heritageatplay

Posts Tagged ‘identity’

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Several Fans in One: The politics of the unaffiliated GAA fan

In Competitions, Culture, Games on July 11, 2010 at 7:33 pm

Having  seen us don Dublin blue, Kilkenny black and yellow, and Galway’s maroon, some of our readership may be feeling that in our efforts to embrace the excitement of GAA action we have undercut one of the organization’s most intrinsic principles: pride in your specific county. This is a fair gripe, for indeed as many GAA members have told us, you are born into your club, you do not choose it. And if you have to relocate to other parts of Ireland, you only change clubs under great duress. If the commute (and everyone initially tries to commute from their new home back to their club/county) is too long, only then can you switch allegiances. Even then, clubs members will still introduce you as a former member of so-and-so even when you’ve raised your children at the new club, and lived there for over twenty years. County colors run deep.

With all this culture in mind, its been a bit cheap to switch colors for every match we watch. No doubt this superficiality is a sure sign of our persistent American sports identities, which generally permit such movement between loyalties. That is, unless you were to be a Boston Red Sox/Celtics fan like me, in which case you might feel a certain twinge of embarrassment at moving between counties and clubs so freely. Which I do.

But what are we to do? We’ve only just arrived, we’ve no home base, and even while the Dubs are technically our home team, we’ve learned that Dubs fandom can be undesirable. There are too many of them, we were told in the country. Support someone small, like Offaly!

We still haven’t committed. Its more fun supporting the sport over any specific tribe. We salute the beauty of the game, and the way it is played with care and pride. As for the pride of its fans, there is no denying their commitment. And for that, over all over things, we stand with them, scarves held aloft, our voices rising with theirs.

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Colors of the Counties

In Culture, History, Travel on July 9, 2010 at 11:59 am

An ad in Tipperary like the one we saw outside Croke Park. Except the jersey has been exchanged.

In Dublin, it’s navy and baby blue. In Offaly, it’s white, green, and yellow. In Cork it’s red and white. How do you know?

It’s unmistakable. Walking through the streets of Cork, we found flags flying everywhere in the red and white county colors. In what we would call “dollar stores”, generic flags, hats, whistles, horns, and keychains are sold in the checkered red and white. These items are often called “Gaelic Flags” or “County Colors”. And on the back of their packaging are guides to the other 31 colors of the counties.

Within each county, every club has it’s own colors, too. For the Nemo Rangers, it’s black and green. For St. Rynagh’s, it’s green and white.

Green is probably the most popular color, because, well….

The county colors as we found don’t belong to anyone. So generic flags and scarves and all sorts of paraphenalia can be made and sold. Guinness and other advertisers also play with the colors as a popular ad around Ireland shows a mass of people holding a flag with the slogan “A County will Rise”. Guinness always plays to the local county.

The jerseys of course are also branded in these colors, but often include crests which are themselves the county crests. With some exceptions…notably Kilkenny, who uses a more abstract GAA icon.

Kilkenny's abstract GAA icon.

People play with the county colors and attach them to their bags so that when traveling through Ireland as we’ve seen, it’s always possible to look at someone’s luggage and say, “You’re from Galway, aren’t you?” and then start up a conversation. As they say, some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. And that’s exactly where the club or county crest is always put on the GAA jersey.

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On being Irish-American (Part Two)

In Culture, History, Reflections on July 7, 2010 at 2:38 pm

I want to be Irish. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s simply of consequence of American buffet style identity politics. You must be something in America, and it’s very hard to be American. No one is American, unless, well you are Native American and that’s not exactly American is it? American is the identity that some (white) people forced over those Native Americans, a supra-identity that was more club membership than a definition of character and heritage.

So friends and teachers and employers always recognized me as Irish. It was my “Mc” name and my brown hair and my writerly disposition. Americans have reacted to me as though there were some intrinsic Irishness that I couldn’t root out, a genetic expression rendered subtly in my personality.

But the Irish remind me I am not Irish. That identity is past recollecting, except in the general abstract recollection of the entire Irish people. Except in being Irish rather that from Cork or Munster or members of the Fianna (once upon a time). This is why St. Patrick’s Day is so popular in America: it isn’t just that “everyone’s Irish” on St. Patrick’s Day, it’s that on St. Patrick’s Day it is perfectly acceptable to honor your heritage in the most abstracted manner. No one remembers the feast days for the patron saints of their villages, everyone celebrates Patrick, and drinks Guinness (rather than a more local brew) and laughs about fairies, lepherchauns, and green things. One day for an identity lost. Raise your glasses!

No, my family were not there to be Fenians in the late 1880’s or Provisionals at the Easter Uprising. They didn’t wage guerilla war on British Black & Tans. They did not defiantly speak Irish. They did not ratify the treaty that bifurcated Ireland. They never voted in an Irish election.

I have never heard a family member recite Irish. We speak English. We hold American passports, and vote in American elections.

And all the while, we carry forward names whose previous holders we can only thinly see as we look back over the sea wondering at an origin.

-ZM

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On being Irish-American (part one)

In Culture, History on July 7, 2010 at 10:03 am

My grandfather was the son of an Irishman. No one knows from where in Ireland he came, although popular tradition claims it was County Cork. I have never doubted that my grandfather was Irish. The family photographs make him look as regally Irish as Ronald Reagan, who was once welcomed to a tiny town in rural Ireland where Reagan’s own grandfather had- so they say- once left for a new life in the States.

My grandfather’s father does not survive in photographs. But the house he built to raise his American children in still stands. In a Real Estate listing it has been described as a three bedroom single family home, but in the early 1920’s, over eight family members lived together there.

My grandfather is a beloved figure in family memory. He never drank, despite his heritage and its stereotypes, but he did love pubs and the social scene they offered. He was a man of stories- so they say- who could find the charming and the remarkable in old homes, busy cities, quiet towns, or old saloons. On the GI Bill, he took college courses for over forty years, grabbing seminars at Georgetown, Columbia, and Brown, before finishing his degree at Harvard University and walking with the 21 year olds as a 60-somethng year old college grad.

His diploma, gorgeously framed, is in the attic in the home his father built. I have seen it. It is a fact.
But my grandfather’s father is someone who sits just over the edge of the horizon in family memory. What can be said of him? Who could know something of him to say something? And his Irishness, likewise out of sight over a sea of memory, is at best an abstract thing. We are Irish, yes, it seems obvious. But what of that Irishness? What stories have we who are so American we go looking and hoping for something of that old heritage we ran away from?

Could we even be Irish?

The modern Irish I know have told me quite clearly I cannot be Irish.

“Have you ever been to Ireland?” they ask. “Do you have family there? Do you speak Irish?”

I haven’t. I don’t. I can’t.

There is no Irish to recover in me or my family save the oddest remnant of heritage: pride.

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