Returning Gaelic culture to Scotland

In my capacity as the de facto head of Irish studies at UC Berkeley, I was invited to a private luncheon/discussion/Q+A with Chris Patten on Fri 8^th May, in the wake of the Tories’ success. He was indiscreet and very smart; he correctly pointed out that the physics/comp sci graduates being employed by the bookmakers were always more likely to provide more accurate predictions than the official pollsters (including Nate Silver ) and so the result had been less of a surprise to him.

He added that he will of course travel England’s green and pleasant land boosting whatever deal Cameron gets from the EU before the referendum. And NI, he continued,  pays dearly for peace in the shape of bad government; the unionist “cultural” expression is a tribal perversion of Britishness with which he is uncomfortable. Finally, yes, the UK may split up.

Scotland will look within after secession and all indications are that it will use its Gaelic past as a key pillar of its identity. Indeed, it can look to Ireland’s successful playing up of the sophistication of the Neolithic culture, the Gaelic language, Scottish reels and bagpipe bands  as usurpations of Scotland’s own culture. It will do the necessary DNA analysis and conclude that there was no massive Irish invasion of Scotland, but a shared culture and people over North-Eastern Ireland and western Scotland.  Finally, as this blog has consistently argued, it may make Ireland irrelevant by using its superior intellectual and legal traditions.

Unlike Ireland, which simply adopted the most arcane traditions of English jurisprudence, Scotland has its own legal system. It is of course a fantasy to imagine that legal and moral standards are immeasurably higher in any other country to one’s own; yet what passes for “law” in Ireland beggars belief. After a brief period of republican courts, the Irish free state re-instated the British system, labeled “insane” by the plaintiff in the current Facebook case who realized that he could get neither a speedy nor a fair trial in Ireland.

What Ireland uniquely possessed was tortured, exiled writers and a political absolutism that led briefly (1921-1998) to independence of part of the island. This absolutism may indeed stem from the perception that a whole alternative civilization was locked up in texts and music that the British had not got around to suppressing for precisely the same reason as that in India; it just seemed too childish and pathetic. By the 1990’s that “infantile” culture had achieved such worldwide currency that Liam Neeson, prior to accepting an OBE in 1999, spoke of how universal consciousness was manifesting in Ireland….

It was just about then, Neeson’s Deepak Chopra moment, that things were falling apart there, But what had held them together up to then? There is no equivalent of Edinburgh’s “Athens of the North”; Ireland’s writers were in general banned and exiled; the music was sustained more by barowners’ steadfast refusal to take money from musicians drinking and playing there than any state initiative. In my opinion, the answer is complex; it was a sense of the numinous in Irish society, one that protected clerical pedophiles but also asserted a hierarchy of value in the elite arts like theater; a nexus of impresarios, theater-managers and actors who sensed (in a system that Neeson himself befitted from) that while there was very little money, free rehearsal space in a modern city center is a gift; an Irish twist on roman Catholicism that allowed organizations like Opus dei actually make a positive contribution; and a political system where even an undoubtedly venal person like Charles Haughey would assert not just the territorial integrity of the country, but the greatness of a past that could – and, briefly, did - yet shape the future.

In fact, the only truly egregious thing that Haughey inflicted on us was Bertie Ahern. Within a year of the latter’s taking office, and the unionists’ brutal murder of Sean Brown that led to what they must have seen as the IRA’s surrender, all the pillars of the old Irish society were gone. Neoliberalism replaced Catholicism as the state dogma; the folk music was privatized in a contract that only the Irish legal system could assert as valid; a series of bubbles was generated that led to the surrender of the country’s economic autonomy. We are now facing at least a decade of political instability, with political parties being birthed and dying in a fragmented political landscape.

The country that Ireland has become is not a fit locus for the remnants of Celtic/Gaelic culture that it preserved with such persistence and courage. The book of Kells could with justification just as easily be termed the book of Iona; the bagpipe bands so beloved of Irish-Americans are Scottish; the Fiannaiochta exist as strongly in Scotland as Ireland. It is possible that the Irish state has served its historical purpose. The fact that the British ensured, by repeatedly frustrating the democratic will of the people,  that it was birthed in violence, resulted in a pathological state. They will not make the same error with the Scottish, who will thrive in a resource-starved 21^st century, hopefully as our close partners.

Indeed, there is a case for a Scots-Irish confederation, with the rights of Protestants protected by the demographic reality of their being almost 50% of the population.

PS Aspects of Ahern's destruction of Irish civil society is outlined in this free excerpt

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/59226


There are further deatils and proposed solutions in this conference proceedings;

http://www.amazon.com/Ireland-Crisis-Analyses-Proposed-Solutions/dp/1443849650