‘Cúpla focal’ of old lady that helped heal years of hatred

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s not that long ago when an Irish soccer audience watching an English soccer team playing a World Cup match would be pretty united in terms of their support for whatever team opposed the English. This, despite the fact, that many of those same people would ‘live and die’ in their support of English club teams for the rest of the year.

Last week though, as I watched England and Croatia battle it out for a place in the World Cup final, there was a pretty even 50/50 split in terms of the different camps. This really is the breaking of the last frontier in terms of us growing up as a people and maybe, at last, getting on with our neighbours, who admittedly weren’t that nice to us for the best part of 800 years or so.

Ireland is a changing country, and while some might argue not always for the better, in most instances, it is a far more tolerant space to live than the land of bigotry and intolerance where anyone who was different or who didn’t toe the official line, was regarded as an outcast.

We probably do have good grounds for not liking the ‘auld enemy. Probably the biggest stain of all that England left on Ireland was during the time of the Great Famine of the 1840s when one million Irish people died from starvation and as many more took the coffin ships to America. And all this under England’s watch, when their people living in a period of relative prosperity.

They always seemed to ‘hammer us’ too in the rebellions, whether it be 1798 or 1916, and while we did write powerful songs of great deeds of bravery in those battles, we could never seem to make any military impression against the Empire, although in the end, we did get there.

Back on a May day in 2011, when Queen Elizabeth II visited Ireland, she was to set in train a charm initiative that has left a touching legacy of conciliation. On paper, it should have been just another official visit of a Head of State, but when she made her famous Dublin Castle speech using the ‘cupla focal’, many of us thought that: “God, she’s making a real effort to build bridges.”

Her visits to symbolic places of Irish nationalism such as the Garden of Remembrance and Croke Park and her contrite words of apology over past wrongs, just touched a lot of hearts. The Queen’s mingling with the ordinary people of the English Market in Cork also made us sit up and say: “She’s a pleasant old lady visiting our land.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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