Saints and Scholars

Adam Gadahn, a prominent associate of Osama bin Laden, apparently wrote to him that Ireland was fertile ground for recruitment. It is notable that, entirely matter-of-factly, his experience of Catholics in the Middle East led him to see people from that background as second to none when it came to opposition to Zionism. He was, of course, quite right.

I have been taken to task elsewhere by those who labour under the strange delusion, which persists like British Israelitism, that Ireland kept the flame of Christian learning aglow in "an otherwise dark world". What "otherwise dark world"? Rome? All the other centres on the Continent? It is amazing how many ordinarily sensible Irish people manage to believe this rubbish. Why do they think that only the Irish have ever heard of it? Do they imagine that, for example, the present Pope was taught it? In Bavaria? Hardly!

The darkness in which the Irish Saints were occasional points of light was Ireland, no significant proportion of the population of which was in any meaningful sense Catholic until the middle of the nineteenth century. Go back only a couple of generations again, and you will find that, less than a hundred years before the beginning of mass emigration, the Irish were still so pagan that they were widely polygamous. Not much later, in the great scheme of things, Islam should suit them down to the ground.

I laughed myself hoarse at a suggestion in a comment today that I "felt excluded" from the "Irish identity" of Catholics in the North of England. It is a good 20 years since I met a Northern Catholic who thought of himself as remotely Irish, and they were a good age even then. Not only my lot, born in the 1970s, but even most of their parents, born in the 1950s, had literally no concept of such a thing, not even in the legendary Consett area. It was and is certainly no part of the persistence of 1950s levels of Sunday Mass attendance up there. It was no such part as long ago as 1989, practically a generation.

At my Catholic secondary school serving that citadel, among other places, I remember people with Irish surnames who assumed that their names were Scottish, and who were quite put out if a teacher or whoever casually remarked that they were Irish. I remember one called ... well, no, I shouldn't say it on here, but it was very Irish indeed. Yet she, a practising Catholic, had just assumed that it was English because she and her family were English and no one of any age had any concept of being anything else. They had never even thought about it. She was horrified when a teacher suggested that her ancestors would have been on the Irish side in battles with English workers in the nineteenth century.

She might very well have children of her own by now; she is 33 or 34, like me. Anyone under 50 would be bemused or positively offended at the suggestion, even if his name were O'Hagan or something. The makers of Coronation Street might still think of Catholic priests as Irishmen, but no one else does. I am told that below a certain, quite high, age, they are all Polish or African even in Ireland these days.

On Saint George's Day, I heard one of the priests of Saint Patick's, Consett, no less, give a church full of Scouts (admittedly in Lanchester, but they came from all over the former District of Derwentside) one of the most uncompromisingly English sermons that I have ever heard, far beyond anything that I ever heard in the Church of England. He dismissed "Celtic propaganda", the term used, about the historical status or otherwise of Saint George. And he was younger than I am. In his thirties, but only just. Do not be too surprised in future years to see churches called Saint Patrick's renamed Saint George's.

A far higher proportion of the Catholic population of England than of Ireland is practising, or even occasionally observant. The Church can now realistically claim a greater influence on public policy here than there. No wonder that Irish-descended Northern Catholics no longer feel even the tiniest "Irish identity". You do get the odd parish bully who tries to keep it up, but they are very old now and it is fair to say that most parishes do not even have so much as one of them anymore.

I simply will not let pass the suggestion that I am somehow anti-Irish. Using any socio-economic index, compare Ireland in 1800 with Ireland in 1922.  Compare the provision of healthcare in the United Kingdom, free at the point of need, with that in the Irish Republic, where people still scrimp to pay the doctor, as has not happened in Britain or in Northern Ireland for most of living memory. Like the pro-Catholic position when one contrasts the condition of the Church here with what has become of Her there, the pro-Irish position  is Unionism.