black-out curtains drawn and the illicit drinking could begin.
In order to maintain the tension at my local lock-in, it was necessary for the Gardaí to organise sporadic raids. What is the point in breaking the law if the law doesn’t ever chase you? Every three weeks or so, the barman, after peeping through the curtains at the street outside, would whisper loudly, ‘Quick, take your drinks and get out the back – the Guards are outside.’ We would run into the backyard and try to stay as quiet as possible but someone would always start a whispered conversation to enhance the tension. Next day, those who were locked in together would exchange knowing nods when they met each other on the street and say, ‘Close one last night.’
A typical lock-in in a country pub would consist of the barman offering educational lectures on a wide range of topics to his captive audience. These lectures typically covered the subjects of thermodynamics and political ethics. The barman would hold forth at length on the relative merits and performance indicators of diesel versus petrol engines in second-hand cars, while polishing glasses. On a different evening, there could be critical assessments of the effectiveness of our local political representatives. The most important rule of being locked in was that you could not leave before anyone else because you would then become the subject of his lectures. But you could also be picked on by staying put.
One night, the barman pointed at me sitting up at the counter and, addressing his audience, said, ‘Look at your man there. What kind of a fecking doctor is he? He won’t treat children or animals who are a bit peaky and he calls himself a doctor!’
I tried to defend myself. ‘You know our former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald?’ I said. ‘He didn’t treat children or sick pigs and he was a doctor.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said the barman, suddenly enlightened, ‘You’re in the fecking Fine Gael party.’
3
Blow-Ins: Dingle, the Poor Plastic Paddy’s Schull
Other people have a nationality. The Irish … have a psychosis.
(Brendan Behan)
There are two reasons why anthropologists study cultures that are not their own. First of all, it allows the anthropologist to see what is noteworthy in a culture that may remain invisible to the native. Second, it is customary for the anthropologist to compare a culture with their own to provide insight into both. For example, nineteenth-century anthropologists were disturbed by stories of cannibalism in newly explored parts of Africa, not because of an innate vegetarianism but because it caused them to wonder if Europeans were cannibals at any time in their own cultural development. Contemporary foreigners, travelling to Ireland for the first time, might suspect that we have cannibalistic tendencies because of our Hiberno-English reference to eating each other during our everyday interactions. But the verb ‘to eat’ has no culinary etymology in this context. When an Irish child tells her parents, ‘In school today Miss Murphy ate me because I was daydreaming in class’ or someone says to you, ‘She will eat you if you tell her that her arse is big in that dress,’ they are using the Hiberno-English verb which, translated into English, means ‘to reprimand’. Hiberno-English synonyms are the verbs ‘to attack’ or ‘to savage’. Thus, we can see such anomalies with the help of an outside perspective.
To help us learn more about ourselves, I look at other cultures in order to get some insight into our own. However, I didn’t travel abroad for this research. Instead, I studied the foreigners who have come to live here, those strange creatures who have voluntarily given up the comforts of cultural familiarity to live amongst us. I wanted to find out from them what they think makes us who we are, or, indeed, what makes them different.
Any guide to Irishness must take into account those unfortunates who want to emigrate here as a lifestyle choice or who may have relocated here against their will as part of a witness protection programme. The practical approach, if you find yourself in this position, is not to become Irish but to pretend to be Irish. We Irish will always be able to tell the difference even if you can’t. While the terms blow-in and Plas
tic Paddy are often used interchangeably, technically those who have come here, usually against their will, and are stuck here for whatever reason are blow-ins. Those who have come here and want to stay and adopt our habits are Plastic Paddies. This latter group think they are really Irish but it is practically impossible to fake it. However, if you are a blow-in just killing time in the West or you are an earnest Plastic Paddy, you might follow the rules for becoming Irish; you might follow the example of those who have gone before you, some of whom I interviewed for my research. Like my nineteenth-century anthropological forebears, I did have to undertake some arduous travel: I had to travel to the West to find these people.
Many of my informants claimed that people are the same wherever you go. If that were true then anthropologists would be out of a job. By looking at the slight things, anthropologists see the small differences that make a real difference. At the same time, we are not very interested in the big cultural differences.
The anthropologist must also try to ignore what is already generally well known. For example, during my research, I kept hearing that we are not as organised as the Germans. Most blow-ins also tell us that we are friendly but not intimate; even the word intimate makes us worried that something embarrassing is going to happen.
I also found out that, if you are a little bit different in Denmark, it is easier to fit in here than at home. It’s not that we are tolerant; it’s that we don’t mind what people who aren’t related to us do. And, yes, Danish oddballs can still be a bit different over here. Also, a number of blow-ins felt they should try harder to learn Irish because it is obviously important, though no one seems to know why.
How to Be Irish Page 4