The End or the Beginning?

So dear Patrick Pye has died, and as Noirin his widow says, we hope he is being led by his artistic master, El Greco, to his encounter with the Lord. So instead of heading for Portugal, Fiona and I have to change course back towards Dublin. I am tempted to say, ‘greater love hath no man….’

A Consultation with Patrick Pye.

It was Rory who introduced me to Patrick, having announced his intention of doing so as we yarned on the roof of the Liverpool Simon Community, in between the odd bout of trying to fix the leaks. The original alcoholic Jack-of-all-trades, Rory had also spent whiles helping Patrick with his stain-glass windows; he hailed from Boharnabreena at the bottom of the hill that led to Patrick’s studio at Piperstown, and he quickly perceived the common ground between Patrick and myself, in that complex territory where English, Irish and Catholic identities meet.

When I was young, we English Catholics and our frequently Irish priests used to pray regularly ‘for the conversion of England’. Such prayers quietly fell by the wayside when we came all over ‘ecumenical’, inclusive, progressive and all things cuddly. Maybe such a miracle was quietly deemed impractical anyway. As a teenager, my father pointed out Moonraker to me in Fowey Harbour; newly in from the Azores, Patrick's father Peter Pye had bananas slung up the back-stay. Unfortunately Patrick's mother was not the sailing type, and was by then bringing up their son by herself in Dublin. Her family had come to Ireland to try to convert the benighted Papists into Protestants. As it turned out, painting turned Patrick into a Papist. When in due course I got around to climbing that hill into the Dublin Mountains, and to sharing with Patrick our common aversion to the ‘plastic’ culture of modern England that we both reacted against, the big question was whether Ireland and/or Catholicism actually offered any viable alternative.

It had occurred to me anyhow that it was a much more inviting prospect to rear a family within a society that was on the way up than in one that was on the way down. A little bit either way may make the difference between spending life relishing new possibilities or kicking against contracting ones. I was asking myself if Ireland might offer a way out of spending my life banging my head against the brick walls of England! It turned out that the English, with their remaining grace and resilience, actually held on to civilisation with better success than I anticipated. However, it happened around this time fifty years ago that Britain started to do away with its babies, and losing a fifth of a nation's population is hardly a recipe for success. Now there are signs of decline everywhere one looks.

In Devizes, where we have just visited, the pavements are still deep in last year’s leaves, ‘because the Council hasn’t got the money to pay anyone to sweep the streets’. In Bungay, the lead story in the local paper is about cuts in health facilities. The cuts are making outright oppression necessary. Here in Hertfordshire, I heard from a parent about the system of fines for ‘unauthorised absence’ from school, the legacy of one Mr Michael Gove's time as Secretary of State for Education under Mr Cameron.

Who, one might ask, is entitled to authorize children to be absent from school? The child’s parents? Apparently not in this society, for they are the ones being fined ‘£60 if they pay within 21 days, £120 if between 21 and 28 days’; otherwise they face prosecution. Well how about doctors? No, apparently they are too busy to get involved in playing Big Brother, indeed refusing to do so. Anyway, how are harried parents, having to keep down two jobs to maintain the roof over their heads while also trying to look after sick children, supposed to find time to wait for hours to see a doctor in order to get a bit of paper?

It all gives a taste of the kind of society that one of the leading Brexiteers advocates! We are pretty much back to the days of putting people in prison for the crime of not having a roof over their heads at all. Maybe not quite there yet, for a notable feature of London in this cold, damp weather is the number of people sleeping rough; but we shall get there if they have their way. They won't have to have those pesky Continentals muscling in on the Welfare State; just get a load of 'guest workers' in, suck the life out of them and then send them home. All sold to the public on the ticket of 'controlling immigration'!

As far as our Irish national culture is concerned, it is all too probable that Ireland will follow a similar trajectory to Britain's,- I would say especially so if abortion becomes legal. In such a situation of decline, politics becomes a matter of codding the people into believing things are going to get better, while the politicians become servants of the smart crowd who think in terms of command and control, and slipping away into the sunlit paradise of wealth. It remains however just possible that with the rest of Europe we will remember the basis of our Catholic culture. Patrick showed how it may be done!

Meanwhile, I play my little game of turning the dream of sailing boats and exotic places on its head. That too can play a part in our redemption! I did not succeed in selling it to the extent of making the Fundit scheme work, but the offers for sailing on the Anna M still stand, somewhere on the Gannetsway between the south of Spain and Ireland. Email me direct if you are interested on the said Way at gmail.com.