IRISH INTROSPECTION

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33241, 2 June 1973, Page 10

IRISH INTROSPECTION

The Irish—are they real? By Patrick Riddell. Hamish Hamilton. 228 pp. The Orange Order. By Tony Gray. Bodley Head. 291 pp.

It was rival tribes of Celts who are said to have originated the expression “Mind your ’p’s and ’q’s.” When the Brythonic Celts from Wales, who peppered their speech with ’p’s, got stranded on the coast of Gaelic Ireland, where ’q’s were all the rage in popular speech, they had to conform for the time being, or pay for their carelessness with their lives. And the reverse held true for Irish castaways on the Welsh shore. So we see that from the dawn of history, we Celts—for this reviewer is one—have been good haters, and prone to verbal hair-splitting; we still are. Other inborn aptitudes we share

are a penchant for political mulishness, and an over-retentive memory for historical wrongs. A superfluity of books exists to apprise us of these foibles, and here are two more, written, appropriately enough, each by an Irishman. Still, these two authors, it must be allowed, write of their opposite numbers with laudable tolerance and restraint; they must have stayed, while writing, well out of sight and sound of one another.

Patrick Riddell was born in Belfast. He notes at the outset that his countrymen are reputed to be “mercurial and inconsistent, gay and sullen, witty and humourless, brave and cowardly, in-ward-looking, hospitable and mean, over-reactive to criticism, advanced and backward, art-loving and philistine.” He covers Irish ground looking for an oracle who will tell him if the Irish are real. He finds an uncle who happens to be a judge, and succeeds in cornering him. But his uncle turns the tables on him, and demands that he answer his own question. Patrick wriggles, but cannot physically escape. Finally he thinks up a juicy example of tetracapillectomy. “It all depends,” he says, “on what you mean by ‘real’.” A perfect Irish answer.

Tony Gray has eight previous books to his credit, and has won a reputation for objectivity in writing as a journalist on the Irish Question. He has a mother of Scottish Presbyterian ancestry, a father reared in the Anglo-Norman tradition and the Church of Ireland, and a Catholic wife. He feels that he is the resultant of a triangle of mighty forces. As a cure for too much history, he writes more history, judiciously, ironically, persuasively. The Order of Orangemen comes out with its stoic virtues and its Calvinistic limitations. He disentangles three different categories of Orangemen: the Blackmen solemnly debating and discerning biblical prophecies, the demonstrating Orangemen, “looking for Jesuits in the jam” . . . “And in between, there will be a considerable body of Orangemen who will steadfastly work to contain the arrogance of Rome and its attempts at world domination. How long it will take the latter to realise that they are, in fact, tilting at rusty windmills, is anybody’s guess; I reckon a long, long time.”