Teaching my kids how to be Irish

A few months ago, we got a class email from our daughter’s Kindergarten teacher, inviting us to come in and share our family’s traditions or cultural practices with the class, “in order to celebrate the rich diversity of the classroom”. We said put us down for a day around Saint Patrick’s day and then we tried to think what we would do.

I asked David what our family traditions or cultural practices were and he said “We celebrate Christmas?” which, yes we do, but the most celebrated Christian holiday in the world? It didn’t exactly feel unique. I know we celebrate Christmas slightly differently to the USA but I couldn’t explain to a group of 5 year old New Yorkers how our cultural practice is that the entire country stops working for over a week and how a very important tradition is that the best session of the season is the unplanned one. The casual Christmas get together you thought you’d take it handy at or the day you went into town to buy the last few bits but you bumped into a friend and instead ended up in Kehoe’s, getting absolutely perfectly pissed and now Fairytale of New York has just come on and someone has opened up a bag of crisps in the way people do only in pubs and you wonder if life gets better than this?

Think think think. What are the traditions in our modern, English-speaking, largely Christian culture that are so different from America? I was suddenly mad the kids don’t speak Irish. Or that I didn’t, at least, give them Irish names. We speak Irish occasionally, but only when we don’t want them to know what we’re saying and whenever we do, they always turn to us and ask: “Why are you speaking Spanish?”

And then I thought of something we do do quite differently. But could I stand in front of a class of 5 year olds and say “Hello children, by the time I was your age I had seen several dead bodies. SEVERAL!” Was I part of an Irish equivalent of the Famous Five? Where dead bodies mysteriously washed up on the banks of the Boyne and we (me, my three pals and our red setter called Tadhg (he was always chasing after the bus)) felt compelled to investigate the circumstances of their death? No. Did I see so many dead bodies because my parents were serial killers who brought their kids along for the ride because childcare was so hard to come by in the 80s? Also, no. Oh, undertaking was the family business? Again, no.

No, see, eating mountains of triangular-cut sandwiches, washed down with cups of endless tea, while sitting beside a recently deceased body, now laid out in the corner of the room was just a standard Friday night’s entertainment when I was a kid. I’m not saying that seeing that many dead bodies so young was good for me - it probably wasn’t. I was absolutely terrified of them. But I’d also say that nights spent at wakes of older relatives were some of the best nights of my childhood. Running wild outside while your parents were inside tucking into the second layer of a tin of USA biscuits. What better opportunity would your older cousins have to impart the cautionary tale of the friend of a friend who’d used a Ouija board? Or to tell you how they’d heard a howling wind a few days ago but looking back now, it was obviously the banshee? Or that story about the person that got drunk at a wake and lifted up the corpse, throwing it over their shoulder for a dance but rigor mortis had set in and now the corpse was permanently bent over and had to be tied down with rope in the coffin except the ropes became undone during the funeral and the corpse shot up suddenly to sit up dead straight in the middle of the church? No, I couldn’t tell them that.

The blight is here

I don't want to throw my parents under the bus here but one of my earliest memories, when I was about the age of the kids in this class I’m about to educate on our culture, is of being in a pub when someone ran in shouting “GUARDS!” and everyone (me aged 5 included) hopped the bar and scarpered out the back. Was I at a lock-in? I must have been at a lock-in?? I can’t have been at a lock-in. Can you even trust your memories at all?

My husband swears (SWEARS!) that when he was about 10 years old, he was woken urgently one night by his mother who told him “The blight is here”. According to him, he was made get up out of his bed and, bleary-eyed, dig up the spuds in the dark. Now. There is a lot to unpack there. Every single part of the story, I would say. You grew up in the 90s in Roscommon, yeah? The 1990s like? Not the 1890s? Why were you growing spuds? How did she know the blight was coming? Actually no, I refuse to go down this road. He clearly just read ‘Under the Hawthorn Tree’ like the rest of us did at that age and has confused the memories of young Michael, 10 year old boy and fictional child of the actual famine, with his own.

That’s a bit Irish

I don’t know yet what I’ll say to the class but I won’t go telling stories against ourselves. I don’t like when people say “That’s a bit Irish” to describe something that doesn’t function properly or is a bit rubbish.

However.

I brought the kids to a screening of some short Irish films in the city last year as part of the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and I have to say, the whole thing was a bit Irish. First off, the films were advertised as being children’s films but were in fact, merely “short films”. They weren’t suitable at all and my 2 year old said over and over to me: “I’m scared”.

But that was just the start of it. After the short (adult-themed) films, we were treated to a display of Irish dancing by a local New York dance school. Now, the theatre was an old fashioned movie theatre. Every row of seats was at the same level as the front row (instead of ascending in height as they went back). The dancers set up shop on the floor right in front of the screen - not on anything helpful like an elevated stage or anything, just on the floor in that gap between the screen and the first row, which meant that we (a few rows back) could only see them from the waist up.

I’m sure everyone reading this can picture Irish dancing and knows, there is not a lot going on in Irish dancing from the waist up. Absolutely nothing in fact. The action is all in the legs and the only activity from the waist up is in the muscles of the face, studiously concentrating on keeping the arms glued down and the posture, erect. The result was that we were treated to a view of torso’s bobbing up and down, accompanied by some gold medal-worthy grave facial expressions.

But the extreme Irishness of this situation was - unbelievably - not over yet. No no. The dance teacher stood up to inform us that the girls were just going to pop out and change into their hard shoes for the next dance. Lovely! I love a hard shoe. The best bit of Riverdance is when they turn the music off and let Michael Flatley go hell for leather with his hobnailed shoes against the stage. At least we would be able to hear this dance, even if we couldn’t see it. Back came the girls and they began to dance. Except there was radio silence. I couldn’t believe it. I had to stand up and peer over to see what was going on and - yes! - they’d changed into their hornpipe shoes for the purpose of performing a soundless dance on a carpet. (It has just this very moment come back to me that I once, aged 13, did an Irish dance on the radio. I will leave that sentence there and we’ll just move on).

Later that night, I went to see Westlife at Radio City Hall and when Nicky Byrne thanked his parents and in-laws for coming, I looked down from the balcony and into the crowd and lo, my eyes immediately fell on Nicky Byrne’s father-in-law, none other than Bertie Ahern, former Taoiseach of Ireland (as the woman in that viral voicenote about him felt the need to clarify). After the show, he was clapped on the back by everyone he passed as his bodyguard ushered him out. And that too all felt a bit Irish. No, I couldn't tell the kids about how there is nothing more Irish than five handsome young men, being plucked from obscurity to form a manufactured boyband that does cover versions of cover versions, now forced to lip-sync for their supper because they’d gone and blown it all that one time we all thought we were a little bit rich. Nothing more Irish except maybe how a former prime minister (the one from the time we all thought we were a little bit rich), who resigned, right as the economy was coming crashing down and amid his own personal corruption scandal, would be literally - very literally - backslapped by every single Irish person he passed at the concert of the aging popstars, bankrupted by a property crash caused by the economic policies of the Government he led.

Irish cuisine

When I was on Erasmus, students from every European country would put on a meal of traditional food from their country. When Ireland’s turn rolled round, we invited everyone over for Sunday morning breakfast rolls and my abiding memory of that morning is of a tall, blonde German, who looked like he stepped right out of Hitler’s wet dream, asking incredulously “Vud you eat dis every DAY?”. Maybe we would, Rolf. Depends on how heavy the night before was and on the current availability of jambons, doesn’t it?

Irish cuisine

In Brussels, I was invited to a similar party where everyone had to bring food from their home country. I brought smoked salmon (Norwegian smoked salmon because the Irish stuff was too dear and I was living on €1,000 a month. Living very well, I should add, but it didn’t stretch to Irish smoked salmon when the cheaper Nordic one was right there) on soda bread and made up some shite about it being a traditional starter on Christmas Day. If I was running with a Christmas Day starter story, I really should have brought a wedge of yellow melon with one single glacé cherry on top, I know. My abiding memory of that night is one of the English interns (Britain was in the EU in my day) asking why, during the famine, didn’t the Irish just eat fish? She filled in the stunned silence with “Because you’re an island?”

More Irish cuisine

OK, Boys and Girls

I don't know why I’m putting so much thought into this display of culture to a Kindergarten class when we were always going to do what we always do for every single life lesson for the kids that Daniel Tiger doesn’t cover in an episode and that is READ A STORY and then DO A CRAFT!!

*lifts revolver to blow brains out*

Sorry, how many times have I given full on lessons to this Kindergarten class? I feel like I'm cosplaying Marian from Bosco half the time. “OK boys and girls, we are going to make some SHAMROCKS! And don't forget to BE CAREFUL WITH THE SCISSORS!”