Free Days of Heaven by Declan Lynch Page A

them. (You can still find people who think that Ireland’s indigenous TV service RTÉ turned down Father Ted , but the truth is actually worse than that — RTÉ never got the chance to turn it down, because
it never occurred to the lads to offer it to them in the first place.)
    In fairness to us, we have always openly acknowledged the Anglo-Irishness of some of our most celebrated writers, of Yeats and Synge and Beckett. We have never denied that Wilde and Shaw and
Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan needed to join forces with all sorts of English types to make their genius known, or that Sean O’Casey — who, like Bono, is from the Protestant
tradition — eventually preferred to live and work among the English. There was Joyce, who might appear like a rare exception to the rule, until you recall that he may have been all Irish
himself, but he found it necessary to get out of here, in a hurry, in order to be discovered by the cognoscenti of Paris. And of course, the hero of Ulysses , the definitive Irish epic, was
the Jewish Leopold Bloom. Not exactly your card-carrying, bona-fide, full-metal-jacket Paddy there.
    Nor were Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, founders of the Gate theatre, who constructed this weird and marvellous façade of Irishness around themselves, perhaps to
take our minds off the fact that they weren’t Irish at all, but English.
    You might be thinking though, that Christy Moore is Irish, in every possible way and that is true. But then Christy is not universally known and internationally successful in the sense of having
hit records in Britain and America and all around the world. Not like Chris de Burgh, for example, whose father was British and who lived in Argentina as a child.
    Brendan Behan himself, whose image would appear on any tea-towel featuring the faces of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, is an interesting case. Behan’s sensibility was largely
influenced by two things — his membership of the IRA , which involved him in the bombing campaign in England for which he was sent to borstal, and the borstal itself,
which broadened his view of life and gave him the material for his best work, Borstal Boy.
    You could compare this awakening to the way a raw young Irish footballer would go to England with a lot of ability but a lot of bad habits too, which would be knocked out of him in one of the
great ball-playing institutions of Manchester or Liverpool. All of which, in the fullness of time, would leave him better prepared to serve his own country, in a more constructive fashion.
    It is also universally acknowledged that Behan’s work in the theatre was championed and largely shaped by Joan Littlewood, who was born in Stockwell, a part of London not unknown to Paddy
in the 1980s. The young Conor McPherson was similarly nurtured by the Bush Theatre in London and Martin McDonagh, lest we forget, is a Londoner by birth.
    Behan himself, who kept a close watch on the Paddy in all of us, would have noted the ironies and paradoxes of his revolutionary roots, the fact that the men of 1916 included Pádraig
Pearse, whose father was from Birmingham and would not have qualified to play football for Ireland, and James Connolly who was Scottish and who could only have played for the Republic that he
envisioned under the parentage rule. When you add in exotics such as Roger Casement to the mixer, you can see that even in the defining narrative of Irish independence, Paddy couldn’t quite
make it on his own.
    Dana herself is from Northern Ireland, which is another country. Jesus H. Christ, even Foster & Allen, who gave us a few anxious moments with those kilts they were sporting on Top Of the
Pops , were singing ‘A Bunch Of Thyme’, which is thought to be of English origin.
    The search for the ‘true’ Irish goes on: Bob Geldof’s people are originally from Belgium; Sinead O’Connor’s great hit was written by a little guy from Minneapolis
called Prince Rogers Nelson;