Beware Nostalgia

I am separated from my formative years by more than time.

Mark O’Connell has a somewhat off-beat and entertaining piece in The Irish Times here, one that makes a serious point.

Somebody from… let’s just say the right of the political spectrum, who also happens to be deranged, shows colour footage of Ireland in the 1970s. O’Connell writes “The creator of the video, a man in late middle age – bespectacled, white-haired, wearing a shirt and tie and looking for all the world like the manager of a regional credit union branch – faces the camera, addressing the viewer, while colour footage of Ireland from the 1970s plays behind him. People getting in and out of Ford Cortinas. A guard on a bicycle. Convent girls walking down the street eating ice creams. A grimacing auld lad in a flat cap. Two small children conferring with deep seriousness at a bus stop. A man in a shop coat delivering a crate of milk bottles. These scenes are uniformly bathed in the soft glow of late summer sunlight, and over it all a gentle and melancholy traditional Irish air plays…”

“What you see there,” he says, pointing upwards at a tractor idling at an intersection, “that’s the real Ireland. Oh, we were so rich! We were rich beyond our wildest dreams, and we didn’t even know it! It was an age of innocence. But we have been sold out. Our leaders took the money, and they wanted us to become Europeans. They paid them off. They bought them.”

Of its nature, this kind of thing is ripe with comic potential. O’Connell continues “It goes on like this for a while, a Faustian narrative of recent Irish history building to a mournful soundtrack of fiddle and uilleann pipes. “This Ireland here is gone,” he reiterates, pointing, for some reason, at a guy driving a forklift at a recklessly brisk clip through a car park. “They took this from you.”

This video has gone viral, of course, because once the numbskulls of MAGA find something anti-Europe, especially if it’s from Europe, they rejoice and share.

As Mark O’Connell concludes, we in Ireland did once have a potent anti-modern, isolationist movement and it retarded our national development for decades. Anyway, this all got me thinking about the 1970s, a decade I entered at the age of ten and which I exited as a TCD undergraduate aged 20. So yes, pretty formative.

So. do I entertain any nostalgic feelings for the decade? Well, yes, I do. I was lucky to grow up in a comfortable home in the Dublin suburbs with a mother who was a very talented and, for the times, adventurous cook, and an enthusiastic gardener; and a bibliophile father who was both a reluctant civil servant and a talented painter. There was a big garden and the vast acres of All Hallows seminary was right behind, in which I and my next door friend would happily trespass all day long during the school holidays.

Also behind our house was an enclosed Carmelite convent where the nuns had a house cow. Their farmhand on one occasion asked my mother to phone the AI man and haded her a piece of paper with a number. A male voice answered and my mother said, “Oh hullo, is that the artificial inseminator?”

After a lengthy pause came the reply “Madam, I can assure you that there is absolutely nothing artificial about me!”

There was even more rus in urbe across the road where the Rosminians had a school for the blind and a large home farm. From my bedroom I could hear the corncrake.

When I was very small, way back in the 1960s, one of the farm labourers in All Hallows used to take a horse and cart past our house to deliver a churn of milk - unpasteurised, of course - to the nuns at what I now know to be the notorious High Park, a Magdelene laundry. (My parents, devout Catholics, used the Protestant Swastika Laundry, the name of which had been adopted before World War II - perhaps they knew something). I would go with him, participating in a tiny way in something that had not changed in hundreds of years. I remember the smell of that spanking fresh milk so vividly today.

And despite my urban childhood I grew up with a love of wild plants and streams and the smell of hay and even fresh horse dung - all because I was surrounded by the numinous pockets of countryside that had somehow survived just two miles from the GPO. Of course they have long been built upon and I struggle recognise the neighbourhood in which I grew up on my rare visits. That they endured for so long was thanks to religious orders; my father liked to say that we lived “in the odour of sanctity”.

The 1970s saw me fall in love for the first time, experience the hottest Summer on record, my first experience of acting, my first visits to Continental Europe, my discovery of a love of gardening, start of my enthusiasm for the works of PG Wodehouse. Nothing quite equates to the excitement of doing certain things for the first time so, yes, I do feel nostalgic for much I experienced in that decade.

Not so much for the decade itself. Not for The Black and White Minstrel Show, the casual racism and omnipresent homophobia (both of which I was guilty of as a teenager), not for the decor, the flares, the shirt collars that plunged towards your navel, the ubiquitous brown and orange, cheesecloth and tie-dyes, the lunchtime oxtail soup at school, the absence of girls.

And not at all for a country that was, in effect, run by the Roman Catholic Church (which I formally left at the age of 21). Divorce had been explicitly outlawed in 1937, having been unavailable anyway since independence in 1922. Contraception was banned in 1935 and abortion, even after Britain introduced a limited form in 1967, was unthinkable. It was not until the year my second child was born that homosexual acts between consenting adult males became legal.

Throughout much of the 1970s a predatory paedophile stalked the younger boys at my school (something I have written about, along with its cover-up, at length here and elsewhere). I was one of the lucky ones but when I was twelve I was groped by a seminarian from All Hallows; one of the clerics from the school for the blind used to ask me and my friends distinctly inappropriate or, as we said at the time, creepy questions. The 1970s in Ireland were idyllic if you were thoroughly observant heterosexual Catholic but for anyone else, especially children, it was a dangerous time.

I don’t feel old, most of the time, but occasionally, especially when talking to younger people, I am made to realise that the 1970s are really very long ago. And thankfully we are separated from that era by even more than time.

The world is in a parlous state and in Ireland we have considerable problems, with housing in particular, but I’m not being unduly Panglossian in looking around me and saying: this is a better place than the one in which I was a child.