“Son, could you pass me my wallet?” I rose from the seat in the barber’s shop and took down my father’s coat from where it hung.
“A good performance from the England football team, in the end,” said the barber. He looked at me and said, “you won’t have been pleased, though.”
“It’s the wrong shaped ball for him,” my father said.
It was easier to talk about last weekend’s rugby international matches than to try to explain to the barber that I had supported England football team since childhood and had gone through a period during student days when I had tried to attend every home match at Wembley, including fixtures against unglamorous teams from eastern Europe on cold nights in November.
Who else would I have supported? The shop in which we stood was in my home town. My family had lived and died in the neighbouring parish for four centuries.
It was odd that he recognised my father as local, yet identified me as Irish. More than that, though, he assumed that having lived in Ireland would foster a natural enmity toward a sporting team from England.
Perhaps his assumption was reasonable, anti-English sentiment is still common in most of Ireland. Jokes at the expense of the English were a frequent part of my experience. Occasionally, when I thought the line between humour and prejudice had been crossed, I would object that I was English and that the joke must, then, apply to me. More than once the response was, “Ah, Ian, you don’t count. Sure, you’re one of us.” Jokes at the expense of fellow countrymen made me feel very much that I was not one of them, to the point that I suggested at one point that if English jokes about the Irish were racist, then the reverse must also apply.
Who defines who is “one of us”? How is being “one of us” defined?
If birth determined who is one of us, then the Duke of Wellington was an Irishman, a notion that would have been rejected by Wellington himself and a notion firmly rebuffed by the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell, “No, he is not an Irishman. He was born in Ireland; but being born in a stable does not make a man a horse.”
To be considered one of us seems to depend on much more than where one was born. It seems to arise from a complex of factors, including heredity and family ties and culture and attitudes – and perhaps which sporting teams one supports.
Next time I go for a haircut, I am going to ask the barber to which side his family owed allegiance in the English Civil Wars. If he cannot tell me, I shall smile and suggest he is not really one of us, for local people know the side on which their forebears fought.
Lately I’ve been doing some work on the social structure about 100 years ago. And what struck me was the sheer number of British army generals that self identified as Irish. This was something that would never have occurred a mere 40 years earlier. But the Celtic Revival and academic realisation that the Irish and to some extent Scottish pre-dated the “Anglo” by some considerable distance. Any woo’s, between 1890 and about 1920 having an Irish connection sprinkled a bit of fairy dust, or so it seemed.
As to the anti-English feelings amongst the Irish I’m not so certain about that. Yes, there is the anybody but the English in any sport from tiddly-winks to the Derby. But the Irish are hardly alone with that sort of thinking. Indeed I’d say that mentality is even more honed with the Scots. Not helped by the bias of the BBC to the English side. And if you wanted to see a Scot become volcanic watch a game with that Scottish tennis player when Wimbledon comes around. You’ll see the BBC speak of British while the guy is winning but Scot if losing.