The land of migrant saints and scorers - new RTE shows uncover home truths

Irish Daily Mirror

13 hours ago

Had anyone bothered to ask I'd have told them for nothing.
When a replacement anthem was needed to unify the various Irish sects, north and south, to be played at big sporting occasions, Dominic Behan's shanty 'Thank God We're Surrounded by Water' could have ticked most of the boxes.
It's a good seafaring ballad fit for a wild island tribe.
In their wisdom the powers that be asked Phil Coulter instead and the rest is history.
But if you wanted reminding that being surrounded by water is what defines us more than any other thing, it came this week in the shape of two epic new RTE productions.
Both have the taste of salt air about them and plenty of Irish people doing what we have done well for centuries - gazing out at the waves and contemplating the sheer unlikely wonder of it all.
'From That Small Island' ambitiously sets out to tell the story of the Irish since prehistory in four lavish episodes every Sunday evening.
On Mondays, 'Hell for Leather' even more ambitiously tries to capture Gaelic football's part in that island tale in a mere five parts.
Both depict the Irish as a tribe apart, cut off by the waves at the edge of the world.
The sea has been with us from the beginning, right back when we drifted off into the wilds of the north Atlantic while England was still waiting on its initial tectonic Brexit from the continent.
The first hunter gatherers may have walked from Africa to Western Europe, but to get all the way here they had to get in a boat.
The documentary makers revealed how the earliest homo sapiens to make that determined journey were likely dark skinned from around modern-day Turkey.
So were the first farmers who followed them, shipping cows and barley over the seas and setting up in what they must have assumed was the ends of the earth.
Instinct says this isolation should have made us an inward-looking people – 'insular' was what outsiders even called our strange language when they would encounter us.
But like all good stories there's a twist. There became as many departures as arrivals from the island, or as one academic describes it to viewers, our story became one of 'comings and goings.'
We earned a reputation as 'the wandering Irish'. And maybe the greatest of those early wanderers was a monk from Co. Carlow.
Columbanus founded seats of learning on the continent in the sixth century and brought crazy Irish ideas across the seas with him.
Some still survive in his own writings. One was that people should be judged on their principles rather than their station in life.
Another was the radical concept of a united Europe.
Over a thousand years later, a gathering of statesmen marking the anniversary of the death of this migrant monk amid the rubble of war, would use his ideas to conceive of a project that we know today as the European Union.
Not surprisingly this narrative of who the first Irish really were and their migrant roots has sparked the usual deranged mouth-frothing in the online echo chambers.
Presumably some of their modern-day descendants were hoping for an origin story involving a pure race dancing at the crossroads around burning buses.
If 'From that Small Island' annoyed the far-right people, 'Hell for Leather' just annoyed the right people.
Its handful of critics were mostly those who baulk at the notion that the GAA is somehow a sport apart, uniquely of the Irish, born as it was in this place surrounded by water.
They object to contributors to the programme speaking of how that somehow allowed the game to forge intangible connections like identity, community, belonging, and a sense of parish.
These are some of the same people who then go away and get misty eyed themselves while singing Ireland's Call or supporting a team of multi-millionaires in the pay of multi-billionaires somewhere over the seas.
But when it comes to what they dismiss as 'over mythologised' and 'mystical guff' about the special place of the GAA in the Irish story, they refuse to believe in a sense of wonder.
As that other seafaring monk of the Skellig Islands, Yoda, might have told them, that's why they fail to get it.