JACKEEN BOGNIGGER CULCHIE BLUES

The Commitments, the Irish are “the niggers of Europe”, (“That’s grand”} black American music, Louis Armstrong’s “white man”, to be Irish in the twentieth century is to live an extraordinary life, seductions misadventures, close calls, menial jobs, transcendence.

Oh, Play That Thing (2004) Jimmy Rabbitte  in The Commitments, the Irish are “the niggers of Europe”, (“That’s grand”} black American music,  Louis Armstrong’s “white man”.to be an Irish everyman in the twentieth century is to live an extraordinary life, seductions misadventures, close calls,menial jobs, transcendence.A bumpy style for a bitty structure the knack, rare in reality, in the right place at the right historical time,a repository of Irish fortunes.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) The Commitments (1987), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991) The Woman Who Walked into Doors The Deportees (2008)(Irish immigration) (“I’m getting there. I’m getting there.”)(billed in 1999, as “Volume One of The Last Roundup”), preoccupied with daily survival to worry about politics (“I didn’t even know I was Irish”),accidental Republican revolution skirt-chasing flag-waving, 

 “Fuckin’ Moses” in Celtic mythology: “the man who never gave in or gave up”. “solid evidence, the memory of my eyes” over the conveniences of myth,  idea of the necessary lie or liberating fiction of the commonality of all men “amiable qualities” of human nature equally available to “the finest lord and the dirtiest charity-boy”; “mere men”; and so a man’s character doesn’t determine his fate; it is a matter of luck and timing.

Busy tales, full of malice and benevolence, reclaiming his old misapprehensions from a point of greater wisdom, (“I was talking through my hole, but I believed every word”). (“I was the Baby with No Name”), disposed of for reasons of safety, then rendered irrelevant by UVF bombings, just a civilian, a nameless nobody), different conceptions of time, to Irish poverty (an enjoyable challenge in the 1900s, “atrocious” in the 1980s), and treatment of women, particularly widows.

Different uses and meanings of words like “republic”, whether it is the “republic” which Henry leaves in 1952, the “republic” established or the “republic” “There was a lot of blood poured for that word, republic”. “Did I see the beauty that others saw, in the years that I tended the Northside’s bigger gardens?” “I did like fuck.”self-description of “Thatcher” “The lady, the miserable cunt, wasn’t for budging”.“the soggy bags of chickens and chips at two and three in the morning, no one outside of Dublin knew how to cook a fucking chip”.After Bobby Sands becomes MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone, “Thatcher would never let a British Member of Parliament die on a hunger strike”.“Thousands of people marched slowly behind his coffin to the republican plot in Milltown Cemetery”.

“The shock and the cold hauled me up from the dead”; “The air trapped the stink with a cold hard hand”. Deaths and bombs arrive suddenly, un-omened as in real life.

James Connolly Lyrics

Marchin' down O'Connell Street with the Starry Plough on high There goes the Citizen Army with their fists raised in the sky Leading them is a mighty man with a mad rage in his eye "My name is James Connolly - I didn't come here to die But to fight for the rights of the working man And the small farmer too Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws So hold on to your rifles, boys, and don't give up your dream Of a Republic for the workin' class, economic liberty" Then Jem yelled out "Oh Citizens, this system is a curse

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