Gallowglass

Placing You

Kieran Healy has a post about how Irish people meeting each other (especially abroad) check out each other’s political/historic pedigree and social networks as soon as is decently possible. After Henry posted yesterday (post titled ‘hagiography’) mentioning our great grandfather, he and Kieran Healy took a trawl back through three generations of our respective families, a genealogical ritual that passes for a handshake in Ireland, or perhaps what dogs do when they sniff each others’ bottoms. This isn’t strictly a class thing, though - at least not in the way my UK friends can infer all sorts about schooling, regional origin, and precisely locate their exact niche in the class system within 30 seconds of a British starting to speak. It’s got more to do with politics I think, and social networks that don’t quite map onto what you’d call a class system. When you get down to it, it’s a pretty tribal method of figuring out a person’s political background and mindset.

But, the thing is, it kind of works. Our old professor Tom Garvin calls it ‘seed, breed and generation’. As I remember it, Tom was able to place most of his incoming class of about 300 in this way, and could probably tell you anything from what side their great-grandparents supported in the civil war (1921 - 1922) to how they might be expected to vote in the next election. Some might say this is not the sort of preference revelation political scientists should really be studying (!), but in a country where history is truly vital, knowing someone’s family can tell you a lot about how they think. It’s on the way out now, as we get further away from our defining civil war, and broader access to third level education has meant that the politically active and educated class has grown exponentially in the last 20 odd years. And a good thing too on both fronts. But I know that if I, or any of my siblings or cousins on my mother’s side, ever went into politics, many would judge us on our family’s involvement in politics going back over a hundred years.

The flip side of it all is of course the notorious ability and enthusiasm of the Irish to use these networks abroad. In Brussels, the Irish network is called the ‘Murphia.’ Tom Garvin once told me about a trip to Washington DC where, within 24 hours of landing and having a pint with a cousin of a friend, he was invited to meet a committee a senior lobbyist he’d met had been trying to get into for months.

I sometimes think the Irish have never come across an international organisation they didn’t like the look of, and didn’t want to help their family and friends, neighbours and pets to join. People from other nations avoid each other like the plague when abroad, but our crowd sticks together like glue. A family friend with long experience of the European Commission reckons that the Irish are good at working in international organisations because growing up in a big extended family trains you in strategic thinking before you can walk and imparts an unshakeable belief that there is always a possible compromise (pity we can’t apply that second bit up north, then). Now that we’re embracing higher standards of living and birth control, maybe that competitive advantage will fade too.