Hail, Glorious Saint Patrick

People expect me to hate it. In fact, it is a pretty good hymn tune, since it is genuinely designed, as the old ones are, for congregational singing. And the lyrics are so unremittingly bad that I find them quite endearing. They may or may not have been written by an enemy of the British State. But they were certainly written by an enemy of the English language. Not a category in which one normally puts the Irish, but there we are.

I am told that in every parish it is people whose families have been cradle Catholics since the dust, and I do not in any sense mean Recusants, who complain every year, as they were certainly doing in my ear this morning, that "It reads like it was written by a member of the IRA" and that "We've been waiting forever for X to die so that we no longer have to have it, but they have only gone and lived another bloody year." As I said, they assume that I agree with them. But I feel as if I should be intruding on an internal family squabble if I were to do anything other than listen to them in silence.

It is quite clear that this sort of thing now only goes on once a year, if it still goes on at all in many places, and then only because one or two people in their eighties would complain if it didn't. But there used to be, and perhaps there still is, a lively belief at the Higher end of the Church of England that Hail, Glorious Saint Patrick was sung at the conclusion of every Mass, certainly every Sunday and possibly every day, throughout this country and even throughout the entire English-speaking world. I remember being told that as a fact well into the 1990s, and I have heard it expressed as a concern about becoming a Catholic into the present decade. Was it ever actually the case? I only ask.

All of which is one of my characteristically roundabout ways to my main point. Those of you downing pints of the Black Stuff this evening, or who had been doing so by the time that you read this, take note that well into the 1960s, more than 40 years after Irish independence, Guinness refused to employ Catholics in any managerial capacity and was owned by the dynasty that provided four successive Tory Members of Parliament for Southend, a town a mere 40 miles from the centre of London. The last one, a former Cabinet Minister under Margaret Thatcher, did not retire until 1997 and did not die until 2007. Everything that you probably think that you know about Ireland is wrong.

There is much emphasis on land reform as having allegedly broken the power of the Ascendancy. But in fact the Anglo-Irish Protestants continued to own everything from the breweries to the banks, via things such as Merville Dairy, all of which practised frank anti-Catholic discrimination in employment for many decades after independence, as in a different way the great concerns of the present day still do.

No even nominal Catholic was made Editor of The Irish Times until as recently as 1986, 64 years after independence. It is also notable that even in 2013 one of the Governors of The Irish Times Trust has the OBE while another has nothing less than the CBE; such, quite amusingly and very tellingly, is the Irish Republic's newspaper of record.

We were singing Hail, Glorious Saint Patrick this morning in England, Scotland and Wales; in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; why, even in parts of the Pope's own Argentina, where there is no shortage of Irish surnames as one of many monuments to "the Informal Empire" through which Britain once dominated South America. Under that Imperial Flag with Saint Patrick's Saltire on it, the Irish carried the Faith even "to the end of the world".

But few will have been those who were singing it in Ireland. Or at least in the part of Ireland where that flag no longer flies, having been replaced with one that makes no reference to Saint Patrick, although it does have an Orange stripe on it, for which there is a reason. The Church vigorously, but unsuccessfully, opposed the adoption of the Constitution there under de Valera in 1937. Everything in that last sentence tells you something important.

Frankly, to have sung Hail, Glorious Saint Patrick, then they would have had to have gone to Mass. And even if they had been minded to do that, then there would have had to have been a priest to say Mass for them. The country that once discriminated against Catholics in favour of Protestants now discriminates against such practising Catholics as there still are, a far lower proportion of the Catholic population than in England and quite possibly a lower absolute number, in favour of wallowers in each others' published and unpublished, spoken and written misery memoirs of embittered ex-Catholicism.

They know their own to be packs of lies, and sometimes utterly preposterous, such as the supposed persistence of corporal punishment in schools decades after it had been abolished. But they assume everyone else's to be genuine. They therefore see themselves as somehow expressing a broader truth. And in any case, it is the only way to get on.

Far from there having been some taboo against criticising the Church until Mary Robinson became President in 1990, this sort of thing goes back at least to George Moore, and it has made the fame and fortune of many a mediocre to downright abysmal writer, with Frank McCourt only the latest in a very long line. Moreover, being able to produce this drivel to interviewers is now the only way to become any sort of public or responsible figure in the Irish Republic, in the way that being a posh Protestant remained long, long after independence.

No wonder that those who wish to turn up and sing Hail, Glorious Saint Patrick now live somewhere else. Anywhere else at all, in fact. "Thy people, now exiles on many a shore," indeed.