The green green grass of home

There are few sights as beautiful as the Irish countryside on a sunny Midsummer evening. Driving back home through Monaghan and Louth my eyes feast on the festival landscape that Midsummer serves. The gentle light of a sun that is staying up late allows the colours to emerge in the glad-rags of their best-dressed, seasonal plant-hosts. The sloping drumlins of Monaghan, like shop-window displays, present their goods to the seeing eye. The grazing livestock in the pasture lands provide polka-dot contrasts to the gentle greens of the swards and meadows. Here, jet-black Angus cattle, spread out over the grassland in well-spaced symmetry. There, cappuccino-coloured Charolais cattle lie on a hillside, soaking up the last rays of the sinking sun and chewing the cud over a day in the life of a beef-bred bullock.

A murder of crows opportunistically hunts in the stubble of a recently-shaved silage field. A few shy rabbits vigilantly graze on the headlands. A stream of vehicles weaves its impatient way home. People with problems in their faces grip their steering wheels tightly; their eyes trained on the left-hand side. Roadside grasses have reached seed-stage. The gentle lilac of a spread of full headed hay-seed defies the reaper on the verge of the motorway, nodding and swaying in the wake of the traffic-thread. The carefully cultivated verges of the recently constructed roadways are a credit to the planners and to the planters. A stray rape-seed plant reflects the yellow sun as it dims and sinks towards the receptive horizon. Other newer crops like maize plants, with their strong shining leaves and stalks have filled in the furrows and hidden the bio-degradable covering that protected them in their infancy.

As I moved into the plains of Louth, the sheets of grain in the generously-proportioned fields were taking on the first shades of ripeness. The trimmed-back sycamores in the hedgerows glowed purple in their tenderest shoots and the elderberry bushes splashed out their frothiest blossoms. The oak and the ash have filled out the winter gaps in their branches and the chestnut has shot up chandeliers of blossom, pointing to the buttermilk sky. Pig’s parsley or hogweed reminded me of childhood ‘loanins’ and of stories about its leaves and roots being fed to swine in poorer days. More prosperous times were suggested to me by the Dynasty-style, dormered mansions that dwarf their single-storied predecessors hidden further down the laneways. The industrialisation of agriculture was evident in the giant spools of cut sward rolled into a corner awaiting fork-lifted help.

I used to wonder what all the talk was of Ireland as an ‘Emerald Isle’. ‘Surely grass is green everywhere’ I generalised. I thought that talk of ‘forty shades of green’ was mere emigrant sentimentality. It was only when I touched down at Shannon in daylight, following my first trip abroad, that I realised just what it was that enthralled visitors and returnees. I had discovered that grass could be sunburnt-brown, wiry and sparse, like the combed-over hair of a balding man, or tall and dull-hued in a desert-drought. As our aeroplane tilted and hovered in its descent, the patchwork of fields below, that I saw through the dull surface of the cabin window, appeared vivid and bright, luscious and shining in the wake of an autumn shower. Now I knew and understood all that talk of Ireland green.

Sometimes I try to impress on people who live in the area of Mid-Louth that they have an environment and living conditions that are second to none. Those who are fortunate enough to live in the villages and in the countryside mostly enjoy a quality of life that many city-dwellers can only dream of. Emigration is no longer almost compulsory for many of our young. The climate is temperate and predictable in its unpredictable Irish way. Communities are largely homogenous with no serious ethnic or political tensions. Farms are generously proportioned and fertile. The environment is rich in its diversity and largely unspoiled. Family and community life is still strong despite the inroads of modernity and the confusion that social change inevitably brings. Maybe I’m being romantic or utopian in my reading of the countryside but then I was driving home from the wedding banquet of my niece!

It all reminds me of a poem by Alexander Pope. The poem is called ‘The Quiet Life’.

‘Happy the man whose wish and care / a few paternal acres bound, / content to breathe his native air / in his own ground. / Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, / whose flocks supply him with attire; / whose trees in summer yield him shade, / In winter, fire. / Blest who can unconcern'dly find / Hours, days, and years slide soft away / In health of body, peace of mind, / Quiet by day, / Sound sleep by night; study and ease / Together mixt, sweet recreation, / and innocence, which most does please / With meditation. / Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; / Thus unlamented let me die; / Steal from the world, and not a stone / Tell where I lie’.

School’s out for summer

School’s out for summer

At gatherings of teachers I often try to impress on them that they have no idea of the depth of impression they are capable of. Teachers routinely underestimate the effect that they have on the young minds that they mould. Ours may be an information age, with access to answers at the touch of a fingertip on a button, but technology and the Internet do not have the capacity to influence us after the manner of a good teacher. The moulding of character is an essentially human privilege. As our students and teachers look forward to the summer break and release from the goldfish-bowl world of the classroom, it is good to remind ourselves of the pedagogues of past and present who left their stamp on us and on our communities.

There are very few people who take to studying easily or enthusiastically. Most adults express regret that they did not ‘stay at the books’ a little bit longer. I confess that I escaped from the books and from my ‘A’ Level studies prematurely. I was only sixteen when I decided, without benefit of advice from anybody, that I was through with school. I simply did not return following the Christmas break. Almost six years later, I went back to the books as a ‘mature student’. Some people say that the terms mature and student are mutually contradictory. Whatever about maturity, I sat behind the desk again following an interval filled with all kinds of experiences. Twenty years later, at the end of a three-year post-graduate course, I sat down to what I hope was my final examination this side of the day of judgement.

In the family bar I used to hear old men occasionally speak bitterly of their teachers. Most of their generation did not progress beyond Primary School and their experience of a tough or an inadequate schoolmaster often soured them. The sarky, sarcastic comment of a teacher is often remembered long after the physical punishments have been forgotten. The contrast with contemporary classroom experience is stark. Children routinely say that they love their Primary School teachers. Graduation ceremonies are generally sentimental, tearful farewells as students move from one level to another. The idea of a fear-filled, punishment-heavy routine is beyond their experience.

The layers of help available to contemporary students are a constant source of surprise to me. Learning difficulties are usually spotted early on in a student’s life and appropriate and sensitive help is offered. Children no longer leave school illiterate even if contemporary standards of spoken and written English leave a lot to be desired. The range of options open to them as they ponder their future is impossibly broad; the possibilities and choices from which they decide were unimaginable to past generations.

As in all professions, there are structural and personnel difficulties and a particular culture that goes with the job. Teaching has its share of jargon and fads, in-words and social experiments. Teachers are accustomed, like many of us, to getting lots of unwanted advice from people who have never stood in front of a class. The culture of complaint weighs heavy on them as they try to balance the rights and responsibilities of school, students, parents and staff. The solution to every social problem is dumped on them as more courses are recommended. People forget that we are all teachers, if only by example.

The recent success of the Irish economy and the foundation-stone of our prosperity have been credited to the high educational standards of Irish society. We have come a long way from the hedge-schools and the town Academies. The infrastructure of education owes a lot to Church bodies and almost every educational opportunity most of us got came from parish schools and diocesan or Religious colleges. This leads to accusations of over-control on the part of the churches yet ‘control’ is the one thing missing, in the view of many observers of modern character and culture.

My own experience of school was generally positive. I have had some truly inspirational teachers and have sat through some abysmal attempts to teach. Most of the latter were at third level. Over the years of priesthood I have got to know the profession from the inside and have made many friends from their ranks. Primary School business forms a significant part of a pastoral priest’s workload. I am still shocked, however, when teachers spell a word wrongly or use bad grammar. My child-like idealising of ‘teacher’ has never quite left me. It’s like hearing a priest swear!

‘Free at last, free at last, I thank God we’re free at last’ are the words of an old Negro spiritual song. They might well be adapted to describe the feelings of our students as they leave their cages in the classrooms of the country. I have no doubt that most teachers will be feeling a little of the same exhilaration as they turn the key in the school-door. Even the priest will breathe a sigh of relief as the school-year cycle goes into free-wheel until autumn. If the opening hymn next Sunday is, ‘Free at last, free at last, I thank God we’re free at last’, you’ll understand why.

When being young was very heaven

On a summer morning in 1968 the pupils of Anamar Primary School, which I attended, gathered to meet a C.I.E. bus at the border and headed off to Dublin, to the zoo; to the ice-cream factory and to visit a former class friend in a school in Drumcondra. The school was for the partially-sighted. When we arrived I saw, for the first time, young men with the pigment deficiency called Albinism. These young Albino men were gathered in huddles, listening intently to transistor radios which had their antennae extended. I had never seen a person with the pigment deficiency before. I was puzzled by these different looking people with white hair and pink eyes and even more puzzled by their intent listening to the new-fangled transistor radios for what was obviously breaking news.

It was an age when the technology available to us was scarce and cumbersome. Radios were hardly portable and listeners generally went to the family or communal radio and sat around it rather than carry around their own personal set. If anyone at the time had told me that these young people were an invading tribe from another planet, listening in to messages from their extra-terrestrial leader, I would have believed them. I later learnt that the news that was so preoccupying these teenagers was the assassination and death of Senator Robert, ‘Bobby’ Kennedy while he was on the election campaign trail. It was June 6th 1968.

Many people of a certain generation remember exactly where they were or what they were doing when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in 1963. I was too young to remember or to register any memory then but I remember the assassination of his brother Robert. The fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s death; the illness of his brother Senator Edward Kennedy and the breakthrough of Senator Barack Obama as Democratic Nominee in the upcoming American elections have reminded many people of that period, a generation ago, when enthusiasm and hope was so high. The poet William Wordsworth is often quoted in his description of a period when idealism was similarly high. He was an early admirer of the reforms of the French Revolution, though he later repudiated his support for it. Two centuries ago, he wrote a poem on the Revolution that contains two lines which are particularly remembered. The larger extract reads:

‘Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy!/ For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood/ Upon our side, we who were strong in love!/ Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! Times,/ In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/ Of custom, law, and statute, took at once/ The attraction of a country in romance!’

Senator Obama’s rival in the election will be the older Senator John McCain. The parallel with Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity,’ which is how he described poetry, is further heightened in the following imagery from the same poem:

‘The budding rose above the rose full blown. / What temper at the prospect did not wake/ To happiness unthought of? The inert/ were roused, and lively natures rapt away!’

The early decades of recent centuries have been times of idealism and optimism. Each succeeding century offers a blank sheet on which humankind must write another chapter of our ‘his-story’ as we call it. In Northern Ireland we appear to have effected our own revolution in community relations. A certain realism has replaced the heady idealism of the 1960s and we are still living with the fall-out from the excesses that almost always follow periods of revolution and rapid change. It has been said that an elderly Chinese politician was once asked what he thought was the legacy of the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. He replied that he could not adequately comment on it because, as he explained, ‘it is much too early to say’.

Wordsworth counselled us not to build castles in the sky; not to be overly optimistic. He wisely noted that our dreams and visions need to be rooted in the messy reality that is human nature and the natural world. Age brought perspective and the idealism of youth gave way to the mellowness of his more mature years. All idealists are, he wrote, ‘called upon to exercise their skill,/ Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,/ or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!/ But in the very world, which is the world/ of all of us - the place where in the end/ we find our happiness, or not at all!’

The end of the oil age

Joseph was imprisoned. He had been betrayed and sold into exile by his own brothers. His salvation and his freedom lay in a dream. The story in the Book of Genesis tells of how Pharaoh had a troubled dream one night. In his visions he saw seven fat cattle as he stood by the river. The fat cattle, rising up out of the water, were joined by seven scraggy and mean looking cattle. They all stood on the river-bank. The dream ended with the lean cattle eating up the fine, well-fed ones. Pharaoh woke up. He later returned to sleep and the dream recurred with seven full ears of corn and seven thin ears as the central symbols. The dream-story ended the same way. Pharaoh was mighty troubled by these nightly visitations and found nobody among his staff who could competently explain them to him. Joseph made his name and his best career move by explaining to Pharaoh that seven years of good fortune were to be followed by seven years of ill-fortune and famine. Pharaoh elevated him, gave him a wife and followed his advice to stockpile food against the lean years. Egypt alone was prepared for the seven years of famine that followed, as foretold by Joseph.

It is unlikely that real famine will hit our end of the world but it looks as if the years of plenty are receding. The credit crunch has been followed by an oil squeeze. We are all feeling the effects as transport costs rise and food and heating bills spike. It may help to reduce our collective carbon footprint by making us reflect on our use of fossil fuels and on our dependence on oil. The crisis has not so much hit us in the pocket as mugged us at the pumps. It has forced us to reflect on our relationship with the energy sources of the past; those we now enjoy; the possibilities of an oil-free future and the end of the oil-age.

The last time I remember such a crisis was in 1973. The problem then was a scarcity of oil. I was in boarding school in Newry and we were asked by the College authorities to encourage our parents not to feel that they had to visit us. The head of the oil producing countries organisation, OPEC, was Sheik Zaki Yamani. We had a joke that he had told the countries of the West, ‘Ya Mani – or no oil!’ The Sheik made a prediction a few years ago that sounds startling coming from such a source. He said, “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil”.

My earliest memory of a pre-oil age is of my grandmother gathering sticks or ‘brosna’ as she called it, using the Irish word. She collected small, brittle twigs from under the nearby ditches and stored them overnight in the plate-warming, bottom oven of her ironically named Modern Mistress Range. These sticks were used in the morning to kindle the fire that was the focus of the household. Gathering sticks was a common chore as was ‘splitting sticks’. Many people still say that they prefer the drama of a real fire in their sitting rooms over the push-button illusions that gas or electric fires present. As children we used to play outside in the summertime, often building fires of wood as we camped and cooked eggs or tinned beans for ourselves. Our mother knew when we had been sitting around the camp-fire for when we returned in the evening she would tell us that we smelled ‘like the tinkers’.

The fuel most commonly in circulation then was paraffin oil for the various lamps that were used inside or outside. Every household also had a supply of ‘methylated spirits’. This was used for lighting the Tilley Lamp; for cleaning the windows with dampened, crushed newspaper; for singeing the down off a freshly-plucked chicken or for removing stains. It was also abused by street-drinkers, sometimes with terrible results. With the coming of the mechanical age and the TVO Tractor, with its twin-fuel system, farmers needed small amounts of petrol to kick-start their tractors before turning over to Tractor Vaporising Oil when the engine got going. The widespread use of diesel came later. Switching over to TVO, following the high-octane, petrol-fuelled beginning, came to be used as a simile for those men whose drinking habits began with a couple of ‘half-ones’ before switching over to bottles of Guinness.

The largest fuel stock back then was probably the coal-pile. Some households bought coal by the ton and a ‘ton of coal’ was a common prize in raffles. Coal, slack and shingles were piled up outside, covered over with a few sheets of tin or galvanised iron and brought inside as needed. It was liberally burned in the ranges and fireplaces of the time with their huge, inefficient fire-boxes and roaring chimneys. Turf was not widely used, although older people had worked at ‘saving’ turf and families still had turbary rights in assigned strips of nearby bogs. Nobody worried about their carbon footprint or about global warming. The price of a barrel of oil on the international market was thought to be only of interest to sheiks. Ten shillings worth of petrol at the village pumps went a long way. The only ‘tiger’ around then was the ‘tiger in your tank’ of the popular petrol advertisements. As we Celtic Tiger cubs reel from the effects of price hikes, it’s good to remember that our dependence on the ‘black gold’ of the Arab world, like every dependence, had a beginning and may well have an end.