Fantastic madness in the world of International Relations and International Football today. There I was, sat at the bar in the Quays with The Body, watching the Ireland v Armenia game. Admittedly I was shouting for the Boys In Green when an 50something American tourist beckoned me to go over to her and her husband.
“Does the game have much longer to run?” she asked, in a perfectly-clipped Minnesota accent.
“About 10 minutes.” I replied.
“And how are we doing?”
I knew what she meant and could see no reason to waste good time bothering to explain to her that I was in fact English, while she was clearly American, and that there was no ‘Us’ about any of it, at all at all. Neither of us was Irish, but we both wanted the Irish to win, so ... did that make us ‘We’?
“We’re one goal up!” I heard myself reply.
“Well I think we’re going to win!” she cried, eager to bond with me over her green roots, at which point she offered me her raised clenched wrist, into which it would have been churlish of me not to bang my own, at which she quickly withdrew her arm, lifting it into the air crying
“Go Ireland!”
Retuning to my barstool, I wasted some time wondering how strange it was that ‘You’ had become ‘I’ and that ‘We’ were not Irish at all. Then I spent the rest of the match looking forward to watching the England game later on.
In an uncertain world, I could be pretty bloomin’ sure that not too many Irish or Americans would be cheering on my boys, but nothing would stop me.
3 comments:
"Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis"
Brendan Behan
your fecked, you have been nearly assimilated ;p
Good man Paz - Brendan, got that right, as did you with your analylsis!
'Twas one of the prouder moments in my life, many years ago, when Blitz raised a glass to the assembled crew in Padraicin's bar in Furbo, toasting me as an 'Honorary Irishman'.
'Honorary' is just that, an honour, but I don't want to be Irish. I am proud of who or whatever I am, be it psychotic, neurotic, peripatetic or just pathetic. My Dad told us as a family that we were English, Yiddish and Rubbish, a lesson in humility that has always served me well.
I won't hold that against you, where your from, where youv'e been, what youv'e makes you what you are. The world would be a boring place if we were all the same type of gobshite :D
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