Word: english
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Irony is the first resort of the oporessed. Operating out of two languages, Gaelic and English, the lads found they could shoot up a smoke screen of Irish bulls and blarney that no colonial officer could penetrate. Forbidden to write patriotic songs, they wrote love poems to a girl that sounded suspiciously like Eire, hate poems couched as hymns and generally got things so snarled up that they even have to watch each other. (The best Irish talkers have eyes like terriers'.) Gulliver's Travels, the Anglo-Irish classic, is the high point of the two traditions...
Most of the familiar Irish characteristics-which nobody admits to having seen lately-are survivals and distortions from the past. Under the batswing of English protection, Ireland was spared a role in history almost completely. According to the Chinese, this is a blessed state to be in. But the Irish chafed under it. They cursed the English and they cursed themselves-to the point where cursing itself became a distinct Irish art form. "May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may the High King of Glory permit her to get the mange" is a comparatively mild...
...have reason to be cautious, as even Rap Brown must know by now. After roughly 1700, the revolutionary spark in Eire came mainly from Anglo-Irish Protestants more recently arrived, such as Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and Parnell, and from people rich and secure enough to take chances. The English habit of stuffing their problem island with Britons kept backfiring in this way. After a generation or so, the new settlers were Irish themselves, ready for a fresh fight...
...history the Anglo-Irish missed includes the whole Industrial Revolution. The wit of Wilde and Bernard Shaw jumps us back over the smokestacks to the English Restoration, when Dublin and London were more like country towns and a man had time to work on his wit. Now the English have stopped exporting clever fellows across the Irish Sea. Yet their dandyish wit lingers in the air, and when it flicks against the grotesque imagery of the Gaels, it sets off one of those wild word-fires, fastidiously phrased, that can sometimes blaze up in pubs and books alike, becoming...
...church that the angry Ulstermen fear so much is a good deal more adaptable than they admit. As soon as the English eased the fierce penal laws in the 1800s, it made its quiet peace with them, and by the 1916 rebellion was a definite anti-revolutionary force. In the '20s, it excommunicated Eamon de Valera for his part in the bloodshed, only to turn up shortly thereafter in full partnership with...