Get your own Free Home PageThe Irish Character
by: Jon Crane
Vol. 2, No. 22 (November 6, 1999)
It’s said that an Irishman has an abiding sense of tragedy that sustains him
through temporary periods of joy. Historically, the Irish people are intimately
acquainted with oppression and hard times. It’s what prompted Cormac MacArt,
High King in Ireland of old to instruct his son Cairbre when he asked him what
he did, “I was fierce on the battlefield; I was gentle in friendship.”
Cormac summed up the character of the Irish that has allowed them to survive
centuries of hardships, invasions, famine and oppression. They are fierce in
standing on what they believe yet gentle with their fellows. If fate means the
Irishman to lose, he gives him a good fight anyway.
Mary Murray Delancy in her book, Of Irish Ways, notes another
characteristic mark of the Irish: an excitable and impulsive nature. She
comments that the latter quality, impulsiveness, may perhaps account for the
gentleness in friendship and a tendency to generously share whatever they have
with others.
Hospitality among even the poorest of Irish marks their ways. Céad míle
fáilte (pronounced “keeud meeli faalchi”), means “a hundred thousand
welcomes.” It is something practiced as well as preached.
In old Ireland, and today, the visitor was welcomed, be he stranger or
long-time friend. No one was ever turned away, even from the poorest table,
owing to the fact that Irish considered Críost (Christ, pronounced
“kreest”) to be in every stranger. To close one’s door against the stranger was
to risk closing the door against Críost Himself.
To the man who shuts his gate against the stranger, an old and anonymous poem
says:
When his mouth with a day’s long hunger and thirst would wish
For the savour of salted fish,
Let him sit and eat his fill of an empty dish …
Above the ground or below it,
Good cheer, may he never know it,
Nor a tale by the fire, nor a dance on the road,
nor a song by a wandering poet.
Till he open his gate
To the stranger, early or late,
And turn back the stone of his fate.
Much of the Irish character was built through adversity. Centuries of
oppression, invasion, famine and poverty failed to daunt the Irishman’s love of
life. Pope John Paul II once said that “love is never defeated, and I could
add, the history of Ireland proves that.”
A legacy of famines and insurrections that failed taught the Irish to endure
the difficulties in this world with a belief in compensation in the next. It’s
how they endure. “When anyone asks me about the Irish character,” said Edna
O’Brien, “I say: ‘Look at the trees: maimed, stark and misshapen, but
ferociously tenacious’.” An old proverb reminds us that we never ask the Lord
for riches, but for courage.
What prompted this stir in my Celtic blood? I attended the annual Celtic
Nations’ Festival in New Orleans last weekend. The event celebrates the
heritage of all Celtic lands: Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Galicia, Scotland, the
Isle of Man and Brittany. It always gets this full-blooded Irishman going.
Unfortunately, it rained most of the weekend. On Saturday, it poured. Most of
my Celtic cousins from Wales, Scotland, Brittany, etc., huddled under
the large tents around the grounds of Marconi Meadow in City Park. Only the
Irish were out at one of the stages where a band from Ireland was carrying on.
Singing drowned out the drumming of the rain with step dancing in the soggy
grass spraying water everywhere. We were soaked with God’s soft rain and the
pure joy of the Irish soul.
After all, a little water never killed an Irishman -- unless he drank it.
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