Naomi O’Leary:
Hello, welcome to Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
Let’s do it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Welcome to the Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
I’m Tim McInerney.
Naomi O’Leary:
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
Tim McInerney:
We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi?
Naomi O’Leary:
Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3.
Tim McInerney:
OK. Hello!
Naomi O’Leary:
Hello, hello. So this week we are asking who are Ireland’s elites? And to answer that question, I visited a castle in Dublin, one that still has a family living in it whose ancestors have been there for 800 years almost.
Tim McInerney:
Let’s go over to Naomi in Howth Castle.
Naomi O’Leary:
I’m walking up to the entrance of Howth Castle. I can see there is some family crests up on the walls, but they’re so worn a way that it’s hard to make out what they say. But there is no need to really, because only one family has ever lived here. Today, the current heir has agreed to meet me and show me around inside the castle.
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
My name is Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence and my family own Howth Castle.
Naomi O’Leary:
So that big heavy door opens and this is what you see, an entrance hall filled with heavy wooden furniture and portraits on the walls of Earls and Lords of Howth going back generations. There are some rich rugs on the floor. There are antlers on the walls. And there’s an enormous stone fireplace. Can you tell me, how long have your family been living in this residence?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
My family came from Normandy in 1177, and they came here in an expedition that was led by John de Courcy because he was supposed to be in a battle here against the incumbent population. They won the battle and they’ve been here ever since.
Naomi O’Leary:
So just to make it clear, when you’re talking about the land and the house, what does it actually consistent of?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
Well, we own, I suppose, somewhere around 650 acres, that includes Ireland’s Eye, which is ours.
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s the island just outside Howth harbour?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
Yes.
Naomi O’Leary:
An island, two golf courses under a lot of the wild, rugged moorland that covers Howth Head, the peninsula that forms the northern arm of Dublin Bay. But the reason I’m here is because the heydays are over for castles like this. The 20th century disrupted the conditions that allowed them and they lead families that lived in them to prosper, keeping the place going is a challenge. It’s a plight that mirrors that of other old families in other countries. But in Ireland, it’s perhaps slightly different. People don’t have happy associations with big old houses here. There isn’t really a tradition of visiting them. So the Gaisford-St Lawrencees have been experimenting. They run a cookery school out of its cavernous kitchens and they’re inviting people, like me, into the castle to show them around.
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
This is the drawing room.
Naomi O’Leary:
Who is this we see up in the in the portrait here?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
That’s the third Earl. Yeah, this is the library.
Naomi O’Leary:
This is such a beautiful room. I think this one is my favourite. Room after room revealed more treasures. An enormous portrait of the satirist Jonathan Swift occupied a custom sized alcove in the dining room. The man himself had once been a regular visitor. As Julian took me through the rooms, it was like peeling back layers of time. One stairway led us down into a lower level, filled with storage rooms and the detritus of centuries. Thick wooden beams stretched above us, giving away that this floor was once the original medieval castle hall.
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
Room has only been painted once since it was built in the 1730s. Because of the intricate gilt on the walls, the walls used to be washed down, and then by the 1970s they got to be rather thin and my parents decided to have the room repainted. They had quite a lot of misgivings about employing the only man they discovered in Dublin would actually do a proper job of the whole thing. The room was repainted in 1973 by Cathal Goulding, who was then head of the official IRA.
Naomi O’Leary:
The head of the official IRA gilded this room?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
Well, he didn’t guild it, no. He painted in between the gilding and left the gilt.
Naomi O’Leary:
I had been told a myth about this castle when I was growing up. I was told that Gráinne Mhaol, Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen of Connacht, had knocked on the door of the castle once and had been refused. Furious at this breach in the ancient laws of hospitality, the story goes groaning well, kidnapped the castle’s young heir and only returned him after extracting a promise from the Lord Howth that every night a place would be set at the table ready for the unexpected guest. I walked into the dining room and there it was at the head of the enormous wooden table, a single place was set.
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
When I was growing up here, the extra place was laid out, every meal. Every meal, every meal was there. I was told about the tradition which continues on.
Naomi O’Leary:
Absolutely fascinating. I would have been told that story when I was growing up, but I thought it must be an urban myth. I never realized I would come inside Howth Castle and find the place set, waiting for Gráinne Mhaol. The thought crossed my mind at times that this house was like a museum, but in a way it was something different, perhaps something more rare. All the objects were in their original context. It’s all here. Nothing has really been sold. It’s one unified collection that stretches back centuries and amid it all, the casual touches of informality, the wear and the clutter of a home. The ash tray perched among scattered parchments and piles of leather volumes in the library. And of course, it was Julian, the owner, the occupier, the heir to it all, who was showing me around. At one point, footsteps echoed in the distance and Julian’s elderly father appeared from a staircase leading into the room. Hello.
:
How do you do?
Naomi O’Leary:
They began talking about some party that was supposed to happen in Kildare.
:
Have you been asked about Grattan de Courcy-Wheeler to his party?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
No, is he having a party?
Naomi O’Leary:
What stuck out to me was that surname, de Courcy. That’s the same surname as the knight John de Courcy that Julian had told me led the expedition that first brought his ancestors to host an 1177. 800 Eight years have passed; the British Empire has come and gone. But St Lawrence’s and de Courcy’s, are still hanging out. But it’s a world that’s fading away.
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
Suddenly, a number of houses I visited in my youth are now shadow of what they previously were or converted into hotels or similar. I was educated in England, I went to Amperforth, which is a Catholic public school. The same as my father went. There were 70 Irish boys in a schools of 400. When I started, there was over 30 in school of 600 and when I left there were 20. When I thought about where I might send my son to school, that was down at three, so I think that that that world still exists to some extent, but it’s fast fading away, basically.
Naomi O’Leary:
What do you think the stereotype that people have of big houses like this is?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
I think that there’s an association with the years of the famine and an association of these houses with an imported Protestant ruling class.
Naomi O’Leary:
Would you consider your family an import?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
Well, we’ve been here since 1177. We’ve been here longer, before the death of Elizabeth I and since, so we wouldn’t want. One of my Elizabethan ancestors complained that in England he was considered to be an Irishman and in Ireland he was considered to be an Englishman. And that was 400 years ago. And something of that still remains.
Tim McInerney:
That was fascinating to hear, Naomi, and I think even for people who live in Ireland. This is a really a hidden part of the country that people very seldom get to see.
Naomi O’Leary:
Absolutely. It is an unappreciated, I think a treasure in many ways. I mean, just walking around Howth castle was incredible to see what was there, was better than many, many museums that I’ve been in. So unvisited, not that known about, you know? You can almost tell the history of Ireland through the history of this one family. They’ve had fairly prominent positions throughout the centuries.
Tim McInerney:
Can we just take a moment to appreciate Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence’s name? Good name.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. OK, so the St Lawrence part, right? The reason why it’s called that is because his ancestor won a battle in 1170 on the feast day of St Lawrence and that’s why they’re called that.
Tim McInerney:
Oh right. But, of course!
Naomi O’Leary:
All that long time ago. And so in the castle, they have this sword, right, that’s hanging on the wall. And it was reputed to be the sword of Howth, supposed to be the same sword with which this ancestor won this battle and was granted all these lands, right. In fact, they got it carbon dated and it’s only, only, 500 years old.
Tim McInerney:
Well, come on. Come one, Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence.
Naomi O’Leary:
So it can’t be the same one but it’s still pretty old.
Tim McInerney:
I, for one, am disappointed.
Naomi O’Leary:
Tim, who were the Normans?
Tim McInerney:
Right. OK, so the Normans are actually known in Irish historiography a lot as the “Old English” because of course, they came over to Ireland from England. But this is a kind of misleading name because they probably would have spoken French at the time back in the Middle Ages. They acted as kind of feudal elite in Ireland right up until the Cromwellian conquest.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. OK. And I suppose one of the defining factors of this group, right, which was that they became assimilated kind of quickly into Gaelic society, the old Gaelic society of that time. I’ve heard this phrase used about them that they were more Irish than the Irish themselves.
Tim McInerney:
It was often just a matter that these old English elites did what was strategically clever to do, and they married into the native Gaelic ruling dynasties.
Naomi O’Leary:
Ok.
Tim McInerney:
And a lot of them, after one or two generations, changed their names to Gaelic names, which you could imagine anyone doing after they left the country for a generation. So this was a huge problem the whole time, really, for the British who wanted to take control of Ireland, especially join the Tudor era, which is when they were putting those plantations in the north of Ireland. If you want to hear more about that, you can listen back to our first episode on the border, because successive waves of these colonists kept assimilating into Irish culture.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh right, so they would lose them. They would go native.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, they went native. Yeah, exactly. They went native. There was a whole historical process, Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis, which means quite simply, like you said, that the medieval elite became more Irish than the Irish themselves and actually started turning against England with the native Gaelic Lords. But the important thing I think to consider about those first Nauman elites was that they imported a feudal style template into Ireland that hadn’t been there before. So it was possible to have a kind of equivalent elite group in Ireland as it was in Britain, even if the Irish ones adopted Gaelic customs.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. And but these, they were different to the later arrivals, right? Who were granted land after the Cromwellian invasion.
Tim McInerney:
Right, yeah. Indeed. So those old English really saw themselves as the as the “real” elite of Ireland for a long time. But a lot of them were actually disempowered after Cromwell’s invasion — and this is in the mid- 17th century — because, of course, they were Catholics. Cromwell’s invasion was a very anti-Catholic phenomenon. To put it mildly. The army of hell, I believe, is how he saw Catholics.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh my god.
Tim McInerney:
But it’s really important to understand the sheer scale of Cromwell’s invasion. You know, in a space of a few years, mostly using strategies of crop burning and mass starvation, he had seized about three quarters of Catholic Irish land. And by the time he left, only about 20 percent of land in Ireland was held by Catholics, mostly in Connacht. There’s a famous phrase that he said, “To Hell or to Connacht”, and rest of the land had been taken over by this tiny colonial elite who were mostly Protestant. And by the end of the 18th century, that tiny colonial elite, these new settlers, owned something like 90 percent of land on the island.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so this small group who had a different religion owned like 90 percent of the land and they were they were at the top of the social scale and they more or less held all of the economic and political power.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, right. And they’re often known as the Protestant Ascendancy, which might be a bit misleading because a lot of the old Catholic elite just threw in their lot with them and there were Catholic landowners among them as well, which explains Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence, you know, still being the master of his estate today. Even some Gaelic chieftains were integrated into this group as well.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. Julian actually emphasized that, well he said his family had retained what they had essentially by being kind of subtle and diplomatic and not obviously taking one side or another too often and compromising. So he told me that, for example, sons, you know, tended to marry Catholic women, apparently, and the daughters would be raised Catholic and the sons would be raised Protestant.
Tim McInerney:
It does make sense. If you look at the property laws, the Protestant Ascendancy did get a lot of their power by virtue of their religion. For about 200 years after Cromwell, they benefited from these famous sectarian Penal laws, which we’ve mentioned a few times on the podcast already because they explain a lot of the social divisions in Ireland and those Penal laws gave them enormous advantages in matters of inheritance and in land rights, which pretty much ensured that they always maintained the upper hand and a kind of monopoly of power on the island.
Naomi O’Leary:
And of course, there’s a distinction between the Protestants who had this power in the southern part of Ireland and those who are in what’s now Northern Ireland, right.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, sure. Like the Protestants in the north who we talked about again in the first and second episode, they had come much earlier than the post Cromwellian settlers and they were a different kind of Protestant. They were dissenters, which means that they weren’t part of the official state religion. And that also meant that in Ireland and in England at the time, they didn’t have full civil rights either. Under the penal laws, they were a good bit better off than the Catholic majority, mind you. And we’re talking about 75 percent of the country when we talk about the Catholic majority in the 18th and19th century. The Catholic majority were denied rights across the whole board of public life. It was mostly to ensure that they couldn’t mount a rebellion against the colonial elite. And right up until 1829, when a lot of those penal laws were repealed, which is very late if you think about, Catholics were restricted in their rights to education, be represented in Parliament, to adopt children, you know, which is pretty awful, You can imagine if your sister died, you couldn’t adopt her child. You’d have to give it to a Protestant. To inherit land, to hold arms or even to be represented in the law. So all of these restrictions that were pretty variable over the years, but in their entirety, they set up this really stark dichotomy between a massive, disenfranchised and really squalidly poor Catholic majority and a tiny minority. We’re talking a few thousand people of Protestant elites who had their own Parliament in Dublin and more or less controlled all walks of life in Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
A lot of this history actually can be read in the architecture of Ireland, like Georgian Dublin, for example. You know, the Protestant ascendancy understanding more or less built a new city over medieval Dublin with these kind of austere, huge mansions. I’ve actually been inside one of them, you know, on Henrietta’s Street in Dublin, which is one of the more preserved Georgian streets, and inside there are just palaces, just the enormous scale of them, the height of the ceilings, like just the money that they would have taken it just to heat is incredible. They must have had so much wealth.
Tim McInerney:
For sure, yeah. And from the outside today, they don’t look that impressive, but that’s actually on purpose. They’re built purposely to be extremely plain on the outside, and that’s supposed to represent austere Protestantism.
Naomi O’Leary:
Wow.
Tim McInerney:
You might compare them a little bit to modern architecture in that it’s the scale of the streetscape really that is one of the most impressive things about them. Just these kilometres, stretches of uniform houses. They were jaw-droppingly modern at the time.
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s interesting what you say about the ornamentation. Of course, Dublin is so different from continental European cities like Paris or Rome. You know that the most ornamentation that you’ll get really around those houses is just a little bit of fancy glass around the doorway.
Tim McInerney:
And a really interesting facet of the ascendancy, they had this terrible inferiority complex. People in London laughed at them for being provincial. And even worse, their own tenants kind of laughed at them, too, because the myth of the old English, of the old elite, never really went away for the tenants. And when you read 18th century, 19th century literature, the ascendancy are always being mocked as being just Cromwell soldiers. And people didn’t really take them seriously on either side of the Irish Sea as a real ancestral elite.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK.
Tim McInerney:
So I mean, a lot of people have seen Georgian Dublin as a response to that kind of little man feeling because they build these huge projects like the Parliament House in College Green, which a lot of our listeners will have seen. It’s the Bank of Ireland now. But at the time when it was built, this was the first-purpose built Parliament House in the world, to just house a Parliament. For comparison, in London, the Parliament in Westminster was working out the back of an old church. And that’s actually why the Parliament in London is still shaped like a like a church. Have you ever noticed that?
Naomi O’Leary:
I didn’t know that.
Tim McInerney:
But when the ascendancy built this building, it was ten times more grand than what they had in London. And it seemed really inappropriate and really ostentatious and really silly and everyone laughed at them.
Naomi O’Leary:
And I suppose another symbol of this era, I suppose, is what’s called the Big House. And it’s always capitalized, the Big House. So these are literally large houses, often on the edges of towns now where the landowner and his family would have lived. And they sort of loom large as well in Irish literature like, Tim, doesn’t your own family have a complex history that overlaps with the Big House?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it’s a bit of a mystery, actually. I tried to squeeze it out of my family, every time I get hold of one of them, but they don’t find it as interesting as me so it’s hard to get them to spill the beans. So both my great grandparents were servants in one of these Big Houses, quite a big one actually in County Mayo. So to kind of get a feel for the place, I actually went to the house a few weeks ago where they lived to find out more about that world.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. Let’s hear from that report.
Tim McInerney:
I’m walking here just along the road leading to Bloomfield House in County Mayo, or I suppose what’s left of Bloomfield, because like so many of these Irish Big Houses, this one was mysteriously burned down in the years following independence. What I’m looking at now is more or less a massive grey ruin. It’s mostly covered with ivy and you can just see the high walled gardens and stable buildings, which are really very extensive. From the looks of it, it was quite an impressive estate once upon a time. It’s one of those typical drizzly days that you get in the west of Ireland, what we call a soft today, and it really does look something spectacular. It was originally built in 1776. This was the seat of the Anglo-Irish Routledge family and they owned loads land around in this area, actually. But more importantly, most importantly, this is where my own great grandmother lived and worked as a housekeeper in the early 20th century. Now I’m holding one of the sole surviving photos of her, which can be day to do around 1906 and she’s wearing a very respectable Edwardian attire. She’s standing beside her husband, that’s my great grandfather. He actually came over from England. He’d been shipped over to work as a gamekeeper in another big house a few miles away. And that wasn’t very unusual, actually. Lots of the ascendancy families preferred to import English servants instead of hiring locals. Just down the road from this house, there is a neat little line of slate roofed cottages. They’re still there. They’re still being lived in. And they were actually built originally to house English servants like my great grandfather. Here in the photo is my grandmother as a baby. And she’s actually still instantly recognizable, even though she must be less than a year old. She’s all bundled up in white lace on her mother’s knee. And beside her, her older brother is about three years old and he’s in the arms of his father. Now, two things really fascinate me about this photo, especially standing here in front of the house. First of all, it looks very likely that this photo was taken somewhere out the back of this burnt out mansion in front of me. The doorframe that they’re standing at has some very finely cut stone and it certainly isn’t their cottage, which is which is not far from here. Secondly, there is my grandmother’s brother. That’s the pensive looking three year old there in my great grandfather’s arms. This is pretty fascinating because by the time that boy reached young adulthood, he had joined up with what was known as the old IRA in this region, and that is to say, the original guerrilla army of the rebel movement during the war of independence and the civil war. He was killed actually in an ambush not far from here when he was 17 years old in 1922. And he became a bit of a local martyr. He was given a full IRA military funeral and he was paraded through the local town Ballinrobe. In my grandparent’s cottage, which is only a few minutes away. You could almost see it from here. They used to sing songs about him. He was commemorated even in ballads. I have an old recording somewhere at home that I’ll dig up and see if I can play it on the podcast.
:
He was a gallant soldier of the famous IRA. That host of likely warriors who have thrilled the world to-day. With deeds of Irish valour, of chivalry and renown, when fighting Irish forces against the forces of the Crown.
Tim McInerney:
Just two years after my grandmother’s brother was shot dead by British forces, Bloomfield House would burn to the ground and I can’t help wondering, who did it? Was it an accident? Could it have been a member of my own family? A servant lighting the single match that burned down their Master’s house? What experiences drove my great grandparents, one of whom was English, to join up with an anti-British rebel movement? Were they, in some respects, spies in that house? What exactly happened between them and their employers? Just like Bloomfield, hundreds of these houses were burned down during the war of independence and hundreds more after the foundation of the free state. Lots of others simply fell into dereliction. They skulk now on the outskirts of practically every town and village, and they always seem somehow embarrassed despite their name, some weren’t particularly big at all. In fact, some aren’t much bigger than a modest suburban villa. The reality of life in a country house in Britain as well as Ireland was, of course, very different from the rosy, almost propagandistic image of a big happy family that you might pick up from period dramas like Downton Abbey. Servants would, to be sure, have consider themselves lucky to have a job in a big house, but they were not part of the family in any sense. When you read what the upper orders thought about them, it quickly becomes clear that they were considered something closer to a different species. Right into the 20th century, when a member of the family encountered servants in the hallway, it was not unusual for the servant to be obliged to face against the wall, to make themselves part of the furniture, not to offend anyone’s eyes with their very existence. When a servant got old or infirm, there was no retirement scheme. After a lifetime of service, they were very often just thrown out into the street. All of this paled in comparison with the dire situation in Ireland, though. Lots of historians have tried to rehabilitate the Irish ascendency’s villainous reputation over the last few decades. But if you ask me, they’ve always faced an uphill battle. By the 18th century, the Ascendency were renowned all over Europe for their brutal tyranny over their Irish tenants, who, it might be remembered, mostly spoke a different language, practiced a despised religion, and had little or no recourse in the law or in Parliament. The penal laws had ensured such a clear distinction between the privilege, Protestant elite and the disenfranchised Catholic majority that corruption and abuse of power was widespread and constant in the Big House. A considerable number of landlords in Ireland were English born and had hardly set foot in their ancestral estates. When Sir William Pope tried to choose an Irish title back in 1628, he remarked, “I am certain there are such towns as Lucan and Granard but I cannot find it on a map. If it is possible, we will change Granard for a whole county.” So William’s wish was granted. He became the Earl of County Downe. This toxic relationship fostered a deep feeling of resentment within and without the walls of the Irish estate. The ascendancy novelist Maria Edgeworth recalled in her diaries the moment that Republican rebels began to advance towards her Big House during the 1798 rebellion and seeing with horror the flashes of joy in the faces of her servants. I suppose that goes to explain why so many families had their closest staff imported from England. In the 19th century, Ascendancy tyranny was swapped for appalling negligence. After the act of Union, which saw the colonial Dublin Parliament abolished, somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the landed ascendancy, abandoned their Big Houses in Ireland and moved to the British capital. In British tradition, the whole idea of a local landlord was that he be a kind of neighbourhood patriarch, improving the land and looking after the day to day concerns of the tenants. In Ireland, the Big Houses and their tenants were increasingly given over to land agents and middlemen who hiked rents relentlessly in the pursuit of further and further profits. It was a disastrous recipe when the impoverished masses of Ireland were already heading straight towards the greatest calamity of mass starvation the island has ever or had ever witnessed. And no matter how small these Big Houses were, they were palaces in comparison to the dwellings of the Catholic majority. If you look at pre-famine maps, you’ll see these dwellings everywhere, little clusters of black rectangles covering every corner of the countryside. On the maps, they’re not even qualified as houses, but rather cabins. Some of them would have resembled the typical Irish cottages that you might see on a postcard. Many others, however, were more like mud huts. Sometimes they were just holes in the ground. So it’s no surprise that the Big House was at the eye of the storm during the famine years. Inside the walls of great estates. Life went on much as usual ballroom gatherings, lavish dinners, seasonal fruits from the walled orchards. Outside the periphery, entire villages were lying dead in the holes in the ground they called cabins and new holes in the ground were being prepared every day — mass graves which covered the countryside. The original driveway here at Bloomfield has been overgrown with grass, you can still see it in aerial photographs, but on the ground level, the big ornamental gateway just opens into a green field. But you can be sure and certain that in the mid 19th century there would have been starving possessions, a staggering down that driveway to the landlord’s house. That was what was happening all over the country. And this area in County Mayo was one of the worst hit. Not far from here is another Big House in Strokestown which has been restored to its original state. And today it houses the National Famine Museum and there you can you can still see the enormous soup cauldrons the landlord set up. That small mercy, mind you, didn’t stop him from evicting 3,000 families in the worst year of the famine, 1847. Since that land was much more profitable to a landlord as grazing for livestock. Later in that same year, the landlord of Strokestown was found murdered. His family fled that palladian mansion and they never returned again. The Big House was at the centre of one of another major episodes in the Irish independence movement, and that was the land war. Not far from where I’m standing again is another smaller ascendancy house, Lough Mask House. The land agent, Charles Boycot was looking after that estate. In the 1880s when the famine was still fresh in people’s mind, under the guidance of nationalist leaders, Charles Boycott’s tenants refused to pay him a single penny unless he stopped imposing abusive and unreasonable rates on them. I think what is most emblematic of that movement and that wave of hatred towards the land owning classes is Charles Stewart Parnell’s great speech to the tenants around this area during the land war. Now he was trying to convince them to ostracize people who took up the houses of evicted tenants, but the tenants actually took this even further and they started ostracizing the landlords themselves. This is what he tells them to do and it’s still electrifying, you know, a hundred years later. He says, “You must shun him on the roadside when you meet him. You must shun him in the streets of the town. You must shun him in the shop. You must shun him in the fair green and in the marketplace. You must show your detestation of the crime he has committed.” And that, it turns out, was the original boycott. The rain is coming down on me now, so I better get out of here because there isn’t very much shelter, as far as I can see. But all of this and looking at the Big House makes me think every time of a passage from the novel by Elizabeth Bowen The Last September, which is published in 1929, just after Ireland’s independence. It’s a passage that has become iconic, really, for the twilight of this Big House culture in Ireland. There’s a moment when Elizabeth Bowen’s main character walks up a hill and can see her own ancestral big house from above and this is what she says, “Far from here, their isolation became apparent. The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to huddle its trees close in fright and amazement at the wide light, lovely, unloving country. The unwilling bosom were on it was set.”
Naomi O’Leary:
I just love when people’s families histories overlap with the kind of history that you’ve read about in books. It just brings it alive. And I love this story about the origin of the word boycott as well. I think that, you know, that should be more widely known. I think this history, like it kind of explains a lot about how class works in Ireland today. So, ok, from what I remember, maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong, but what really happened to disrupt this whole system was the land war in the 1880s. So tenants essentially refused to pay their rent until their landlord sold them the plot of land that they were renting.
Tim McInerney:
Right. Yeah. In a nutshell, that’s more or less how it worked. And they had to sell the land for a standard price, you know, which was, of course, a pretty low, low price. It was a genius move. And it was based on industrial striking culture that was happening in the U.K. at the time. It’s essentially a strike, right? A boycott is just a strike. It’s a rent strike. And it was all orchestrated by two men, one of whom, Charles Stewart Parnell who I mentioned in that report, he was a nationalist ascendency landlord himself, so he’s a curious figure and another guy who’s just totally different. Michael Davitt, who was a very working class Irish immigrant in Britain who had his arm chopped off by a machine when he lived in Britain, actually, and who was trying to import socialist striking culture to Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. And I think it was more successful in some places than others, right, but essentially, at the end of it, you ended up with all of these former tenants who now owned their own small plot of land and they became little landlords in their own right, right. So they had capital, something to pass on. I think this ultimately destroyed Davitt’s hope of importing socialism, really, because having that capital and that stake really separated the kind of agricultural poor in Ireland from the industrial working class in the UK.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, absolutely. It was much more Parnell’s vision of what he wanted to happen. And what you really end up with are all these I suppose, you know, these like micro capitalists with one or two acres, but they own their one or two acres and they’re extremely attached, of course after the land war, to this idea of private property. That said, it’s important to note that the farmers didn’t really become any richer materially. But like you say now, they had capital and they were also free from this endemic mismanagement that had really characterized ascendancy culture.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay, so what’s essentially created is this huge fairly poor rural middle class in Ireland, right, and kind of at the same time the nation is being born that’s really anchored in these ideas of Catholic respectability and Irish nationalism.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, largely so. Absolutely. So, for instance, my grandparents who I talked about in the report, you know, they had 13 children in a really small four-roomed house. That’s seven kids in one room, seven kids in the other room, the parents and the third and the kitchen.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh gosh. Your poor grandma.
Tim McInerney:
But they wouldn’t have considered themselves working class, ever. You know, more than that, they were the bread and butter of the nation. It was families just like them that really characterized the post-independence population in Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
After this huge upheaval, this massive redistribution of property ownership and a new nation being born, what happened to the Big House elites during that period?
Tim McInerney:
Right. Well, there’s an easy kind of myth to feed into that they were driven out of Ireland like cattle, you know, and I suppose if you look at all those hundreds of houses that were burnt out after independence, to a degree that is kind of true. But it doesn’t explain the demise of the ascendancy really in Ireland. The truth of the matter is that just like the London classes in the UK in the beginning of the 20th century that the economic realities around the ascendancy just changed and it made that kind of lifestyle pretty much unfeasible. And this was especially true of course then in Ireland with the war of independence and the economic coups of the land war. You know, they really didn’t help.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right.
Tim McInerney:
A lot of Protestants left in general, actually, which you can see quite clearly if you look at a census from that time. A lot of the ascendancy, though we have to remember, we’re really thrilled about the new state. I mean, we can’t leave out people like W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, who were part of the ascendancy, too. And they were huge figures in the nationalist literary scene. You know, they imagined in a certain extent that they would become some kind of new intellectual aristocracy in an independent Ireland. And then like the others, the free state wasn’t necessarily hostile towards them. The Seanad, which is the upper house of the Irish government, it was more or less kind of modelled to accommodate old ascendancy lords, the people who had been running things already. It was kind of like a House of Lords equivalent, actually, except, you know, democratic.
Naomi O’Leary:
Except for that old thing.
Tim McInerney:
That part, yeah.
Naomi O’Leary:
Actually, that was something that Julian mentioned. He said that his family historically had tended to be sympathetic to Irish nationalists. But the thing was, though, they were imagining a different sort of Ireland that maybe not Irish nationalism so much as home rule. And they thought that they could be sort of bigger fish in a smaller pond, he said, you know, and throw their weight about a bit more.
Tim McInerney:
For sure, yeah. And the ascendency wanted this at several points during history. There was a big push for Irish independence at the end of the 18th century as well with what was called Grattan’s Parliament. But what he wanted was exactly what you’re saying, he wanted an Ireland for the ascendancy. He had no intention of helping out the 75 percent squalidly poor Catholic majority. And that was what the ascendancy wanted a lot throughout history and it was no different after independence than before.
Naomi O’Leary:
I think, you know, what came through when I was speaking to Julian that I don’t think people realize so much is that their world didn’t actually go away. To a large extent, it actually remained an island in a slow kind of decline. But it remained; a lot of it centred around things like horses and horse racing, so there are families like them who were living in their same old houses in Ireland and of course, in England it’s this huge cliché that these old aristocratic families can’t afford to heat their houses anymore. And in Ireland, it’s kind of even more extreme because the tactics that exist in places like England to get to keep up the house, which is essentially to open it up to the public as a kind of museum, that does really work in Ireland because there’s this whole history of complex and negative kind of public attitudes towards those Big Houses. And, you know, they’re a symbol for many people of a history of oppression and sadness. Julian is on the board of the Irish Historic Houses Association, which is a lobby group of owners of such castles and old houses, like the ones he lives in, and they push for them to be able to be retained and kept up in the way that they are now as important cultural and historical treasures. He told me that he was annoyed at the decision of the Irish Tourist Board to market historic houses in combination with the history of the famine. So you’re telling me that the owners of the Big Houses in Ireland weren’t delighted with the line of marketing that was taken?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
Well, I’m Chairman of the Irish Historic Housing Association and we have about 160 members who own historic houses in the state of varying sizes. In the launch of Ireland’s Ancient East by Fáilte Ireland, we weren’t, in fact, consulted about it. Fáilte Ireland decided to market Irish houses under the heading of “Big Houses and hard times” and to contrast larger houses with the eras of famine and poverty and eviction. We have been trying to convince Fáilte Ireland that that is not the way houses of this nature should be marketed. It is a perpetuation of a version of history which has led to the neglect of these houses in the past.
Naomi O’Leary:
An interpretation of history. Do you have a different interpretation of history?
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
Well, the fact is that if you look at Europe as a whole, there were substantial gaps in between the levels of wealth, between the wealthy and the poorer levels of society. And the problem encountered by the Irish populace as a whole were very similar to those encountered elsewhere in Europe. Where there was a dysfunction was in terms of the religious differences between the majority of the population and the Protestant ascendancy and in the economic catastrophes that occurred in the agricultural industry in the 19th century.
Naomi O’Leary:
The famine.
Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence:
The famine, also a decline in commodity prices brought about by railways making produce more easy to transfer it, to move across the continent. In Ireland as a whole majority of large houses were in fact built at times of prosperity when Ireland during the 18th century enjoyed an agricultural boom.
Tim McInerney:
Right. Well, I mean, I’d have to disagree with Julian on that one, really. I can, I think, look at a big house without thinking that its screams from every corner of its facade of the famine, especially when you look at these walled gardens on the grounds thinking that there was, you know, there was a fortress of food in such a sea of apocalyptic poverty, really, and people dying on the streets all around you when you left the Big House. Another house actually that has kind of marketed itself a little bit in conjunction with an idea of the farm is Westport house. It’s opened now to the public and the family there historically did relatively quite a bit to help people. And they have some letters on display from the lady of the house at the time. And, you know, like it’s all very sympathetic. But in one letter, she’s writing to her middleman. First of all and you know, and this was half the problem with the famine, that middlemen were controlling the houses, about what a terrible thing was happening in Ireland. And then later on she gave some advice on how better to grow strawberries and there’s something , you know, deeply sinister about that. A total disconnect from the fact that people were starving to death everywhere in the country. Let’s remind our listeners that, what, two million people just vanished, during the famine, a million across the sea and a million into the ground. You know, like a third of the population by the end of the whole thing had been reduced, so this isn’t just some agricultural disaster. This was a disaster on a monumental scale.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. And of course, the effects of it continue to kind of reverberate in Ireland today and have shaped Ireland to many respects. Of course, the population has never recovered to this day. This was something that the director Patrick Cooney, mentioned to me when I spoke to him. Let’s play an interview of that now. So essentially, Patrick Cooney spent about a decade infiltrating, I suppose, getting to know in dept the last remnants of this Anglo Irish aristocracy who remain in their crumbling houses around Ireland. He made a documentary about it called The Raj in the Rain, which is a really a must watch. He told me, actually, that those who remain often have a slightly awkward relationship with history.
Patrick Cooney:
My name is Patrick Cooney. I decided to go off and without a commission recall these people’s lives and as much detail as possible, which meant I had to spend quite a lot of time with them. It wasn’t weeks. It wasn’t months. It was actually over a period of 10 years. Getting to know the people, getting their trust, getting to know the story and getting to know their lives and their lifestyle. And as I said, how they fitted in to 21st century Island.
Naomi O’Leary:
And what did you find out about them? How would you describe them to someone who’s kind of new to the subject?
Patrick Cooney:
I always called them a lost tribe, and I felt a certain amount of affinity because I was born in London and I’m of Irish ancestry. I came back to live in Ireland. I have a very English accent and I fitted in superficially with the Anglo Irish far more than I did with what you might be called the native Irish, because most of the Anglo Irish have very English accents; they’re still schooled in England and most of their social circles are English.
Naomi O’Leary:
So who are they, these people?
Patrick Cooney:
These would be the descendants of, I suppose, what you would call planters who’d been involved in the plantation of Ireland or settlers going back to Anglo Norman times. They would have come in, they would have been — as they always said we acquired land or we were granted land — essentially the land that belonged to the native Irish was seized. This was a colonization and it was given to the favourites of whatever court there was at that time or whatever king there was at that time. And these people who now live here are the descendants of those court favourites. And they are in many cases they’re as Irish as any other Irish person. But they have a very, very, and this came out in the film, a very conflicted identity and a strange myriad of allegiances.
Naomi O’Leary:
Can you expand on that a little bit more? Like what’s their outlook?
Patrick Cooney:
Well, one of the first questions I asked all of them — I asked them all the same questions — “What nationality do you consider yourself?” And the answers were very interesting. Some of them said Irish. One of them said, Hiberno-Norman-Gaelic. And then one of them Josslyn Gore-Booth from Sligo said, “It’s very confusing. I am Irish, but I’m not. But I am English, but I’m not.” And I could identify because in England I have an English accent, but I’ve got an Irish name and people would say, you’re Irish. Over here in Ireland, I have an English accent and an Irish name, Irish people say, “You’re English.” So I had a little bit of affinity with them. But they are, I’m not I’m not saying they walk round with a big wound in them, saying we’re not accepted here, because I actually think Irish people were very, very generous when we got our independence. There’s a myth that the Anglo Irish were burnt out and driven out. They were not. They were actually encouraged to stay to form the new state. The Seanad, which is the Upper house of our houses of parliament, was created specifically for them and they were offered grants to restore their homes. That’s extraordinary for a nation coming out of six years of revolution to actually ask the old order to stay.
Naomi O’Leary:
So what are their lives like day to day and what remains of the old society that they would have had? Can you just describe a little bit about what their houses are like and their lives are like?
Patrick Cooney:
Well. As I always thought it was going to be Downton Abbey and Brideshead Revisited. The reality is most of them live in a very small portion of that large house, normally two or three rooms. Quite simply, those other rooms are show rooms and they always were. You can’t afford to heat those rooms 12 months a year without actually turning your house into a venue. And most of them, the younger generation, have accepted that and realise that if they do want to keep the family home, they’re going to have to turn it into a venue and they are going to actually have to become event managers. And some of them are not suited for this. Most can come from essentially privileged upbringing. And there they are, they’re having to invite everybody into their house and obviously get paid for it, but they’re opening up their homes to everybody. And so it’s a real turn around. And it’s only the last two generations that have had that, because up until the 1950s, they were still clinging on to a way of life that they’d had for hundreds of years. Now it’s totally different and it’s quite interesting. That’s what made the documentary interesting. We showed the younger generation having to come to grips with the fact they were going to have to find out how were they going to actually pay to keep the lid on the roof. And these houses are not designed for the Irish climate. These are Italian palazzos. And that’s why I called it The Raj in the Rain. They were the Maharajahs, but my god, they were in the rain.
Naomi O’Leary:
Something that I noticed when I was speaking to Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence, who we might have heard from earlier, is that he did feel that the state should give him money to maintain his house because of just, I suppose, the rareness of it and the preciousness of the things that were in it. And also, he had quite negative feelings, a feeling of kind of not being appreciated, fully appreciated or properly valued in modern Ireland, was that something that you came across?
Patrick Cooney:
I didn’t know. I can understand what he’s saying, but the reality is this is a Republic and we fought on and off for 700 years to drive the British out of Ireland. And the reality is the Anglo Irish ascendancy, whatever they choose to call themselves, are viewed very much as the old order and the old order’s day is gone. And in a society we live in where with as many pressures on the exchequer, how can you argue that you’re going to fund some toff to live in a Big House when we have hospital waiting lists? That’s the reality. But I did say to a number of people when they were asking me about the value of these houses, in many parts of Ireland, there is very little to draw tourists apart from the Big House and the Big House that used to be closed off, used to be walled, have now in many respects become hubs, tourist hubs, creative hubs. And the very best of them are doing that. Friends of mine who I’ve retained from my time making the film have taken over the estates and they’re turning the outbuildings into creative zones. That’s important because that involves the local people. It obviously brings in money. And it also, they realise that they are no longer Lord of the Manor. They can only stay in that house as long as the locals allow them to and as long as tourists come to visit. It’s great levelling out process for some of them. And obviously some of them have not coped for that very well. Others have. It’s very, very difficult, I suppose, to look round your family, whom you’ve been 400 years, and realise that actually the game’s over and you’re going to have to open the door and charge admission.
Naomi O’Leary:
Is there anything else that I haven’t asked about it you’d like to add?
Patrick Cooney:
I would say, well, I am a Republican. So I was the right man to let in to do a film on these people. It was never going to be a cosy up, I think, I’m glad their day is done. I’m glad we live in a Republic. But I think they have a part to play because as I said, Ireland is very dependent on tourism and the Big Houses are part of that.
Naomi O’Leary:
I’d love to ask you just to repeat what you told me earlier, which was, you know, they have this, They didn’t like to be marketed in association with the famine. Can you tell me what their point of view is and what your assessment of that is?
Patrick Cooney:
What I did hear from many of them was this almost an apology that each one of them had a great-great-great-grandparents who had mortgaged the house and had set up soup kitchens to save the Irish. And I kept hearing this all the time. I thought to myself, what if there was so many of these aristocrats wanted to save the Irish? Why did the million die and why did a million emigrate? I think underneath it, quite rightly, they have a shame and they should have a shame because the reality of the Great Hunger is still with us. It explains a lot about Irish society today and our excesses, being landless and being hungry. I don’t think many of them actually understand it because they didn’t have to go through it. Most of us who come from, I suppose, what you would call native Irish peasant stock, you only go back three or four or five generations and our great great-great-great-grandparents lived through the famine. And I’ve always said anybody who is Irish today comes from a nation of survivors. Those who survived, we are their descendants. And so I feel very strongly about that. It’s a stain on them, yeah. You can’t blame, it’s like blaming modern German teenagers for Hitler. You can’t do that, but some of them accepted and some of them don’t.
Tim McInerney:
I still actually haven’t seen that documentary and I’m dying to now.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, I’m so glad that he did manage to capture that world before it vanished. He said that, you know, the days of the old order are over. So, Tim, I wanted to ask, who are the elite now? Who has filled that gap?
Tim McInerney:
Right. Well, it’s a good question, right. I think after independence in the mid 20th century, the most obvious group that seems to fill the gap, I suppose, were the Dublin bourgeoisie, which was a mix of Protestant and Catholic and they built a kind of exclusive middle class culture that was very centred on Dublin. But this was a dramatically lower wealth bracket than, say, the owners of Big Houses.
Naomi O’Leary:
So, of course, there’s this stereotype, which has become rather famous, the D4 stereotype. So that’s named after the Dublin 4 postcode, which includes wealthy areas in Dublin. So the associations I have with D4 are sort of a particular accent that’s quite distinct. It’s distinct within Dublin as well. It’s like a posh Dublin accent. There’s other signifiers, like particular clothes that probably change over time, you know, perhaps having your collar popped up and wearing like deck shoes, you know those boat shoes. Liking rugby, there’s a whole like thing about rugby, loving rugby.
Tim McInerney:
Right.
Naomi O’Leary:
That kind of thing, which puts them at odds with a lot of Ireland because of course, the most popular sports in Ireland are Gaelic games and the sports of kind of working-class Dublin tends to be football. Tim, how would you describe D4?
Tim McInerney:
Well it’s actually hard to say, right? Because it’s a bit like you describe it’s kind of partially myth and it’s partly cliché and it’s partially reality. It’s a lot reality, actually, I suppose.
Naomi O’Leary:
I suppose, maybe, the thing that really sums it up is conspicuous consumption — being proud to be seen as richer than everybody else.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, sure. And it’s very much of its time, right. There’s something kind of “footballers’ wives” about it. I actually spoke to Dr. Ciaran O’Neill of Trinity College Dublin who is an expert on elitism in Ireland. He wrote a book called Irish Elites in 2013. So I asked him what he thought about this whole culture of elitism in Ireland today.
Tim McInerney:
Thanks very much for talking to us, Ciaran. So in your opinion, is there a recognizable elite in Irish society today?
Dr. Ciaran O’Neill:
The short answer to this question is yes. One of the most interesting aspects of Irish society is the extent to which we pretend that we don’t have an economic or social elite, that Ireland is somehow classless. And I mean, if you want to clean, look a look at the recent internal Fine Gael power struggle, where two elite, educated, middle-aged men duked it out to become effectively our unelected prime minister. There was almost no comment on the fact in media or popular reaction that one of those, Simon Coveney, is a Clongowes educated member of a political dynasty, and the other, Leo Varadkar, is a King’s hospital educated son of a medical doctor and a Trinity graduate.
Tim McInerney:
For our listeners, Clongowes or Clongowes Wood College, is a private Jesuit school just outside Dublin. Its annual fees are currently set at just over 18,000 euros a year. Ciaran, this private versus state education is really prominent in UK coverage of politicians, especially during election seasons, so why do you think it’s almost entirely absent from the debate in Ireland?
Dr. Ciaran O’Neill:
I think one of the reasons for this is that Ireland’s leaders is generally politically understated and muted, I would say. The economic and social elite typically remain within the professional classes or the financial industry and within a close knit milieu bounded together by social, sporting and educated, educational ties, so they’re contained and somewhat invisible.
Tim McInerney:
So invisible though they are, do you think that at the end of the day the elites in this country are essentially tied to this circle of the privately educated?
Dr. Ciaran O’Neill:
I think it’s unquestionably true that there is a link to what we call elite culture and the education system in Ireland, yes. In the Republic, the proportion of what we call the fee-paying schools is about seven percent of the school going population, more or less exactly the same as it is in Canada. And our nearest point of reference are probably the public schools of the UK; the Harrows, the Etons, the Winchesters, they also account for 7 percent of the school going population, but they disproportionately stock prestige, professional occupations, the judiciary, the financial sector and so on, sometimes supplying as much as 50 or 60 percent. And the Milburn report in the UK has made very clear in this causal link between elite and the equal education systems and life chances and social mobility. We’ve never seen a research project on that scale done on contemporary Ireland. But I can say for certain that the causal link is evident historically because I research that myself and I presume that a survey of any similar occupational strata across contemporary Ireland would likely show roughly the same sort of percentages, and we know that anecdotally. The bottom line really is that our fee paying schools are cheaper only because the Irish tax system subsidizes them in the form of teacher salaries to the tune of between 90 to 100 million euro a year. Now as a citizen, I think that’s totally wrong. If we want a fair education system, then the only way to achieve that is to make it illegal to charge fees and to discriminate on grounds of faith, wealth or kin. Anything less than that would be a half measure.
Tim McInerney:
And what about the so-called Dublin 4 phenomenon? How does that fit into the elite culture in Ireland in recent times?
Dr. Ciaran O’Neill:
I’ve always been fascinated with the D4 phenomenon, which is really a catchall phrase we use to denote a group of people in Ireland who intentionally delineate themselves from the majority of the population by relying on social signifiers. So typically accent, choice of fashion, choices sport or leisure activity and so on. What we call D4 over the past 30-odd years has a much longer history. In fact, you find that accent parried in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair from 1848, for example, and it’s recognizably the accent that we would today label D4.
Tim McInerney:
Looking at a copy of Vanity Fair here in front of me, I’m guessing Kieran is talking about the character of Mrs. O’Dowd, who appears about 200 pages in. She’s an ascendancy dame who pronounces the word Merrion Square, “Muryan Squeer.” That is M UR Y A N S Q U E E R. And whose full name, she insists, is Auralia Margareta, daughter of FitzGerald Beresford de Burgh,Moloney of Glenmoloney, or Peggy.
Dr. Ciaran O’Neill:
50 years ago, my grandfather might’ve referred to that accent as a Rathmines or as a Rathgar accent. The Gaelic revivalists bemoaned what they read as sort of an anglicized element to that accent in the late 19th century, but not too loudly since many of them spoke with one.
Tim McInerney:
I think a lot of people in Ireland will associate the Dublin four phenomenon with boom time culture. This is the years in the 1990s and the early 2000s where Ireland briefly became spectacularly rich, or at least it seemed that way for a little while. Do you think the culture has kind of gone into decline since the economy crashed?
Dr. Ciaran O’Neill:
I wouldn’t agree with that at all. Just this afternoon, I heard our new prime minister addressing a press conference with Theresa May and in what I think we could easily characterize as a D4 accent. That accent isn’t going anywhere. It’s just changing slightly with each generation.
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s interesting that Dr O’Neill says that its importance is really enduring. Certainly to me, I can remember this sort of D4 culture stereotype having its high point during the Celtic Tiger boom years. Because people then, I can remember a moment when certain people in Dublin were proud to be identified with that stereotype, you know. They really embraced it and kind of played up to it. And they loved the comedic fictional character Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, who’s, you know, he’s a satire of it, but they kind of embraced him. And in a way, he came to define it in an interesting way. He defined it in a way that it hadn’t been before.
Tim McInerney:
Right. And it is like you say, it’s a satire, right. The character’s name, like it’s a double barrelled name in itself is a satire. But, yeah, lots of people seem to kind of purposefully miss the satire and champion him as a kind of hero.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, and really play up to it. To me, the interesting thing was the dramatic change that I witnessed in the attitude towards that culture and people who were identified with that culture. And to me, it changed dramatically with the financial crisis. It happened quite suddenly that that lifestyle and any association with it and any kind of conspicuous consumption that suddenly became deeply, deeply unfashionable. And instead, you had coming in this whole idea of authenticity and embracing of things that were authentic. I think it’s very related to like the hipster movement, you know, which came out of Brooklyn, I suppose, in the United States. But in Ireland, what that meant was embracing things that were Irish, which really wasn’t a marker of lots of people in Dublin before the crash, I must say.
Tim McInerney:
But in terms of who actually wields power, who are the real elites, though, because I don’t think it’s Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.
Naomi O’Leary:
I completely agree with you. Okay, so here’s the thing. Here’s my take, right. So power, power itself isn’t a problem, as long as the systems to wield it are transparent. But we actually need people who can exercise power in fact, to fix problems when they arise. The issue is in Ireland is that in recent years, power has been wielded in an extremely non-transparent and non-democratic manner and I think this is at the core of the rage at elites. So it’s the big cliché about Ireland, right, is that we all know each other and in many respects that’s actually true. It is a small island.
Tim McInerney:
It is true.
Naomi O’Leary:
Like there aren’t that many degrees of separation between people. And that can be really and I think that can be a lovely thing. But when it applies to people who are elites or who are powerful in different ways, it becomes really dangerous. So if the politician and property developer and the businessman and the banker, if they all know each other, it can create these situations, where there are various powers combined in a close circle with no oversight, without any check checks or balances.
Tim McInerney:
Like a terrible Captain Planet.
Naomi O’Leary:
like a terrible Captain Planet, right.
Naomi O’Leary:
And when that happened in the financial crisis, that small group of people was able to bankrupt the entire country through their decisions, you know. And that kind of elite power is something that poses a real continuing threat to Ireland, I would argue because that casual informality and resistance to oversight and resistance to openness is extremely current. It is something that is not changing. It’s not the obvious people who are carrying Louis Vuitton handbags down Grafton Street that are the problem. It’s not the power that you see. It’s the power that’s invisible. You know, that’s powerful enough to hide itself, that’s the problem. And it’s not going anywhere.
Tim McInerney:
Right. And Naomi’s latest blog on Lizard People will be up anytime now
Tim McInerney:
No, sorry. You’re quite right. You’re absolutely right. And it’s something I think that’s really interesting, actually, coming around full circle is the word that’s constantly still used in the media today to describe this kind of inner circle of power being Gombeens. Today, the word Gombeen is used in Ireland to describe corrupt politicians or general wheeler dealer types, but back in famine times, the Gombeen man referred to a middleman or a moneylender, or just the general corrupt circle of people who profited from the extreme inequalities at the time, so there you go. Maybe things haven’t changed all that much since ascendency rule after all.
Naomi O’Leary:
We’re sadly out of time, so we’re going to wrap up.
Tim McInerney:
Indeed we are. So what we’re going to talk about next week, Naomi?
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay, so next week we’re going to look at Ireland and Europe. So Ireland’s relationship historically with its continental neighbours and how that might evolve with Brexit. And we’ll be discussing whether, as some people argue, there is an argument for Ireland leaving the bloc too.
Tim McInerney:
The dreaded Irexit.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So catchy, guys. You’re going to have to come up with something better. So for now, as always, thank you so much for listening.
Tim McInerney:
And please don’t forget to rate and share the podcast, as always, it makes a huge difference to us, so if you haven’t done so yet, would really appreciate it. And if you have any questions or comments on this episode or any of our other episodes, we’d love to hear from you. You can get us on email as usual at theirishpassport@gmail.com.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yes. And we’re on Twitter at @PassportIrish.
Tim McInerney:
I’m useless on Twitter, unfortunately.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, Tim, you don’t even have a handle. It’s so sad.
Tim McInerney:
I don’t even have a handle. But I man the Irish passport handle incognito half the time. I’m actually a little bit afraid of Twitter. I don’t know how to use it. But I didn’t make a lovely Facebook page, guys, so come and check that one out instead.
Naomi O’Leary:
Tim, you’re like a dad. Okay. Thanks so much for joining us.