World View:

The Admirable Ireland

by Prof. Dr. Türkkaya Ataöv

There are two Irelands. The first is called “Northern Ireland”, which is one of the four units constituting the United Kingdom of Great Britain. The other three are the lands of the English, Scots, and the Welsh. The “admirable Ireland” that I am referring to is the Irish Republic in the south of the smaller island. The latter comprises 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland. 

            The U.K. was established in 1707 when the parliaments of Scotland and England joined together. “Ireland” was added to the official title in 1801 with the dissolution of the Irish parliament. The original Scots, who gave their name to Scotland, were also Gaelic-speakers from Ireland. Anglo-Saxons called the speakers of Welsh, a Celtic language related to Cornish and Breton, “Wealas” (foreigners), from which derives the word “Welsh”. By the beginning of the 17th century, England conquered and controlled the whole of Ireland. Full-scale rebellion broke out three decades later. In 1905 Sinn Fein was founded, aiming to re-establish independence. The Protestant majority of the Six Counties in the North remained part of Great Britain, however rioting damage and deaths continued in Northern Ireland, representing only the tip of the iceberg of political, religious and social conflicts which have a history going back centuries ago. In 1922 civil war broke out, and in 1949 the Irish Free State became the Irish Republic The 1937 Irish constitution had also claimed Northern Ireland as well.

Attempts to understand the fraught situation were made more difficult because of the interaction between the English, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The long tradition of Gaelic Ireland was overlaid by Anglo-Saxon settlers. With English colonization the Protestants gradually became the majority in the North. Separated by natural terrain, Ulster in the upper region had a distinct character from the rest, that difference becoming more marked with the development of the North during the Industrial Revolution. Trade policies stressed the economy of Southern Ireland and encouraged the growth of Belfast, which had close links to Glasgow and Liverpool. Protestants and Catholics flocked to the bigger cities, but each to their own areas. The Republic of Ireland in the south also had a very small (3.3 %) Protestant minority. The solution may lie in talks around the table and in the new circumstances of the European Union, where the economic interests of all the Irish will be the same.       

            I first set foot on Irish soil in February 1955 when an old four-engine plane destined to take me to New York for graduate studies had to stop and give a break at the Shannon airport on the most westerly edge of the European continent, for a final gas refueling before heading across the Atlantic. From the courses on world literature at Robert College (RC, Istanbul) I knew that some of my favourite writers like Swift, Sheridan, Shaw, Synge, Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce were Irish, but that stop exactly half a century ago happened to be in the middle of the night, and all I saw were only a few Irish faces. My studies in the U.S. took about four years, at the end of which I joined the teaching staff of the International Relations Section of Ankara University. It was in 1991, on the invitation of our ambassador and his first secretary, both my former students, that I went to Dublin after attending a seminar in West Sussex (U.K.).

            Our ambassador then, Halil Dağ, now retired, was a self-made man with a modest family background but who proved to be an intelligent and a hard-working individual with principles and discipline. He married a young British lady during an earlier appointment abroad. His counsellor, Deniz Özmen, now Turkey’s ambassador in Seoul, was also an outstanding student in school and married the daughter of my illustrious commander while I was performing my military service as a reserve officer. Their son was then one of the few Turkish children who knew some Irish (or Gaelic). Through their courtesy, I had a much longer glimpse of Ireland and I found its people to be admirable.

            I not only spent some time in the capital city but also had a chance to see some other places, including some of the inspiring seashore. I took notes and photos, and also made drawings.  Like all visitors, I adored the accomplishments of the old Trinity College of Dublin. There I learned that playwrights Beckett, Behan, O’Casey and Lady Gregory, poets Mangan, Kavanagh and MacNeice, novelists O’Brien, O’Flaherty and Edgewotrh, and other writers such as Burke, Lecky, and Lynd were all Irish. I had listened to poet Louis MacNeice’s lecture at RC’s conference hall and heard his recitation of his own verse that started with the line “I am not yet born/O, hear me!”. I had then tried to render that lyrical piece into Turkish, which some of my class-mates thought was “not bad”.

            Four decades after that I read the lines of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, who is perhaps the greatest contemporary poet writing in Irish. Having once been at the farthest western corner of Ireland, I am now pleasantly surprised to read the following description: “...with honeyed breezes blowing over the Shannon”,  from one of her selected poems translated by M. Hartnett. The Irish Literary Supplement writes: “Her voice thunders, and you can only marvel at the consistency and quality of that unified voice.” I had then watched Dhomhnaill on television. She is expressive, forceful, convincing and poetic, all the way through. Did you know that she is married to a Turk and has four children? She describes Turkey as a “wonderful country.” It was also another pleasant surprise to learn that James Clarence Mangan (d. 1849), a Dublin poet, was the first to translate Turkish poetry (via German) into English.

            Much of the Irish poetry, on the other hand, is linked with the country’s history, or its continuous struggles against invasion for liberty. A line from an anonymous poem in early English says: “...holy londe of irlonde...” It is a holy land for the Irish, who pride themselves as patriots, as John Hewitt put it, “since Clontarf’s sunset saw the Norsemen broken...They entered their soft beds of soil/not as graves, for this was the land/that they had fought for, loved and killed/each other for.” Ireland earlier saw the Viking terror, and much later the faces of the young English soldiers, who look, in the words of Padraic Fiacc, like “lonely little winter robins.” Catholic Ireland still remembers the revolt of the 1640s, suppressed by Cromwell. There exists much writing on the events of those years and the second Irish civil war. Especially the Catholic siege of Londonberry and the Battle of Boyne stand out as the two episodes still celebrated every year. In the wake of another rebellion the Protestant Irish Parliament in Dublin was suppressed. But Irish Catholic men finally won the vote in 1829, just before the potato famine of the 1840s. the greatest disaster of Irish history.

            The famine cost many lives and led to mass emigration to North America, England and Australia. About the Irish in the U.S., Walt Whitman wrote: “What you wept for was translated/The winds favor’d and sea sail’d it/and now with rosy and new blood/moves to-day in a new country.” The İrish population was 8 million before the famine, and never managed to recover. The emigrants’ descendants kept their religion and Irishness. The former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, for instance, was a fourth-generation American, his great grand-parents having emigrated on account of the same famine. Those who went abroad still remembered the “abandoned roads reaching across the mountain, threading into clefts and valleys, shuffling between thick hedges of flowery thorn.” The old country was a place of nostalgia. Ireland continued to give new names for the country. W.H. Auden wrote for Yeats: “Earth, receive an honoured guest; Williams Yeats is laid to rest.”  

            The Irish are generally described, however, as being incurably optimistic. They take a delight in jokes. They even print selections on linen tea towels. One reads: “There are only two things to worry about. either you are well or you are sick. If you are well, then there is nothing to worry about. But if you are sick, then there are two things to worry about: either you get well, or you will die. If you get well, then there is nothing to worry about. If you die, there are only two things to worry about: either you will go to heaven, or to hell. If you go to heaven, there is nothing to worry about. But if you go to hell, you’ll be so damn busy shaking hands with friends, you won’t have time to worry. So why worry?”

( DIPLOMAT  -  June 2006  -  Ankara )