Questioning Ireland is a lucky bag of commentary gathered from sources as varied as The Irish Times, the Dublin Review of Books, PN Review, a Cork City Planning Department Document and Facebook. Interrogating the legacies of Northern writers and the Southern ‘Ascendancy’ it attends to literary works as well as the visual arts with particular focus on figures from the author’s native Waterford and adopted Cork. Questioning Ireland confirms that Thomas McCarthy has been a pioneering champion of Irish women’s writing.
Hyperbole is a byword in the generosity of the author’s criticism and discerning readers will find in these pages much to learn and to dispute. A gathering of fifty years’ work, this copious collection of essays and reviews by the steadfast poet, novelist and diarist shows Thomas McCarthy to be a figure from a bygone era — a true man of letters.
‘If you want an original and beady take on Ireland, then look no further than McCarthy’s book which spans 1916 to the present day. A collection of his writing culled from 50 years; it includes old pieces from the Irish Examiner which veteran readers might recognise . . . ‘
Thomas McCarthy’s book offers an original and beady take on Ireland.
I was in Waterstones last week on St Patrick’s Street for the launch of Thomas McCarthy’s new book, Questioning Ireland. On the drive home to ‘the country’ it struck me how we urgently need a greater variety of voices and perspectives on this island. Maybe it’s the same in every country, maybe there are people currently whinging in Marseilles that the Parisians set the Gallic tone. But in Ireland, the same old heads get wheeled out for their opinions and too many live within the Dublin metropolitan area. The narrow Dublin-centric lens does nobody any good.
Does it matter who mediates what? It does, because he or she who controls the narrative controls the people, what they consider good or bad, what they like or dislike, what they read, and how they perceive both domestic politics and international relations.
When a small cabal self-reflexively frames the dynamics of the political and cultural debate they are vulnerable to what Thomas McCarthy terms “cliquish capture, shutting out any unconnected” perspectives.
If you want an original and beady take on Ireland, then look no further than McCarthy’s book which spans 1916 to the present day. A collection of his writing culled from 50 years; it includes old pieces from the Irish Examiner which veteran readers might recognise.
It’s all in there, history, literature, economics, politics, and the place of women in Irish society.
McCarthy has a different angle for several reasons; he came from a council house in Cappoquin, in Co Waterford, his description before you call me a snob.
But in a very different Cappoquin, he once worked at Glenshelane House for his friend Brigadier Denis FitzGerald where he replanted his Victorian garden.
As he wrote in a previous book it was a place “where a lyric poet of the South could hide from an oppressive Catholic Irish Free State”.
For decades he worked in the Cork city library, a West Waterford exile in the real capital.
He was once a Fellow of the acclaimed International Writing Programme at Iowa, is known in poetic circles for his beautiful poetry, and has been described as “the most famous and distinguished poet living in Cork”.
However, he is also a public intellectual. You may not know him as such which buttresses my point about which voices we are exposed to. McCarthy who shares this frustration about a narrowed lens is acid when he considers the problem of our native land being distilled in clever phrases by a tiny number of public figures for a foreign audience.
“Every idea I have about my country is not conceived for the seminar or lecture circuit.” It’s a problem, he postulates when a commentator inhabits an Ireland that is “metaphorically smack in the middle of the Anglo-American Atlantic”.
Different readers will home in on different things in this book. I found myself triggered reading his section on the Celtic Tiger (let’s just say been there and bought that T-shirt).
He writes at the time so you can smell the fear and desperation on the page. “Our country has been undone. The national purpose is in a heap of fragments. We are living at the heart of a national catastrophe”.
Referencing the late Brian Lenihan he writes:
“I can see more wreckage far out to sea; all receding still. The pilot boat with all its unused lifebelts has the mark on its prow where you were pushed, Brian. Black gulls return to their feeding grounds: Paris, Berlin.”
We should have burned the bondholders I muttered to myself (I’ve left out the expletives because I’m a nice Cork girl).
Perhaps unsurprisingly McCarthy is sharp on social class which is threaded through every page. Some claim there’s no social class in Ireland. This is patently untrue. Tuppence ha’penny looking down on tuppence you may say, but it’s there alright lurking in the hedgerows and green fields, in the towns and villages, and he is expert at denuding its subtleties.
On the pain of emigration, he writes: “The success of the Irish economy comes from the voluntary self-exile of surplus labourers over a long period.” He recounts being buttonholed in the 1980s after a reading in the London Irish club by a drunken middle-aged Cappoquin man with a pint of Guinness in hand. “Yoosir, so you’re the Capperken pote,” he said, very annoyed. He had an interesting accent, half-Waterford, half-Kilburn, like so many of my relatives. “Tellmay, do da fokine nuns and the fokine Major still run detown a Capperken, do dey?” In that one question, he felt a lesson in sociology had been delivered. It spoke of the betrayal and rage felt by those forced out of an Ireland that had no place for them, and who saw emigration as their only chance for success and survival.
This is the strata of men and women who produced the Gallagher brothers, the Manchester Irish otherwise known as Oasis who I mentioned last week. The Gallagher brothers have said how they identify as Irish, with not a drop of English blood in them.
Many children of Irish immigrants have spoken of feeling like outsiders among the English, but outsiders in Ireland too. The late Shane McGowan said: “You never forget the fact that you originally came from Ireland.” They have often looked to the cultural arena to express themselves finding a home in language.
As Thomas McCarthy once wrote: “I doubt if wealth or social success would have released me from the nightmares of rural poverty in the way that art has done.” That is something McCarthy instinctively understands, that so many of us are not one thing or the other.
As human beings we have many sides, our forebearers and parents may have come out of different shoes, our families may have moved, and we have been born in one place and raised in another.
How we identify may be complicated and fluid. The question of who gets to be Irish, and who owns Ireland still dogs us, just in new ways. Not a book written by a lad for the lads
On the subject of perspectives, this is not a book written by a lad for the lads. The thorny subject of how Irish women’s voices have often been written out of the public narrative or “sniffed at” is met head-on.
McCarthy looks back at the “breathtaking” masculine hegemony and the “pervasive literary presumption” which saw female writers being ignored.
Describing the distinguished poet Paula Meehan’s breakthrough he writes: “It was still the early ’80s in Ireland, a land of lightly trodden and unpaved roads in women’s writing.”
The lack of balance is addressed by many female pathfinders from the poet Eavan Boland to former president Mary Robinson to the recently deceased journalist and feminist campaigner Nell McCafferty.
Along the way, there are beautiful descriptions of Cork city, a place that “never feels under any pressure to decentralise into the rest of Ireland” which made me laugh.
But this is not a Cork anthology. With McCarthy as our guide, we journey from the local rather than the parochial to the national and international.
I was sorry to finish the book, but that’s life, all good things come to an end.
— Sarah Harte, The Irish Examiner
