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The Artist Has the Last Laugh

From a very early age I grew up speaking both Irish and English on a daily basis. Irish was spoken all day at school and English was spoken at home.

My parents were not native Irish speakers and their fluency was scrappy. My mother could sing the national anthem, hold short, polite conversations of a basic nature and was fond of teasing us children with a couple of the aphorisms she knew: "Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile" (literally, One spider recognizes another. Or, as we would have it today: "It takes one to know one"). And whenever we fretted about some aspect of our lot in life, measured against the attraction of far-off hills which seemed forever greener, she would trot out: "Níl aon tintean mar do thintean fíin" (There's no hearth like your home hearth).

My father's vocabulary was minimal, which he would never admit. His usage, usually inaccurate, was nonetheless flamboyant. I overheard a Russian sea captain ask him once if he spoke Irish and my father told him rather grandly he was fluent! As children we delighted in gabbling questions at him, knowing full well that he did not understand, though he always pretended he did. His response was always the same, unhesitating, always monosyllabic. Faking comprehension and intellectual gravity by clearing his throat, he would proclaim, invariably incorrectly, but loudly, and in a tone of great importance--"TÁ!" (Is).

My mother rolled her eyes and laughed and said he was incorrigible.

But they believed passionately in the idea of nationhood for Ireland, and in the maxim "Tír gan teangan, tír gan anam" (A nation without a language is a nation without a soul), and determined that their children would acquire fluency. They understood that mastery of our native tongue would provide each of us with an essential key, an access code, into an individual and unique ownership of who we were within that concept of Irish nationhood, whether historic, actual or potential.

So when we reached school age, they sent us to an inner-city national school where Irish was both the language of communication and instruction. This was referred to in the Dublin vernacular as "learning through the mejum (medium)," and accorded at that time, by all but Irish enthusiasts, the same mixture of suspicion, scorn and pity commonly reserved for operators of the ouija board.

The school was one of fewer than half a dozen such throughout the country. Irish, like math, was a compulsory subject in all national schools. However, outside the official Gaeltacht areas where it was natively spoken, most all national schools taught Irish as they did the rest of the curriculum, through English, and English was the language used by both the students and teachers on a daily basis.

My mother was frequently challenged, by well-informed neighbours in the housing project where we lived on the north side of Dublin, on the wisdom of daily bussing her young children to the ubiquitous, dangerous inner city, to attend an all-Irish institution, rendered triply suspect for being staffed exclusively by lay teachers and under the direct management of the Department of Education and not of a parish priest. Didn't she know she could have saved the bus fare and had us wimpled into submission right round the corner by the Holy Faith? And what did we need to be fluent for, in a language that was dead and no use to anyone?

"Useful or not," my mother would quietly reply, "it's our language and it's no burden to carry."

"Bloody nuns!" my father would bellow, needlessly.

I am and will be forever grateful to them both.

As I write, my father has been dead for almost five years. My mother, now suffering from senility, lives on in Dublin, where she is compassionately and comfortably cared for. When I go there I visit her daily. Many times she does not recognise me, but is too ashamed to ask me who I am. I always tell her, but my name drifts away from her. She cannot hold onto it. I feed her chocolates and hold her hand and talk to her about simple things and try not to cry.

I ask her if she has heard from her other four children recently. They and their children are scattered on two continents, from New York to Sydney. She doesn't seem to remember. I name them for her. She looks at me accusingly and tells me they were here a minute ago. She has embarked on a journey to a country for which I have no entry visa. I can only stand on the pier and watch her little boat recede. And hope she will look back, see me and wave.

She tells me my father is out in the garden.

I don't know why I suddenly reply in Irish. Perhaps the change of rhythm will dispel the knot in my throat. Hold back the tears. I am not even sure she has heard me.

"An bhfuil sé? Deir tú liom é!" (Is he now?!) She glances at me. Her eyes are suddenly focused, merry with recognition, complicity.

"He's out there now! And wait till I tell you--"

"Is he?"

"Yes, and--" Her voice rises into a giggle.

"Now?"

"He said . . ." She is giggling so much she can hardly speak.

"What is it, mother?"

"He . . ." Tears stream down her face.

"What?"

She struggles, helpless with laughter.

"Tá! . . ." And out it comes. "He said TÁ!"

I stare at her. "He said--TÁ?"

"Yes! Yes! I'm telling you--" She is off in another gale of laughter, mopping her eyes. Then I remember. And we are both off now, giggling uncontrollably, our laughter echoing from the high ceiling, buffeting the window where the winter garden waits, a silent shade.

"Knock-knock!" beams a nurse face as it tilts around the door. "Are we alright here?" And instantly answers itself. "Grand!" she assesses, cheerfully.

Our laughter abates. "Now!" the nurse face exclaims, in benediction, pleased she has invented us. And vanishes.

I catch my mother's eye. "TÁ!" I murmur, and we are off again, our faces awash, my ribcage aching.

It goes on and on until we are both wheezing, breathless, listing in our chairs and the paper hankies are used up, strewn all around us on the floor, primroses in the darkening wood of the room. She taught me to find. On summer evenings long ago. I genuflect to gather them.

"Tha' was," I tell her, in the Dublin vernacular of my childhood, "the bes' laugh!"

With my mother. And my father too, I like to think. I turn and look up at her.

She is fidgeting with a tissue. Her mind has moved on to other concerns that do not include me. She can no longer remember the joke.

She is tired. Her eyes close. Her hands lie like injured birds in her lap, never quite still. And I can see that her boat is moving closer to the open sea.

Now I can leave. She has waved.

The Artist in the Empire and Vice Versa

It is a small sign. I spot it as I lift the latch of the iron gate, which is lopsided and swings away from me. Propped discreetly in the left lower corner of the front bay. I cannot read it from here. I expect it will say 'Please Beware dash Dog!', as many of them do. Or, blank space, 'Pints Today Please', for the milkman, because they're so organized and polite over here. Not like at home where he has to count the empties or be a mind reader if we forget to put them out.

Leave the case here. Too awkward to carry up the path. Prop the gate half shut. But what if a dog comes tearing out when she opens? Onto the road and hit by a car? I'd be responsible. Hardly likely to get lodgings then. Killing the landlady's dog. Have to pay for it too. I shouldn't think, as they are always saying over here. Why, I wonder? A warning. Must believe thinking is bad for them. Perhaps that's a basic tenet of theirs. How-do-you-do I'm your new basic tenet! Maybe she hasn't got one. Didn't say anything about pets on the ad. There, leave it across the open gate. That should stop him. Unless he has a death wish, in which case nothing will. But take the make-up box. Looks good with its worn leather-bound corners. Dark maroon once when the mahogany was new. My father's gift. That he got for a bargain he said from an auctioneer fella that owed him a favour. Early 19th. Century Mahogany Theatrical Make-up Case; Poss. French, in spidery faded violet ink on the antique dealer's tag. Which I keep pinned to the satin lining of the smallest compartment. I'll show her that when we get into conversation about it. Because she's bound to ask. And the brass plate with my name and the Abbey's name on the lid that my mother had made for me. I won't say Thespian because we in the theatre don't. But if she does I'll smile. At least I'll know she has some savvy. Then I'll ask her do you know that it's less than a hundred years since actors had a price on their heads, in France? That always amazes people. At home they think it's only rebels or priests. The canny French. Knew we were both. Artists, therefore dangerous. Richelieu started it, was it? Well I won't tell her all that. Frighten the life out of her.

See myself approaching in the shine of the letter-box flap. All wobbly. Are my legs fat ? Should wear higher heels. Smell of floor polish. Clean anyway. Hadn't expected to have to pay so much but at least it looks a respectable street. Has a certain decorum, as my mother would say. What does the sign say? Marine blue letters someone has stenciled. Curling script on a white card. Capital N and I trailing tendrils reminiscent of Gaelic lettering. Must be the right place so. The card veiled by the net curtains. Genteel. Drawing me forward towards the steps. Like the best fishing lures. Now I see it. What? Eyesight! Squinch them tight and open. A joke, is it? What? Or mistake. Must be. A foreign language.

The air is all of a sudden chilled, still. In the eye of that stillness there is no sound. Only the sign. Watching my confusion. To see what I in my Irish foolishness will do. Next. Must tell someone. Who? Panic. Someone. There must be someone to. Why is my heart going so fast? Scalding. Tell them. Can't think of. What? Who? Your credentials girl and be quick about it! My-mother's-sister-served-as-a-nurse-in-the-Royal-Alexandras! My-father's-father-fought-in-India! Don't! Must get away from here before someone. Say it's a wrong address if they. Why are my hands shaking? Back up the path or turn? My life hangs on which. What is the protocol? That can save me. Quick!! Out with it! Subjects must back away from the monarch. Bowing. Yes! Shakespeare! No! Wait! Before that. The comics! The School Friend. That my teacher said was British propaganda and trash. Threepence weekly. Good Queen Bess. The Adventures of. Whom I secretly envied. A mere girl, they said. But with plucky chums. Of Yeoman stock. Who won out. Always. Tiny hand in a seed pearled sleeve raised in gracious acknowledgment of all the avid readers of her bubbles. Where Ireland never intruded. Why couldn't she have been ours instead?

God the gate is a hundred miles away! Will the Good Queen save me now? Communist Republican's daughter I? Should I close it after me? Can't move. Mute. I am not what you think I am! Ah! But I am! I am.

A shape moves in the room and a head inclines towards the window. Through the net a child's face peers, blankly curious. No qualms of entitlement there. Our eyes meet. I am released. Red-faced. I whirl and am hurrying too fast back down the path, I've been led up. Quick! Shove the bloody suitcase through. The gate begins to swing shut. Get out! Get out can't you! Back up through it. The make-up case bangs against the bars. Flies open. Heifer! Jarring pain streaks up the left arm. O Jesus! Lid of the box yawning, hairpins and photographs cascading down to the pavement. Grab at them but they slip through my fingers like lost opportunities. Twenty identical faces of myself stare back from their strewn positions. Serious as a postulant, resume attached. Pitiful, actor's assets. Ha! Hunker down and slam the lid shut. Turn to gather them and a brown hand is stretching towards me from a tweed cuff, proffering a bouquet of my image.

"Here you are Missy."

Soft Indian voice hunkers down to eye level.

Liquid brown eyes and a turban; he reaches for a stray photo.

"Very pretty. May I ask are you an actress?" He makes it sound like temple dancer.

"A model, perhaps?" Soft, teasing voice.

The worm of shame squirms in my chest cavity. Snaking downwards to my hips. I know what models do here. Don't, please! I give no answer. My face is a beet root. Go away.

I grasp the photographs but for a split second he increases his grip, withholding them.

"You are a model?" More insistent now. The brown eyes hard, smiling slightly. Slut, he means. I want to kill.

I snatch the photographs and propel myself upright, make-up box handle grasped tightly in the right hand. Murderous with humiliation. I'll swing it if I have to.

"I don't want your help. Thank you. Just leave me alone."

I am reaching for the suitcase, the photographs forgotten, crushed now between my fist and the suitcase handle.

"I am not one of your slut temple dancers!" I am using my stage authority voice. I crack it like a whip. I hope I sound English.

I see his eyes and catch reflected there the shock of my abuse. But I have not done. I will savage my brown brother into his place as I have been taught.

"My grandfather fought your kind at the Khyber Pass!"

Degraded, I am fast walking down the street away from him, leaning away from the suitcase weight, the make up case bumping my knees. Jesus! Why did I say that? It isn't even true. Granddad hated the British Army! Crushed photographs tumble like leaves in a trail behind me. I stumble on.

Sweat is pouring down my ribcage. Roaring sound between my ears. Breath thundering. Make for the corner. Round it. Safety! Where am? Out of Terrace and into Parade. Roaring worse now. Sit down for a minute. Area railings. Hold on. Easy does it. Make-up box on the ground between your feet. Something solid. Going to faint. No you're not. Not here, your first day over. Put your elbows on your knees and get your head down between them. Can't. Unknown young actress faints on London street. Just breathe. What if somebody? Pretend you're reading the lid. Concentrate! Breathe! Feel dizzy. Keep breathing! Deep breaths. Read. Can't. Upside down. C-o-n-c-e-n-t-r-a-t-e.

Think of the inside. Secret compartment. Thank God it didn't open. See it. Brand new stick of Carmine still in its cellophane and gold wrapper. Keep it from streaking the greasepaint sticks. Like fat fingers they are, lying side by side. Breathe. Count them. Leichner's number two, Leichner's number three. That's good. Breathe. Out loud. Leichner's three and a half. Don't want to do this. Feel sick. Keep the head down. Breathe. Five and nine for a suntanned look. Dot of carmine red in the eye's inner corner. For youth. Keep going. And a Lake liner in case I play a crone. Or a consumptive. They sweat like this. Feel weak. Probably white as a sheet. No colour. Or Irish. O God I'm--

Down in the West End, the black taxis are circling Eros, purring the London audience towards an evening performance. Perhaps the Shaw? Something about John Bull's Island. Other Island darling. Yes, well, whatever that means. Or the Oscar Wilde one. You know with Lady Whatsit? Bracknell. Yes. So amusing. But we must see the Irish one--O'Casey, I think. Dark, they say. Really? How odd! They're usually so funny.

Up in NW5, on the pavement where Terrace and Parade collide, on this fine Autumn evening in 1964, I am losing consciousness. As blackness descends it seems that all my young history, and my father's history and my mother's history, and their fathers' and mothers' histories and their fathers' and mothers' before that again come rushing forward to meet this moment.

Half the world away on the far side of the Atlantic, they have not yet marched in Birmingham. Freedom Riders have appeared but not on our horizon. Yet they will. They surely will. Unknown to me, somewhere in the dark hills of Tyrone, a young woman called Devlin is looking westward, listening. A mere girl, they will say. Soon the world will never be the same again.

Everything I've learned in life I learned through Culture Shock.

The Artist's Unwritten Resume

I grew up in gray post-war Ireland of the forties and fifties. Before Television. Before Vatican 2. Before Revisionism. Before the Car Ferry. I was born in Dublin, capital of an ancient, cultured, island people in the Atlantic who have survived more than eight hundred years of systematic, orchestrated attempts by our closest neighbours to annihilate us and steal our land.

To this end, they imposed on us some of the harshest and most unjust laws mankind has ever devised, and when we rebelled they evicted, imprisoned, banished and murdered us. They persecuted and outlawed our religious practices and taxed us cruelly to pay for theirs. They suborned our spiritual leaders who aided and abetted them and joined them in degrading us further. They destroyed our institutions, then proclaimed us dangerous savages for having none.

When, armed with little more than farm implements and outrage, we struck back at them, they deported us by the hundreds of thousands to penal colonies at the ends of the earth where our women became indentured servants and our men became slave labour for their prison industries. We built them the greatest seafaring vessels their navy had ever known. Our women carved out crude homes from the Australian bush and the American prairie, and slaved as cooks and kitchen maids, and yet bore children whose children became teachers and law makers and explorers and generals and labour leaders and revolutionaries and film stars and secretaries of state and presidents of nations.

When the potato crop failed and we suffered the greatest holocaust of the 19th century, reducing our population by half in the space of twelve years, they seized the opportunity to clear us off the land completely and 1.2 million members of bewildered Irish families who could not, or would not, make the perilous journey to other shores, clung together in holes in the roadside ditches and died in demented wild-eyed terror as starvation and fever wiped them out.

They called us sub-human. Their cartoonists drew pictures to prove it, and they were reproduced as warnings in smart periodicals in the New World where we landed, against all the odds, desperate for any chance to hold onto the slender thread of life.

We lived in stinking hovels in shanty towns in the heart of urban America, and those of us who endured survived poverty we could not have dreamt of, and prejudice that rivaled what we had left behind.

Scornful of our language and ignorant of its beauty and complexity, our masters ridiculed it, taught us to demean it and finally outlawed its usage, imposing their own.

We took that and honed it and produced Shaw and Sheridan and Synge and Wilde and Yeats and Joyce and Beckett and Sean O'Casey and Evan Boland and Brian Friel and Bram Stoker and George Moore and Seamus Heaney and Kate and Edna O'Brien and Scott Fitzgerald and Henry James and Eugene O'Neill and Frank and Flannery O'Connor. And hundreds more of their kind. Brilliant beads on the literary rosary that loops Ireland to the farthest reaches of the Irish diaspora.

For centuries they loosed upon us the might and sophisticated brutality of their empire, and the nations of the world did not intervene. We were not liberated. We invented modern guerrilla warfare to resist them and were called terrorists.

From Skibbereen to Suez we have cleaned their floors and cooked their meals, raised their children and dug their railways, staffed their hospitals and nursed their sick; fought and died under their flag from Belfast to Burma. We do it still.

The Dublin telephone directory is a Who's Who of the outpost institutions they left us. Hand-me-down titles we tout as symbols of a national identity that continues to elude us.

The Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, Royal City of Dublin Hospital, Royal College of General Practitioners, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Royal Dublin Golf Club, Royal Dublin Society, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland, Royal Hospital, Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Royal Irish Academy, Royal Irish Academy of Music, Royal Irish Automobile Club, Royal Irish Yacht Club, Royal National Lifeboat Institution, Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Royal St. George Yacht Club, Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital.

They have taught us and we have learned well. Good Queen Bess must be laughing up her seed-pearled sleeve.

They have never apologized, the plucky chums.

We, the savage, the sub-human, from the ruins of our self-esteem, from our grief and treachery and humiliation at their hands have salvaged one entitlement only. The Right to Imagine. We have forged it into an institution. It is possibly the only truly Irish one we have. We use it to tell ourselves who we are.

Culture shock? 'Tis mother's milk to us.

My mother's hands, 1995. Photo by Fionnula Flanagan

My mother's hands, 1995. Photo by Fionnula Flanagan

The Artist Goes to the Ends of the Earth

In 1993 my husband and I were invited to take part in an international conference on Social Dreaming in a tiny seaside resort on the wildly beautiful coast of New South Wales.

We took advantage of the trip to Australia to make a detour from Melbourne by air to Hobart, Tasmania. From there we drove for two hours by car through wild bush and picturesque farmland to the farthest tip of the Tasman Peninsula, gateway to Antarctica, to visit the Penal Colony of Port Arthur.

Today Port Arthur is a series of ruined buildings now excellently preserved by the Australian Government, which has courageously documented the shameful history of this institution and designated it a national monument. In the 1840s its name undoubtedly evoked as much terror as would the names of Nazi labour camps a hundred years later.

With the loss of the Americas in 1776, the British Crown also lost the right to transport convicted felons from their overflowing prison system to states such as Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia. Other outlets had to be found, and as far from the stately homes of the British ruling class as possible.

The secession of the Americas also raised the spectre of further losses of Empire should the conflagration of freedom jump the Pacific Ocean and spread to the Orient where Britain had immense holdings. A military toe-hold with accessibility to the Far East and within easy striking distance by their navy would be necessary should such an emergency arise. Rich in timber, Australia and the island of Tasmania--then called Van Diemen's Land--off its southeast coast satisfied both requirements.

The Penal Colony at Port Arthur with its attendant garrison was opened on the southeasterly extreme of the Tasman Peninsula in 1830. It was intended for those transported convicted felons classed as "Incorrigibles."

Within the first three years of operation, the prisoner population under sentence at Port Arthur rose to five hundred men, the number of military personnel guarding them to four hundred. The prisoners, working in chain gangs, were made to carve the site out of the wild bush, build the garrison quarters and then their own stone cells. Each cell measured six by three feet.

Prisoners wore a coarse hessian uniform of yellow, the colour of humiliation, fashioned together with black to resemble the traditional Court Jester or fool in society. They worked in irons, waist deep in icy salt water for the first six months. They had no change of clothing. Once wet, the uniform became heavy and rubbed the flesh raw. Damp ate into the bone. They worked in silence. This hard labour became standard introductory treatment for all new prisoners from then on. In the words of Governor George Arthur, ". . . that within the bounds of humanity the offenders are to be subjected to the last degree of misery."

Houses were built for the officers by the prisoners, who also laid out a Victorian rose garden for the officers' wives and daughters. English oaks and elms were imported, and a chapel with fourteen spires modeled on an English country church was added to make the garrison feel at home.

The Sabbath commenced with punishment time in the yard in the early morning attended by the entire population of the garrison and the prison. For the slightest infraction of the rules prisoners were flogged. Absconders could expect up to a hundred lashes. Standing Orders decreed that those who fainted in mid-flogging be revived in a shallow salt bath so that the punishment might be continued, intensified. The prisoners were then marched to the chapel where attendance at the service was compulsory, irrespective of denomination. They sang hymns.

The prisoners planted a vegetable garden, constructed a mill and a boat yard. From the tall gum trees they built masts for the British Navy. Within a decade their metal and woodworking shops were producing battle ships in excess of 250 tons. Within fifteen years the prison was not only totally self-sustaining, but was exporting tons of carrots, cabbages, potatoes and bread throughout the other penal colonies and the adjacent towns mushrooming around Tasmania and Australia. They were also producing 68,000 hand-made bricks per month, and had expanded into the manufacture of fine furniture, which was exported all over the world.

Port Arthur, with an endless supply of slave labour, many of them skilled craftsmen and artisans condemned to transportation by the British Courts, became one of the most productive and lucrative prison industries in the Empire. A decided asset of the Crown.

In 1849 Port Arthur was designated a Model Prison. Ironically, this would be its downfall. New approaches, modeled on experiments at Pentonville, were introduced. Flogging was abandoned, diet improved and new, modern methods of punishment were introduced. One such was the silent treatment.

From the day of admission to the end of sentence, prisoners were confined to solitary work cells for twenty-three hours a day and no word was spoken to them during that time. They were forbidden to speak, signal to another prisoner or make noise. No bells were rung and the guards wore pampootees as they patrolled the carpeted corridors outside the sound-deadened cells. Total silence and isolation were mandatory. Prisoners were compelled to wear hoods over their heads in the exercise yard so that glancing at a fellow prisoner became impossible. The chapel was redesigned so that prisoners stood in individual partitioned stalls, ensuring that no man could see the man standing next to him. No contact could be made.

Breaking the silence was punishable by confinement in a cell where the unrelenting darkness ensured that a man could not see the hand in front of his face. Most of the prisoners went mad.

Built in 1867, the last building put on site at Port Arthur was the Lunatic Asylum. Of the prisoner population at that point some 64 percent were considered by the authorities to be mentally insane, and the remainder too feeble to work; therefore "the costs of its construction was borne by the British Government: to serve as some measure of compensation for the reality that these men would never be allowed to return to their native shore" (Short History Guide to Port Arthur by Michael Ross and Alex G. Evans).

14,992 Irish men and Irish women were transported to Van Diemen's Land alone, and during its forty-seven years of operation, some 4,000 Irishmen were deported to Port Arthur. Of that number 70 percent were transported there for political offenses. Escapes were rare, and those that managed to do so usually chose America. Few were pardoned home to Ireland. William Smith-O'Brien made it home.

Some 14,900 others did not. Culture shock.

I sit in the airport terminal at Hobart and think of them while I wait for our flight back to Melbourne. 14,992. Of my people.

In a curious twist of serendipity, I notice that satellite television has just flashed on the Irish Taoiseach emerging from an important meeting somewhere. News hounds crowd around him. They are hurling questions and quotes: the Beef Scandal, the Bishop Casey Scandal, the Scandal of the X Case. He ignores these and does not break stride.

Amidst the cacophony, one young jackal pushes to the fore, microphone outthrust as he cites rising levels of unemployment in Ireland, demanding the government's solutions to the current brain drain as thousands make illegally for the U.S. It is not a new issue. I have heard it many times. On both sides of the Atlantic. But I pay attention, leaning forward. I live on the diaspora. I like to listen to the voices from home. One day I hope to hear them grant us the absentee ballot.

It will not be to-day. The Taoiseach is affable but does not wish to linger. Who could blame him?

So I am surprised when he drops an answer to the young reporter.

A spur of the moment decision, I am convinced, as he moves into close-up. Maximum second of impact for an exit line, as any actor knows. He smiles warmly, his tone courteously acknowledging his inquisitor, deftly buttoning the double-breasted Armani with one hand. Almost regretful that it should be necessary to bring to our attention what he is about to point out. He is utterly sincere. He believes every word:

"It's a very small island, you know. We can't all live there."

So saying, the head of the Irish Government exits. Exits frame, as they say in Virtual Reality.

It's a very small island. We can't all live there.

A New Mantra for the Irish Diaspora!

Hardly original of course. Cromwell said it--albeit crudely. So, I fancy, did every tax-strapped landlord who ever pressed American passage into the hands of reluctantly grateful Irish tenant farmers. Perhaps the latter chanted it together for comfort in the stinking bowels of the Coffin Ships or in the rat-infested shanty towns they endured in Boston and New York.

Hey! Perhaps it's chanted there still. Up on Bainbridge Avenue on a Saturday night where the Irish illegals sleep ten to a room. I tell you what, Taoiseach--let's get rid of "OLÉ! OLÉ! OLÉ!" which belongs to the Spaniards anyway. Let's put the Irish punt where our mouths are. Let's hear 'em roar out at the next World Cup:

It's A Very Small Island. We Can't All Live There!

And sure isn't Charleton the man to make them do it? Yeoman stock.

But I digress. Port Arthur. Van Diemen's Land. 14,992 Irish. What sustained them? What was their mantra? A few prayers, perhaps in Irish. A few beloved names, sayings from childhood townlands. Níl aon tintean mar do thintean féin. There is no hearth like your home hearth, Taoiseach.

The air is limpid at Port Arthur after the rain. The wind from the South Pole is sharp. The sea a blue green. The quiet of the bush is vast. In summer they have a long twilight. The gray blues and soft greens of the gum trees turn purple as the light changes. Shadows on the low hills play tricks on the eyes. It could be Donegal.

Heartbreak, surely.

Two nights later I am in the deserted members' lounge of the hotel in New South Wales where the Social Dreaming conference is taking place. It is late but I cannot sleep.

I am leafing through the Australian newspaper. Page after page of paid advertisements by the international mining cartel decrying the Australian High Court's recent decision to return ownership of vast tracts of mineral-rich land to the Aboriginals. The advertisements contain dire warnings of national economic ruin. They urge Australians to come to their senses.

I am joined in the lounge by another insomniac, an Australian. We exchange a few words. His name is Brian. His great-grandmother was from Ireland, he says. Came out on a prison transport.

"Incorrigible, was she?" I inquire. I am my father's daughter.

"She must have been right enough." He laughs. "Raised eleven kids and put them all through university."

He'd like to go some day, he says, for a visit.

"Should have happened years ago," and he indicates my newspaper.

"I bet," he says "there's been a few cardiac arrests in the mining company board rooms over the past few days!" And he laughs again.

"Yes, I suppose," I grin.

"The Irish it was made that happen o' course. You knew that?"

"No, I didn't. How do you mean?"

"Simple. There's seven judges on the Court. Five are Irish Catholics!"

He sees my astonishment. And misreads it, thinking he has offended me.

"Well Australian-Irish of course. But it's the same. Well, probably to you it's not. You being the real thing! But we like to think it's the same." And he smiles. "Well, I do, anyway."

Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile.

It takes The Real Thing a few moments to respond. I have come a long way to know the answer. To the ends of the earth.

"It's the same," I assure him, my like-spider, my co-descendant of Incorrigibles, "We are the same."

Balm.

A visit with my mother, Dublin, 1995