Going Your Own Way, Irishness as 'Not-Britishness', and Rethinking Entitlement

Who do you think you are?

Welcome to the influx of new Peak Notions subscribers. I’m so glad you’re here! I’ve almost finished a new column on ‘gut instinct’, what it is and why we shouldn’t necessarily take it at face value. While it’s almost ready, I know it can be better with a bit more work, so I’ll have it for you soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share this essay on non-conformity, postcolonial identity and self-image. It originally ran on Patreon last year but it remains relevant and this longer, more in-depth column came to mind again after I wrote something on emigration for The Irish Times this week. I hope you read it and then exercise some entitlement (the liberating kind, not the arsey kind).

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James Joyce and Nora Barnacle (being entitled) in Zurich

“’Do you know what Ireland is?’ asked Stephen with cold violence. ‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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Back in 2018, when I was still living in Dublin and writing weekly for The Irish Times, I wrote a column on the challenges my generation faced in trying to buy property.It was titled ‘We can’t buy a house; we may as well have our avocado toast’. When that title was chosen (writers don’t choose headlines), I despaired gently at the sound and aroma of chumming salt water and waited for the inevitable seething responses. It’s par for the course as a newspaper columnist. At the time, Dublin rents constituted 55% of average take-home pay. Doubtless they’re even more now, and that’s if you can actually find a vacant property to rent in the Irish capital. I realised that even with two incomes and two PhDs under my – rented – roof, buying a home in or near Dublin was objectively out of reach. I knew we were far from unusual in that situation. That certainly seemed worth knocking a column out of.

The article garnered the attention of then-Newstalk radio host and seasoned Irish bloviator George Hook. Hook and his co-host (a man who matched Hook’s inherent gift for adding two and two and getting mayonnaise) thrashed and frothed over the column on Hook’s weekend radio show. I didn’t mind all that much. We all know how radio works. Commentators need topics to rupture the capillaries in their cheeks over on a rolling basis, and that week must have been thin on outrage-fodder. They spent several minutes talking about a column that didn’t at all resemble the one I had actually written, excoriating the gelatinous spines and lack of work ethic of my entitled, work-averse leftie generation. Not identifying as left wing, I thought the segment was a thrilling example of cognitive bias in action, and wrote another column on that topic. Columnists need fodder too, after all. The wheels of legacy media are greased by reactivity. It’s how people and platforms stay relevant; how they both become part of a story and play a role in its trajectory and outcome.

That incident wasn’t the first or last time I’d become tangled in the weeds of someone else’s outrage as a result of writing something-or-other, but it came back into my mind this week because I found myself considering entitlement. If you are Irish or British, that word will likely be negatively coded in your mind. Indeed, not to be a philosopher bell-end about it – philosophers are constantly accused both of being bell-ends and of wading around in a tepid tide pool of definitions when everyone else just wants to run into the water and surf the waves – but it does depend on what you mean by the word. Entitlement. I thought that this week, I might try to reclaim it. As I hit full stop on that last sentence, I swear I can hear the nuns who taught me at school shifting uncomfortably and disapprovingly on their sparsely padded orthopaedic chairs in a day room that smells like boiled ham somewhere in a convent deep in the Irish countryside.

Americans are better at entitlement than we are – their culture rests on a rich seam of natural rights and individual liberty. When you come from a place whose culture (at least in theory) celebrates a person’s right to live as they see fit provided they don’t breach the rights of others to do the same, claiming and occupying your own individuality is relatively uncontroversial. In cultures like ours, particularly in the context of Ireland, whose colonisation necessitated the formation of a collective identity rooted in part in ‘notness’, the individual is discouraged as a mode of self-identification. That Irish identity formed in opposition is not completely positive. Nothing that comes into being in reaction to something it hates can be entirely positive. To be Irish is in part to be ‘not British’. Colonised places are unable to access their identity in isolation from their imperial history and experience, and so they are seemingly left with no option but to fill the breach by forming their identity in direct reference and opposition to their colonisers.

When Ireland finally managed to get a crowbar under the British and winkle them out, the place and people were too changed to return to a then-lost identity. There were significant numbers of ordinary Irish people who identified as British, for one thing. When we retell the story of our nation’s genesis, we tend to omit them. They complicate things. However, when Irish people managed to form a government of their own, part of that ‘not-Britishness’ inhered in Catholicism. It was one of the things that marked Irish people as not-British and therefore by default as truly Irish. For decades, Irish people overlooked the fact that we had replaced one hierarchical overlord with another, and without a sense of our collective identity as distinct from conflict and the moral and functional guidance of an external power, we had in large part given away a sovereignty that we didn’t know how to manage.

Of course, there are costs to promoting individuality – loss of social cohesion and collective meaning can be two, and they aren’t minor. That’s a topic for another time, however. There are costs to everything and I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that Ireland has not changed enormously in the last decade especially. We’ve arrived here via a quick look at colonial history for the following reason –when there is a point to prove or an oppressor to spook off your front lawn, there is not the luxury of individual identity. Collectivisation, and consequently conformity, might be considered necessities. If you coast forward eighty or a hundred years from the formation of the Irish state, that’s how you get a country where you may be frowned upon for such deluded actions as wearing a beret in a small town (social suicide) or articulating anything implying self-esteem or non-conformity in front of other people.

I remember as a teenager having a mild altercation with the husband of my mother’s friend. I was an Irish teenager, so by altercation, I mean an incident where he was strangely intense and overbearing, and I quietly sat there in possession of no feeling that I was entitled to do very much to argue or defend myself. I had just got a place at university to study philosophy and English (admittedly wanky), and my mother shared this news with her friends, blooming with pride. ‘Ah, you’ll be an English teacher so, will you?’ the man asked, but without any upward inflection to differentiate the question from a statement. ‘I don’t think so’, I answered. ‘I haven’t made up my mind about what I’d like to do after university, really’. In early 2000s Limerick, where I grew up, this response was naturally considered the verbal equivalent of whipping a blade out of my sock and threatening orphan the man’s children.

He audibly scoffed, a piece of masticated scone flying forth from his open maw. ‘But of course you’ll be a teacher.’ The unspoken end of the sentence was ‘you flighty, arrogant little nitwit.’ He looked at me with enough weariness to melt the face from a department store mannequin and his voice was viscous with patronising certainty. ‘Sure, that’s all you can do with that degree’. In that moment, the world was a box of his creation, and his father’s before him, and we all had a fixed place in it. It was seen as a heinous act of self-aggrandisement to study anything so willowy and impractical (fair enough), and then to presume I might be able to create any options for myself outside of the path he saw ahead of me. ‘Who do you think you are?’ is a common reaction among a certain generation in Ireland. It views non-conformity or any aberration from established norms as a form of entitlement. I can’t help but wonder, though, whether the word might be reclaimed. Surely it is right and proper (when you are lucky enough to live in a place where you won’t be imprisoned for non-conformity) to exercise that freedom, that entitlement. To wear the hat even if someone you know will see it and shout from a van window that you look like you’re taking mime classes at the community centre. To see options for yourself – or to nurture the hope that you might work to create some – even if someone else’s vision of your value and capability is fixed and confident.

In reality, we are alone. We can share our lives with others, but we are limited by and answerable only to ourselves. We can participate in the stories people tell us about ourselves, but we don’t have to. We can feel entitled to go another way, to try things, to fail without reference to other people’s decision that a failure constitutes the end of a story rather than the beginning or middle of one. There are malignant forms of entitlement, but some forms are simply articulations of self-possession. It might just be the bell-end philosopher in me, but I don’t think any of us will lie on our death beds and think ‘… I shouldn’t have worn the beret’.