Golden Wedding and FFF XIX,To Ireland.

So here are the grandchildren! Fiona and I have been celebrating our Golden Wedding Anniversary. It was some get together; very enjoyable and wonderful, though it has left me feeling in urgent need of a month's quiet aboard the Anna M in Guadianaland! However, that is not to be just yet; there is a lot to do here before I go back to Nazaré, with yet more to do till we get the old boat back in the water, hopefully by the end of September. Thank God for a young Frenchman, Arthur Drieu, who has turned up to relieve my aching limbs! Which also gives me time to return to the Fractal Frontier....

Fixing wings.

FFF XIX
I have often been asked why we moved to Ireland, back in 1973. After all many Irish people had been moving in the opposite direction for years. There were many strands to the decision. I had a strong feeling of claustrophobia in England; no matter what I tried, I felt that I was banging my head against a brick wall. I did not feel like spending a life-time up against that wall. But whatever about such abstruse feelings, there was also a rational thread which has been strongly borne out in recent times.

One might have expected that ‘the Brits’, meaning a certain stubborn residual element in the complex British psyche, would have got over their imperialist nostalgia by now. Indeed on the whole it’s not that they don’t recognise that the days of Empire are well and truly over, but that Calvinistic habits of mind have still not been replaced by anything more positive than the drift into consumerism and liberalism. Indeed they have found a new lease of life by tagging along with white America.

The liberal dimension on the whole has merely taken the myth of the autonomous individual to new heights, along with cultural exceptionalism. The Republic of Ireland may have managed to distance itself from the Imperial mindset, but despite the fact that it was Catholicism which provided the ‘frame’ for this distancing, we have since seen it caught up in the cultural slipstream of Britain and America. Meanwhile the rediscovery of a mythical language of human solidarity has never been more urgently required.

It was unfortunately a Jansenistic, almost Calvinistic, kind of Catholicism that Ireland had inherited from the terrible famine-stricken years of the nineteenth century. Times had in many ways changed for the better; there were no longer the same dire imperatives in keeping life together. We had seen enough in England to know that the Church was heading for troubled waters, and would have to endure an extremely difficult transition if a renewed Catholicism was to provide a future basis for solidarity, at all levels, and for building a way of life that was not terribly at odds with nature. Politically, a new focus for these was being established among the previously warring nations of Europe. I glimpsed in Ireland a special opportunity to address these inchoate problems.

One may not be able to build a life on such vague intellectual generalities, but one may perhaps be much more effective in doing so if one does pay attention to them. They have been knocking around my mind for fifty years or so, and unquestionably have enriched my life and on the whole well informed my decisions. But there is more to all this than ideas, important as they may be. The people, the books and ideas that came my way have somehow constituted a coherent story, and interwoven with all kinds of fortuitous circumstances, this story gradually took in my mind the substance of a relationship. I felt the Lord’s presence in it all.

Fiona’s niece Sarah, who lives in Israel, tells me that there is a Jewish saying that ‘It’s not what you say, but how you frame it.’ Certainly, when it comes to fundamental matters, the possibilities for misunderstanding are so serious that we have to be very careful. Frequently we are better off keeping quiet and letting our actions speak for themselves. But at a time like the present, when the foundations are shaking under us, it is necessary to articulate, to make sure our picture is displayed as clearly as possible, in a good frame! Even when discussing the E.U., for example, how many people take aboard the fact that while the economic arguments may be important, it is the effort to promote solidarity with our neighbours which is of prime importance?

To revert to what Fiona and I did, under pressure with those three little ones back in 1973, it has to be said that it was Fiona who was on the heroic side, though no doubt she would get few brownie points for it from the feminists. She left Somerset very reluctantly, even if she was interested in the relatively unknown Fairyland across the sea. We had indeed read and talked about living in islands and other remote places extensively, and were committed to establishing as self-sufficient a basis for our family as was practicable.

I went on a ‘fishing trip’ with Rory, and first of all we went to see his friend Patrick Pye, who lived up the road from his home place, in the Dublin mountains. Rory had got to know Patrick by helping him in his stain-glass studio, and thought we would get on. We did, became instant friends, and great has been the support Patrick and his wife Nóirín have given Fiona and I ever since. With my other Irish artist friend, the sculptor Ken Thompson, we were all on the same page, looking for a cultural rebirth of Irish Catholicism; the very same dear Kenneth who had carved 'MIGRATURUS HABITA' over our fireplace in September Cottage! (Live as one about to migrate.)

Rory and I had neither money nor time to spare. I had heard about South-west Donegal first from my father’s friend Jimmy Hamilton, who had grown up in Rosbeg. I have already mentioned his story*, but will add now that he did me the favour of painting our mad idea of going to live there in a positive light to Dad. Well, still a bit of a journalist, I went to interview Father McDyer in Glencolmcille about his project to reverse the flow of emigration that was emptying his parish. By means of a co-operative, a vegetable and fish processing factory, a weaving shed, a hotel and a holiday village had been established.

I rather think Fr McDyer gave me more time as a visiting journalist than he did in the subsequent 14 years when we lived there. Though friendly, he was nervous of these English blow-ins. Still he did direct us to a lovely old lady called Ann Gavigan, who sold us a little two-room cottage with a leaking thatched roof in a beautiful location at the head of the Glen for a small sum, and whose family went on to help us enormously in the difficult business of establishing ourselves there.

* see http://gannetswaysailing.blogspot.ie/2017/04/from-fractal-frontier-v.html

Angel Evelyn

Fr Gerry makes sure we've got it!

Teenie with a horse.