DAVID DIMBLEBY GETS IT BACKWARDS
Mary Ellen Synon wonders why
the English consistently misuse the term Anglo-Irish'
EDMUND BURKE spoke Irish as a child. Oscar Wilde's mother was a Nationalist agitator. Brendan Bracken's father was a Fenian. Richard Brinsley Sheridan came from an Irish Gaelic family. And the moth- er of Sir Patrick Mayhew, like the mother of the Princess of Wales, was an Irishwom- an born with the County Cork name of Roche.
Now, I give you all that information without the word 'Anglo' being attached to anything. All the people mentioned were, are, Irish. None was Anglo-Irish. Yet when an Englishman talks about Burke or Sheri- dan, or any of many others, and concedes their Irish origin, he will describe them as 'Anglo-Irish'. Why? Wilde himself had it: 'They count as Tories. They dine with us.'
The presentable Irishman is a problem for an Englishman. Consider the way David Dimbleby introduced his guests on Question Time when the show was broad- cast from Belfast earlier this month. Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was there. As Mr Dim- bleby introduced him, he said Sir Patrick had an 'Anglo-Irish' mother. Then Mr Dimbleby introduced Clare Short, a Labour MP. She had, said Mr Dimbleby, family who were 'Irish'. Get it?
Yet Mr Dimbleby had it exactly back- wards. Miss Short's father was an Irishman of English descent (the Shorts are an English family fairly numerous in Ulster and in Dublin). Sir Patrick's mother was a Roche, a family not of English descent. But tucking the Roche family under the rubric 'Anglo' means this to an English- man: they are Irish, but they can pass for white.
The word 'Anglo-Irish' is an invention largely of this century. It has just one cor- rect usage, and it is this: it describes those English settlers who arrived in Ireland under the Tudors and the Stuarts, and under Cromwell. Irish historians call these people the 'New English'. The 'Old English' were the Normans, who were not English at all, but were French- and Flem- ish-speaking invaders who swept into Ire- land in the 12th century at the behest of the Pope. The 'Old English' were Nor- mans who used England as a jumping-off point, not as a gene pool. And most became, to the irritation of the later English crown, more Irish than the Irish: the Burke and Roche families were among them.
Instead of 'Anglo-Irish', the word that Englishmen such as Mr Dimbleby may be groping for is 'Ascendancy'. But if such 'Apparently, the piranha's brilliant!' Englishmen know the word Ascendancy at all, they think it means the same as 'Anglo- Irish'. It does not.
The name comes from the period in Irish history known as 'the Protestant Ascendan- cy'. But the Ascendancy, which was made up of the aristocracy, the gentry and, later, some of the professional classes, included both Protestants and Catholics. In the 18th century, the Ascendancy was often sympa- thetic to nationalism. About 40 per cent of its families, by Mark Bence-Jones's calcula- tion, were drawn from Gaelic and Norman stock: for example, Lord Inchiquin (an O'Brien) and Lord Iveagh (a Guinness) were from Gaelic families, while the Duke of Leinster (a Fitzgerald) was of Norman descent.
Indeed, the largest body of Anglo-Irish was not the Ascendancy, but the old work- ing class of Dublin. Until the 19th century, Dublin was a predominantly Protestant city. These Anglo-Irish were descendants of Cromwell's soldiers and settlers, and of the English who swarmed into Ireland after William's victory at the Boyne. They were gradually absorbed into Catholicism (and into the waves of Irish immigrants who left for England and America in the first half of the 19th century). But the English language their offspring speak is still tied to Cromwell.
The archaic English pronunciation which survives among the Dublin working class is the settlers' 17th-century lower-class tongue. This is Hiberno-English. It includes the rough Englishman's solecisms: the fre- quent Irish use of a singular noun with a plural verb ('He have 20 acres') is one of them. The 17th-century pronunciation of tea survives as 'thy'. Dryden's verse rhymes correctly if someone from Dublin's working class reads it. Yet the English do not embrace these brown-eyed mem- bers of Dublin's working class as 'Anglo- Irish'.
The distinction hardly bothers the Irish. Irishmen call themselves Irishmen, whatev- er their distant origin. It iS the English who like the Anglo-hyphen-Irish notion. I pre- fer not to put the hyphen down to racism. Perhaps I should put it down to too many Somerville and Ross stories, and too many British television adaptations of Molly Keane's novels. (Molly Keane's family, of course, were not Anglo-Irish; they were originally 0 Cein.) Still, if the English will not let go of the little dash, then they had better learn how to use it: Gaelic-Irish, Norse-Irish, Old English-Irish, New English-Irish, Scots- Irish, Huguenot-Irish and a small clan of Spanish-Irish (the de Valeras). And that is without even hyphenating anybody by reli- gion: Church of Ireland, Methodist, Pres- byterian, Catholic, Jewish (2,300 of them in Ireland) or Muslim (about 6,000). A gen- uinely Anglo-Irish, perfectly Anglican Irishman, Theobald Wolfe Tone, put it best: leave them under the common name of Irishmen.
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