{"id":1327,"date":"2012-03-08T17:23:42","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T17:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/?p=1327"},"modified":"2012-03-09T12:18:07","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T12:18:07","slug":"stuck-in-a-moment-we-cant-get-out-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/2012\/03\/08\/stuck-in-a-moment-we-cant-get-out-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuck In A Moment We Can\u2019t Get Out Of"},"content":{"rendered":"

And so, it begins. The annual exercise in counting our national blessings, looking ourselves up and down, and concluding that Ireland, all things considered, isn\u2019t a bad old place.
\nExcept, it\u2019s not beginning, because it never really stopped. National self-examination is no longer a periodical or commemorative exercise, but a constant, ongoing affair. It is becoming clear that there is no answer to the question of what it means to be Irish \u2013 if there was, we would surely have stumbled upon it by now. Nonethless, every other week it seems, yet another twitter hashtag thread seeks to plumb the depths of our identity, as represented by Bosco, Red Lemonade and Sally O’Brien<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

#Iristhings, all of a month ago, was followed in less than a week by #advicefornewcitizens, which purported to tell newly sworn-in citizens how to be gas characters like ourselves. The possibility that these new citizens might be a bit fed up with our self-congratulation, or that they might play a part in creating a new, more diverse Irishness was mostly not touched upon. Meanwhile #ThatsIrish runs more or less permanently, as does #SoIrish and #PureIrish. I started writing this post after the #Irishthings hashtag and then forgot about it until it was too late. I needn\u2019t have worried. A few weeks later, just in time for our national holiday, here come #BeingIrishMeans<\/a> and #HowToBeIrish<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting, if you take a look at the hashtag streams, that they focus on the old-fashioned, the rural, the defiantly unfashionable. There\u2019s much talk of \u201chang sangidges\u201d and \u201ctay\u201d. Regional colloquialisms for bad weather and drunkenness abound. There\u2019s plenty of the sort of thing that gets shouted from the stands at GAA matches. These things were out of favour during the boom years, but are now talismans of an older, better place, an Ireland before it all went wrong. Soon enough though, these streams always degenerate into a weirdly vacuous narcissism where quite commonplace things are claimed for Ireland. A good third of this Joe.ie compilation<\/a> from the #GreatIrishWords stream is actually English. Similarly, #Irishthings included such essential parts of Who We Are as \u201ctalking shite\u201d and \u201cDrinking lots of drink and getting drunk\u201d Before long someone will be claiming that oxygen, gravity and back pain are #uniquelyIrish. <\/p>\n

All countries are guilty of this self-regard (yet another way in which we are not unique). \u201cOnly in America\u201d is appended to phenomena that exist in literally every country in the world. \u201cQuintessentially English\u201d summons up an insufferably smug catalogue of reactionary tweeness and contrived eccentricity. But in those cases, there\u2019s much less embarrassing neediness on display. Current or former superpowers don\u2019t need to reassure themselves the way a small, broke, marginal country does. <\/p>\n

Can it be as long as a year since the last St. Patrick\u2019s Week? If it seems less, that is mostly because we laid on an extra one last year for the visits of Queen Elizabeth and Barack Obama. The QE2\/Obama week was an instructive one. It said a lot about where we are as a country. We were visited by two of the most personally famous Heads of State in the World, representatives of two of the world\u2019s most dominant cultures. You\u2019d think we might show an interest in their respective homelands. But we didn\u2019t really. The visits were not about America, or England. The whole thing was pretty much all about us, as reflected back to ourselves via our illustrious visitors. \u201cYou like us!\u201d, we said, \u201cYou really like us!\u201d. Then, when they were gone, we were able to get into the real purpose of the whole exercise: sitting down to watch a highlights show on RTE called \u201cReelin\u2019 In The Week\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Shared cultural moments are no longer fleeting instances that you either experience live or miss forever. If you were out when something momentous happened, you can quite easily see it later. And if you were in, rather than allow the moment to take root in your mind, as memories used to do, you can watch it over and over again, then email it to your friends. Media moments are thus \u201cshared\u201d in a very different way these days. Nothing can just happen anymore. Indeed, nothing can really be said to have truly happened unless it creates a social media buzz. In the past, such moments were shared due to a perceived significance, hence the old question of \u201cwhere were you when you heard…?\u201d These days, there is only one answer to that question, \u201cI was on Twitter\u201d. Everything is a shared moment now, whether it deserves to be or not.<\/p>\n

This is a particularly hyper-actively self-regarding atmosphere in which to have a national identity crisis. Irish people have not been this insecure, figuratively or literally, for generations. Not only is there grinding recession, there is also no certainty that things won\u2019t get radically worse. On a national level, embarrassment at the folly and excesses of the Celtic Tiger era, plus the fact that our sovereignty is now in question makes us defensive about our national identity. No wonder we are keen to wrap ourselves in the warm blanket of old certainties and repeat to ourselves in our national mirror \u201cI am a good country. I am unique. I am great gas altogether\u201d. At the same time though, we are angry at the people who got us into this mess. There\u2019ll be no forgiveness for as long as austerity lasts. When we’re not patting ourselves on the back for being such great gas, we’re lacerating ourselves for our hypocrisy and greed. We are so committed to the rut we’re in that we take offence at the words “move on”. And so, trapped in a perpetual present, we thrash about in a time-loop, reliving the same experiences over and over. We look back no further than the 1980\u2019s (the childhood of the pope\u2019s children, the most self-obsessed generation in Irish history), and we don\u2019t look forward at all. We watch and read<\/a> retrospectives of the economic crash and fume as if it were yesterday. We buy tickets to reunion shows by the bands we liked in the 90\u2019s, and we dance as if that was yesterday too. We buy re-issued editions of our old school text-books<\/a>, for goodness sake. These are not the activities of a people embracing the future. We have become nostalgic for our own present, the most abject form of conservatism imaginable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And so, it begins. The annual exercise in counting our national blessings, looking ourselves up and down, and concluding that Ireland, all things considered, isn\u2019t a bad old place. Except, it\u2019s not beginning, because it never really stopped. National self-examination is no longer a periodical or commemorative exercise, but a constant, ongoing affair. It is becoming clear that there is no answer to the question of what it means to be Irish \u2013 if there was, we would surely have stumbled upon it by now. Nonethless, every other week it seems, yet another twitter hashtag thread seeks to plumb the depths of our identity, as represented by Bosco, Red Lemonade and Sally O’Brien. #Iristhings, all of a month ago, was followed in less than a week by #advicefornewcitizens, which purported to tell newly sworn-in citizens how to be gas characters like ourselves. The possibility that these new citizens might be a bit fed up with our self-congratulation, or that they might play a part in creating a new, more diverse Irishness was mostly not touched upon. Meanwhile #ThatsIrish runs more or less permanently, as does #SoIrish and #PureIrish. I started writing this post after the #Irishthings hashtag and then forgot about it until it was too late. I needn\u2019t have worried. A few weeks later, just in time for our national holiday, here come #BeingIrishMeans and #HowToBeIrish It\u2019s interesting, if you take a look at the hashtag streams, that they focus on the old-fashioned, the rural, the defiantly unfashionable. There\u2019s much talk of \u201chang sangidges\u201d and \u201ctay\u201d. Regional colloquialisms for bad weather and drunkenness abound. There\u2019s plenty of the sort of thing that gets shouted from the stands at GAA matches. These things were out of favour during the boom years, but are now talismans of an older, better place, an Ireland before it all went wrong. Soon enough though, these streams always degenerate into a weirdly vacuous narcissism where quite commonplace things are claimed for Ireland. A good third of this Joe.ie compilation from the #GreatIrishWords stream is actually English. Similarly, #Irishthings included such essential parts of Who We Are as \u201ctalking shite\u201d and \u201cDrinking lots of drink and getting drunk\u201d Before long someone will be claiming that oxygen, gravity and back pain are #uniquelyIrish. All countries are guilty of this self-regard (yet another way in which we are not unique). \u201cOnly in America\u201d is appended to phenomena that […]","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-irish-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1327"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1335,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327\/revisions\/1335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}