I have this theory about Irish people that we always have to do things to an extreme extent. It’s only fair to say that I have found very little support for this view among other Irish people.
However, you will recall that for a long time we were the best Catholics. Now we are the best liberals. We always wanted to be the best Europeans. When we had the bailout we were the best country at taking our medicine; we were never going to default like the Argentinians (I mean, they took that to their own extreme).
I don’t know if it’s a post-colonial thing or a small country thing or what. When I was growing up it was drummed into us by home, school, society that if you were going abroad you were representing your country and you couldn’t let us down. I’m not talking about going abroad to perform in the maths Olympiad here, I’m talking about a camping holiday in France.
Though all this does remind me of a funny story my mother told me. Shortly after she finished her master’s degree in Cork, she got a DAAD scholarship to continue her chemistry studies in Freiburg in Germany. It was the late 50s/early 60s and Ireland was poor and Germany was enjoying its post-war economic miracle and it was a world leader in science. Her professor in UCC said to her, “They’ll have all kinds of equipment there you’ve never seen before but don’t go around saying ‘Ooh, I’ve never used that before’ – you’re a clever woman, you’ll work it out quickly enough.” And so she did.
Anyway, in case you didn’t know, one of the things we quite like about ourselves here is that we’re good at death: talking about it; managing the rituals associated with it and generally seeing it as part of life. Regular readers will know that I am blue in the face from going to funerals and removals (the evening event – handy if work means you can’t go to the funeral – though a couple of hours out of the office to attend a funeral is alright by most employers). I have seen more dead bodies than I can remember. I don’t think there is a person over, say, 10 in Ireland who hasn’t seen plenty of corpses. And many under 10s have seen them too, it’s just not all of them have had a grandparent die. My mother died in 2019 and we had a normal funeral, full church, lunch, lots of people we hadn’t seen in years, random relatives, colleagues and friends (hers, my father’s, mine, my siblings’), the lady captain of the golf club, whoever you’re having yourself, and every one of them had something comforting to say. When my father died over Christmas in 2020, at the height of Covid, there were only 9 mourners in the church for the funeral and it was quite grim. I liked the way though that during Covid, people started using the condolence section of that stellar resource rip.ie to write messages of sympathy. I have pages and pages from my father’s death notice. That’s something quite nice that remains a feature even though Covid is over and we’re all attending funerals to beat the band again.
So, I think my credentials as a funeral going Irish rip.ie enthusiast have been pretty firmly established here. Nonetheless, I saw this in the paper this morning and I thought this is ridiculous, we’ve overdone it again.
Seriously, RIP the podcast? They’ve got to be joking.
*Billy Joel fans will know that the next line of this immortal number is “Darling, I don’t know why I go to extremes”.
