We rise with the light

A note for the week that's in it

Late March, in Ireland. The Spring Equinox has come and gone, mid-week. The tipping point, and now the days are longer than the nights, thirteen and a half hours of light already, we rise with the sap towards that summer sun. Tonight, the sky poured lilac past sunset and there have been rainbows all week, a mild heat in the sun and the breeze blows less icy now.

Saint Patrick’s Day came last weekend too, days dressed in green. Patrick, Patrician, Patriarchy, and oh what a mess it’s made of the place. And so, once a year on this messy day full of stereotype and grief, the world proclaims itself to be Irish. The traumatised Irish dulling their pain with whiskey and stout, the evil of the Christian Church in this land we have barely begun to reckon with, the green we wear to honour our rebel dead, all of it rolled together and celebrated so flippantly, ignorantly, or even more worryingly with a fervour regarding this colonial Saint.

The hard-drinking Irish, a deliberate piece of propaganda used to reduce our power, our legitimacy. A coping mechanism against all the pain inflicted on us. You see it too in other colonialised peoples, a way to numb the pain, a way to disconnect, to self-subdue. And once a year this is made a global joke, a drinking game, at our expense.

Once a year the world wears green. In lands far from here they dye rivers and food and beer and even their hair. A thousand shades of green for this tiny island on the edge of the Atlantic. And no one mentions why. No one mentions that we wear green on this day to honour our dead, those rebels against the brutal British regime who pinned something green to themselves to make their side known. We wear green in proud solidarity, still.

And Patrick, what of him? The myth, the propaganda^[1]. I see the mountain he supposedly herded sheep on as a young Welsh slave daily, it rises like a pregnant belly from the fertile land all round. As we know the best story does not in fact win, the colonisers lies are the ones made into the official story, the ones recorded and repeated whilst the real story, often the best story, is left to die. Patrick did not bring Christianity to Ireland; it had arrived before. Patrick did not cast out the snakes, they did not make it across after the ice melted. In the mythology of this made-up saint he is said to have cast the Druids from the land, those are the so-called snakes, the indigenous practitioners of the ways of this island.

The story told is that the conversion of Ireland to Christianity was a peaceful one, and that may well be true, merely because we simply allowed a veneer of Christianity over the land and kept practicing the old ways regardless, they were woven into folk traditions, infused with a particular Irish brand of Christianity. And yet there is something inherently violent in the thinking that you are so exulted in your faith that you can take your god and stamp it onto another’s land. There is something incredibly violent in the colonial rewriting of a countries mythology to include your foreign god, and there is a deep patriarchal violence in the early monks rewriting our mythology to involve the gang-rape of our goddesses whilst they ridiculed them and stripped them of their power.^[2] This is the violence still at play in this land, where the evils of the imperialist Catholic Church saw women forcibly separated from their children and used as slave labour in the unforgiveable Mother and Baby Homes or Magdalen Laundries. This is the evil that left Ireland via a Limerick man to found the Christian Reform Schools that brutalised indigenous Americans. This is the violence that to this day means my son and I, as an “unwed” mother, are not recognised as a legitimate family under the Irish constitution.

The violence here in the North was political violence, although it was drawn along tribal Christian lines, which in living memory saw a Protestant Christian Reverend call for a genocide of the remaining Catholic/Irish population.

This same “peaceful conversion” began the separation of the indigenous people from the land, which when they would not give up their nature-based beliefs was othered into something evil, something to be made separate from the cleanly ideals of Christian civilisation.^[3] And so, the destruction of our wild places began, othered by the new religion, unprofitable to the settlers our forests were destroyed, our sacred rivers poisoned, our holy wells filled in or claimed for the foreigner’s god. And now we have the least amount of wild space left in Europe, now our lough is dead with chemicals and our goddess rivers run with polluted with sewage.

Oh, our Paddy made an unholy mess in this place.

And yet, Christianity only managed a veneer here, one so easily chipped away. How could it truly take root in a land literally named for a Goddess. Ireland, Éire, Ériu.

I had the privilege of attending Manchán Magan’s Talk in Belfast on Monday night and he echoed what I have been feeling for years; there is a remembering happening in this land, we are scrapping off that veneer, we are rooting back down. The land is speaking^[4], it is calling us home, those goddesses are roaring, their tales ready to be told. Our ancestors are screaming, a reckoning is coming, a swelling of memory, of magic, of truth and interest and it is up to us to pull it through.

And so last weekend I found myself in green and crying for the ache and the awe of it all. I was watching the rugby on Saturday night, our boys in green, our men. Men whose first reaction, win or lose, is to gather their children into their arms. The last of the Fianna my grandmother always said. Warrior men. And they were wearing green whilst thousands of Irish voices sang a famine song^[5]. It echoed around the stadium, the aching memory of forced starvation and occupation, and I’m crying, for Gaza, for Ireland, for humanity.

On Sunday, in a shameful display we watched our politicians in direct opposition to our will shake hands with an American president hell bent on facilitating a genocide through extreme violence and forced starvation, all whilst claiming to be of this land. No, you don’t get to be an oppressor and be Irish. Indigenousness exists solely in relation to the coloniser, it is not a necessary concept unless there is someone else making a sole claim to the land, and so no, if you seek to colonise you are no son of ours.

The mothers of Ireland are in a sacred rage, our ancestors screaming at our backs, from famine pits and Magdalene pits and croppy pits, their bones rattle, their memories rise. I dream true, I sat in my garden, my child at play and watched a war plane from the west lowering to land across the fields. The international airport is just miles away and they have been allowed to use it on their way through. I screamed bloody in its wake. I dream of snakes; I dream I weave them golden into the curls of my hair. I dance serpentine in the night under those stars, barefoot, to shake off the day, to remember. And so, you see Paddy, you didn’t drive us out, not at all and we’re rising. So, take off our green you foreign saint, put down our whiskey that water of life^[6], shake off the last of your god from our land, and away with you now. Land of saints and scholars once, but land of poets and gods we will be again.

The moon will be full on Monday morning here in Ireland, along with a partial eclipse. I will bring you the first of the stories, na scéalta, in my new project on Sunday morning. This project, published with each month’s full moon will recount a piece of local folklore and use it to inspire a new tale. This first one is a sneak peek of a story from my ongoing collection of interwoven narratives each shot through with local mythology and folklore and set against the backdrop of Ireland’s most recent traumas. They are told by unreliable narrators interconnected via the few degrees of separation Ireland, and particularly the North of Ireland, enjoy. Their stories thread through each other to create a tapestry woven with a particularly Irish mythic imagination and which examines issues of identity and humanity amid conflict and trauma. I have already published one here, and Sunday will bring you another alongside the local folklore that inspired it and the lore of that moon. Most of this project will root deeper into the land than this initial tale, a deeper remembering, I hope singing true after all this time. Be sure to subscribe to get them directly to your inbox. I’ll see you on Sunday with that moon.

Grá agus Saoirse 
Siobhán 
Xx    

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^[1] For a much deeper analysis on the real history and political propaganda of Patrick see Denise ní Chonraí

^[2] See Mary Condren, The Serpent and the Goddess. Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. (Harper&Row 1989)

^[3] See Tom Cowan, Fire in the Head. Shamanism and the Celtic Spirit. (Harper One, 1993)

^[4] See Manchán Magan Listen to the Land Speak. A Journey into the wisdom of what lies beneath us (Gill Books 2022)

^[5] At Rugby matches Irish fans tend to break into a rendition of The Fields of Athenry. Lyrics here.

^[6] Come guess me this riddle…