Forty Shades of Anglo-Irish
Created | Updated May 12, 2014
The term 'Anglo-Irish' is almost like the term 'Politically Correct': it is only employed to refer to others, never to the speaker. Nobody claims to be Politcally Correct; the usage is generally 'I'm afraid that's not very PC' or 'God preserve us from the Politcally Correct brigade'. Similarly, the term 'Anglo-Irish' has a particular usage attached to it: it is predominantly used in order to negate a person's rights regarding Ireland, on the grounds that that person is not truly Irish.
People
But who is truly Irish? The Nationalists of the 19th Century, working for the removal of absentee landlordism from Ireland, were sure that the dichotomy they addressed was between the Anglo-Irish and the Celtic Irish. It was in the name of the Celtic race that the Insurrection of 1916 was undertaken, which led eventually to the Republic of Ireland leaving the Commonwealth.
However, rather embarrassingly it seems to be the case that:
- The Celts' influence came to Ireland, their language replacing whatever was spoken here beforehand, but Celtic people did not, in any significant numbers. There is no evidence of a Celtic invasion, hardly any Celtic DNA in the present population, and very few Celtic artefacts have been found in Ireland, hardly any by comparison with the abundant Celtic treasures in France and Switzerland.
- The Britons who inhabited Britain at the time have an equal if not greater claim to be Celtic. Historians are cagey about what the word 'Celtic' means, but the British culture was, apparently, a Celtic culture.
- The English language is a pastiche derived from various sources including Germanic and French, evolving over the Middle Ages; from long before it became modern English, it was also present as a vernacular in Ireland1. All the earliest Irish cities were founded by the Danes or Vikings, and each one traded across the sea. In each city we find a ghetto called 'Irishtown', a small area of the city, outside the centre, where Irish was spoken. There are Irishtowns in Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, Bandon near Cork, and in counties Galway and Mayo. The language spoken in Dublin in the early 10th century would have been Old West Norse.
Language and Literature
Anglo-Irish literature is a body of work surprisingly influential for the size of the population that produced it. It is literature from Ireland, written in English2. However we run into a paradox if we apply that literary criterion to the body politic, because the proportion of Irish people who speak and/or write in English is virtually 100%, if you can call that a proportion.
A man stops a stranger on a Paris street and says "I'm lost, can you tell me where I am?"
When directions have been given, the stranger asks "How did you know I spoke English?"
The man replies "I saw your Fáinne."
The Fáinne is a ring worn in the lapel to show that the wearer is an Irish speaker.
