Sean Connolly (2022) On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World.

My mother’s maiden name was Connolly. As a child, she was sent ‘home’ to Ireland, during the Second World War, with her sister (my Auntie Phyllis) to safeguard them from German bombs and to make their Roman Catholic faith bombproof. She didn’t talk about it, certainly not to me, but there were whispers of predatory paedophilic attempts. And as outcast Irish, they were treated like cow shit. My Auntie Phyllis and my mum had a lifelong-bond based on shared hardship. They were Irish immigrants of a different kind, but they faced the same kind of prejudices and poverty.

My dad was born in Northern Ireland. But he came here as a child. His dad was here and his mum died early. He went to Our Holy Redeemer’s School (still going strong) in Whitecrook. He had a Scottish accent. Not Irish, like my Uncle Charlie and my godmother, Auntie Josie. Or like Pat McDaid’s dad, or Sporter Sweeney or Boxer Toi’s dad. We’re second or third generation and experience the cultural fade of fitting in and marrying into the existing population. Most of us remain mad Glasgow Celtic fans.

In the United States, it is evident that there is little or no difference between the second and third generation Irish who voted Republican and for Trump, the moron’s moron. A generation ago, when John Kennedy won by a very slim majority (and a bit of electoral cheating) Catholics were demonised and if it wasn’t for the electoral blocks delivered wholesale by Capos of the Irish-Catholic, Democratic, immigrant machine, he would have lost.

The Ireland my Uncle Charlie and Auntie Josie left a lifetime ago was rural. What little industry there was in the North, in Belfast, weaving and shipbuilding. The population halved after the Irish Famine (there was also a Scottish Famine mostly in the Highland and Islands) but it was in Ireland were subsistence farming meant the humble potato was breakfast, lunch and dinner for millions that famine took around a million lives directly and indirectly.

Ironically, the root cause may have been a cargo of seed potatoes from across the Atlantic in 1845. The population of Ireland had doubled from 4.4million in 1791 to above 8 million in 1841. Almost 90% of the population depended on the potato. The more prosperous tenant farmer who could afford a cow had assets to sell. Most did not. All they could offer was cheap labour.

An estimated 109 000 sailed for North America in 1846, almost double the total of the beginning of the Famine. What we now know as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina were less popular destinations. For those with little or no money, the short hop across the Irish Sea meant that tens of thousands a week ended up in the ports of Liverpool and Glasgow.

In their poverty and need, we were caricatured as sub-human and disease stricken. There was some truth in the latter. Ships bringing export goods from America and the British colonies filled their holds with human ballast, which they could charge a fee, and make the return journeys profitable.

For babies, one-in-seven did not survive the journey. Those packed below deck had a nominal space of 6 feet by 3 feet for married couples. Toilets were rudimentary. Women, in particular, crouched down and shat and urinated wherever they could. Water and food were rationed. Typhoid and dysentery were not. Coffin ships delivered their cargoes to cities that started asking for bonds to offset the cost of treating the ill, but which pushed up prices and more ships towards Canadian ports. But more than 90% made it ashore and became citizens. Women, in particular, became a prized asset.

When my Uncle Charlie left Ireland the population was still haemorrhaging the young and fit, but the destination pre-and-post War—with the Hungry Thirties as an interlude—was to British cities. Cities that were crying out for cheap labour the Irish specialised in. Labour that dug canals with pick and shovels, connected railways across continents, created reservoirs and build road after road and house by house helped make Britain and its former colonies Irish enough to have St Patrick’s Day parades and indulge the bonhomie of a green and pleasant land usurped by British rule. Step forward President Joe Biden, following in the footsteps of JFK, Jimmy Carter, and even Ronnie Reagan whose aspirations were more Protestant blue blood.

Ireland, that Irish tiger that has become a parking space for big corporations—with promises of low taxation—inside the EEC has seen its population double from when my Uncle Charlie left Ireland to around five million. It has more Polish immigrants than Britain. And to my great shame has also played the race card. Demonising immigrants while most of its wealth, like in Britain, goes to the rich and Irish 1%. The most oppressed people ever banner, once worn with pride, is now a rallying cry to deport and demonise those at the bottom. Cultural fade. Not for me. I’m not buying into that propaganda. We’ve a different kind of famine in housing and public services and it’s the rich that we need to pay their way. Not the poor, oppressed masses that America once claimed to represent as a sanctuary and offer a welcome. I’m not ashamed to be part Irish. I’m ashamed of such policies finding fertile soil in whatever side of the Atlantic you happened to be standing on. Sean Connolly offers a comprehensive account of what it means to be Irish, but that doesn’t mean the story is ended. It’s still being written by us now and I don’t like what I’m seeing or hearing.

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Muriel Spark (1992 [2009]) Curriculum Vitae.

If you’re like me, you’ll associate Muriel Spark with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I don’t think I’ve read the book. I’ve seen two television versions. Miss Jean Brodie really is a gift to any actress with our Dames playing the lead roles. Muriel Spark reminds us teachers in the James Gillespie’s Girls’ School in 1930s Edinburgh were also actors that had to instruct their audience: ‘the creme de la creme’. Not just by teaching, but charismatically added that certain something that fuelled youthful imagination. Miss Jean Brodie, or real life Miss Christina Kay, did just that. The irony here was the fascist leaning, Mussolini loving, Miss Brodie, who worshipped at the altar of the leader who made the trains run on time, would have seen Muriel Spark whipped off to the death camps. Muriel Spark (nee) Muriel Camberg, her brother Philip and her father, Bernard, were Jewish. Many people who denounced others were spared, so if her mother, a woman who was Christian enough, had done the same, she might have been spared such malign fictions (which have become reborn).

Muriel Spark made that long journey to becoming a Roman Catholic. This is in the last third of the book. By this time, the award-winning poet had married a man who was unhinged, jealous and insane. Moved to Southern Rhodesia. An apartheid regime based on the South African model. She tells the story of a man who shot and killed a ‘pickaninny’ boy because he’d looked at his wife breastfeeding. And of a settler, who killed a black cyclist, drove over him, because he wouldn’t give way on the narrow strip of tarmac. Among the group of white wives, this was considered acceptable behaviour in polite society. No surprise that Hitler admired the British Empire’s ability to subjugate such a large group with so few men. She contacted blood poisoning and with no penicillin, it was touch and go whether she’d live. Her husband’s insanity meant she knew she’d have to get home with her son, even though there was a war on.

She settled her son in Edinburgh and went to work in London for MI6. They helped fabricate false accounts of the German war effort. Her middle-class background meant that she found accommodating, but she was also writing poetry and got jobs with some literary magazines.

It gets boring here. A settling of accounts of who said what, which for the general reader (me) is time wasted. We know, of course, Muriel Spark would become a literary giant. She won an Observer short-story writing competition. That gave her access to publishers and commissions for books as yet unwritten and articles published in literary magazines.

Her debut novel was largely, write-what-you know, based on her experience of taking Dexedrine (amphetamines) which kept her appetite down. During 1951-52 rationing was still in place. Skipped meals the norm for many mothers so their children could benefit.  

‘I didn’t feel like a novelist,’ she wrote. The Comforters, published in 1957 was also based on her hallucinatory experiences. She compares it to the dialogue Job had in The Book of Job with his Comforters.

By coincidence, Evelyn Waugh also wrote a book the same year about his reaction to different pills which mirrored Spark’s. His endorsement helped legitimise her book. And more important, by association, it got reviews in the right kind of papers. Spark’s trajectory was upwards. But she admitted often debut novels (a testing ground for publishers) were often followed by literary flops. Not in her case, of course. She had plans to write a second part of her biography, which would cover her more successful years. I’m not sure if she wrote it. I’ll give it a miss. Read on.   

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Green Book (2018) screenplay written by Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly and directed by Peter Farrelly.

This is a buddy movie and a road movie based on an odd coupling of two different cultures. It draws its authenticity from a friendship between a classical pianist and his chauffer, and one of the writers, Nick Vallelonga, witnessed it. The former is black and the latter is white. The year is 1962. John F Kennedy is newly elected, regarded as a progressive and a liberal. Voters proved that even a Roman Catholic can become President. But while JFK can schmooze with the Rat Pack, and advocate for liberal causes, he would never think of inviting Sammy Davis Junior to the Whitehouse, in the same way he could his buddy Frank Sinatra. Even though the latter had, alleged, Mafia connections.

I’m rambling on here. Trying to illustrate how deadly and dangerous the South was, and it didn’t need to be that Deep, for Dr Shirley (Mahershala Ali), the classical pianist. On the playlist of Southern Caucasus of Senators was hating Communists and, as Senator Old reminded them keeping ‘uppity nigras down’ (quoted in Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson). Senator Jim Eastland also suggested ‘[he] could be standing right in the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he’d say the niggers caused it, helped by the Communists’.

Lyndon B. Johnson despite bringing a draft of civil right bills and pushing them through the Senate wasn’t much of a believer in equality. He’d a black driver, and the future President made sure he knew his place. Having a black driver was acceptable. But, of course, they couldn’t stay in the same place, they couldn’t use the same toilet, or drink water from the same faucet, don’t even think about them drinking in the same bar.

The Green Book in the title refers to the Negro Motorists Green Book (the cover was green). A roadmap, literally a lifeline, listing where black and coloured could stop off for something to eat or drink and stay overnight, without being whipped, or lynched, or jailed on trumped up charges. Out of the way spots where they could relax.

That’s the set-up. First up is showing ‘Tony Lip’ Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) at work as a bouncer in the Bronx. He’s handy with his fists and gives a petty gangster a beating and flings him out of the Copacabana nightclub and into the street.

‘You don’t know who I am?’ the petty gangster bawls.

Tony shrugs. He’s old school, in with the bricks. He knows all the old Dons that run the numbers and run large parts of street life. He doesn’t take shit. But the Copacabana is closing down and he’s looking for another job.

Black workmen are doing carpentry work in his kitchen and all his Italian relatives are watching a ball game in the living room. They explain (in Italian) that it wouldn’t be right leaving his wife alone with these ‘eggplants’. His wife gives them a glass of lemonade before they leave. Tony picks up the glasses the workmen have used and puts them in the trash.

Tony’s a racist. But he’s also a slob. He wins fifty bucks beating another guy in a contest to see who can eat the most hotdogs. The other guy ate twenty-three. And his wife berates him for losing that amount of money, but then he admits he ate twenty-six and pulls out the note. He’s hitting the high notes.

When he goes to see Dr Shirley he finds out he’s not a real doctor. But he’s impressed by where he stays. Above Carnegie Hall, it’s something like a castle. And Dr Shirley has a manservant and sits on a throne. As well as playing the piano, Dr Shirley speaks several languages, fluently. In other words, he’s upper-class and refined.  He’s got connections so far above the petty Dons of Bronx street life that makes small town dictator’s heads spin. When they are jailed Dr Shirley springs them by using his one phone call to phone JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States.

I’m not sure this happened in real life, but it makes for a dramatic scene, and sense of different worlds. When rubbing chalk against cheese something is sure to give. The period detail is great. And the most important thing of all, this movie is great fun.

Tommy Burns, BBC Alba 9pm, BBCiPlayer.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0000fk0/tommy-burns?suggid=m0000fk0

In the week of another lacklustre Celtic performance in Europe, and, ironically, when Celtic visit Kilmarnock’s Rugby Park on Sunday,  this is a wonderful tribute to the evergreen Tommy Burns who died ten years ago, at the age of 51, of skin cancer, who managed both teams. Why a boy from the Carlton was on Gaelic telly I don’t know, and don’t care, I loved it. Tommy loved his family, who appear here talking about how great their dad was –and I’m not arguing- he loved his fitba and Celtic and he loved his Roman Catholic faith. His life revolved around his beliefs. A true Celtic diehard, but not a bigot.

Former Ranger’s managers Walter Smith and Ally McCoist helped carry his coffin. All the football greats were in attendance of this humble man. Billy Stark his former teammate and assistant manager at Kilmarnock broke down in tears as he talked about Tommy, and how grateful he was to have played for and followed in the footsteps of the great Jock Stein and managed Celtic.

Kenny Dalglish, Danny McGrain and Davy Hay the Quality Street team of the Stein nine-in-a-row era all loved Tommy. Gordon Strachan stayed an extra year in the gold-fish bowl of Celtic because he knew Burns was dying. Paddy Bonner shared a room with the young Burns and a love of Celtic. George McCluskey talked about signing a contract with Kilmarnock because of Burns, a friend he trusted – to slag him off – but not rip him off.

But to imagine this is a programme about football would be a mistake. This is a programme about family and uncommon humanity. Burns wasn’t the cream of the Quality Street team, but in a new era where we have Kieran Tierney, a boy who is Celtic daft, playing for the Hoops, he would do well to follow in the footsteps of the late-great Tommy Burns, who oozed joy in living and may he rest in peace in Paradise. All Celtic players should be made to watch this programme. Then, maybe, some shysters, like Dembele, would understand, there’s no king of Glasgow, we are a republican team, but the passing on of a true Carlton heritage of Brother Wilfred and helping each other be the best we can be. Hail, Hail, Tommy Burns.