What it is to be Irish

I was expressing some skept about writing 225,000 words on what it is to be English in the guise of it being an analysis of [social] science and experimentation. Apart from some snarky comments about bluff USAians being baffled by British irony, almost all the data comes from observations of the English in England. It is hard therefore to determine if the conclusions are specifically about English humans or Humans in general. A lot of the findings d♪ng true for Ireland, for example.

El Blobbo has made some meandering comments about whether science has anything at all to say about the human condition acknowledging that the fiction of Jane Austen or Emily St.John Mandel or Claire Keegan has more pointers about how to live well than all the scientific papers I ever wrote.

As it happens, the night before I left for a week of sole-searching in France, I downloaded two e-books from Borrowbox. It would be a sin to take an earbook on pilgrimage: when there are ppl to greet and birbs to list. But maybe some reading matter is handy for trains and planes and before anyone else is up and about.  But a book would be weight in the pack. The MiamMiam DoDo camino-guides print not only the price €18.00 but also the weight 320g on the back cover!

• All in a Doctor's Day by Lucia Gannon about being [a bit more than] half of a GP practice [the surgery R] in Killenaule Co Tipp
• See also A Fortunate Woman about being a rural UK GP.
• The House on an Irish Hillside by Felicity Hayes McCoy about working from home in remotest Kerry as a Dublin-born but London-based media person

Both these women came, as adults, to particular but not too peculiar small rural communities and established themselves with a degree of intimacy and acceptance that enabled them to be among you taking notes. and distill something about What it is to be Irish [kind, generous, non-transactional, funny, ham sandwiches, booze] in a lot fewer words [75,000 for the Doctor book] than 225,000.

Gannon's book gives an insight into the pervasiveness of GAA in rural Ireland: so many county-colour shirts, so many flags. I guess it is A Good Thing if it gets kids out in the fresh air getting fit in all weathers. The shouty local rivalries, not so much?

There's a nice tale in the Hayes-McCoy memoir when they come home to find a huge heap of seaweed dumped on their lawn. Their neighbour above had been hauling algae off the beach as fertilizer for spuds and assumed that of course the in-blows could use a tractor-trailer load. That required English Wilf to help the neighbour to dig the seaweed into his lawn, and later plant potatoes, rather than setting his own adult agenda for the precious hours away from London. 

I guess these memoirs / autobiographies are not Dewey-decimalled as 'fiction', although 'some names have been changed to protect the innocent' doesn't make them fact either. What they definitely are not is Science. There is no attempt to objectively gather and record data, let alone test hypotheses. But they are narratives: picking out the notable bits from the swirling surge of daily, weekly, annual, experiences. They give us clues about how to deal with, react to, similar issues in our own lives. They capture something about what life is like in Ireland in the 21stC.