How to Be Irish

by David Slattery

  From a standpoint outside of the Irish family, it is easy to confuse complaining with unhappiness. But, for us, complaining is just a habit we have gotten into. We are never happier than when we are having a good moan about each other. Couples who have been happily married for years routinely express their devotion by complaining about each other to anyone who cannot get away. This is because, being Irish, we are too embarrassed and definitely too emotionally inhibited to use affectionate language in public. Married couples are often so obsessively in love with each other that they complain all day long, every day. After Christmas, devoted wives will get together in golf clubs or at coffee mornings to compete with each other over which husband deserves the accolade for being the most neglectful, most thoughtless and most useless around the house.

  What Applies to Them and Us

  Divide your kinship system into them and us. Those who normally live in your house on all the other days of the year are us; all those others in your house on Christmas Day are them. You can alleviate the stress of having Christmas guests by drinking straight vodka from coffee mugs. Even if you have an established alcohol problem, it is best not to call attention to it by drinking straight from the bottle on Christmas Day. Pour a large measure of vodka into a number of festive mugs and leave them strategically around the house for us. This way, you and your family can give the impression that you are just enjoying a sociable coffee together. If you like, ask them to join you in a coffee, but remember to serve them coffee and not vodka; coffee, not vodka. When you eventually fall over on the floor laughing or crying, or both, or you sag into a corner and snore, the more sober members of your vodka-in-coffee-cup drinking circle can excuse your behaviour by telling the rest of your guests that you are just exhausted from all the work you put in to make this Christmas special for them.

  Christmas Dinner Conversation Rules

  Corral your guests together, herding them with a ladle, and ply them with drinks. This will both improve their appetites and dull their critical faculties. Don’t serve a starter for Christmas dinner because it is too difficult to manage a main course, dessert and secret drinking on top of a starter. If desperate to make an impression, allow them to suck on half a grapefruit, which you prepared earlier by halving it.

  There is a significant literature on how to produce a moist turkey, but what it ignores is the fact that most Irish people, while they won’t admit to it, secretly like dry turkey. One informant told me that, coming up to Christmas, he worries that his wife will discover a technique that actually works for producing a moist turkey. Once the turkey has been placed in the oven, it should be henceforth referred to as the bird, that is not your brother’s new girlfriend. As the fear of turkey-based food poisoning is a deeply embedded national food anxiety, turkeys should roast in the oven for twenty minutes per pound of meat plus eight hours. If you actually over-do it, you can use a saline drip to revive the turkey.

  Remove the bird from the oven, allowing it to rest while the male members of the family compete to carve. This should take about thirty minutes. If you hope to win the right to carve, you should be otherwise unfamiliar with a kitchen or be unable to use a knife. But you should be able to subdue the competing males using drunken headlocks and menacing behaviour with an electric carving knife. Don’t threaten to sulk for the rest of the day if you are unsuccessful, because then you will only be playing into your host’s hands.

  Once the bird is hacked and served, the cook should open the dinner conversation by asking the diners to comment on the relative moisture content of the turkey. Diners will also be asked to draw comparisons with previous Christmas turkeys. It is customary for the cook to ask, ‘What do you think of the bird? Do you think it is too dry?’ This is a ritual, so remember, without reference to the reality on your plate, the customary response is ‘No, it is very nice. Very moist. Delicious. Hmnnn. Hmnnnn. Can I have more gravy please?’ After this ritualistic response, you will be invited to compare it with last year’s turkey, regardless of the fact that you were in Aksai Chin last year avoiding Christmas. You should affect an exact memory of last year’s bird, responding with ‘This year’s bird is much better.’ At this point, inquire about the unique cooking technique, which allows you to pretend that you actually have some interest in the state of the bird. Your host will take you through Richard Corrigan’s recommendations, which they followed, but adding their own twist.

  While you will not be asked to comment on the quality of the vegetables in the same detail, you may be asked to remark positively on the variety and whether or not the carrots are cooked to your liking. Before you can respond, you will be told that we Irish have an unfortunate habit of over-cooking our vegetables and that it is really for your own self-improvement as a gourmand that you are being exposed to al dente carrots. This is because your host should have forgotten to cook the carrots because they were in a pot under the kitchen table, which, following annual custom, were discovered only a minute before dinner was served.

  Ever more varieties of vegetables have been added to the traditional Irish Christmas dinner menu. No contemporary traditional dinner is complete without fifteen varieties of vegetable, including arracacha and nopales. You should serve bread sauce, onion sauce and gravy – and tomato ketchup because you will have forgotten the cranberry sauce. On Christmas morning, observe the ritual of calling on your neighbour to borrow cranberry sauce, which they should also have forgotten to buy. Stay for a gin and tonic that you are allowed to drink from a glass. You should demonstrate at least five potato-cooking techniques – because you are Irish – including baked, roast, boiled, gratin and one of your own devising.

  Polite Irish Christmas dinner conversation typically takes the form of monologues that can run in parallel – but we don’t like to talk about ourselves. Popular soliloquies include relating in minute detail the opinions and attitudes of strangers that you met on a train or plane; people you met in your psychiatrist’s waiting room; or people you read about in the newspaper. If you run out of factual information, because the subject of your monologues is unknown to everyone else, you can endlessly improvise by adding illuminative detail at will. Before you start, be as confident as possible that no one present knows those you choose to monologue about. Remember, in polite Irish conversation an evergreen subject is to relate the successes of the children of complete strangers to your own children. Christmas dinner is the best time for Irish parents to report on how their children’s old classmates are doing. Irish Christmas dinner conversation between mothers and daughters should take the form of a monologue as follows:

  Mother: When I met B [insert the name of any unknown person frequently referenced on family occasions] last week, she told me that her eldest, M – you remember M? She was in school with you. No? That is funny. I was sure you would remember her. She won the school millennium prize for her outstanding contributions to scholarship, sport and international charity fundraising in her final year. She was in all the papers. She was on the telly. Surely you remember her? No? How strange. You remember she was tall with that beautiful hair and skin. Not a spot. Not a blemish. She never missed a day out of school. You were probably in hospital having your acne operation on the day of the award ceremony. Well, never mind, but you should get that memory checked out. I believe drink is very bad for the memory cells in your brain. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. B was telling me that after M qualified as a paediatrician, she saved the lives of literally millions of babies in Africa. She is now married to the president of a pharmaceutical company that provides reduced-price condoms to HIV victims in the Third World. When she was young she kept her head down and concentrated on her studies, waiting for the right man to come along. She didn’t allow herself to become pregnant at sixteen and end up with someone who doesn’t even know what a condom is. She has two beautiful children, one of each – a boy and girl. Neither of them is stunted with a learning disorder because she didn’t smoke or drink when she was pregnant. They live in a wonderful house overlooking
the sea. Her mother tells me that she is the happiest person in Ireland. I suppose we are all happy in our own way.

  The particular daughter to whom the monologue is addressed should throw down her cutlery, scream that she ‘can’t stand this anymore’, and rush from the room. Her sisters should say that they will bring her back. The daughter should have fled to a room where festive mugs of gin have been pre-hidden for this eventuality. The sisters should drink the gin and exchange small talk about how well they think the day is going before returning to dinner.

  Someone will say, ‘For God’s sake, Mother. Can you talk about something else? J went to a lot of trouble cooking dinner for you.’ Mother will say, ‘What have I said? I was just telling you how well M is getting on. I thought you would have been happy for her. I suppose I will say nothing at all. Just keep my mouth shut. Saying nothing is the best policy. Poor Mrs R was telling me last week about how she is confined to bed after her gall-bladder operation went badly wrong when the doctors removed her spleen by accident…’

  If, between courses, you ask your sister-in-law how her attempts to have a baby are going, you know that you are drunk. Switch to water for forty minutes.

  Then there is the silent relative who rarely speaks except to grunt to confirm that they are still alive. These are to be cherished and should be a chair-filler at all your family events.

  Rules for Having Arguments

  In general, the volume of continuous complaining accompanying each dinner course is an indication of how well a Christmas dinner is going. While you have done your best up to this point to deflect or postpone conflict, once seated at the dinner table it is important to get the family quarrels underway as quickly as possible. Don’t leave people waiting. Once everyone is seated, it is polite to kick-off immediately. Irish people cause family arguments in order to get attention – any form of attention is better than being ignored. As Oscar Wilde used to say when he still lived in Ireland, ‘There is only one thing worse than fighting with your family, and that’s not fighting with them.’

  After dinner you can compete walrus-like for some space on the couch, where you then lie, stunned, watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. If you are feeling more agile, you can play a board game or a game of cards. Or you can participate in a family row.

  The rules of family rows are straightforward. One participant gets the row going and at least one other keeps it going. Some of my relations have been known to take on both roles simultaneously, so if you are on your own for Christmas you can play the solitaire version. Family-based arguments and resentments require the participants to have extraordinary memories which continue to function under the influence of alcohol. Take any one of three common approaches to get the argument underway. First, there is the who has always been treated better than whom and by whom discussion. This is where one family member voices the view that another member of the family, preferably a sibling, has historically been routinely treated better by a parent than them and/or anyone else. The examples offered of unequal treatment should relate back to incidents that happened at least twenty years ago. This family row scenario should ideally reference frequently rehearsed incidences involving larger dolls, better clothes, being allowed to stay out longer or more often when young, being taken on more holidays, getting more pocket money and getting better presents at Christmas. If the participants are very drunk, a parent should be accused of loving the other sibling more. This will cause a very sudden embarrassed silence that will allow for glasses to be re-filled. You should also make time for the other participants to remember their grievances. But use the love word extremely sparingly and only if the row is in danger of fizzling out. A variation on this theme is to repeat the view that, while everyone was treated badly, you were treated worst of all.

  The second common approach to starting the family row is to speculate aloud who amongst the participants is most likely to be the beneficiary of the single, elderly, ill and very rich potential benefactress aunt, who is at this time passed out in the corner of the couch. This is the who is getting the old bag’s money discussion. The opening gambit can lead to the more interesting version of this row, focussing on who deserves to be left everything. Each candidate should list their reasons why they should be the one, illustrating their argument with examples of good deeds that they did for their aunt. There is no need to wait for another player to finish their reasons before shouting out yours. Satisfactory examples of behaviour meriting inheritance include visiting every other year, not returning phone calls to avoid rows, begging money off her for your round-the-world trip, stealing cigarettes from her handbag to help her avoid lung cancer, stealing her handbag and borrowing her car for two years as a road safety measure. Whatever it is you do to show your special affection, don’t move the old bat in with you for forty years and ‘wait on her hand and foot’, because if you do that she will definitely leave you nothing.

  The third standard technique for starting a family argument is to ask whose turn it is to [insert an unpopular familial responsibility, such as hosting Christmas next year or taking your unconscious aunt to the hospital]?

  The older you are the better scope you have for rowing, because you probably only have long-term memory. This means you can draw exclusively on memories from ancient family history, giving you an advantage over younger branches of the family tree. Older relatives can engage in subsidiary rows involving discussions going back over fifty years.

  The Irish like to row, so if your newly adopted Irish parents-in-law end up in a headlock, you should say, ‘I suppose it’s great to see them still so close after so many years together.’

  * * *

  No account of Christmas is complete without a traditional Christmas recipe. Here is mine, which was handed down to me from my grandfather: the turkey sandwich. The size of the turkey should be at least twice that required to feed everyone at dinner. This allows for the first round of turkey recycling in the form of the turkey sandwich. Avoid goose because it doesn’t provide leftover turkey to make sandwiches.

  Ingredients: White bread (pre-sliced), butter (lots) – left to sit at room temperature for five hours – mayonnaise (a large blob), cranberry sauce (break into a shop for this because it is essential), cold bread and sausage stuffing, white turkey meat and two layers of turkey skin (crispy, with the sub-dermal fat still on).

  Preparation: From start to finish, this recipe takes three hours. Immediately after dinner say you will undertake one of the most important rituals of the Irish Christmas: the washing-up. Make sure you volunteer first before any other dinner guest. Coincidentally, the washing-up will take three hours, even with a dishwasher, because the cook will have used all the utensils, bowls and pots in the kitchen to cook dinner. There are two advantages to doing the washing-up. First, you avoid the after-dinner family discussions. Second, you can source the best ingredients to assemble your turkey sandwich. Spend three hours in the kitchen doing this.

  Cooking: Assemble all of the ingredients in layers with the bread on the outside. Consume on your own in the kitchen with a cold bottle of beer. Delicious!

  9

  Politics: She Doesn’t Have the Hair for High Office

  Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.

  (Groucho Marx)

  Anthropologists like to investigate political culture from the bottom up. This is what we call producing a subaltern narrative. I thought that it might be interesting to do a top-down study by examining the rules of how to become an Irish politician. What better way to be Irish than to either become a TD or, if you can’t achieve that, to vote in an Irish election? I decided that the best way to research the rules on how to get into public office or vote would be to be a fly on the wall during an election campaign. For that I needed two things: I needed an election campaign; and I also needed a candidate who knew the rules and who was going to be elected. The previous Fianna Fáil-led Government has been much criticised but I have no complaints. Almost to the day of
my decision to research politics, the Government obligingly collapsed, announcing an election before I could even make my request for one in the interest of social science. The second thing I needed was a good election prospect who would tolerate me stalking him or her.

  I knew my neighbour, Pablo Cruise,19 would be canvassing to become a TD. Pablo gets most of his funding from his mother. He is often slagged off on Twitter for actually bringing his mother canvassing with him. In 2003 he spent forty-eight evenings in a row canvassing door-to-door with his wife and mother when he was a totally unknown aspiring politician. For this election he had a much increased support team, which I was hoping would include me because I decided, in traditional anthropological fashion, to follow him around to find out firsthand what the rules for becoming elected are. This was going to be exciting – I was going to be there from the start to the victorious end on the night of the count.

  With my stalking methodology worked out, I set out to put my plans to him. I found him sliding down a hill on a sleigh fashioned from the poster of one of his political rivals. He pointed out that this was a Green Party candidate who should have no objection to his election materials being recycled. He told me to give it a go. I slid down the hill. It is not just politically satisfying to grind the face of your opponent into the dirt (or snow), it is also great fun. To avoid this happening to him during the next snowstorm, Pablo decided to make his posters too small to serve as improvised toboggans. When we had worn out the Green candidate’s posters, I put my plan to him. He told me that the party would be nervous about someone following him but that I could go undercover as part of his campaign. I agreed because here was an opportunity to carry out classic participatory research, what the great father of modern social anthropology, Malinowski, called ‘participant observation’. Pablo was now officially my candidate. Lucky him!