1 - Of Important General Matters

Summary

My father was Irish. In 1946 he accompanied his eldest brother on his first trip over to Britain. On landing at Liverpool, they went to the toilets. While both were standing at the urinals, my uncle looked at the porcelain, then at my father. ‘No Shanks here John’, he said, smiling.

Over the decades my father told me this anecdote several times. It amused him so much because, I think, it demonstrated in a familial, deeply unpretentious way the nature of national difference. In postwar Britain, my uncle had learnt, even something as everyday as urinals were made by different companies. Shanks and Co. had cornered the Irish trade; other firms dominated the British market. Politicians, poets and other governors of the tongue might propound grand theories about the substance of a nation but, to people like my middle-class Irish forebears, nationality had almost as much to do to with Shanks and that ilk as it did with Finn MacCool and other mythic heroes of the Celtic Renaissance.

My father's delight in telling this vignette may well also lie in the way it gently subverts or implicitly criticizes the bombast of nationalist politicians who liked to tell people what nation they needed. Though a fluent speaker of Gaelic himself, he had had enough of stern schoolmasters forcing the language onto native speakers of Hibernian English. In contrast to the would-be stirring vision of nationalist prophets, he maintained a profoundly unassuming Irishness: one where a love of Joyce, an appreciation of the place of Shanks, and a distanced scepticism of jingoistic historicizing all easily blended together. In short, he upheld what I like to call an unofficial nationalism.