Intro & A Deep Breath Together

Dia daoibh a chairde. Sesamh is ainm dom, and you're listening to Big Irish World and Irish Diaspora Podcast. The first thing I would like us to do in this very complex episode is take a deep breath together. Just to make sure that we both remember how. So we're gonna "tóg anáil" We're gonna "take a breath". Start with the in . Isteach ("Inward")... Out. Out is "Amach" or "Outward". If at any point during this complex conversation of identity and personhood and agency and connection, um, if at any point in this conversation you begin feeling a rise of anger or anxious energy, then I think uh by the end you'll definitely have places to go. And none of this conversation should leave anyone feeling like they are more or less connected than they were in the beginning. This is really just food for thought in an area where I feel like the conversation is a bit lacking. So let's dive in. Um, I'm gonna try to do minimum editing on this one just so um you can realize in the moment, like I'm negotiating these things, and I want you to see it for the "flawed one guy on the internet"'s take. I just think it's a conversation that threw friggin' thousands of "Comhrá"'s and even more conversations by folks out in the diaspora where where your Irishness is interrogated far more actively and consistently. And I know that that's part of the issue too. So I think there's an experiential gap between folks who have never really once in their life considered someone could question whether they're Irish at all. Like as a valid thing, like you wouldn't just laugh it off. Oh ha ha ha, of course I'm Irish. You know. And that's understandable. And again, no one's trying to really manipulate any of those pieces. We're just trying to have a nuanced conversation around a complex subject that I think is under discussed. So there's kind of a couple of different ways that folks talk about culture, and I think that those distinctions matter because you can sometimes be sometimes the the friction that folks get into is it one person will be using one definition and someone else will be using another, and that both are valid within their own context, but trying to use them like the same word in the same moment, um, it just it's not a recipe for communication or understanding. So I think part of the conversation that we need to have is um so when I have this conversation just out with friends, I like to start with a hypothetical. There's actually if if you know me, you've probably heard this 800 times because I actually really like this one. So let's say that you're out at a party at a friend's house. Doesn't even really matter what for, but it's you in a gathering of folks, and for whatever reason you're the only Gael in attendance. So, uh suddenly the power goes out. It's like nine or ten o'clock at night, and one of your other friends who has just waited until the last second to either do their homework or to help their kid sibling with some homework, and they come out and they say, Hey, wait! Are there any Irish people here? And people naturally point them in your direction, and they say, Oh my god, I am so happy that you're here. Uh, we are gonna be so screwed with the internet being out. So you ask them, like, what's going on? Um, and then in this hypothetical. Um So we can say uh the paper is on a topic around Irish culture, and we have three choices of topics. It can be on "the Celtic Tiger", "the Easter Rising", or "the Good Friday Agreement". So, pause for a second in this hypo. Uh if you don't know what any of those words mean, or if you've heard those words, but that's about as much as you can claim. That's a question, isn't it? Like, why? Why why wouldn't these massive massive topics uh have escaped your gaze or your understanding if you really do feel such a close personal connection with this culture? Like three massive things that have shaped and continue to shape the culture today. It's you know, I guess the punchline here isn't so much, you know, which of these would you do and how well would you do on this paper? That's not, I'm not trying to grade people on their Irishness. I'm not trying to create a hierarchy here. Um, all I'm saying is that in this moment, when someone bursts out of the other room and they say, Hey, I have this Irish cultural paper that's due. Um in there asking you, you know, can you answer these questions? Can you at least guide my inquiries so that I can find the answers that I'm looking for? And all someone can say is, "yes! A valid Irish passport!" You know? Um now before folks say that I'm talking with Strawman here, uh, we get a lot of folks that come over from the island. And part of the part of the confusion that happens over here is there's an assumption that whenever you live like let's give a local example first, to be fair. So there are lots of folks that live in New York City who've probably never been to the Statue of Liberty or been to the top of the Empire State Building or been in any particularly posh shops, right? But people just assume that if you live in proximity to something, you're kind of like more juiced in, like you're more in the know than most folks would be, you know. But that's that's just not the case. And what seems to happen often enough is uh the folks that make it over recreational are for work, and they hop the pond, they come over, and this is I understand just as true in Canada or other places, but but folks hop over and their expectation is that people over here don't know anything that goes on over there, like it's just this black box where only people that live there understand. Like we don't have access to RTÉ or uh A "RnaG" (RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta) or TG4 (Irish Language TV with Free apps!) or so or like that there are folks over here that use Irish when the cops walk in. You know, it's a thing. It really throws people too. It really throws folks to get over here, and beyond the little, you know, "Dia is Muire dhuit.", like the "cúpla focal" in the beginning, then folks start asking about, you know, what were you up to over the last weekend? And you see the panic in people's eyes, they say, oh crap. Like there are whole comedy routines about this. About that moment where folks uh from my from Ireland actually come over to other places. Uh I think I forget what it was. There was a specific comedian (Grace Mulvey) who had a whole thing about um her (Grace Mulvey) escape with saying that the guy she (Grace Mulvey) was speaking to at Starbucks, who was starting to kind of exceed her (Grace Mulvey) "Cúpla Focal", that uh he said, Oh, you must not understand me because I'm speaking the "king's Irish". And she (Grace Mulvey) just like ran with it, right? And that's hilarious. Like, I love that skit. Um but it speaks to a real horror that's like cropped up a little bit as you start to see folks that come over uh for any amount of time and they bump into their first speaker, or they they start noticing people walking around with their fáinne (a 'ring' pin Irish speakers wear) like actually wearing it, and like speaking to the guy behind the counter, the bodega or something, you know. And folks aren't prepared because there's this misunderstanding of who you're talking to, you know. I think that's a big piece of it. And there's a reverse to this too. I'm trying to keep the equity here. There's a reverse to this, true. I do want to address for a moment the very real fatigue that folks on the island who spend most of their time on the island have honestly accumulated by idiot tourists, just by the hundreds, saying the same dumb things, getting the same dumb stuff, looking for the same dumb experiences. Like, I get it. I'm not gonna tell anybody that they're wrong in that capacity, man. You're not. I'm frustrated with Americans over here too. A lot of us are, is a thing. Like, there are probably by numbers more of us in your camp over here physically, like, per capita even maybe, than the alternative. Like, most of us over here agree with, like, yeah, guys being a jerk. Or uh, there was a there was a a recent incident in Northern Ireland where a woman went into Starbucks and was asked about how she voted, and she was very surprised by the social and cultural differences between how important it is to talk to your neighbors and own those decisions. Um, that's a whole other episode we could get into if folks want to. And you can bring it up. We we do take suggestions on the Speakpipe.com/BigIrishWorld, which is like a voicemail box. There it's incredibly easy to submit things anonymously. So if you're a scoundrel, you can send us crazy things that way too. We won't know who it is or where it came from. Just putting that out there. So the most honest feedback is probably that way through the speakpipe. Um, bigirishworld at gmail.com is another way to get us an email. We're uh @Big Irish World on Discord. Uh, but we'll give all of that in the show notes and stuff at the end. So, anyway, what do we do with this, this mess? So I think there's a type of model of thinking about culture itself. Like even before we address it or apply it to Irish culture or anything like that. I think that there's a precept of like this, what I'll refer to as like the golden ticket model, where you have uh a person shows up and they say, "Well, I've got this golden ticket! "Whack!" and they put it down, tell you, you know, "you owe me all of this stuff, and the people that have this golden ticket, they're they're they're the only ones who are supposed to get that stuff, and there better not be people out there with fake golden tickets, because then they're gonna get my stuff!" You know, that is such a fraught broken, fragile way to approach culture. This thing that otherwise breeds resilience and like um I would say like spiritual nourishment at that level. Like it reaches that level. Where it's something that could be filling you up instead of turning it into this weird zero-sum blood feud, like you know, I I heard somebody mention that the um that the yoga in the United States has basically turned into a blood sport. And I think if you've got access to Google the same as I do, there are examples out there that might be in the running for that definition. But that's not what this is about. So, golden ticket model's wrong. What do we do? What do we do instead? So I always hearken back to the idea of when somebody needs a Gael in the room, when they're having a bad time, and they just want to have a casual conversation that references a lot of cultural things, but they don't want to have to give two seasons worth of information just for people to understand the language involved, let alone the people involved, let alone the historical context or the cultural context. Like you just want to, you got some news today and you're feeling away about it, and you want to be able to process it with someone who's got a lot of that pretext down. You know, that's one of the utilities you get in Cora. You don't bump into a whole lot of cats who show up just to speak Irish for the heck of it, who don't follow what the hell is going on. That's one of the reasons why I whenever somebody is wearing their fania, or they're or they're showing up to Korra, they're just showing up for cultural events like that. That's a green flag for me. It means you probably are gonna be less frustrating and exasperating for the gaos of any place to talk to. Like not just the folks in Ireland, but just any place where you don't want to have the same two conversations either. You know, we faced out hell and it's a hell that we live in. You know, think about that for a second, like you'd never leave you think you can't leave the gift shop. Man, anyway. Anyway, I think I don't really have a name for this model, but it feels more like if you have Irish blood, I think that that's an invitation to culture, but that the type of cultural exposure that you may have is gonna be a spectrum. And I don't think that it requires an invitation, but I do think that if you have little invitations like this that are afforded to you by people that either loved you into this world or meant a whole lot to you, you know, that's precious. I'm not gonna touch that. Like that's precious. Um I think I think that there are a lot of folks who haven't even considered that it's something to take action on at all. Like because you were born there and because folks say, well, that's all I really need, it's like a minimum standard. And so when folks try to have a more complex conversation about uh folklore or history or just current events in the context of culture itself, like why something get why something may come across as more tone-deaf in a cultural or historical context, and that missing that context, it makes people who are more informed and upset. Boy, that's a conversation we never have, is it? But when I talk about almost like filling a bag or like, you know, collecting pieces of the culture, I feel like there's the first step is there's some kind of invitation or a calling, something that tells you there's plays in this playbook that might help you. And so the first step is you start reading on it, and you start collecting some of these pieces. And some of those pieces might be resonant as hell, and they're gonna be things that you think about every single day, maybe every hour of every day that you're awake. Possible. Some of this stuff really hits that heart. Um, if you get your first Seanfhocail book, I've known some folks, but they get their first Seanfhocail book, and it really is like a religious experience. Like they just get this little condensed wisdom that they think about all the time. And then whenever they have, uh, you know, they're having a bad experience. Someone cuts in front of them in lines somewhere, or somebody was rude to them whenever. And they just whisper this little Seanfhocail spell to themselves. Um, I love this one. "If that's the worst thing that today has to offer me, she's still a good one." Right? That's resilience. Um, there is this kind of vague illusion that you get from a lot of folks about how uh there is a resilience that Irish culture bakes into you whenever you expose yourself to it and you actually live the culture. That's another vague illusion people give. Is they talk about uh living the culture, and then folks try to nail them down for life. But what do you mean about that? Oh it's so hard to explain. I think that it can be tricky to explain, but I think you can do it, and I think if you love it enough, you probably should be able to. Um, that's one of them, at least for me, you know. Uh, there are others. Uh there are other things like oh man, so my brother, whom I am incredibly proud of every single day, uh, he works in death services, and he is working with families all the time who have lost someone, and that's a that's a hard part of life to like be in. So you're constantly kind of a grief counselor. He is he is truly gifted with people who have lost everything, and he's there to help them find the pieces that they still have and to connect with the people that they still have. And I think that some of that is informed by uh how much Irish culture he has had just funneled at him. He's been given models. He's been given, you know, not just a tradition of a Wake or Keening, but he's been given a few models for how to approach this and help people feel whole at the end. And I think right now more than ever, we need that kind of resilience. And I think we can share that kind of resilience too. Uh perspectives. Things that are informed by culture don't have to be possessive as agents of that culture. You know, if you like if you like eating soda bread, knowing that you ate soda bread this morning doesn't necessarily make you more Irish. It just means you're you know that soda bread is a thing. Maybe you'll know that it's an Irish bread, and that you'd be surprised how few people actually have those two data points connecting. So you're already kind of a little bit easier to relate to with less overhead and less of a lift. So if we were ever out um just having a beer or something, or a "Pop-up Gaeltacht" or comhrá ("conversation") or something, I think we could spend more of the time actually expressing and listening to each other express with a more cultural fluency and a fidelity, so that an hour between someone who wants to have a quick conversation about something recent in a cultural context without having to have a whole TED talk about it. They get to have the catharsis of that expression, and knowing that it was taken in by ears that understood it. And there's something in that act, just knowing that it reached a brain outside of yourself that understood it for what it was expressed as. Like that's I feel like that's what social media pretends to be. But I think that's the real deal, like, when you get that with someone. Ugh. Oof, alright, this has already run long for one of my episodes. I try to keep him respectfully short, and I may actually have to edit this one down a little bit. But but I did want to leave a little bit of a um hypothetical that is not a hypothetical to a lot of folks out in the diaspora. So if blood truly was what made someone Irish or not Irish, if that was the difference, then if two people from Cronamara have a child they cannot support, and they put them up for adoption, let's say that there are two loving parents to pick them up in Mexico City. Perhaps they chose Ireland because of a family history with a San Patricios. (We're gonna talk about them in May...) So let's say this child grows to adulthood and their parents finally inform them that they were adopted from a couple in Ireland. So they decide to go. We can't see blood. We really can't. No matter how much folks try to say that skin will tell you more than it can, like you can't see blood. So if this young person from Mexico City shows up somewhere in Galway and they start telling everyone how proud they are that they're Irish, like the weight of the smack across their entire soul. Whenever the people they came to love and admire, and to try to find some kind of connection with, slap them so hard. You're not like us, you have no place with us. We're not like you, you're not like us. And then often enough the folks that say that the loudest are gonna be the ones pushing this blood garbage. You know? Like we can say that. It's dumb. It's a poor indicator. Anyhow. But that's plenty. Let's take one more deep breath together. Oh, but that's a lot to take in, isn't it? I'm sure folks are gonna let me know how they feel. And please do. I'm here to I'm here for folks' opinion. You can leave us a voicemail in the speakpipe, you can drop us a line at bigirishworld at gmail.com. 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