The Irish

Gone native, so ye have.

Twasnt ever us that weren't native hi

ulster will fry and ulster will be fried

they used to say the highest sea cliffs thing about Slieve League too

also when I was growing up they always used to tell us Letterkenny was the "fastest growing town in Europe"

― Number None, Wednesday, 30 October 2013 13:01 (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The aul fella just got into a fight on Wikipedia with a Donegal man about this

And some fella from Malta intervenes with the dingli cliffs, blows em both outta the water

Ice cold

this lad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Fenton

I feel conflicted over #repeal - glad that not being in the country means I’ll hear about the poisonous campaign secondhand, but also angry that I can’t vote. Reproductive rights are incredibly important to me and I wasn’t old enough to vote. Think repeal will squeeze it but it’ll be narrow, and the campaign is vile. I remember as a child that I would often see campaigners out in town with placards with pictures of mangled foetuses on them - in a country where it had been illegal since before I was born. So yeah, this is going to be fucking ugly.

*the last time we had a vote that touched on the subject (2002)

You'll never beat the Irish (at being socially conservative in Northern Europe)

Fuck the media

There won't be anything like a debate for the majority

Just nutters on each side which neatly sidesteps that one side is p much all nutters

Nutters and/or Americans.

Who are the pro-choice equivalents? I wasn’t aware there were any with the profile of the Iona Institute.

couldn't find an irish lit thread

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/books/review/time-pieces-john-banville-memoir.html

So, “Time Pieces.” The title is a four-way pun, I believe, referring to wrist and pocket watches, pieces of writing on the subject of time, fragments or units of time and the assemblage of memories that time pieces together, such as this memoir. Banville’s book is about time, insofar as a memoir is about anything, and about the past particularly, of which Banville is an honored citizen. In his Benjamin Black crime novels, he often takes up residence there, as he did in early novels like“Kepler,”“The Newton Letter” and “Doctor Copernicus.” In the recent novel“Mrs. Osmond,” his sequel to “The Portrait of a Lady,” he extends the past as he picks up Isabel Archer’s story where Henry James thought he’d ended it. It’s no surprise, then, that in “Time Pieces,” Banville asks himself, “When does the past become the past?”

Driving around town with his friend and travel companion Cicero, in Cicero’s little red roadster, he becomes the flâneur with wheels, greeting the past as he goes. He touches on the pain of leaving Dublin as a boy after a visit to his aunt, hiding his tears on the train ride home to Wexford because “something was ending” and thus becoming the past. He also veers into old Dublin as he writes of the preserved stones of the Abbey Theater, destroyed in a fire in 1951, and pauses for a recollection of Georgie Yeats, the poet’s wife, and her penetrating black eyes that glanced at Banville “straight out of the past.” In a house on Henrietta Street, he notices a fragment of wallpaper whose survival unaccountably reminds him of the ruins of Herculaneum, sections of which were preserved in volcanic dust, spared from the lava flow that destroyed Pompeii. “How many imbricated layers of the past am I standing on?” he wonders, an echo of an earlier quote he recalls from Rilke: ”But this/having been once, though only once,/having been once on earth — can it ever be cancelled?”

It never can be. The only tense we live in is the past; the present moves so fast that it becomes the past even as it’s observed and experienced. And the future is, well, the future. And since the people, events and objects of our little histories are never commonly agreed upon — I saw it one way, you saw it another — the past becomes endlessly interesting, as changeable and unnerving as any work of art. Perhaps childhood never leaves us because we were pure artists then, unfettered by much personal history. Childhood fascinates Banville because it’s “a state of constantly recurring astonishment.” When the astonishment ebbs, the past clouds over into itself. “The process of growing up,” he writes, “is, sadly, a process of turning the mysterious into the mundane.” Only when the adult artist revives it are we excited at the prospect of what is long behind us.

Jesus Christ that writing has made me tense in the present

Yanks shouldn't get to write about Irish writers that's a stinking piece.

write us one dmac

I would but I haven't read anything

Yanks shouldn't get to write about Irish writers that's a stinking piece.

LOL deems, so right.

"So, “Time Pieces.” The title is a four-way pun, I believe, referring to wrist and pocket watches, pieces of writing on the subject of time, fragments or units of time and the assemblage of memories that time pieces together, such as this memoir. "

This is where I take off my watch and beat him with it around the face and ears

here's a better one

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/time-pieces-a-dublin-memoir-by-john-banville-review-utterly-delightful-1.2834302

I have a friend who was over visiting relatives in Kilcar, Co. Donegal, which I think I might even have been in myself, so this Notable People From wikipedia entry caught my attention:

Bishop Séamus Hegarty is from Kilcar.

Dr. Diarmuid Hegarty, former County Coroner is from Kilcar.

Michael Hegarty, Donegal Senior Player 1998 - 2011, Ulster Final 2011 and All Ireland National League winner is from Crowkeeragh, Kilcar.

Showband singer Dermot Hegarty hails from County Longford, but his father Andrew Hegarty was from Crowkeeragh, Kilcar, cousin of Michael Hegarty Donegal Senior player. He is a legend in the Irish country scene. In 1969 he formed with the Plainsmen topping the bill at venues throughout Ireland, England, America and Canada. 1970 saw the release of 21 years which dominated the Irish charts for 47 weeks.

whole lotta Hegartys in Kilcar

wouldnt mind its not even a kilcar name

kennedy now thats a kilcar name

https://www.irishpost.com/entertainment/everything-you-ever-need-to-know-about-irelands-showbands-50291

I can't believe there isn't a 50's - 70's Irish Showband scene thread on ILM or a Clipper Carlton c or d?

twont be me starting it calz

My dead dad would have been game on, if he had worked out that computers had moved on from the playing Moon Buggy on the C-64 days and maybe got one!

whole lotta Hegartys in Kilcar

I think Bishop Séamus Hegarty had a lot of offspring.

Just think, if Dermot Hegarty, cousin of Michael Hegarty, Donegal Senior player, had released '47 Weeks' it might have dominated the Irish charts for 21 years.

🚨 BREAKING: Google has announced it is pausing ALL adverts relating to the referendum on the Eighth Amendment over concerns about “election integrity.” @thetimesIE

— Ellen Coyne (@ellenmcoyne) May 9, 2018

yeah it is!

Belatedly started listening to the Blindboy podcast and love it, but his voice is weirdly soothing? I fell asleep listening to him.

Just over 17 years since the OP:

As Francis was driven through the centre of Dublinon Saturday afternoon, there was a generational divide in attitudes.

Louise Clifford, 24, a designer from Limerick who now lives in the capital, said: “If this was 20 years ago this street would be full, but there are about 20 people and the pope is about to drive by.”

She said she and her friends were “not really religious” but described herself as a “cultural Catholic”. “It’s the norm in Ireland,” she said.

Bernard Connelly, 82, from Rimnheh on the outskirts of Dublin, was waiting eagerly. “I’ve seen five popes in my lifetime and I think Pope Francis is fantastic. He tells it like it is.

“This abuse scandal has gone on for years and years. There is no getting away from it. Please God it will be fixed soon. Let’s hope Pope Francis is the man to do it.”

According to Sarah Carolan, 33, there was a “nice buzz” around the pope’s visit. “I am Catholic but not a believer,” she said. “I was raised Catholic, married in church and all that craic. My sympathies are with the people who suffered at the hands of the church, but I also think there is good there.”

I am aware of the fact that many many Irish people are 'raised Catholic' but non-believers (like the Dirty Vicar of ilx for instance) - fine.

But still I find 'cultural Catholic' quite puzzling here. Surely the 'culture' involves Catholic practice, religious things. I am not sure I see what 'culture' you are left with once you take the religious practice away, except for, to be sure, fine art.

The culture part refers to rituals such as weddings, christenings, communion, confirmation etc. Its a good point though. I think the catholic church has failed to properly make their dogma resonate through these events anymore

i think the focus is on the cultural aspect in how the ethos, structure, practice and effects are implicitly (if not explicitly) present in the day to day lives, communication, speech, assumptions of the majority of the population

xp somewhat what mike says but again one remove again away from actual religious practice

I think Michael B's response makes pretty good sense -- so ... you go through this Communion and Marriage stuff without believing it - that makes you a Cultural Catholic? (Not just a lapsed one?)

re Darraghmac's statement: but I don't see what the ethos, practice, etc are once you stop doing the religious stuff.

Surely for instance 'Catholic ethos' would include no contraception (among lots of other things)-- if people are using that as a matter of course, then they are not acting or thinking in a very Catholic way at the level of 'everyday habitus'?

re Irish speech, I am sure that Catholicism has left much trace in it but would think that the larger shaper of Hiberno-English is the legacy of the Irish language, which I am not sure is especially linked with the Church but has deeper roots. And then of course it has also been shaped by the last 50-100 years of 'global culture', Americanization, immigration from Africa, etc.

Thanks for the quick replies anyway!

But still I find 'cultural Catholic' quite puzzling here. Surely the 'culture' involves Catholic practice, religious things. I am not sure I see what 'culture' you are left with once you take the religious practice away, except for, to be sure, fine art.

― the pinefox

guilt, hypocrisy

drinking

rushomancy, I think I see, those could be real answers.

I saw lots of the Papal visit today on a silent BBC News 24 screen in a library. He spoke at St Mary's Pro Cathedral about marriage and the family. He seemed quite jocular, talking of how if you are married you can throw plates at each other as long as you make it up by the end of the day.

The curious thing, that I always think, is, what would he know about being married?

"Rimnheh"?

But still I find 'cultural Catholic' quite puzzling here. Surely the 'culture' involves Catholic practice, religious things. I am not sure I see what 'culture' you are left with once you take the religious practice away, except for, to be sure, fine art.

― the pinefox, Saturday, August 25, 2018 1:42 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you've heard of secular jews right

my mom was born in ireland, went to convent school, and is now an atheist but still sort of appreciates the ritual and pageantry of the church, and generally likes jesuits for caring for the poor and believing in eg gravity and evolution

i myself went to catholic school as a child, was never confirmed, never done a catechism, generally repudiate most of the church's teaching, and reflexively crossed myself when i went into a cathedral as a tourist a few weeks ago

which is to say: as an irish person by passport only, i can still appreciate how ritual, practice, dogma, et al can suffuse someone's thinking, despite a more surface level rejection of the faith itself

Ha anytime I'm at my parents, I bless myself with the holy water before the drive home after my mother asks me to

I know enough semi-practising or "cultural" Catholics and enough history of the Church to feel comfortable saying that there's always been lots of people who'd self-define as some form of Catholic without taking specific rules - e.g. contraception - very seriously. The Papacy has never been the only game in town aiui

honestly the best part of being catholic is embracing the little-c

It honestly looks like they've rounded up the most Irish looking people in Ireland for this appearance by the Pope at Croke Park.

I can remember a cousin from Dublin visiting and staying at our house, and my mum, who like her brothers had a rough time in the Irish industrial schools in the 50's and endured every type of abuse. On a Palm Sunday my crazy grandmother was admonishing my poor cousin: "Are you coming to church with me, or staying with these anti-christs?". Obviously my mum had turned against the church at various points of her life because of her and her siblings horrific experiences in the care of the Christian Brothers, but kept flip-flopping on the issue and I still spent plenty of time being dragged to church, and every room in the house had a crucifix or a jesus pic in it. Strong drug is Catholicism.

id have thought guilt hypocrisy and drinking p obv inclusions in my response tbh but

except for, to be sure, fine art.

A rare joke from the pinefox!

Why did the Irishman wear two condoms?

To be sure, to be sure

But still I find 'cultural Catholic' quite puzzling here. Surely the 'culture' involves Catholic practice, religious things. I am not sure I see what 'culture' you are left with once you take the religious practice away, except for, to be sure, fine art.

― the pinefox, Saturday, August 25, 2018 1:42 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you've heard of secular jews right

― gbx, Saturday, August 25, 2018

I think so. I have certainly heard of the idea of 'Jewish' being a very broad category. But I think the comparison somewhat makes the point. We can all think of Jewish food, for instance; I can't think of Catholic food, outside their Communion thing. 'Jewish' does seem to be a 'culture', an 'ethnicity', let alone a 'race', to a degree that 'Catholic' doesn't seem to be.

From what has been said here it seems like 'cultural Catholic' is synonymous with 'lapsed Catholic', or: 'I was brought up to be a Catholic and I still remember lots of that stuff, but I don't believe in god anymore'.

That's OK - I think it was the word 'culture' that was making me wonder.

could go into a catholic/protestant comparison here from observation and experience but tbh pf you do seem a wee bit determined to focus on the observance aspect and not the ingrained social characteristics that might be in the discussion so....