Tims Times

The alternative title should be “or unimportance of being Irish as the case may be”

The ship has now wound it’s way out of the harbours of Rotterdam, flares, oil tanks and the rest left behind below the horizon. The destination for our present voyage is Dublin.
A surge of pride grips my psyche and I am close to crocodile tears as I think about the city of my birth and it’s significance to me. I don’t really know Dublin anymore, I was born there and lived there, moved away as a child to be tormented by my classmates in Wexford “You thinks you’re great”, I didn’t think I was great, I didn’t think anything, I had been uprooted, I wanted to go back to Dublin. I did but it took 15 years, by then I had become something else, and when I returned to the city of my birth I was greeted with “bleedin’ culchie, red neck, fuck off back down da coontree”.
The joy of return, the soft landing and my accent took another turn of tuning in to the mid atlantic style of Atlantic 252, so by the time I was back in Dublin another 15 years later on a ship the surveyor asked me what part of England I was from.
I replied Dublin, he looked shocked. But what was the correct answer, Wexford, Dublin, Cork, do you have to belong to somewhere, can you make a choice?
Now of course I live in Sweden, and the question asked is, “Do you miss Ireland?”
being sarcastic I say -at every oppurtunity, but it only gets puzzled faces in return, so I say yes of course I miss Ireland, but it is an Ireland that’s gone, I don’t know if I want it back. I can’t get it back anyway even if I want it. I have lived away from Ireland so much that part of me is not Irish anymore, I get surprised by the chaos and the traffic, but I can fit in quickly, nobody notices at first glance that I’m not quick enough with the Euro shrapnel for change when I buy something, and seeing as how most shop assistants aren’t Irish anymore nobody cares.

We received notice of our arrival berth by e-mail from Zbigniew, then I spoke to him on the phone, his Dublin accent and my mid Atlantic ship voice, reserved for VHF radio communication and dealing with European surveyors. Spot the Irish guy.

So what is the importance of being Irish? Every small Irish town has a retail park with Halfords, Tesco, BHS, and a Boots chemist, is everyone happy with this? Maybe this is how to entice the Unionists into a United Ireland….look we are practically Britain anyway, you have all the shops and sports clothes and newspapers, you can get BT telephone accounts, come on down and join the fun, and the orange bit in the flag is for you, and always has been.
Maybe it isn’t so important anymore to be so Irish, or maybe it’s just changing into something new that I haven’t been able to see yet. Maybe the change is that we are becoming more European by accident or design, and does anyone really understand or care? Maybe in the greater Europe of the future Ireland will once again be a province in the north west of Europe, and the less than 100 years of Independence will be seen as an aberration in the grand scheme of things when Britain, France and Germany slug it out for control of power of the United States of Europe.

Come on Ireland!