Tag Archives: Ireland

All that glistens is not Gold

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Dún Laoghaire bay glistened pale blue and brilliant white. On my way there, on board the 46A bus, a schoolgirl sat next to me eating salt and vinegar crisps for breakfast. She was small enough, with wavy brown hair and a chequered uniform. When the bus pulled into Dún Laoghaire, I avoided gripping the point on the pole where she had smeared her greasy fingers. I was early for my appointment in the yacht club so I found a café and bought myself a hot chocolate. I felt as if I were back in London being an early-riser cosmopolitan-type enjoying the sunshine with strict purpose. I took out some books and a notepad with the intention of planning the class I was to teach later on.

Next to me two ladies sat down opposite each other. Fortyish – the two of them – I would say. The one I had a good view of was blackish-grey-haired and had that bowl-cut hairstyle known from childhood. She had an intense look on her face and told her friend and confidante that she needed to use the bathroom. Off she went. I read some more about the Third Conditional and took some notes. The lady came back and the coffees they had ordered arrived. They began to stir their drinks and what they talked about was crying. The blackish-grey-haired lady has spent her life not allowing anybody see her cry and this had to stop. She resolved to cry in front of friends and family. Her friend, or therapist nodded and added “You need to change, Margaret”.

Time up and I had to tear myself away from the scene. All kinds of backgrounds to it had danced around my head- was this an exposure session for a patient suffering from OCD who had a fear of drinking from dirty vessels shared by the general public? Or perhaps the dialogue represented no more than an unbalanced friendship. Or perhaps a marital crisis.

I came out of the yacht cub two hours later the honorary editor of a new website called http://www.writing.ie and smiled when I realised that there may be a genetic component to holding such a title: my father has been honorary editor of the historical journal, The Irish Sword, for years.

I was too timid to ask to use the facilities in the yacht club and so I went in search of a bathroom in the village. I was striding down the main street in the hope of finding a MacDonalds when an elderly man startled me. He came from nowhere and barred my path. I swerved apprehensively.
“Excuse me, love”, he said. “Do you know where I can get a box of sweets around here?”
An extraordinary request, I thought and all that popped into my head was: “I don’t know. I’m sorry, but I am new to the area”.

My mind was still bouncing with ideas from my meeting in the yacht club but my bladder was speaking with a singular urgency. I conquered a cubicle in the Bloomfield shopping centre and emerged, relieved.

On my way out, I passed a gaudy ‘Cash for Gold’ store. Inside, the salesperson was sniffing and mauling a golden chain. Before him was parked a large wheelchair where a young man lay on his side, paralysed. His father hovered above, observing with shifting resignation the sniffing Shylock.

Waking up to Smell the Coffee

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There is nothing like take-out coffee;  its cardboard warmth, its frothy goodness and the biting cold with which it battles. It’s 8.00 a.m. and I am thinking  about it with intensity while power-walking into town. Alas, I am wanting what I cannot have: I am too late to stop for coffee.

Since Tuesday, I have been attending a TEFL course in North Great George’s street, whose buildings boast impressive bursts of red ivy which are modesty excluded from its otherwise ostentatious (yet merited) title. I haven’t seen morning-time for months and so I am slightly smug as I accept a few too many copies of Herald-AM, which those directionless enough still to be asleep must forego. The damp and golden leaves on Mount Pleasant Avenue and the chill in the air suggest a sludgy promise to me; for the next month, my compulsive google job -search sessions are on hold as I join the pleasurable rank of those with a place to go each morning. 

My speed-walk is a collage of brown and orange coffee cups with a backdrop of swaying morning drunkards, slick black business suits and slowly-moving traffic. A man is walking his shaggy sheep dog and his husky down Camden Street and there is a bag of brocoli waiting to be stewed into pub grub outside The Bleeding Horse. I feel like I am watching over the city as it wakes.

In the back of my mind, I am thinking about the class I have to teach later on and whether my clothes are on the right-side up, which is not a given, since I left the house on Tuesday with my dress on inside-out. Andrew Bird is giving me an aural massage as I flick through the Herald AM and decide whether, hypothetically, given the time, I would get a white chocolate mocha or a caramel machiato.

And then –  at the end of Harcourt Street –  leaned against the Postbox, I see her slouched. I have been watching her for months now. She has on every day an off-white fleece and blue jeans. Bent over and biting a cigarette, I see cupped in her hands an empty coffee cup.

Being Made or Maid?

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Rarely a day passes that I do not crave the spongey intellect of my eight-year-old self. It was a time when the pursuit of knowledge was its own goal and when quality entertainment constituted Sabrina Spellman turning Libby into a goat. It was a period of unbounded potential: I could grow up to be whatever I wanted.

I grew up; Sabrina went to college, dyed her hair red and Harvey Kinkle retreated into the obscurity of dubious work as an extra. I took the liberal arts route, with a minor in Psychology and a major in English literature; I began to scavenge for work. The world ceased to be my oyster. Open doors glided firmly, frustratingly to a close.

But what about the gritty, perverse cosiness of graduating into a Recession? The hopelessness and indignation I connect almost nostalgically with historical novels in which hardship is accompanied by the image of a struggling family gathered around an open fire, discussing wistfully their unfulfillable dreams for the future.

There’s a lesson in humility to be had from it all too. The innocent yet ostentatious certainty of worldy success possessed at age eight has become tainted by the knowledge that being a graduate does not confer on me the automatic privilege of joining the working class. 

And why should it, when 72 million children in this world do not have the privilege of an education and 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to water? They are employed trying to survive. My struggle is healthy while theirs is a heinous injustice. Perhaps it is them and not myself that I should be attempting to serve. It’s something that never occurred to me at the age of eight, when the world still worked on magical principles.

When magic plans fall flat and food is scarce.

Bertie Bowls and World Cups

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Bertie Ahern is grinning up at me with scrunched up nose and open-topped shirt. I find him perched comfortably at the top of page 70 of the July 4 edition of the Irish News of the World, where he has conceded that “there are questions to be answered and issues to be resolved” and that “all of the players should realise that it is time to hold their hands up and then move on.” In his capacity as sports columnist for the aforementioned publication, he is of course referring to England’s dismal performance in the world cup. His blend of endearing naivety and wily opportunism is representative of a peculiarly Irish mindset, which has dominated the body politic for at least the last decade.

As its most successful exponent, Bertie Ahern stood smiling over the country throughout its period of extraordinary prosperity and glided to a swift resignation conveniently in advance of its crippling economic demise. At the launch of his autobiography last year, he told David Frost that accusations that he had received bribes from property developers were unfounded and based on nothing more than that ‘one guy said that the other fellow told him he did’. A polished Cleggeron he may not be, but his colloquial circumlocution renders him a similarly slick smooth – speaker.

The Irish gift of the gab is not just about sliding through the nets though. Our eager benevolence and uncomplicated approachability represent the ideal of a mobilised community spirit. When Joe Duffy spoke recently to a woman living in the west of Ireland who confessed to feeling lonely and depressed in her surroundings, within minutes calls flooded in from strangers offering chats over cups of tea and spare rooms in Dublin, where she was on a housing waiting list. With similar vehemence, homeless charities have launched an impressive campaign against the demolition of empty houses in the outskirts, suggesting instead that they be made available to shelter the homeless.   

I was born an invincible Celtic tiger cub and have developed lately into a scavenging graduate, competing to take on unpaid work so that some day a philanthropist will discover an archive of my eclectic and unpublished scribblings and plead with me if they may not immortalise them in serialisation  – at any price. Like Ireland’s dream of winning the world cup, it is a goal worth striving towards in the strangely reassuring certainty that it will never be achieved. It is this paradoxical conviction of both success and failure, which makes possible the symbiotic relationship between self-deprecation and delusion, which has contributed to Ireland’s staggering economic rise and fall.

Bertie Ahern’s curious decision to keep his money under his mattress rather than in a bank account is the mark of both madman and genius, each masquerading as the quietly quotidian everyman, drinking still as Taoiseach in his local pub and insisting on going to Mass every week in spite of his cohabiting relationship with a woman not his wife. Paradox and irony thrive in a culture where emotion is self-consciously privileged over intellect. When Ireland rejected the Lisbon treaty, it did so with an impish ‘let’s see what happens’ attitude. The ‘No’ vote was not an indictment of Europe, but rather a concentrated attempt to get on the government’s nerves. After all, they had burst our bubble. Having wedged ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis, we grinned and voted ourselves out second-time round, much to the annoyance of the UKIP.  

In a televised debate about head shops, it was claimed by a frustrated liberal that Ireland is a country where laws are set “not by experts but by Joe Duffy”. Indeed, when our former Taoiseach concludes as sports expert from the pages of a tabloid that “no one person should be made to be the scapegoat for what was a collective failure” one can only smile at the audacious success of his opportunism and shake one’s head at the grave irony of his accompanying naivety.

Pigeons, Sweets and Epiphanies

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It’s Bloom’s Day eve. Two aged Dubliners are sitting on a bench in Stephen’s Green park with a thermos flask of tea. A pigeon waddles over. Its body is unusually slender. Says one lady to the other: “Isn’t he lovely! Look at the green on his neck”. I recognise the speaker. I saw her yesterday at the hairdresser’s. She has black and grey hair that twines its way halfway down her back. “I’m terrified”, she had told the receptionist. “I haven’t had it cut in years”. The receptionist checks her book. “We’ll put you with somebody soft … wait till I see now, with Sandy. She’s a lovely, soft girl. She’ll look after you”. Her hair doesn’t look any shorter today.

“The best place to buy sweets” she continues, “is the pound shop”. She pauses. “Do you not like sweets, Geraldine?”.  (Geraldine does not) “I love sweets. I’d go to the press now and then when I stick on the telly and get a packet”. Geraldine doesn’t think they’re healthy for your teeth. She shrugs. “It wouldn’t bother me ..  You’d get three bags there for two euro; it’s very good… ”. Geraldine throws a whole slice of bread to the pigeon.

“Who wrote Ulysses? They did say this morning on fm104 that it was the gay fellow … that went to prison but it wasn’t him. I knew it wasn’t him. “Do you know why it’s called ‘Bloom’s Day?’ It’s cause of a woman. She was Bloom. She was a bit of a princess”. Maybe it was the other fellow, Geraldine thinks: William Butler Yeats.  She gasps: “Aw, he was lovely looking. I have a picture of him, a black and white one.” “Oh, do you?” says Geraldine. “I do, I’ve had it for years. Where did I get it from now? That’s it. I done a course once. The teacher gave it to me. He’s stunning in black and white. I still have it. Maybe he was the one that wrote Ulysses”  

 She looks down. “He’s not going to eat all that, Geraldine, that’s too much for him”. Geraldine nods but suggests that it may be eaten by the others. She is quick to agree. “That’s right. It will. It will. Will you have another drop, Geraldine? The sun crawls away and leaves behind it the Dublin that gleams beyond the pages of Ulysses.

Holy Smoke

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An automatic door slides me into the entrance lobby of the Carmelite Church on Whitefriar Street. The Virgin Mary greets me, enormous and plastic. To my right there is a blue tank. A sign stuck on it with sellotape reads ‘Holy Water’. On the walls, behind grubby plastic covers are newspaper cuttings: the round wrinkled face and soft eyes of Mother Teresa, who visited the Church in 1993 and the story of the statue of Mary, which a priest salvaged from a local second hand store in the 1880s. I follow the arrows (they are blue-tacked to the walls) and find St Valentine’s heart, encased in a carved golden box. I wonder who the last person to look inside of it was and at the logistics of its sacred transport.

Inside the Church a hundred candles glisten. An old man shuffles to light one and in a far corner a foreign girl reads quietly to herself a biblical text in a language I don’t understand. Dotted among the pews, the backs of old women are bent in prayer.

 Outside on the street are mothers with cigarettes clasped between their lips pushing babies in pre Celtic tiger buggies. Shops that sell envelopes and fairy liquid, plastic toys and wall clocks are squeezed between modest coffee shops. Red meat hangs unceremoniously in the windows of the butchers. A man turns into a dimly lit bookie, where scrunched up scraps of paper lie discarded on the floor.

It is 11 May 2010, a Tuesday afternoon. Cameron crafts Clegg’s concessions while Brown tells his little sons that they are moving house.  Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said last night that there are still those in the Church who would rather not see the truth emerge. The cloud of volcanic ash lifts its way beyond Irish airspace. Gum decorates the dusty street. The automatic door slides closed, aloof from it all.

Nun The Wiser

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A google image search of ‘nun’ reveals a plethora of results: some humorous, some sordid and some artistic. After all, the ‘veiled’ has a tendency to appeal to the imagination. A veiled remark can cause consternation and when an identity is unveiled its suggestive power is lost. Ireland may not experience the image of a nun as pervasively as it once did but she remains a solid presence in the consciousness of the population. Maeve Binchy who was educated at the Convent of the Holy Child in Killarney realised that “nuns are great box office material” and added that “people are very entertained by nuns’ stories and we all make them much more horrific than they were”. The inclination is to view nuns as characters in costume rather than women in a lifelong habit.

I bear this in mind as I climb the steps into a grand Georgian Convent House where I am to meet Sister Bernadette who entered the sisterhood 48 years ago, at the tender age of 18.

She exudes an extraordinary dignity and is not dressed in a veil, or any form of religious garment. She welcomes me with unconditional warmth and I sense only the smallest trace of guardedness. I am surprised by the surroundings of the convent house. There are no dark corners and no hard wooden benches. All is bright, colourful, cosy. She leads me downstairs to a beautiful basement sitting room where she has prepared a tray of tea and muffins. I sit down and we talk. Not as a prying journalist to a religious instructor but as a young woman to an older and wiser one.

Sister Bernadette had known from the age of 13 that she wanted to become a nun. But what effect did this decision have on her family- especially her brother and two sisters? “I suppose they would have missed me a bit”, she considers modestly. There were four or five from her class who took the same route. “It was an option”, she says simply.

It is an extraordinary decision to make at 18 and one that puts today’s drama of filling out the CAO form into perspective. She agrees that the present-day 18 year-old is far ‘younger’ than it was in generations past. Nevertheless she muses, “It is a time of searching”. Hers was a life-changing decision. Was she not scared? When she made her final vow: yes, a little bit.

Having trained as a primary school teacher, she spent many years teaching at the school attached to the convent. She would encourage all incoming sisters to pursue some form of study or training before entering an order. Her approach is both practical and honest and she doesn’t shroud her life in a religious mystique. I ask her if she would encourage a young woman today to become a nun. She pauses. “It’s a question we ask ourselves constantly”.

The honesty of the response hits hard. I consider the religious outlook of my contemporaries. Would there be any candidates for the religious life? Of the young people I associate with, some are born-again Christians that believe the world was created in seven days somewhere around 6000 years ago. Others are atheists, ardent in their non- belief. Most are just not sure. In our media-driven, western world, we have the opportunity to challenge the meta-narratives in which the generations before us were steeped. At least, we like to think so.

The conversation moves to the place of religion in global politics. I mention Tony Blair’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism and the constant reference to God in the rhetoric of the candidates in the American election. Is it dangerous for the world’s leaders to bring God into politics? “It’s hard to know”, she says. “On one hand, it is good that they stand up for what they believe”. She points out that Americans have a much more public outlook to faith: “In Ireland, faith is a more private matter”.

However ‘private’ faith may be, the convent setting surely organises its routine around it. So what does the daily life of a nun entail? Sister Maura, a Belfast-based nun with whom I speak on the phone explains that “it varies from convent to convent”. She rises at around 6.30 and engages in “some light exercise before meditating for an hour”. The sisters then pray and have breakfast together. She is a trained teacher and counsellor and spends two days a week working with the community. There is regular communication with their sisters in England and America and at the end of each month regional assemblies are held where themes such as communication and leadership are discussed. She and others are interested in broadening the idea of ‘vocation’ to include the secular professions.

I ask her whether her order has any new incumbents. “There is a young woman about to join us”, she tells me. What must she do to become a nun?

First she must pursue a period of candidacy that can last anything from 9 months to 2 years. Interestingly, she must also pass a medical and psychological assessment.

As a ‘novitiate’ she spends two years living in a convent after which she makes her first professions. The final profession usually takes place a year or two after the first profession. She stresses that the woman may pursue training for other qualifications during this time.

The idea of experiencing life beyond the convent walls was fuelled by Vatican II, Sister Bernadette tells me. With greater emphasis on free- thinking in the Roman Catholic Church, a spirit of independence among its followers was incited. Herself far from single-minded, Sister Bernadette has certainly not been shielded from the world. She speaks of her experience as a missionary in Georgia after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. There she had to cope with a language barrier and the reality that there already existed the well-established Orthodox religion. She cites the appeal of music in establishing congregations. “The organ was one of the biggest appeals to new members”. For her, there are no limits to the art forms that should be executed in the expression of faith- so long as rituals are maintained.

After an hour’s chat and still comfortable in my squishy armchair in the convent house, I finish my tea and thank Sister Bernadette for her time. As I am leaving, she offers me an impromptu tour of the building. In the room next to the magnificent drawing room is a chapel. She opens the door tentatively. We poke our heads inside, only to retract them quickly as we find a nun sitting there in contemplative silence. walk home in the crisp autumnal air and look back at the convent house with a new, unveiled reverence.