The Drink, GAA Shorts and Behan

The Irish Selfhood

By Ava Cuffe Kelly

Illustration by Duanna Taylor

Well, what does it mean to be Irish? It was a question that had been playing on my mind, since being away from home with the months rolling on. Each time I introduce myself, it’s an impulsive utterance I have to let out at some point: “I’m Ava…from Ireland”. It’s an easy first point of conversation, and my one identifier here. It seems odd I feel more Irish here than I ever did back in Ireland. Somehow being a kind of limited commodity makes it all feel more fundamental to my sense of self. With the latest resurgence of the ‘charming Irish’ brand in Western media, ‘Irishness’, whatever that means, has become a trend once again. It’s a profiting wheel of branding and commercialization we are probably the ones turning. Maybe it’s the Normal People effect, but Sally Rooney wasn’t the first to feed the world grass-stained GAA shorts and convince them it was caviar. It happened long before Rooney, bringing us back to another hailed Irish name, Brendan Behan. Well really, the contemporary Irish poet Neil Young brought me back to Behan in his poem, Last Man Not Standing. Young uses Behan as a canvas to teasingly paint the glorification of a simplified Irish cultural identity. In the poem, Behan embodies the tendency to mythologize filtered realities, especially those associated with his stereotyped ‘innately Irish’ persona. It was a story that immediately intrigued me, and one I felt hadn’t been told before. This was the spark of my first conversation with Young on Behan’s persona and the Irish selfhood.

For those of us who don’t know, our ‘Borstal-Boy’ Brendan Behan was a famed Irish playwright born in 1923 in North Dublin to a republican family. Behan started life as a child bomber, who later joined the IRA, before arriving at Borstal and then Mountjoy Prison for fourteen years (quite the history, I know). In the commotion of that time, Behan set two of his most known literary works, The Quare Fellow and Borstal Boy. These works would earn Behan his title of being known as one of the greatest Irish writers of all time. He was a character, to say the least, regularly carrying out his interviews half-cut, accessorised with an uncensored wit. Even with his lasting whiskey breath, the non-conformist rebel Irish boy was adored by the masses. Behan was the original poster boy of the ‘Irishman’ before Barry Keoghan or Paul Mescal ever blessed the eyes of the international audience. By Young’s sarcastic description, he was the ‘slum-boy Irish Messiah’ who soon became typecast as a working-class drunken genius.

The interesting footnote to Behan’s stereotyped identity is that maybe he was a tad more privileged than he led his doting fans to believe. His family were relevant and knew a more comfortable reality of life in working-class Dublin than his struggling neighbours. Their connections even ended up saving his life after one of his more serious paramilitary crimes. Yet Behan was time and again awarded for performing a reductive Irish working-class trope, so that was the narrative he spearheaded in the media. (As Young put it,) he became enamoured with his own ‘elaborately constructed myth’, that bordered his professional career. Behan branded himself as the Irish rebel who, by his description, was a ‘writer with a drinking problem’. Awarded or exploited, Behan seemed to exist in a grey area up to his untimely death: A premature end, which was at the hands of his boisterously encouraged alcoholism. Young allegorizes the misinformed glorification that accompanied Behan’s career - a type of glorification Young said he had seen before.

Looking back on his upbringing in a loyalist Belfast, Young recalls a culture steeped in “martyrology and self-mythologizing”, one quality shared with hard-line Irish republicanism in his eyes. Originating in defensive communal coping mechanisms, this aged into a toxic framing of historical traumas. And, equally became a core part of the communities arrangement of selfhood. This distinctive awareness is what kindled Young’s interest in Behan’s associative image in the first place. His upbringing allowed him to recognize and explore the inheritable wounds that bleed into shaping connected generations. It isn’t difficult to notice Young’s views as a libertarian socialist as we comb through the political undertones that narrated his childhood, and the life of Behan.

The identity of the ‘brave rebel’ has always been a naturally appealing one. In Republican Ireland, it was a term of respect, denoting a sense of purpose and honour to those who took ownership of it. The thing about group polarization in any society is that it brings that respective community together in a completely inimitable, oddly beautiful way. “Ireland unfree will never be at peace”, those were the words of Patrick Pearse in 1915. They were words that roused a nation, ringing true to so many at the time. They were words that would equally rouse Behan years later, and ultimately create his plastered perception as simply a ‘rebel boy’- one he didn’t mind endorsing. In truth, the seed of social unrest in Ireland was planted centuries before Behan or Pearse. Ireland has represented the voice of the oppressed for so long, that it’s hard to say where it all begins or ends. But somewhere along the way, has it commandeered our cultural narrative and identities?

The reality is, that the Ireland of today shows very little resemblance to that island of centuries ago. Our coloured past paved the way for colourful classrooms, and little old Ireland is more globally relevant than ever. I wonder as I write this are we all perhaps a little like Behan ourselves, comforted by our own assigned stereotypes? If we shave off the mythologizing of identity we’ve known for so long, will enough remain of our current selves to model new Irish selfhood? I sincerely don’t know the answers to any of these questions, or my participation in our cultural narrative. And I’m not sure how to feel about the globalisation of Irish culture - maybe I’ve grown to be a little possessive of my home. I suppose we’re a country of trendsetters, where being Irish has always skyrocketed our likeability and given us a somewhat strange global allure. And as long as that keeps being true, my opportunistic awkward self won’t shut up about being Irish any time soon.