Irish melancholy from new and old wounds
RECOVERY AND setback, accomplishment and catastrophe, optimism and dashed hopes -- these, apparently, are the melancholy facts of the Irish condition. I speak politically and personally. An ultimate breakthrough to peace seemed to take place last month with a formal -- if long overdue -- renunciation of violence by the IRA. The British government responded by beginning the dismantling of its military structure in Northern Ireland. The movement from uneven truce to declared peace by the most recalcitrant Catholic fighting force seemed to fulfill the dream begun decades ago when Derry activist John Hume invited the Irish (and Irish-Americans) to march to a different drummer.
But some drummers remain the same, and, alas, so do some marchers. In recent days, terrible ''sectarian" violence has once more wreaked havoc in Northern Ireland, this time in Belfast, where Protestant mobs rioted when authorities prevented them from taking their insulting ''Orange" parades near Catholic neighborhoods. Dozens of police and civilians were wounded, as paramilitaries attacked with assault-rifles and grenades. Unemployed Protestant workers, at the mercy of transformed economic forces that bypass their kind of labor, focused resentment on the local enemy, with particular anger directed at the so-called Good Friday peace accords, which, on the Catholic side, had reversed a dynamic dating back to the so-called Easter Rising of 1916.
That seems a long time ago, but in Ireland memory is elastic. The Orange parades, after all, celebrate Protestant triumphs of the 17th century. For Irish Catholics, history is defined not by triumph, but by tragedy, even if the memory of its worst instance is clouded. The mid-19th century famine, induced by policies set in London, decimated the Catholic population (more than a million starved or died of disease in a five-year period), and set in motion the great Irish emigration (with 2 million leaving in the 1840s and 1850s).
But the ''hunger," as Catholics prefer to call it (a famine is an act of God; this disaster was an act of the British) did more than that. Coming in waves across years, the famine stamped multiple generations with its horrors, with results that were as much psychological as physical.
Particularities of the Irish temperament -- the mordant wit that hides a profound emotional reserve, the ingratiation that may disguise resentment, a longing for trust in tension with the fear of it -- are echoes of the famine trauma. If this is little acknowledged, it is because the overwhelming response of survivors and their progeny, even as most of them entered the diaspora, was denial. A vast silence settled over the true Irish past, and that, too, was disguised by the lovely ballads, the Pat-and-Mike jokes, and the myth of leprechauns. Irish love songs are sad, as the saying goes; it's the battle music that has an up-beat. And the much-prescribed medication for this condition is the pint.
The Irish are never surprised by setbacks. But the Belfast retreat into violence last week has a special poignancy because of a statistic announced, also last week, by the government in Dublin.
The population of the Irish Republic in April 2005 was put at 4.13 million, the highest it has been since 1861, when the post-famine collapse of Ireland was underway. The new population statistic indicates that a century-and-a-half's emigration has effectively ended, a triumphant reversal of the ancient pattern, as the island nation, with its booming economy, is finally able to support the men and women who are born there. From an actuarial point of view, the Irish famine ended only this year.
What a glorious turn in the story this would have been were it matched by the solidification of peace in the North. End of emigration. End of the IRA. Yet Protestant factions have a grievance to nurse, even if it is rooted in illusions, so there is no end yet to sectarianism. Protestant aggression is sure to generate fresh Catholic defensiveness, and the old tribal drums beat on. I recall a political cartoon of long ago: A figure perched on a tombstone saying, ''Here I am the last man alive in Ireland, and I can't remember whether I'm Protestant or Catholic."
As an Irish-American, proudly in possession of an Irish passport, I offer these reflections from within the wrenching problem. I recognize the self-defeating melancholy as my own. The phantom pain is familiar to me, evidence that the hidden wound of history is far from healed. But all of this is simply the Irish version of human woundedness, what makes us understand Earth itself as a place of exile, the vale of tears.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
