Through the Looking Glass II
'There may actually be a degree of panic in these quarters about what they've done to our country.'
Inside The Fisherman’s Thatched Inn, Co Laois; September 28th 2024
In the Palace of Blasphemy and Broken Glass
‘I remember a time, and it’s not that long ago, when Brian Lenihan [Sr], who ran for the presidency against Mary Robinson in 1990 — and in fact won the popular vote, if we can say such a thing! — saying famously on the Late Late Show, when there was talk in the 1980s about the new surges of emigration, outward migration, and people were beginning to worry about it after a brief lull in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, and people were suddenly again going to America, and they were illegals in America — “undocumented” as they were called — and he said, “We can’t all expect to live on one small island!”’
The ‘public house’ has a special place in the mythology of Ireland, both as a refuge of conviviality and discussion and as a location of colonial and post-colonial wing-clipping. Now that the pub is on its way out — brought down by smoking bans, drink-driving prohibition, cheap supermarket liquor and, finally, the Covid coup of 2020, it may be time to arrive at a verdict as to whether it has been a blessing or a blight on Irish life. For sure, it was (still somewhat is) a place where conversation, discussion, debate and argument rage(d) nightly (and sometimes all day) concerning matters of public and private concern, providing an unofficial instrument of checking and balancing whose influence spread like a radiation cloud through the instant community, providing a self-correcting mechanism that functioned as an unseen and unacknowledged restraint and brake on the excesses and follies of the politician, the judge, the police sergeant and the priest. It was in the pub, much more than in any official chamber of the state apparatus, that the corners were sheared from the vanity, high-handedness, victimisation and unreason of the powerful and influential. On the debit side, it was in the pub also that the locals were policed in order to deter them from seeking to move ‘beyond their station’, which is to say that anyone seeking to become more than his background indicated would be kept in check by the denigration and jeers of his ‘begrudging’ neighbours and peers. This was a vital instrument of community protection in a colonised society, for it was chiefly ambition that led a man to betray his neighbours and serve instead the will of the occupier or his landlord lackey. For these purposes, there formed what came to be described by Tom Inglis in his book, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland, as the ‘bachelor drinking group’, a sociological spin on an actual phenomenon that lacked any nomenclature other than ‘the laads’. A key element of this phenomenon was the involuntary bonding effected by the minor tyranny of the ‘round system’, a practice by no means confined to Ireland, but exercised here as a way of observing (‘He always stands his round’/’He’s as tight as tuppence; wouldn’t spend Christmas!’) aspects of character such as generosity, loyalty and solidarity, and therefore an instrument of administering a form of power that had nothing to do with normative social status but related to the personality, disposition, humour, menace and aggression of the tribal elders and leaders, and their insistence that every other male meet their high standards.
Such a collective consisted of adult males of various types — married, widowed and unclaimed or confirmed single — though the bachelors held dominance on account of having more time to spend in the pub. In general, these members were the most respected, influential and in some respects feared members of the male half of the adult community, albeit under the rubrics of community involvement, temperament and ‘nature’ (likeability and entertainment value, as in ‘he’s great value!’). Wit was the lingua franca of the group, often highly personalised ‘slagging’ and mutual, ostensibly jocose abuse, but always with undertows of menace and envy.
One of the group’s unofficial functions was as an alternative locus of power to both Church and State. When the priest or the sergeant walked into the pub — unless (in the case of the sergeant) it was outside hours and he was ‘on duty’ — he held no more clout than any other man present. This group also existed as a refuge from the unacknowledged power of women, which, counter to legend, was not inconsiderable behind the front doors of the community, in the church or school, or in the rearing of the community’s children. This power derived in large part from the symbiotic alliance between mother and priest, a somewhat unequal (in both directions at different times) institution of religious pedagogy which excluded the father from direct involvement in the spiritual (more precisely, ‘moralistic’) upbringing of his children. The mother had two spheres of influence: the home and the church, wheres the father was allocated the roles of breadwinner and public actor, being regarded by the clergy as having an unreliable moral compass.
The members of the ‘bachelor drinking group’ tended to be purely ritualistic observers of Catholic dogmas and diktats. Neither atheists nor secularists — they attended church on Sundays, but peripherally, standing just inside or outside the door of the church, discussing the events of the week or the price of spring lambs, kneeling at moments of special reverence on their caps or handkerchiefs, but in no great degree pious or surrendering to the power of the priesthood. This is an aspect of Irish life that is invariably overlooked in discussions about men, women and the question of ‘power’ within the (Catholic) Church, and allegedly overflowing into the wider society of Ireland. Yes, the official power resided with a male, celibate clergy, but women were next in rank, possessing a great deal of influence in matters of the immortal soul, compared to their husbands anyway, who were banished behind their newspapers or to the bar of the public house.
For all these reasons, the pub was the locus and university of male non-conformism, the place where true opposition put down roots and was nourished until it was time for it to be launched into the great outdoors. The pub was where the true issues of state were thrashed out and parsed, where each man had his say, regardless of social status, money or property. The story of the Irish pub is therefore part of the story of the advance of democracy and freedom in Ireland, just as the café had provided the early chapters of the scripted history of Western civilisation, becoming the ‘populist’ equivalent of the earlier ‘salons of elegant people’, populated by the Yeates, the Ladies Gregory and the Maud Gonnes. It was in the pubs and snugs of Ireland that the early seeds of suffrage, sovereignty, independence and open public discourse were sown and nurtured into life, just as these seedlings had been germinated in the first instance over the tables of the coffeehouses of England and France.
[A dispute concerning which was the first coffee house in Europe rages still on High Street, Oxford, where two contenders face one another 24/7 across that busy thoroughfare. One is the Queen’s Lane Coffee House, a Turkish café on High Street which unabashedly announces itself to passers-by as ‘the first coffee house in Europe’. The other — directly facing the Queen’s from across the street, is the Grand Café. Both have had several name-changes from their points of origin and both lay claim to being the ‘longest surviving’ coffeehouse in Europe. The Grand’s claim goes back to 1651, but it suffered a closure of several years at a later stage, opening the way for the Queen’s Lane Café — which had started some three years after it, in 1654 — to claim the longest continuous tenure. (It would be almost a century more before The Fisherman’s Inn in Fisherstown, Co Laois, would open its doors —of which more below.)
In other words, Western democracy owed its existence in the first instance not to houses of parliament, Capitol buildings, congresses, assemblies, courthouses, or newsrooms and editorial conference rooms, but to public rooms to which the people were invited to imbibe the imbibements of freedom and free speech, for a relatively small consideration, to be in the company of their peers, contemporaries and neighbours and voice their questions, opinions and concerns about the nature of public reality.
Unsurprising it was, then, when you think about it, that in the spring of 2020, the houses of parliament, Capitol buildings, congresses, assemblies, courthouses, newsrooms and editorial conference rooms were first to fall when subjected to the lies, bribes, threats and menaces of such as the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and the fallen instruments of parliamentary democracy which acted as their proxies in tyranny in implementing a coup against the sovereign people under the camouflage of a pandemic, in other words a coupgh (© JW).
Accordingly, in this second episode of our eight-part pilot series of videoed conversations, Through the Looking Glass — directed at finding a new, post-coupgh mode and locus of public discussion, perchance to build a bridge between the resistance-driven alternative media and the bombed-out foundations of the onetime Fourth Estate — Gerry O’Neill, myself and our doughty film crew return to one of the locations of the 2024 Tuatha de Danann Festival, the aforementioned Fisherman’s Thatched Inn, a 300 year-old pub in Fisherstown, Co Laois. The Fisherman’s, one of the oldest pubs in Ireland — more than three centuries in business — is actually three pubs in one. The proprietor, Seán Ward, told me that he recently had an American crew here to film scenes for a horror movie for which they needed to find three traditional Irish pubs, but went away in a few hours having completed all their scenes in The Fisherman’s.
In this second episode of Through the Looking Glass, we discuss the recent ‘storm’ by the name of ‘Éowyn’, which hit landfall in Ireland in the early hours of Friday, January 24th, 2025, after five days of dire warnings and conspicuously five minutes late in arriving, bringing selective depredation to, in particular, the western part of the country. We also discuss, possibly by way of a rehearsal for a more in-depth discussion of this topic in a later programme, the role of the public house in democratic discourse, and how these ‘palaces of blasphemy and broken glass’ (Samuel Beckett in, I seem to recall, More Pricks Than Kicks) served in modern times to knock the corners off propaganda and political gaslighting, which is why they were among the first places to be closed down in the middle of March 2020. We also discuss the recent very interesting suggestion by a leading Irish economist, journalist and motherWEFfer that it may be time to ‘limit immigration’. And, towards the end, we touch on the recent high-handed and philistinist abolition of Dublin’s 46A autobus, and its implications within the continuing war against Ireland and its culture and — yes — nature and value.
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