Holy Xenophobes Some characteristic qualities of the Irish are their
harsh realism, their salty and unsentimental imagination, their unremitting wit, and their caballero-like handling of an English as lively as our own is jaded. But they still tend to wear their sad history like a hair shirt, and this is one of the reasons why they are saddled with a Hierarchy as ferocious as any spiritual assemblage outside Spain. If there's a possibility of a National Health Service, of a Sean O'Casey play being produced in Dublin, of innocent minds being exposed to the works of James Joyce, one will find those clerics out with bell, book and candle. Now foreigners at large have come under suspicion. On Sunday the Arch- bishop of Cork gave out, as they say there, about them. Nobody, he said, minds them here and there; they are all right as tourists. 'But we have no welcome for them when they come to take over our Irish land.' If the State would do nothing, he continued, the people should do something themselves, and show those foreigners that they are not wanted. Are we to expect a holy war against the rich returned-Americans and Germans and Japanese who are investing in rocky Irish acres (to say nothing of the English who still persist in settling there to escape the rigours of their native land)? The Archbishop has certainly given a new twist to the words 'Sinn Fein.'
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