On being Irish - Time to embrace a new Irishness

SPEAKING in New York at the first US-Ireland Forum, dancer and businessman Michael Flatley has warned that we are losing our sense of Irishness.

“We are in close danger of losing the very thing we stand for and the very thing we came here to celebrate — Irishness,” he warned.

Is it possible that Mr Flatley is being just a tad pessimistic?

In any case one of the defining characteristics that contributes to creating a sense of Irishness is our inability to agree on what Irishness actually means.

The first thing on the agenda is always, as it were, the “split”.

Mr Flatley is certainly right if he refers to the exclusively caucasian, Catholic culture, a patriarchy that placed its roots in a glorious Celtic past.

That sense of Irishness, the one that informed so much of our creative culture since the foundation of the State, is indeed “with O’Leary in the grave”. As Archbishop Seán Brady put it, “the island of saints and scholars has become the island of stocks and shares”.

And it is not a bad thing that we are able to move on from such a narrow, insular and unaccepting time. Moving on, after all, does not mean forgetting, it just acknowledges a different order of priorities.

The reality is that Ireland today has much more in common with the Chicago, Berlin, Edinburgh or Toulouse of today than it has with the Ireland of even a decade ago.

Our move towards a multicultural society continues apace, and if we work on integration — especially in education — it should be an enriching experience for all of us, the old Irish and the new Irish.

Our current prosperity has allowed us embrace immigration with a confidence that we might not have managed a decade ago. Despite the worrying stories of exploitation and gross disrespect, the vast majority of Irish people extend a welcome to anyone who chooses to live and work here, to help build a better society.

Speaking at the same conference, former president of the Coca-Cola corporation Donald Keough warned that Ireland is becoming more “mentally distant” for Irish-Americans. The world’s focus on a successful, peaceful Ireland is waning, he said.

Loosely translated, that means that we’re slipping off the “old country” radar and are no longer seen as needing the financial or political support of the Irish diaspora. Though a welcome — and overdue — rite of passage, it means that we will not have the same degree of attention former US president Bill Clinton afforded the next time we need heads banged together so sanity might prevail.

Maybe Michael Flatley would be more at ease with the changes he sees in Ireland if he embraced them as most of us do and recognised them for what they are — the first, faltering steps of an entirely new kind of Irishness, one where the cultures of the world are as influential as the history of this small island.