We Need to Talk

by Caitríona O’Connor

WHAT’S GOING ON IN CARLOW?

IN EARLY 2024 A GROUP OF PEOPLE SET OFF from Dublin to explore the perennial question: where is Carlow’s finest Snug? From the Old Nass Road, they hit south for Waterford on the N9 passing the Piper’s Stones on Brewell’s Hill before entering the County of Carlow. They wondered what farmer was bold enough to plant pine trees in a hilltop ringfort – something to discuss perhaps, when they find the perfect snug.

Like many county towns, you approach Carlow by bypass. The low-lying hinterland of industrial and housing estates eases you in from the north. This part of the town was once dominated by the cemetery, County Infirmary (1838), District Asylum (1832), Fever Hospital (1829) and the railway Station (1846). Those hallmarks of 19th century Ireland represent the institutional expansion of the 1800s, driven by an emancipated population boom, industrial revolution, public health concerns, and the legal and administrative requirements of the colonial government.

It is proposed that the county of Carlow has both the highest concentration of megalithic monuments and of country houses and demesnes in Ireland. What has made it such a desirable place to live and die over the past 8,000 years? Catherlough has long been within the Kingdom on Leinster, roughly occupying a wedge of arable land between the Barrow, the Blackstairs Mountains and the Slaney. In the early Christian period, Old Leighlin was among Leinster’s largest monastic communities and when Strongbow arrived to help Dermot Mac Murrough regain his kingship, it was his daughter Isabel De Clare who established the first castle in Carlow Town.

The MacMurrough’s informal alliance with the Butlers of Ormond maintained their presence in Carlow during the Anglo-Norman period that followed 1169. Five hundred years later, after Cromwell and the restoration of King Charles II, many Irish nobles in the area successfully reclaimed their lands. It is not immediately clear to an outsider how this relative continuity is reflected in what we see today. Certainly, the rack-rented tenant farmers were as aggrieved as elsewhere, demonstrated by the Battle of Carlow in 1798. And just a few years prior to the rebellion, St. Patrick’s College accepted its first students following the Roman Catholic Relief act of 1793.

So, a lot was going on as we begin the 1800s. With Ireland now governed from Westminster and the great famine on it way, some of Carlow’s most visible assets speak to this industrious but sombre time. Between 1800 and 1840 the population of Ireland rose from 5 to 8 million. It is hard to imagine how full these towns would have been, ballooning catholic families, laisse faire economics. No room at the inn, a packed snug.       

WHAT WAS DISCUSSED IN THE SNUG?

THE MODERNISATION OF IRISH SOCIETY has eroded the need for privacy, or so we would be led to believe. Women, gardaí, priests, the matchmaker – no longer must they conduct their drinking and business from the privacy of the pub snug.  There is a paradox in the loss of need for certain privacies and the legal privacy granted through social progression. The right to conduct one’s life to one’s own liking without fear of judgment or punishment is an emerging tradition for us.

Gaelic Christianity was for centuries a cultural outlier, and only through successive attempts by centrist bishops did Irish Christians fall into line with the roman ideal. By the late 1800s however, following 200 years of suppression, Irish Catholicism had understandably coalesced around national identity. Ireland’s performance on the global stage of Super-Catholics culminated in the Marion Apparition at Knock in 1879. Now the moral alignment of society was simply imperative to our freedom, and the snug was employed to maintain the frame.         

Throughout history the rules of privacy, privilege and performance have been intertwined. Privacy has always been afforded to the empowered because those who understand the rules of conduct know best how to flout them. On occasion, the snug was an example of performed privacy – of course everyone knew when a woman was having a drink in there. Her right to privacy was performed by the whole pub theatre, and it served to remind everyone of their place. The women who dared break the rules had already given over the need to project piousness, setting a benchmark which could cause alarm or provide relief. This scale was necessary to maintain the momentum of falling from grace or moving towards salvation, the fuel of a good life.      

Today, our actual right to privacy has been rapidly followed by the abdication of it all. Regular individuals live more publicly than ever and have more of a window into the lives of our neighbours than any other time in history. Surveillance is almost complete, only our most remote of thoughts, dreams and conversations evade the little god in our pocket. It scans our desires and listens to our conversations, nudging us along with useful prompts throughout the day. The real God used to know what we were thinking too before we stopped believing in him. We learned that most of the snugs were pulled out after the 1970s. Around Carlow we found a few modern adaptions but mostly heard stories of wonderful snugs and good old times. The snug has become a rarity; the holy grail of socialising since we are tired of being watched.     

WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT NOW?

IN IRELAND WE ALWAYS TALK ABOUT the same old things – St. Patrick, the British, the famine, land, the troubles. What we don’t talk might be more potent, but you must first memorise the myths before you can look under the covers. To have a conversation about any of them is unreasonable. There is a front and a back of house, the subject and the reject, what’s in the light and in the shadows.      

Looking at any time, we can analyse the discourse to locate the fear in the shadows. In the mid-1840s, the Victorian press was the central medium through which the British public learned of the famine in Ireland. The London-based daily ‘The Times’ was closely connected with the upper-middle classes and ruling elite. Circulating over 35,000 copies per day, its recurring column on Ireland was clear in its message – the inherent wickedness of the Catholic Irish had contributed to their misfortune and the respectable tax-paying working class of England should not carry the burden.

What was the anxiety underlying this attitude? The first western industrial revolution accompanied a population explosion and the creation of a new consumer class. The petit bourgeoise of Europe and North America had discovered conspicuous consumption to acquire dignity in a social landscape overwhelmed by relentless competition and suffering. Self-improvement, self-interest, and entrepreneurialism accompanied the moralistic grandstanding of Victorian thinking. The fear of sliding backwards would have been acute, and the images of destitute Irish arriving on boats reminded folks of a terrible past which could consume you if you looked too closely.

Hannah Ardent surmised in 1951 that ‘terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other’. She believed that impotence was the hallmark of terror because power came from acting together - if a person’s capacity to add something to the common world is destroyed, isolation becomes unbearable.

If this is true, and lack of capacity to contribute leads to isolation and then fear, how is it showing up in the conversation today? What does it mean for a regular person to be adding to the world? Value certainly plays a role in the perception of contribution; if what you can give has low societal value it may be difficult to keep going. Change is another factor; if the thing you can offer needs to change to fit this reality, who will support the change? Undoubtedly, to feel devalued and unsupported is terrifying and universal. How are talking together about diversifying value and managing change – maybe we are not saying clearly enough how it affects us all and tracing the common threads of history to our contemporary feeling of being used. And then at last, what would be the consequences of joining all the dots, of seeing ourselves in everyone we envy or despise or love. 

DOES IT MATTER IF SOMETHING DIES?

THERE IS VERY LITTLE RECORDED EVIDENCE of Celtic paganism from Ireland. What we think we know is interpreted from archaeology, long range Greco-Roman accounts and those written by the Gaelic Christians who followed. The Celts wrote nothing down about how or why they practiced their religion as it was maintained by the tradition of storytelling. Interpreting physical archaeology always relies on our current mindset so instead of bringing something back to life, it can incarnate something new altogether.

To the early Irish Christians, the death of pagan motifs mattered much and was resisted forcefully. The Celtic threefold death is typified by dying in three ways simultaneously, or by three distinct and functional sacrifices. In the monastic culture which followed Ireland’s conversion, pagan deities, brehon law and visual symbolism were all sacrificed to build a new coherent world. We are warned against using these adaptations as a means of understanding the thing they replaced. Were the pagans duped into changing their beliefs or did this new information make sense in their changing world? It has been said that Saint Patrick used the shamrock to explain the concept of the Holy Trinity, and perhaps the prospect of the one God in three parts appeared a logical conclusion to the pantheon of the divine.

Maybe the monks were laying the ground to cultivate something wonderful and new, or extracting the remaining value from a dying artifice. Or simply longing for the old and the new to be the same thing. Documentation is an important tool of the colonisation process. It fixes something in time, within a certain lens and gives permission to start something new. Euhemerism is the interpretation of mythology which presumes that the accounts of legends originate in real events or people. The early Christians embraced this tool to undermine the validity of pagan gods. Today when an important site has been designated for demolition, it is meticulously recorded, and its story transcribed to prepare for its destruction.

Across the Irish landscape data centres pop up like mushrooms, filled to the top with the documentary evidence of current life.  In the future who will make sense of these occidental repositories, and even with all that information will they remember things correctly? And does it matter that we didn’t find many snugs in Carlow? We gathered stories and reasons and memories. When something dies it leaves a hole which cannot be filled, and every loss is as unique as every life.  Maybe it’s better they were gone before we arrived because if our record were the last, we’d surely get the blame for their death.

WILL WE BE GRAND?

YOU’LL BE FORGIVEN FOR GETTING BORED READING THIS because I got bored writing it. It’s very hard to pay attention to one task for too long, when our attention has been so instrumentalised and monopolised. Dr. Graham Burnett suggests there are approximately three traditions from which we can draw a discourse on value which doesn’t reduce attention to money – education, artistic production and, of course, religion. While yes, these avenues don’t always lead to money, they do offer glory - an idea which can be seductive and scary. There is little that pulls you closer to intimacy with others than the conferring of praise. If you can successfully train your attention to produce something meaningful your labour may be noticed. And to be noticed is to belong to something outside of ourselves.

Which brings us back to the grand performance of the pub. In this intimate space there is belonging and longing. We all know the feeling of entering a small pub, heads may turn, or not. You might be shunned, welcomed, or ignored - whatever the reception you can be sure you have been noticed. In this context, the privacy of the snug is desirable, it is not a place to be banished to. To have the chance to withdraw safely delivers empowerment. Moving in and out of privacy can enliven things, change the direction and then the meaning. The explicit function is to hide, the implicit to contain and hold. If the contradiction is intentional, what does it mean for our culture?

We hide many things for the purpose of holding onto them. We keep old ways and ideas to ourselves so that they won’t be corrupted by the perspectives of others. But do we really know where these ideas about ourselves came from? They say that you can’t talk about Ireland without talking about Christianity. Others say you can’t talk about Christianity without talking about Islam, Judaism, Roman infrastructure, Mesopotamian mathematics, Chinese mechanics, the chariot, metallurgy, agriculture, navigation, fire. In truth we don’t know the root of most ideas, but we hold onto them anyway until something more believable comes along.

Unfortunately, there is no great conclusion to be drawn between the study of the humble sung and the meaning of life. We paid as much attention as we could to try and understand a place and its small spaces. The snugs might be disappearing but the constraints which created them have not disappeared. Discrimination still affects the vulnerable, dogma still limits freedom, civil safety relies upon punitive frameworks and easy love is as evasive as ever. If the Irish pub dies, what do we lose? Will valorisation be enough to remember the feeling of comradery and closeness. Can we make it again, but better this time – more welcoming and less sad. Carlow; we need to talk. And can you think of anything that talks, other than another person? Well, yes but you’re not going to sit in a snug and talk to a parrot.