HALFBRED

I just listened to Peggy Lettermore. There’s so much I don’t understand about the Irish and their voice. Not the brogue they wear easily everywhere they tread. Not that Oirishness. No. Or the Gaelic either. That other language underneath.  There is something there that excludes. It may be a clan thing. It’s something I had always thought was a part of me - tradition, family, culture - and I read and wrote and sang and danced and cried and did my bit, not noticing, until my dad died, that it didn’t need me. And not only did it not need me but it was laughing. Of course in the 80’s and 90’s when all was going well we were tolerated. We got The Pogues. They made sense to me and my dad at the same time. There was a mutual understanding there. He escaped and I wanted to know why when I thought his place must be better than England. But he never told me anything. He never started or joined any Erin go bragh clubs. He wanted to run from all that religion, from those clans, and yet he got trapped in the land of his family’s former captors, and trapped by babies.