T ting about t Orish..? 19 2 11 (10) 25 2 2

Yeah, de ting about de Orish, he says slipping into the vernacular of that rare breed of person, has to be de love-hate ting, especially between the Orish and de English, or would ye not agree? 

At least in these blogs before I have been at pains to punctuate the fact mi muder brung us up not to be prejudiced against one group of people in favour of another, which is not to say this was a given Universal shot thru the whole of our family... So when I gave my blessing to my young kid-sister to go ahead and marry a Catholic boy if that is what she wanted, or at least I told her I wouldn't be making that kind of decision for her, that she must decide such a ting for herself, I chose to overlook the fact that my mother's younger sister Ada hated all Irish from wherever they came...and that it took her and her husband Bill 2 years before they spoke to her bridegroom, another Bill...

And only much much later did I hear from my cousin D who was 3 or 4 years old when I was born into the same house he shared with his Ma, my Da's younger sister L, in their widowed mother, LL's house, together with my Ma and older brother J junior, that our Grannie K when he was still a young lad, or a young man, told him that whatever he did in life he must never marry a Catholic, it was already too late for me to pass such a message on to my sister M who was already married to her Bill...

D also told me that when Paddy (and Paddy is the name all Irish men get from the English because they are all to “Paddies, which to say Micks, that is Catholics!”) our Grandad, J senior and L his sister's father died, J my father was said to have said, aged 8, "now my Ma won't need to buy him anymore beer…” Well what I didn't know at the time was that LL his mother had she herself married a Catholic boy, despite the fact that her own father W, another Bill, was an Orangeman: that is an ultra-right-wing Protestant who hailed from the North of Ireland, or at least a county, C. Monaghan which straggled both what is now the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, one of the six counties belonging to the United Kingdom still, though in the mid-19^th century before he moved to England the whole of Ireland was still united under British rule. 

It was later too I learned that these antecedents departed Ireland during the years 1840 – 50 that is during the Potato Famine years when the country as a whole lost a half it’s population.

So it came to pass little by little that I discovered my father was a full half Irishman with Grandfathers from each of the religious divide, and with much love-hate accompanying the various unions. But if my own paternal grandfather hailed from Dublin was Catholic and was partial to the odd pint of beer, he was no different in that regard to my mother’s father, a Protestant whom I knew and who my mother always maintained liked his pint of beer too much… The fact that he was a moulder by trade who together with AA, our maternal grandmother, brought six siblings into the world and helped rear them, it is probably of no great mystery that he too was partial to the odd pint of beer…

When I left England for Finland as a young man and eventually made it my permanent home I never for one moment thought my behaviour was mirroring what my great Irish Grandfathers had done my moving to England, and when here in the first months I was told by an American colleague, John Feeney, whose all four Grandparents had moved to the USA in the mid-19^th century to escape famine, at the hands of the British, he confided that I was first Englishman he had ever got on with. Poor John died aged 55 before I could relate what is now contained in this blog, but suffice to say that at the time of his confidence I just observed in that in the mid-19^th-century many people were poor and starving, including many English people. Those were times folks with much love-hate. Thank goodness the Finns like to think the Irish are much the same as they themselves are, with possibly no bigger problems here to do with religious divides..?    

But won't it be nice if the "Irish backstop" gets to be the decisive reason why Britain may decide to remain in the EU rather than create a border between the north and south of Ireland to fight over, all over again..?