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An Anthropology of the
Irish in Belgium
Belonging, Identity
and Community in Europe

Sean O’ Dubhghaill
An Anthropology of the Irish in Belgium
 Sean O’ Dubhghaill

An Anthropology
of the Irish in Belgium
Belonging, Identity and Community in Europe
Sean O’ Dubhghaill
Faculty of Social Sciences
KU Leuven
Leuven, Belgium

ISBN 978-3-030-24146-9 ISBN 978-3-030-24147-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24147-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied,
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
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 Preface

This book attempts to address the question of how communities change

over time and across geographical space. What does it mean to be a
community apart? How does it alter the perception of those who reside
within it? Do they come to have new views on home? Who else shares
these new community spaces? This work takes the Irish community in
Belgium as a case study and uses the dual lenses of community and iden-
tity to explore the complex contours of Irishness and Europeanness in
the twenty-first century. However, instead of taking a sterile view from
a distance, this work employs the personal, situational and context-sen-
sitive approach of anthropology to communicate how community might
be better understood. This work is attentive to the issues that concern
the Irish in Belgium and provides an examination of the broader claims
made about how the Irish are understood at home and abroad.
To begin, while Belgium is thought to represent a great significance
to the people of Ireland, through commerce, political belonging and his-
tory (Belgium is Ireland’s third largest export market, valued at €18.1
bn, Ireland is a member of the European Union, headquartered in
Brussels, and the historical presence of an Irish College in Leuven, to
the north of Belgium and many others1) these overlaps have not war-
ranted a manuscript-length treatment of the Irish community in Belgium
to date. There are many reasons for why this is, chief among which is the
general trend of examining Irish communities in anglophone emigration
trajectories (USA, UK, Australia and Canada) in Irish studies. Belgium,

v
vi    Preface

therefore, represents a fairly novel fieldsite in which questions about

belonging and identity might be addressed.
The risk that is run in paying insufficient attention to Belgium as
an area of interest is not just the fact that it is an interesting and com-
monly overlooked site in its own right (See Blainey 2016), but also that
it is home to a staggering amalgamation of peoples; the capital, Brussels,
houses people from 179 nations.2 This cosmopolitanism is also comple-
mented by observable examples of more expected cultural fare, such as
ethnically themed restaurants and, in the case of the Irish, pubs.
To that end, Belgium also represents an excellent springboard from
which questions can be launched anew concerning how we view a com-
munity abroad, how travel changes or fails to change one’s perception
of identity, the role played by the European Union in Irish affairs, the
role played by the historical connections between Ireland and Belgium
as well as how people from other nationalities interact with Irishness, and
how these interactions are viewed and imagined. Each of these afore-
mentioned topics is given chapter-length examinations in this work,
which only leaves us to answer the second question concerning how well
anthropology is suited to a project of the kind described here.
I originally decided to work among the Irish community in order to
better understand how a group of a little more than 5 million (in the
Republic of Ireland) relate and work to understand the more than 70
million members of the Irish community worldwide (DFA 2017). What
conditions the interaction between the ‘home’ community and the
worldwide diaspora? What is at stake in the interaction between the two?
What kind of role does the Irish language play in one’s own perception
of Irishness? Executing fieldwork in Brussels also allowed me to expand
these questions and to situate them in the unique context of Ireland’s
involvement in the European Union and how it might be generalised
and compared to those of other Member States.
As I mentioned previously, idly asking these questions rhetori-
cally is one thing, but executing them in a manner that satisfied the
rigours of an academic work is quite another. The role played by con-
text is an important one to this work, and anthropology is best placed
for an investigation of this kind: here I am in complete agreement
with what Eric Wolf contends about anthropology, that it is ‘the most
humane of the sciences and the scientific of the humanities’ (Wolf 1964:
88). Anthropology is an excellent medium through which to ana-
lyse the interpersonal encounters of issues such as community, identity,
 Preface    vii

language, otherness, and common and shared imaginative viewpoints.

Anthropology attends to the culturally specific, the personal and the
nuanced. Believing with Engelke, as he remarks in his excellent Think
Like an Anthropologist (2017), anthropology’s job is to take a common
staple of our everyday experience (who we think we are, who we think
we are related to and why, how we fit others into our private conceptual
maps) and to re-examine it more holistically by taking many views into
account. Anthropology is nothing short of a necessity in an era of echo
chambering, autocratic didacts and people who think that authority is
derived from talking over others, and not to or with them.
Anthropology’s power resides in its emphasis on storytelling and in
establishing linkages between the ongoing socio-historical processes
and our day-to-day lives. We try to work from the latter back to the for-
mer, where conversations in a pub on a sunny afternoon will drift from
the personal to the topical order of the day (or perhaps the other way
around). Proper attention to induction is also a necessity here where
researchers do not push for any particular hypothesis to be demon-
strated or try to get data to fit a one-size-fits-all mould. This is benefi-
cial because instead of honing in on one method alone, many different
sources can be appealed to which take observations and contentions
made in casual encounters and can make them speak to ongoing discus-
sions in other areas of academia or popular culture; to that end, film,
literature and the analyses from other social sciences and philosophy are
common dialogue partners to anthropology.
Fieldwork was undertaken from the period of January 2011-May 2014
as well as a few ethnographic skirmishes undertaken thereafter in 2017
and 2018. In total, 45 people committed their time and assistance to the
project by sharing their stories and experiences of life in Belgium with me
and they agreed to be interviewed; their composition was broad and was
quite evenly spread between the Brussels and Leuven contexts, as well
as elsewhere in Belgium, and by gender. Apart from the 45 individuals,
however, there were almost countless, less formal encounters with travel-
ling artists or filmmakers, partygoers, tourists, students, people working
in the EU ‘bubble’, Irish-language enthusiasts, hibernophiles and people
who would occasionally butt into conversations in bars or cafés to chime
in (usually after hearing Irish accents) to share their views. Informed con-
sent was given verbally at the beginning of every recorded interview.3
This work is not meant to serve as an authoritative or prescriptive
guide; cultural anthropologists take a poor view of work that attempts
viii    Preface

to convey the world as something as simple as that. Many books tout

the idea that there is such a thing as a key to unlocking or seamlessly
being Irish, with titles such as How to Be Irish: Uncovering the Curiosities
of Irish Behaviour (Slattery 2011), How to Be Irish (if you already are)
(Kelly and Rogers 1999) and many others, as well as programmatic
guides illustrating how one might affect an Irish accent or mannerisms.4
In my work, a great deal of space has been dedicated to breaking down
the various ways through which a monopoly is sought over Irish identity;
these claims are often found to be profoundly insubstantial and attempt
to fetishise a kind of Irishness that privileges the claims made by the 5
million far and above the interjections of the 70 million who are con-
signed to only emulate Irishness at a remove. Rather than having the last
authorial word on the matter of Irishness abroad, though, I will con-
stantly return to how the people with whom I spoke view their own lives
in Belgium, both the positives and the negatives. However, the tumultu-
ousness of the everyday is also figured at the grand scale of politics too,
and even though it is too early to speculate on how Brexit will play out, I
wish to draw attention to how it has called for a renewed attention to the
unique position of the Irish in Europe.
While the magnitude of Brexit is difficult to overstate, it is also dif-
ficult to state what will happen as a result with any certainty; most
accounts are informed by an ambiguity of how it will turn out exactly.
However, there are a few concrete phenomena that I wish to point to
that have a direct bearing on Ireland’s relationship to the European
Union, via the UK, and that is the possibility of a border within Ireland,
the observable increase in passport applications for Irish passports from
citizens of the UK with an Irish ancestor and the rehabilitated place and
prominence of the Irish language. The expected departure of the UK
from the European Union, or Brexit, on 31 October 2019, has certainly
complicated self-understandings of Irish and European belongings, par-
ticularly as an island nation that is now separated from mainland Europe
by another island nation that is no longer a part thereof. This division is
also expected to be observable within Ireland itself, between Northern
Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; Brexit has brought a fresh spate
of concerns to the fore about whether a ‘hard’ border will be erected
in Ireland, given that borders need to be put in place between EU and
non-EU countries. The so-called ‘Irish border backstop’, and the fierce
negotiations surrounding it, would mean that Northern Ireland would
be exempt from adhering to certain laws to which the Republic of
 Preface    ix

Ireland would be bound. Put otherwise, Irish people’s European creden-

tials are coming to the fore, even as people remain unsure of both what
this entails and how this might prove beneficial; this can be shown with
reference to the dramatic rise of applications for Irish passports by citi-
zens of the UK, more on which below.
One cornerstone of the ‘leave’ Europe camp was the desire to wrest
control back from an interdependent union of European Member
States or to have hitherto overlooked voices have their say (Gusterson
2017). The common characterisation of ‘Europe’ is also interesting here,
given how it was employed to refer to anonymous technocratic elites in
Brussels as well as to xenophobic characterisations of immigrants [for
an excellent review see Stein (2016)]. However, others who voted to
‘remain’ would need to find another avenue through which to maintain
a connection to the EU and one common manner to do so was to seek
out Irish passports. This can be observed by the fact that applications
for Irish passports from the UK in 2015 were 46,000 and which rose
to 86,000 in 2017.5 There has also been speculation that residents in
Northern Ireland who have Irish passports will have more rights after the
formal departure of the UK in October 2019.6 There is also some con-
fusion about who is entitled to an Irish passport and who is not, some-
thing indicated in an interview with a Tory MP, West Leicestershire MP
Andrew Bridgen who rhetorically commented:

We have a reciprocal agreement where I can go to Ireland and ask for an

Irish passport, and someone from Ireland can come to the UK and ask for
a British passport. We have that system. That’s the system we have, right?
(18th, October 2018).7

This is of course untrue, but what it points to is the confusion and

mutual misunderstanding that exists.
Another confusing matter, and an unintended consequence of Brexit,
was the possible downplaying or decrease in recognition of the English
language as a modern European language. According to the Treaty
of the Functioning of the European Union (or TFEU8), only a coun-
try’s first language can be recognised by the European Union formally.
With the UK gone, English will go too, in theory at least. Ireland and
Malta, while anglophone countries, still recognise Irish and Maltese,
respectively, in their constitutions and that is what matters to the EU.
What complicates matters with the roll-out of the Irish language (it
x    Preface

is scheduled to leave derogation phase in 2022, a decision made long

before Brexit) is that the Irish language is not spoken in Ireland very fre-
quently outside of a classroom setting. Recent estimates indicate that it
is spoken by 73,808 people daily and by 111,473 people weekly in the
Republic of Ireland.9
The confusion brought about by Brexit notwithstanding, the exam-
ples provided above point in a clear direction and now is an excellent
time to review some of the common sense understandings we have of
ourselves, of change, of identity and sameness, about what it is to be
European and of how difference is understood.10 Understanding how
these processes are lived and intuited will allow for a broader examina-
tion of those features of everyday life that are both irreducibly unique
and which are general and shared. This book attempts to take a step in
this direction by employing the Irish (both at home and abroad) as a case
study of all of these phenomena and by drawing upon real experiences,
mediated imaginaries, and from the past.

Leuven, Belgium Sean O’ Dubhghaill

Notes
1. Mesen peace park, mercantile partnerships, the Wild Geese, the Irish
dames of Ypres at Kylemore abbey, the rectorships of Irishman Thomas
Stapleton of Belgium’s oldest university and others (for an exhaustive list,
see MacAodha and Murray 2014).
2. ‘One in three inhabitants of Brussels are not Belgian.’ https://brus-
sels-express.eu/one-three-inhabitants-brussels-not-belgian/ Accessed 18
December 2018.
3. Hibernophile is a combination of the word Hibernia (which comes from
the Greek Iouerníā (written Ἰουερνία) meaning Ireland) and philia,
meaning the adoration or love of something.
4. See: ‘What being Irish means to you’ http://www.gaelicmatters.com/
being-irish-means.html; http://howtobeirish.blogspot.com/; ‘Speak
with an Irish accent’ https://www.wikihow.com/Speak-With-an-Irish-
Accent; ‘How to speak with an Irish accent.’ https://www.ehow.com/
how_2002845_speak-irish-accent.html; ‘How to put on a convinc-
ing Irish accent.’ https://learn-english.wonderhowto.com/how-to/
put-convincing-irish-accent-326679/.
5. BBC, Irish Passport Applications Skyrocket. https://www.bbc.com/
news/world-europe-46030552.
 Preface    xi

6. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/17/brexit-deal-gives-
more-rights-to-irish-passport-holders-experts-say. Accessed 19 December
2018.
7. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/irish-passport-
england-uk-andrew-bridgen-tory-mp-brexit-border-eu-a8587286.html.
Accessed 19 December 2018.
8. This provision can be found in Article 342 of the TFEU, which states:
the rules governing the languages of the institutions of the Union shall,
without prejudice to the provisions contained in the Statute of the Court
of Justice of the European Union, be determined by the Council, acting
unanimously by means of regulations.
9. Central Statistics Office (2016) Irish language profile. https://cso.ie/en/
releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp10esil/p10esil. Accessed 19 December
2018.
10. I mean common sense in the manner in which Geertz (1975) writes about
it, as a cultural system.

References
Blainey, M. G. (2016). Groundwork for the anthropology of Belgium: An over-
looked microcosm of Europe. Ethnos, 81(3), 478–507. https://doi.org/10.1
080/00141844.2014.968180.
DFA. (2017). The Global Irish Diaspora Directory. Irish Abroad Unit of the
Department of Foreign Affairs. https://www.dfa.ie/media/globalirish/
Diaspora-Directory-2-FINAL.pdf.
Gusterson, H. (2017). From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the rise of
nationalist populism. American Ethnologist, 44, 209–214.
Kelly, S., & Rogers, R. (1999). How to be Irish (even if you already are). New
York: Villard Books.
MacAodha, É., & Murray, A. (2014). Ireland and Belgium: Past connections &
continuing ties. Brussels, Belgium: Published by the Irish Embassy to the
Kingdom of Belgium.
Slattery, D. (2011). How to be Irish: Uncovering the curiosities of Irish behaviour.
Dublin: Orpen Press.
Stein, F. (2016). Anthropology, Brexit and Xenophobia in Europe. Association
for Political and Legal Anthropology. https://politicalandlegalanthro.
org/2016/06/28/anthropology-brexit-and-xenophobia-in-europe/.
Accessed 17 June 2019.
Wolf, E. (1964). Anthropology. New York: Prentice-Hill.
 Acknowledgements

While it may be trite to maintain that any given work is the culmination
of many individual participants whose testimony and assistance helped
the project come to fruition, rather than just the author’s exclusively, it
is certainly and especially true for the practice of anthropology. It is for
this reason that I would like to express my gratitude to the many people
who helped the project to grow and who saw the merit of this work even
at times when I remained ambivalent. Your support is worth, and has
meant, more than I can express here.
First, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Noel Salazar for his guidance,
supervision and his willingness to take a project under his wing which,
at that time, was completely rudderless. Many thanks also go to Prof.
Dr. Karel Arnaut and Dr. Alice Elliot who furnished me with excellent
insights and profound observations at very critical points in the work’s
development. Thanks also go to Dr. Fiona Murphy whose assistance has
been invaluable, not only in the final stages but for the past 9 years or so.
I would also like to thank Dr. Steve Coleman who has been assisting my
anthropological training since the time of writing my Masters thesis.
I also wish to thank most especially my partner Sarah Tumbleton.
I am forever indebted for her eagerness to listen to large sections of
the work, for her seemingly limitless patience and care and for her con-
stant support. It has meant the world to me in a manner that words fail
fully to capture. I also would like to thank my parents, Eileen and Sean
O’ Dubhghaill, as well as the rest of my family, Ríta, Sorcha, Caitlin and

xiii
xiv    Acknowledgements

Laura who all offered counsel, assistance and support in any way they
could and as often as was needed. I am incredibly grateful for their
support.
Although conditions of anonymity require that I not name them,
I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of my informants who
went to incredible lengths to assist me, in any way they could, and who
often took a great deal of time out of their very busy schedules to sit
with me and to offer their insights into the multi-faceted aspects of life
in Belgium. Many thanks for all of your incredible company, stories and
insights.
Finally, I wish to thank my colleagues and friends who were never
short on erudite commentary, much-needed levity and keen insights:
Joel Hubick, Jori De Coster, Saliha Ozdemir, Patrick Eldridge, Cody
Staton, Marc Bennett, Kristien Dupae, the staff at the Interculturalism,
Migrations and Minorities Research Centre (IMMRC) Xpeditions
Malta Summer School, the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies (LCIS) and
the Cultural Mobilities Research unit (CuMoRe) are all owed a debt of
thanks. Lastly, I should like to thank Stephen Breen for his sage wisdom
and support.
 Contents

1 The Irish Community at Home and Abroad 1

The Irish Community: An Anthropological Perspective 5
A Community of Individuals 8
‘Native’ Takes on Irish Life: The Anthropology of Ireland 11
Imagining Irish Community at Home and Abroad 15
References 20

2 Identity Politics, Belonging and Europe 23

European Identity 25
Mobility: Moving Away from Fixist Models of Identity 31
Becoming European 33
Mobilising Europe: Alterity and Activity 36
Ireland and Europe: Concept-Metaphors 40
What Is a ‘Good European’? 43
The Irish Community in Belgium 45
References 50

3 The Irish in Brussels: Culture, Language, Politics,

Belonging 57
(Speaking) Irish in Brussels 59
Schooling Europeans 61
The Irish in Brussels, January 1973 64
How Ireland Became European 68

xv
xvi    Contents

Ireland’s Development, from Poverty to Prosperity and Back 70

Experiencing Europe: Irish Culture and Language 73
‘Become Irish’ on Saint Patrick’s Day in Brussels 77
Become Irish for an Hour or Two. Seachtain na Gaeilge 80
The ‘Green Book’: Political Engagement in Ireland and Brussels 81
Training Europeans: European Movement International 83
Concluding Remarks 86
References 90

4 Placing the Irish Diaspora in Place and Time in Europe 93

31 January 2014 94
Locating the Irish College of Leuven in Time 98
Exile, the Past and Reconnection: Heritage and Lines
of Belonging 102
‘The Irish Are Now so Used to Exile That It Is Part
of Their Heritage’ 104
‘Closed to the Public’: Putting My ‘Self’ to Good Use 108
Teaching Irish(ness) in Leuven 109
The Irish Pub in Belgium: Cultural Homes Away from Homes 113
Concluding Remarks 118
References 122

5 Non-Irish, Irish Speakers Among the Irish Community

in Belgium 125
‘It’s Fake. I Mean It Sounds the Same, But It’s Fake’
Language and Simulation 126
Philosophy and Simulacra 128
Anthropology, Otherness and Fakeness 131
Whereabouts in Donegal Are You from? Misattribution
and Pride 135
‘No Irish, No Blacks and No Dogs’ 138
The Limits of Pretence: ‘You Can’t Pretend to Speak
a Language!’ 142
Passing, Pride and Dejection: Simulation and Language
Acquisition 144
Concluding Remarks 148
References 152
 Contents    xvii

6 Imagined Belonging and the Irish Diaspora 155

What Is a Diaspora? 159
Diaspora and Reception Abroad 160
The Use of Irish at Home and Abroad: ‘Do Something Irish!’ 167
Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom: Imagining the Irish Language
at ‘Home’ 169
The Imaginaries of Bruges and In Bruges 173
Concluding Remarks 175
References 177

Conclusion 181

References 185

Index 205
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Kiss the Blarney Stone 2

Fig. 1.2 St. Anthony’s College, Louvain (as it was in the eighteenth
century, drawn by William Oldham) 15
Fig. 2.1 Souvenir store on Rue La Montague (Author’s own) 24
Fig. 3.1 ‘Irish for the day’. St. Patrick’s Day in Brussels (Author’s own) 79
Fig. 4.1 Onbewoonbaar verklaard sinds 13-2-2014
(Photo Author’s own) 96
Fig. 4.2 Memorial at ‘Irish House’ Bankstraat (Photo Author’s own) 96
Fig. 4.3 The Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe
(Image in public domain) 107
Fig. 5.1 Scientific Racism: H. Strickland Constable. Image in public
domain (The text which is illegible in the original reads:
‘The Iberians are believed to have been originally an African
race, who thousands of years ago spread themselves through
Spain over Western Europe. Their remains are found
in the barrows, or burying places, in sundry parts of these
countries. The skulls are of low prognathous type. They
came to Ireland and mixed with the natives of the South
and West, who themselves are supposed to have been of low
type and descendants of savages of the Stone Age, who, in
consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never
been out-competed in the healthy struggle of life, and thus
made way, according to the laws of nature, for superior races’.) 140
Fig. 6.1 Dublin Airport signpost (Photo Author’s own) 157
Fig. 6.2 ‘Excited to get you home’ billboard, Dublin Airport
(Photo Author’s own) 158

xix
 CHAPTER 1

The Irish Community

at Home and Abroad

Robin Boylorn and Mark Orbe (2014) contend that auto-ethnography,

writing about one’s own experiences as an explanation that motivates
specific research interests, can be used to convey information derived
from sense experience; Peter Collins and Anselma Gallinat (2010) also
claim that the self is the primary conveyance of formative pre-theoretical
notions and that recounting these events serves to heighten the expe-
rience of ethnographic engagement. Despite the potential shortcomings
of auto-ethnography, there is a vignette from my own childhood which I
believe can concisely impart formative experiences that took place in the
company of my Irish-American cousins. The necessity of this vignette’s
inclusion stems from the overwhelming number of cross-cutting issues it
entails: belonging, diaspora membership, the necessity to perform one’s
identity and of Irishness more generally.
In March of 1993, my Irish-American mother drove two of my Irish-
American cousins and myself down to a remote castle in County Cork,
in the province of Munster in Ireland. At the very top of Blarney Castle,
which is surrounded by lush groves of beautifully arranged thickets and
meadows, is a kind of enclosure surrounded by fortress walls, but which
is also exposed to the elements. The main attraction lies off to one side
of, and atop, a small pile of scaffolding. The reason for our journey was
to visit ‘The Blarney Stone’ which, when kissed, is thought to imbue
those undergoing the ritual with the gift of ‘eloquence’. First, it might
be important to stress that while the gift that is ‘acquired’ through this
odd ritual is not exactly eloquence as such but is, in actuality, commonly

© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. O’ Dubhghaill, An Anthropology of the Irish in Belgium,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24147-6_1
2 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

referred to as the ‘gift of the gab’, a symbolic construction that binds

those who have undergone the ritual and those living in Ireland. It is,
without reading between the lines, thought to involve the initiand’s
induction into receiving a claim of belonging and the gift of being seam-
lessly akin to the Irish in manners of speech, even after (or especially
after perhaps) they have departed from Ireland. Put otherwise, the gap
between diaspora belonging and Irishness can be closed through this one
act, so its importance is difficult to overstate.
Obtaining this highly prized ethnic marker was why we had arrived
and my cousins ran quickly past our tour guide in order to ensure that
they had a good place in line. I was more fearful and hesitant. What was
required, as can be seen partially in Fig. 1.1, is that the neophytes lie on
their back, grab a hold of two iron bars, necessary for securing oneself,
and to kiss a part of the rock that is smoother than elsewhere on the cas-
tle’s inner wall. An attendant assists in this, laying his/her hands on the
torso of anyone supplicating themselves to the rite.

Fig. 1.1 Kiss the Blarney Stone

 1 THE IRISH COMMUNITY AT HOME AND ABROAD 3

What cannot be observed in Fig. 1.1, though, is that there is a

sheer drop, protected only by a fine grill, over which the head of the
prospective initiand is placed. My fear of heights got the better of me
and I stood ramrod still as my cousins beckoned me to join them in
the queue. I saw participant after participant undergo the procedure;
I remember the majority of them as being (Irish-)Americans who had
Irish roots, but no matter how expertly it was conducted, time after
time, I could not be convinced to partake.
I remember feeling quite embarrassed at this. My cousins returned
and were now affecting Irish accents. My mother spoke to me shortly
thereafter, upon seeing my dejection. ‘You know that you don’t have to
kiss the Blarney Stone though, right?’ I was intrigued. ‘Why not?’ ‘Well,
you were born here, your father is Irish and you speak Irish. There’s
no need for you to do this like there is for them. You already are Irish’.
I remember feeling incredibly relieved. What had not occurred to me at
that time, but which would become a huge theoretical concern during
my academic career, was what had constituted Irishness in this instance;
why was it that I did not have to perform in the way that they had? What
exactly made me more Irish than them and why was I thought to be
exempt from having to display it? What makes anyone Irish at all?
What is at stake in this vignette is still as relevant to my research today
as it was when it occurred over two decades ago. In unpacking what had
happened, or at least how I remember what had happened, what had
taken place was the concretising of a claim to belonging by way of some-
thing irreducibly associated with one’s identity; my cousins had trav-
elled from overseas and in so doing had been given the opportunity to
(re)connect with their roots. To me, it was a matter of driving for about
three hours to a new locale. What was more was that I did not have to
get in touch with a connection that was imaginary in nature or that had
to be retrieved; my connection seems to have been secured by a kind
of factual bind and just by dint of what might be viewed as contingent
things, I was thought to be exempt from having to commemorate my
identity.
The questions take on a different dimension when measured against
the concerns of mobility, imaginary connections over time, how we per-
ceive of difference (and how we differentiate) and particularly when placed
against the backdrop of massive webs of significance, which is not secure.
This work is dedicated to the task of directly engaging with these issues.
Returning to the vignette outlined previously, we might begin to place
4 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

the transformation of the subject, their ‘becoming’ something else,

front and centre by asking: how do the Irish community abroad reori-
ent themselves to new surroundings? Do they maintain a connection to
their home (and if so what constitutes this connection)? Do they become
something else, and in so doing lose something of their original ­identity?
What role does the Irish language play in how their views of themselves
change? Does this depend on who is speaking (or not speaking) the
language? What messages about Irishness are being transmitted more
­generally throughout the media and what are these messages symboli-
cally communicating? These questions are engaged in the chapters that
follow; first, perhaps, we might need to get a better overview of the area
in which this study takes place.
The distance between Belgium and Ireland is a little over 500 miles.
How ‘close’ Ireland and Belgium are, though, is not something that can
be measured in miles. For instance, in terms of the European Union’s
development in the post-war era, the fact that Ireland was at a remove
from the continent proper by way of a sea involved a certain sense of
disconnectedness, a certain lack of sameness (particularly when Ireland
acceded to the European community). Previously in history, the exiles
who made Leuven, Belgium, their home tried to maintain a connection
with Ireland by studying a Scottish philosopher, Duns Scotus, and would
have made no distinction between the Irish and Scottish people in their
studies in the seventeenth century. What I mean to communicate is that
how difference is constituted changes over time. Belgium and Ireland’s
nearness is, and always has been, a matter of some debate and touches on
a wide range of issues of belonging, wealth, sameness and difference over
time.
Belgium is an excellent, unique field site and vantage point from
which to examine the Irish community. As alluded to briefly in the pre-
vious paragraph, the connections between the two countries run deep,
but two overarching themes of this work are Ireland’s accession to the
European Union (and how Brussels is invariably referred to as ‘the
heart of Europe’) as well as the long-standing historical connection,
from the time of the Wild Geese’s departure (examined in Chapter 4)
to the Irish college which still stands in Leuven today. Belgium is also an
excellent country from which to launch an examination into the com-
plex topics of identity formation, one’s preferred language and the role
played by ‘Europe’ in reorienting our senses of belonging. Moreover,
 1 THE IRISH COMMUNITY AT HOME AND ABROAD 5

as Blainey (2016) laments in an excellent work entitled: Groundwork

for the Anthropology of Belgium: An Overlooked Microcosm of
Europe, Belgium remains a largely overlooked microcosm of anthro-
pological examination, its huge international population and histor-
ical interconnectedness (to both Europe and its former colonies, the
proper memorialisation of which is still the source of some discord)
notwithstanding.
These concerns give rise to questions that are relevant for any anthro-
pological examination of any community, the Irish community in this
instance, and include: How has anthropological scholarship on Irish
communities been received since its inception? Who is entitled to write
about Ireland and why? What is the difference between a diaspora and
a community abroad? What binds members of a community together
and what sustains them? This chapter is dedicated to answering these
questions.
The central theme of the present work is to address the question of
how, and exact manner in which, the Irish community in Belgium might
be examined anthropologically. Moreover, I attempt to tease out particu-
lar difficulties in how the concept of community has been deployed, how
it presupposes something that cannot be demonstrated, that is imaginary
and personal. Examining the Irish communities who live in Belgium,
their claims about belonging and how they imagine their lives also
touches on aspects that are deeply personal and strike at the very heart
of how we are connected to our place of birth, even though we reside
overseas. It is a task for which anthropology is excellently placed, given
its emphasis on the personal, shared, and lived character of a particular
people group. This introductory chapter aims to establish a general rep-
ertoire for what exactly an Irish community is, and how it has been stud-
ied anthropologically, so that we can come to better understand how we
might investigate an Irish community overseas (and whether that com-
munity comprises a diaspora or not).

The Irish Community: An Anthropological Perspective

To introduce the Irish community in Belgium, it is first necessary to cur-
sorily explore the manner in which the Irish community has been stud-
ied historically. This section aims to understand the anthropological
accounts that have examined the Irish community in its various forms
6 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

over time, a necessity to extract what we can understand about a com-

munity so that we might examine one in an area other than Ireland. This
is achieved by honing in on the ways in which it has been possible to
understand a group of individuals who were encapsulated by the term
community. We begin by tracing the study of community back to the
1930s and by continuing to examinations, undertaken later on that
same century, that problematise and trouble the application of the term
community to discrete groups of individuals with vastly differing inter-
ests. What we see is the development of more sets of tools with which
to test the notion of community, as well as the emergence of the sub-
jective dimension that goes hand in hand with questions of belonging.
We see the island of Ireland go from being an insufficiently industrialised
curiosity that is examined by American and English anthropologists, to
a hotly contested region in which the community begins to ‘write back’
by re-inserting elements from their tradition that are commonly over-
looked or misunderstood. Put otherwise, the following sections attempt
to understand Irishness as it relates to community belonging and then
as it unmoors itself from place and how the idea of an Irish community
abroad becomes thinkable, rather than existing as an oxymoron.
The ‘Yankee City’ project was a community studies project under-
taken by William Lloyd Warner in the 1920s in Newburyport,
Massachusetts, USA. It set the template for works concerning investiga-
tions of modern communities as we think of them today. Warner’s stu-
dents in Harvard, most notably Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball,
were to be the first exponents, in the twentieth century at least, of
both this brand of investigative community analysis and of structur-
al-functional thought more generally. The works they produced that
are thought to be most notable include the authoritatively titled: The
Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study (1959 [1939]), authored
by Arensberg alone, and Family and community in Ireland (1940)
co-written with Kimball.
The works attempted to act as a blueprint for future efforts in sim-
ilar domains and often alternated between descriptions of the com-
munity itself and how anthropology is and ought to be practised. In
so doing, these authors established a foothold for future structural-
functionalist ethnographic examinations; these works placed a premium
on analysing aspects of consonant peasant relations and showed the
manner in which complex tensions and disjunctures can be resolved at
 1 THE IRISH COMMUNITY AT HOME AND ABROAD 7

the community level, lead to harmonious and agreeable social relations

(not the other way around). In its most pronounced form, the structur-
al-functionalist account given by Arensberg is thought to capture, within
itself, the composition and vicissitudes of all of social life:

Balance, pattern, system, structure, may perhaps seem formidable terms.

They may seem too heavy and too prosaic to do justice to the country-
man’s way of life. Or again, they may strike you as too formal; for what
I name with them is compounded of a thousand personal intimacies. Yet
no other terms represent so well the fluid realities of social life. (Arensberg
1959 [1939]: 71)

Directly engaging participants in questions of their everyday habits,

discussing their viewpoints and how they imagine their community to
function seems less important than divining a structure that underpins
their lives. This obviously overlooks the personal stake that community
members have in the ongoing life of the community. Here, the minutiae
of daily life in peasant communities are thought to be reducible to the
necessity of accounting for the genesis point of systemic equilibrium; put
otherwise, harmony and continuity are assured by structure. Outsiders
arrive to a fully functioning and static representation of continuity—a liv-
ing version of the Blarney Stone in a sense that secures an identity in
place. Arensberg’s account of community life was released and gave pride
of place to balance and structure. At around the same time, though, we
can already view something of a schism occurring within the anthropo-
logical structural-functional paradigm in Malinowski’s work The Group
and the Individual in Functional Analysis (1939) in which the indi-
vidual starts to feature more prominently. Malinowski’s aim here is to
recapitulate the manner in which practices unfold and are enacted over
time and become embodied by institutions, rather than by communities
(here he means a community’s view on economics, education, social con-
trol and political formations). This work begins to at least touch on the
notion that individuals are necessary to the perseverance of communities,
which at least hints at the possibility that individuals make and remake
a community, and that it might be slightly less dependent on structural
ties than previously thought. However, there is still often a great deal of
hand-wringing and other overwrought expressions of concern over the
death of communities in anthropological accounts, which is examined in
the following section.
8 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

Malinowski’s analysis involves examining the institutional mediation

that is brought into existence to meet a variety of individually derived
needs (basic, instrumental, and symbolic and integrative needs):

[I]n these analyses the twofold approach through the study of the individ-
ual with his innate tendencies and their cultural transformation, and the
study of the group as the relationship and co-ordination of individuals,
with reference to space, environment and material equipment is necessary.
(Malinowski 1939: 954)

The fusing together of the individual and the space in which those indi-
viduals’ needs are met can be closely aligned with the dual notions of the
interrelation of the individual and the community.1 A community must
be interested and informed by a group of individuals of which it com-
prises; a dynamic interaction must take place.
In sum, we have seen two opposing views on the structural aspects
of community, as that which binds and as it developed into the domain
of community as a mediated, personal and interpersonal domain. We
begin to see greater engagement with community members from the late
1960s on, as well as a parenthetical move away from the felt necessity of
positing a structure or system that accounts for community life; instead,
we turn to accounts of community that are more peopled or inhabited
than they had been previously.

A Community of Individuals
The shift in focus to the individuals as a complementary part of a com-
munity can also be viewed in the anthropology of Ireland. Accounts
written with a structural-functional2 bent in mind began to undergo a
change in terms of the roles played by chronological processes, such as
decline, change and flux; in other words, writing on the topic of Ireland
became something different as time passed, starting roughly from the
late 1960s. The individual actors began to emerge from behind their
structural-functional scaffolding and less emphasis was placed on the
necessity for community to imbue identities to those who subscribe
to it and it became less place-centric. Identity, ethnicity and expres-
sions of selfhood take centre stage and these considerations remain
as personal to people as community life, but do not depend on them
for meaning. In a manner of speaking, here we can also see a clear
 1 THE IRISH COMMUNITY AT HOME AND ABROAD 9

distinction between the disciplines of sociology and cultural anthropol-

ogy, given the former discipline’s emphasis on the underpinning of indi-
vidual behaviours and the latter discipline’s interests in the individual’s
behaviour from a cultural view. Cultural views are not immutable things
though and are always involved in the processes of change over time as
interests and institutions shift. The notion of change is an integral one to
understanding Irish community life and the lives of those living within.
In the decades following the pioneering publications of Kimball and
Arensberg, we find publications that embrace and emphasise change,
such as in Hugh Brody’s Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of
Ireland (1973) and in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ work Saints, Scholars and
Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1979). Both works are
set in the fictive communities of Inishkillane (located in County Clare,
Ireland) and Ballyblan (in the Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland)
and are typified by themes of social disintegration, rather than by the
self-regulating, unchanging communities which had been espoused in
their generational forebears. Moreover, though, they retain the notion
of a bounded community as the central point of reference from which
broader themes of individual experiences of isolation, mental illness,
and emigration can be contextualised and examined ethnographically. It
is only in the aftermath of these works’ publication that something of a
sea-change happened in the perception of community, continuity and the
very position from which authorship about Ireland could take place. This
turn towards interpersonal engagement is certainly an interesting one for
anthropology, and separating personal and interpersonal examinations
of shared issues (such as continuity, isolation, and emigration) is fasci-
nating grist for the mill of any anthropological engagement. With this
expanding of the horizons of anthropology, though, came a certain crit-
ical engagement with Irish commentators who rejected the impressions
that anthropologists were broadcasting on their behalves.
For instance, in a scathing review of Inishkillane, Gibbon (1973)
claims that both Brody’s work (1973) and Arensberg and Kimball’s work
(1959 [1939]) fail to document the exact manner in which change over
time is actually thought to occur and that they both fall prey to romanti-
cally inclined examinations:

The fact is, therefore, that none of the ‘changes’ in Irish rural society
which Brody identifies is (sic) novel at all. All that they are novel in rela-
tion to is rural Irish society as it was romantically depicted by Arensberg
10 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

and Kimball. Arensberg and Kimball’s functionalist theoretical position

produced an account of the Luogh which had more in common with the
vision of obscurantist nativists and revivalists than with concrete reality. On
every score -the family, the ‘mutual aid’ system, the economic and cultural
stability of the system and its politics- their account ranges from the inac-
curate to the fictive. (Gibbon 1973: 491)

Here, we can see the opposition of precision with the difficulty of

accounting for a community. Orienting anthropological accounts
towards a single community, thought to be representable in mon-
ographic terms, comes at the expense of examining external fac-
tors (change, emigration and what communities become over time
particularly). Accounts that were of an overly static sort,3 and which
examined change and decline as foregone conclusions, ignored the man-
ner in which new sorts of communities were also emerging in the wake
of Ireland’s history of emigration. Falling prey to the romanticism latent
in accounts of communities in decline seems to lend itself, rather invaria-
bly, to exactly this sort of romantically inclined dejection; nowhere is this
more visible than in a work entitled: Gola: The Life and Last Days of an
Island Community (1969), written by F. H. A. Aalen and Hugh Brody:

[The people of Gola] are no longer willing to live in isolation, separated

from the opportunities and excitements they have come to associate with
urban centres. They expect more than their small community can provide.
And as they leave, so such communities do become able to provide less
and less… Yet it is but one of many remote communities that share a para-
mountly unifying feature: like so many other isolated centres of rural life, it
does seem to be coming to an end. (Aalen and Brody 1969: 126)

It is on this ominous note that the work concludes. In reading this

account, I have always been struck with why it was that the author
must consider the community to be coming to an end, rather than
the members of that community becoming something different else-
where through mobility. This romanticism, apocalyptic resignation and
hand-wringing about the fate of particular place-bound communities
become things of the past as scholarship on Irish communities moved
into the twenty-first century and as discussions on the possibility of over-
seas communities of Irish people slowly emerges. There is still a signifi-
cant gap in scholarship on the topic of the Irish community in Europe,
given the fact that the topic of the diaspora in anglophone countries
 1 THE IRISH COMMUNITY AT HOME AND ABROAD 11

seems to take greater precedence in this domain. However, with the

departure from the conventional concerns of backwardness and devel-
opment came new expressions of a lost authenticity and a jeopardised
Irishness. This topic is examined in the following section.

‘Native’ Takes on Irish Life:

The Anthropology of Ireland
The history of the anthropology of Ireland is one which is replete with
references both to an underdeveloped country, but also to an idyllic and
bucolic domain. The concern over the erasure of Irish communities is
another symptom of the preferential place that is given to the commu-
nity; why would it not be equally valid to turn one’s interest to the peo-
ple that departed and to the communities that were established in the
aftermath of emigration? Systems of cultural stability that focus on the
composition and function of the family fail to capture the dynamism of a
mobility that has always been deeply rooted in Irish life.4 Brody’s afore-
mentioned work falls prey to a kind of fatalism that ties the inhabitants
of an ‘Island community’ to that very island. Leaving Ireland does not
mean that you sever the connection with it totally, nor is it the same as
being erased from a continuity and authenticity that is often prescribed
to communities by the authors who document them. The difficulty that
anthropologists were faced with as the end of the twentieth century drew
near, and in the early years of the twenty-first century, was whether or
not this view of a rooted and static area necessarily incurred, or actu-
ally gave rise to, the problems in the scholarship on Ireland that had
occurred previously.
By the 1970s, it certainly appeared that the purchase that the term
‘community’ had once possessed was beginning to slacken significantly
for this very reason. Wilson and Donnan remark:

The concept of ‘community’ seemed to have diminished explanatory

power, and the changing nature of Irish life, due to the related forces of
modernization, economic development, secularism and integration with
a wider Europe of the nine member states of the European Common
Market (Ireland and the United Kingdom became members in 1973)
made people both more mobile and more involved in new relations of
class, status and culture. (Wilson and Donnan 2006: 24)
12 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

Interesting here is that the concepts employed to represent commu-

nity life had themselves changed and were no longer appropriate to the
task they sought to legitimate, i.e. understanding the community and,
through it, the people who reside there. My examination takes a differ-
ent departure point by suspending the concern with whether or not the
Irish in Belgium comprises a community by focussing on their concern
with belonging. This is a task that is easier said than done and involved
the disembedding both of the necessity of the term community and also
the necessity to have authors from overseas write on behalf of Irish peo-
ple, rather than including a ‘native’ view of the phenomenon.
Wilson and Donnan provide a summary overview of the conceptual
cachet that Kimball and Arensberg’s work had over the ethnographic
writing of small, Irish communities that were often construed as being
subject to the dual yokes of the declining stature of the peasantry, on
the one hand, and the omnipresence of alienation and emigration on the
other. What occurred in the era following this rejection of writing car-
ried out on discrete areas of Ireland by outsiders, in certain areas of the
academic community, was a recapturing from within of folk-histories and
the undertaking of smaller ethnographic ventures conducted by ‘natives’.
The account included works such as Ó’ Hógáin’s examination of pop-
ular attitudes to Irish poetry (1979), Bourke’s writing on Irish women
and lamentation poetry, ‘cultural loss’ and the virtuality of Irish lore
(1993, 1998, 1999, respectively), Uí Ógáin’s work on Irish fairy music
(2012), Breathnach’s work on Irish pipers in Co. Kerry (1985) and Ó’
Crulaoích’s examination of Irish funerary traditions (1993). These works
illustrate a spike in interest in the examination of tradition and custom
as it was practised in Ireland. What occurs in the period following the
decline of the persuasiveness of structural-functional accounts is a resur-
gence and interest in examining an individuated Irishness in a manner
unbound from community, an Irishness which is negotiated, deployed,
contested and resisted in different ways in diffuse areas of the country.
What has been teased out here is the abiding nature of the term
Irish community, as a legacy from structural-functional examinations
of various kinds, and the parenthetical shift towards an examination
of ‘Irish’ individuals, and an examination of the Irish individuals by
Irish individuals, in terms of the representational expressions that are
thought to be idiosyncratically or irreducibly Irish in nature. The diffi-
culty of course here is that what Irishness is, as expressed in the vignette
provided in the beginning of this chapter, is something that is oddly innate,
 1 THE IRISH COMMUNITY AT HOME AND ABROAD 13

there unknowingly, and in a manner that does not need to be commem-

orated or displayed. Prior to my relocating to Belgium, this is certainly
how I would have viewed questions of identity and belonging, but this is
no longer true.
While I have provided details of works conducted by Irish ­thinkers
and folklorists seeking to reclaim an ethnological foothold, one recent
and excellent example of the difficulty in writing about an unex-
amined Irishness can be observed in Olaf Zenker’s Irish/ness Is All
Around Us: Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in
Northern Ireland (2013). In it, Zenker observes the manner in which
Irishness is treated as a social construct, which is unbound from place,
and the mode in which it is related to the Irish language. It also details
the troubling ‘obviousness’ of one’s own identity. The early sections of
the work relay this difficulty in the following manner:

My open questions such as ‘What ethnic or national identity do you have?’

at times even irritated my interlocutors, not so much, as I figured out,
because they felt like I was contesting their sense of identity but, to the
contrary, because the answer ‘Irish’ seemed so obvious. ‘What else could
I be?’ was a rhetorical question I often encountered in such conversa-
tions, indicating to me that, for many, Irish identity went without saying.
If this was the case, then what did being Irish mean to these people? […]
[I]f senses of Irishness were possibly but not exclusively found in rep-
resentations and practices of the Irish language, where else could they be
found? (Zenker 2013: 3–4)

Zenker’s formulation is interesting because it stems from an inductive

frustration that arrives out of the encounter with a tacit understand-
ing of one’s identity. This is a phenomenon that is difficult to scruti-
nise and which must be countered with rhetoric. If individuals do not
need to determine their meaning from a community necessarily, they
become freer to choose (or not to choose) how they deploy their ethnic
or national identity. This also necessitates the conducting of actual inter-
views with individuals and living among a people group and participating
in their daily activities.
I experienced the exact same difficulty as Zenker when carry-
ing out my work. When asking a question, such as: ‘How are the Irish
European?’, it often took some cajoling to move away from stock-
responses that were usually of two sorts: either the Irish are European
14 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

economically and because of their involvement with the European Union

(we became Irish on the very day that we acceded to the European com-
mon market in 1973) or we are European by dint of a more long-stand-
ing historical tradition (in this instance they might cite the existence of
the Irish college and the involvement of the Irish in warfare on the con-
tinent as evidence of this connection). Both views are complicated for
a wide variety of reasons. The first argument, that the Irish in Belgium
are European because of their involvement in the European commu-
nity over time, pays insufficient regard to the change in perception that
took place with respect to the Irish community. What might we make of
the perception, prominent in 1973, that Ireland was an underdeveloped
‘emigrant nursery’ and how this changed in a little over four decades
from backward, to equals to a somewhat softly Eurosceptical entity and
on and on. The Irish community’s belonging in Belgium, and how it is
informed by European membership, is the topic of Chapter 3.
The second view, mentioned above, that the Irish community in
Belgium ‘belong’ because of the presence of a long-standing tradition of
the Irish college, also overlooks a great deal of discontinuity. Founded in
1607, St. Anthony’s College (colloquially referred to as the Irish college
in Leuven, alternatively written in French as Louvain), is not immune
to shifts in its meaning over time. For instance, if we sought continu-
ity out as our mooring point for a kind of Irishness, we would be con-
fronted with further issues: while the site was the first site to publish an
Irish-English dictionary, it has no tradition of Irish language scholarship
at present. The Irish college originally doubled as a church, but it was
deconsecrated in 1983; the most prominent figure who lived there and
documented one of the earliest annals of Irish history, Florence Conry,
is said to be buried there, but there are many dissenting accounts of
whether or not this is true. To that end, how Irishness can (and c­ annot)
be grounded historically is the topic to which Chapter 2 is oriented
(Fig. 1.2).
A great deal of theoretical attention has been paid to the notion of
an Irish community and the abiding feature of an Irish community is
that it problematises definitions and exceeds representations about it.
The individuals who imagine themselves to belong to a community must
therefore be engaged. In order to lay the groundworks for the exami-
nations of Irishness found in Chapters 3 and 4, we must first return to
the notion of community and specifically to the imagined component
thereof; however, this time I separate Irishness from Irish identity in
 1 THE IRISH COMMUNITY AT HOME AND ABROAD 15

Fig. 1.2 St. Anthony’s College, Louvain (as it was in the eighteenth century,
drawn by William Oldham)

order to carry forward the notion of an expression of what ‘being Irish’

means without having to tie it either to a geographical locale or to the
ethnic marker of Irish language competence, for instance. Senses of
Irishness, representations and speech acts in Irish became unbound and
become practically explorable anywhere. But, would such a thing as an
Irish community abroad be possible? In order to address the possibility
of an Irish community abroad, it is first necessary to examine more con-
temporary critiques of the term community and its applicability.

Imagining Irish Community at Home and Abroad

The notion of community generally appears, in the beginning of the
twentieth century, to be part of a dualistic whole which exists to forward
the interests of the inner workings of structural functionalism, the indi-
vidual and community (or to the more utilitarian construct of group),
as examined previously. Raymond Williams’ account is one that attempts
to disembed the term community from its utilitarian capacity; instead,
Williams displays the warmth with which the concept has been embraced
and the homogeneity that the term itself presupposes:
16 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing

set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alter-
native set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike
all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems
never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing
or distinguishing term. (Williams 1985: 76)

Community, from among any of the terms used to characterise or map

out various models of territorially defined intersubjectivity, describes
both a state of existing relationships, but also (according to Williams)
points to the emergence of new sets of relationships.
This is a possibility that is overlooked in accounts that frame emigra-
tion in terms of the irreversible loss of community as such, as observed
previously in Brody’s work. What might stand in opposition to commu-
nity, at the ontological level, may be something akin to the felt belong-
ing that an individual has to a particular community, even if it changes
over time. This form of belonging is examined in Bauman (2000) who
takes this issue as his point of departure. Williams contends that commu-
nity’s primary feature, apart from its pliability, is its abiding quality, while
Bauman views it as a little more unstable than that:

In so far as they [communities, ed.] need to be defended to survive and

they need to appeal to their own members to secure that survival by their
individual choices and take for that survival individual responsibility - all
communities are postulated; projects rather than realities, something that
comes after, not before the individual choice. The community ‘as seen in
communitarian paintings’ would be tangible enough to be invisible and to
afford silence; but then communitarians won’t paint its likenesses, let alone
exhibit them. (Bauman 2000: 169)

We can see that because communities cannot be realised in one space

and time, that there is a supplementary and ongoing quality to them,
an agreement of sorts about their existence. Moreover, communi-
ties are postulated, unproven entities whose projects are ongoing and
whose priorities change over time. This is a much different tack than
the one taken in the accounts examined previously (by Arensberg and
Kimball for instance), given that Bauman acknowledges that communi-
ties become other entities and change over time. Community is put for-
ward in my work as a tentative entity which has a postulated quality, but
is one which is more useful as a collective designation than it is as an
 1 THE IRISH COMMUNITY AT HOME AND ABROAD 17

individually felt entity. In the closing remarks of Vered Amit and Nigel
Rapport’s The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on
Movement, Identity and Collectivity (2002), they contend:

Over the last three decades, cultural analysts have increasingly resorted to
this form of proclaimed category (i.e. community, ed.), fictive commu-
nality as the theoretical model for all forms of community. But some of
the most crucial forms of fellowship, of belonging, are barely marked by
explicit symbolic icons… But some of the personal links that arise through
these experiences carry on. Most people are able to transform some of
these encounters into more dyadic personal relationships that can be
exported into different contexts. (Amit and Rapport 2002: 63–64)

By fictive, I take Amit and Rapport to mean that communities are

imagined entities, by and large, and their persistence depends upon
subjects who can never be present or fully represented to one another
(keeping Williams’ definition in mind). We must understand that the
imagination functions in a manner that can create a ‘we-feeling’ around
remote or proximal fellow-subjects. This is a necessity given that our
later concern (in Chapter 6), the topic of the imaginaries, involves delv-
ing into an intersubjective imagined domain that comprises a community
all of its own from within. Anderson (1983) has pioneered this idea, and
writing on the idea of community contends that:

It [community, ed.] is imagined because the members of even the smallest

nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even
hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.
(Anderson 1983: 6, emphasis in original)

We can also come to know people, encounter difference and draw

linkages with those residing elsewhere through travel; intimacy, prox-
imity, and mobility are all thought to lead to the development of a
supranational ‘we-feeling’ (Deutsch et al. 1957). This is indicative of
a successfully imagined community and it is the commonly expected
outcome of intra-European mobility (this is examined more fully in
Chapter 2).
The seminal role played by imaginaries of belonging can be evi-
denced by examining how it is that we approximate sameness and dif-
ference. While identity is the subject of the following chapter, for now
it suffices to mention that the role played by the individual in imagining
18 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

a community can be observed in the intentional glossing over of a cer-

tain amount of difference between members of a group (but not all dif-
ferences). This has been noted by Guibernau and Rex (1997):

It is not simply having physical or cultural characteristics that is important

but rather the subjective perception of those characteristics, both by those
who share them and those who react to them […] It is political commu-
nity, however it is organised, which appeals to shared ethnicity and brings
it into action. (Guibernau and Rex 1997: 2)

From this we have the notion that communities depend less on cultural
similarity than on the perception or imagination of that similarity; this
informs how a given expression of a particular culture is thought about
and it is for this reason that communities should be thought of as imag-
inary. In response, academic practitioners should attempt to emphasise
the importance of imaginaries to how we view ourselves and others;
however, we must aver and avoid the reduction of imaginaries to some-
thing fictive or unimportant.
One excellent example of a change in the perception of a community,
and of its belonging and membership, can be observed in Noel Ignatiev’s
account of the Irish diaspora in America in How the Irish Became White
(1995). In it, the author reveals that the work does not concern race at all
but, instead, focusses on ethnicity and ethnic transformation. He writes:

In Britain, the Irish constituted a subject race. Because blackness was the
badge of the slave in America, people from Ireland who went there entered
the free labour system, which made them part of the dominant race. As
unskilled workers, they occupied the lowest place within it. Ethnicity
marked the spot. (Ignatiev 1995: 186)

Curiously placed in the postscript, this final section reveals how it was
possible for the Irish (not members of discrete communities or from
particular locales, but to whom the label was thought to indiscrimi-
nately apply) came to belong in the United States over time, through
changes to the subjective category of their belonging, i.e. their eth-
nicity. The previous examination of the anthropological/sociological
accounts of Irish people in the twentieth century was confined to par-
ticular locales, and the manner in which they perceived their daily lives
and the mode in which they applied meaning thereto. By the end of
 1 THE IRISH COMMUNITY AT HOME AND ABROAD 19

the twentieth century, the Irish subject seems to have become unmoored
as a focal point of analysis. Greater emphasis was placed on how the Irish
became involved in other claims of belonging and less on how commu-
nities sustain themselves. It is exactly this unmooring, the treatment of
a subjective phenomenon changes over time, that is the epistemological
underpinning of this current project.
Community, as well as other expressions of belonging and sameness,
can be thought of in exactly this manner, as merely a reflection of ethnic-
ity which is coupled with a presupposed, imaginatively proscribed quality
which unites those it is thought to encapsulate:

[C]ommunal, local, regional, national, and ‘racial’ identities can all be

understood as locally and historically specific variants on a general and
ancient theme of collective identification: ethnicity. Each of these variants
says something about “the social organisation of culture difference”…
They are, if you like, culturally imagined and socially consequential.
(Jenkins 2002: 125)

How communities are composed of a common perception thereof, and

how this determines the way in which we imagine other people’s lives
to be, is quite similar to a passage found in William Shakespeare’s Henry
V (1599). In it, theatregoers are invited to suspend their disbelief at the
stage on which the play is happening and are asked instead to replace it,
in their mind’s eye, with the fields of Agincourt:

……………….But
pardon, Gentles all: The
flat unraised spirits, that
hath dar’d On this
unworthy Scaffold, to bring
forth
So great an Object. Can this Cock-Pit hold
The Vastie fields of France? Or
can we cram Within this
Wooden O, the very Caskes
That did affright the Ayre of Agincourt? (Henry V, Lines 8–14)

In sum, this chapter has attempted to set the stage for how we might
imagine, and reimagine, the Irish community in order to understand
how it would function abroad. I have reviewed a plethora of concepts
20 S. O’ DUBHGHAILL

that lay the groundwork in terms of introducing and operationalising

a variety of terms, as well as complicated and problematised their all-
too-easy application. The chapter that follows takes this template, but
approaches how we might think of the Irish in Europe from another
angle, namely that of identity.

Notes
1. Malinowskiwrites that his brand of functionalism differs from that of A. R.
Radcliffe-Brown which he claims rejects the role played by the individual,
and their biology, and aligns his efforts more with that of Robert Lowie’s
ethnological enquiry (1939: 939, Fn. 1).
2. Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen’s A History of
Anthropology (2001) devotes only a short section to the shift in academic
fervour for Malinowski’s functionalism and Radcliffe-Brown’s Structural
functionalism in which they write: ‘By 1950, Radcliffe-Brownians had
secured jobs at Cambridge, Manchester and University College London,
and the Malinowskians seem to have lost the competition for academic
control… Functionalist explanations should always be examined closely,
to see whether they in fact specify all the links by which the “purposes”
and “needs” of the whole are communicated to the individual actor. This
will lead us to focus on process and communication rather than function
and structure’. (Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 72–75). The section, enti-
tled Functionalism’s last stand, concerns the entry onto the scene of the
sophisticated analyses of Gregory Bateson, the ushering in of whose work
is thought to have brought an end to studies which touted the centrality
of function and structure over intersubjective examinations of process and
time.
3. The trope of ‘vanishing Ireland’ is examined again in Chapter 6.
4. This is examined in Chapter 4 on the topic of the Irish college in Leuven.

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reflections on movement, identity and collectivity. London: Pluto Press.
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Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Press.
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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in the nineteenth century (pp. 79–92). Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press.
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7-25.
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Tíre, 4, 33–56.
Brody, H. (1973). Inishkillane: Change and decline in the West of Ireland.
London: Norman and Hobhouse.
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Berghahn Books.
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F., et al. (1957). Political community and the North Atlantic area. Princeton,
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Gibbon, P. (1973). Arensberg and Kimball revisited. Economy and Society, 2(4),
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Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became White. New York: Routledge.
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 CHAPTER 2

Identity Politics, Belonging and Europe

The earliest phases of the fieldwork on which this book has been based
were marred with many conceptual difficulties; one such example, the
particular difficulty of what exactly an Irish community abroad means,
has been the overriding concern of the previous chapter. Questions
that were posited about how the Irish community relate to their fel-
low Europeans in Belgium often resulted in hesitation or incredulity.
Informants would often take issue with different components of the for-
mulation mentioned previously. Some responded that Irish people are
also European, and there is no one Irish community abroad, but many, or
that those residing in Belgium were Belgian, not European.1 Additional
questions about identity, mobility and what exactly being European
involves (and if it is a thing at all) compounded these problems signifi-
cantly. One common refrain was that Brussels is ‘Europe’,2 a conflation
that can be observed in Fig. 2.1, while others maintained that Brussels,
and Belgium more generally, maintained a discrete identity of its own.
Similarly, the Irish community’s belonging in Belgium was also scruti-
nised as being either impossible or a foregone conclusion; on the grounds
of a shared European viewpoint, the Irish were already aligned with
their European counterparts, while other informants maintained that the
Irish community in Brussels was a thing in itself, something quite apart
and unique. Concerns were also expressed to me that my work sought
to draw lines in the sand so that clear-cut categories would emerge; I
expressed my disinterest in such cut-and-dry categories on every occasion
on which this concern was shared.3

© The Author(s) 2020 23

S. O’ Dubhghaill, An Anthropology of the Irish in Belgium,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24147-6_2
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
joyfully, and was pleased when all the slaves and maidens of her
suite were drilled like soldiers.

At last they reached Yemen—for, as you may guess, that was their
destination—and entering the harbor they cast anchor and remained
there that night.

The director of the port was notified of their arrival. He went out
upon the quay to look at the ship. When the magnificent creation
met his eyes he exclaimed:

“I am lost in wonder! Whose royal ship is this? Never has one been
seen like it. May Allah protect it from the Evil Eye!”

Then he turned and hastened to the palace, where he informed the

shah, saying: “My padisha, yesterday a ship arrived in port, of such
magnificence that no tongue can describe it. Diamonds and precious
stones gleam in every part. Your majesty should gaze upon it—for,
indeed, it is fitted only to be seen by the eyes of royalty.”

Then the shah sent his vizier to learn what visitor had come to his
kingdom; and the vizier, nothing loath, entered a little boat and was
rowed directly to the diamond ship. [216]

When the princess saw the boat approach, she caused the entire
crew to dress themselves in scarlet clothes, and, as the boat reached
the accommodation ladder, they drew up to meet the vizier and
escorted him to the captain’s cabin; where he sat down and began
to talk very politely.

“O, my lord bey,” said he, “the shah awaits my return. Your servant
has come to secure such information as may be granted. Will you
deign to give your honored name, that I may convey it to the king?”
“I am the son of a merchant,” answered the princess-captain. “I
travel according to my own pleasure, going only where fancy leads.”

After further words, the vizier returned to his king and said: “My
padisha, this marvelous ship is a merchant’s vessel, and its captain is
so young that he has neither beard nor mustache. He is a youth who
is like unto the fourteenth of the moon for beauty; and his crew is in
keeping with himself. Everything is perfect. Surely your Royal
Highness should visit it.”

This suggestion found favor in the mind of the king and wakened his
desire to see the ship. Accordingly he got into a boat, which was
rowed by seven pairs of oarsmen, and, together with the queen,
started for the vessel. [217]

When the girl-captain saw them coming, she ordered the crew to
dress all in yellow, and, as the royal party reached the ship’s ladder,
it was met with great honor and conducted to the captain’s
stateroom.

Coffee was served, and the captain conversed so agreeably with the
king that he was lost in admiration.

Finally, after remaining as long as court etiquette would allow, they

returned to the palace, where the report of the visit was related to
the prince, with such admiring exclamations that desire seized him
to view this wonder with the rest. He hastened to the wharf, stepped
into a small boat, and was rowed directly to the ship.

When the princess-captain saw him coming she ordered her crew to
dress themselves all in green; which they did, and received their
visitor with great honor. They conducted him to the captain’s
stateroom, where he began conversing with the unknown princess.
In spite of his delicate and skillful questioning she did not betray
herself; and the prince felt the same warmth at his heart which had
affected him at sight of the maiden in the window of the crystal
kiosk. He remained until evening before he could tear himself away.
[218]

Let us return to the princess.

Word was sent to the director of the port, and arrangements were
made to anchor her ship within the inner harbor. After that, the
princess, with her attendants and belongings, went ashore and hired
the finest house that could be found. It was situated directly in front
of the king’s palace. Here she took up her abode.

Let us return to the prince.

The next day, upon going to the place where he first had seen the
ship, upon the day before, he could find no trace of it, and beat his
head upon the ground in disappointment.

Then he went to his tutor to learn if anything were known about the
matter. The tutor’s answer was one which gladdened the young
man’s heart. He returned to the palace and sat down at a window,
to look at the house across the way, if, haply, he might catch sight of
the one who had so entranced him.

Presently the princess appeared at her window; when his mind fell
into a pitiable state. “A young woman!” he said to himself. “Who can
she be? She is so like him as to be some relative of the young
captain who so enchanted me. And both are like that wonderful
vision of two years ago.”
As he continued to look at her, standing there [219]with the curls
floating down upon either side of her face, he felt that it would be
impossible to find her like in the world.

When the princess discovered the prince looking at her, she drew
back hastily and the window was closed. But the poor young man—
whose yielding to companions had caused his undoing before—had
fallen more deeply in love this time. He determined not to be
thwarted, and went to all sides of the house, grieving miserably at
his inability to find her again. Finally, when night came on, he
withdrew into his own room, where he became lost in meditation.

At the dawn of morning he hastened out to the kiosk, to look again

at the other house; but, though he waited long, he was filled with
grief to see that the windows continued shut. Unable to bear the
suspense longer, he went to his mother, kissed her hand, and said:

“O, my queen mother! You have long wished me to marry; but I

have been unwilling. Now, in the house across the way, in the family
of this young captain, there is one with whom I am deeply in love.
Take her this jewel box, I pray. Give it into her hands and beg that I
may see her again. If this be not brought to pass, life will become of
no worth to me.” [220]

Very much against her will, but because she was a fond mother, the
queen, accompanied by a minister of state, sought admittance at the
house of the strangers and was admitted, with due reverence, by
the princess herself, to whom the jewel box was presented.

The unknown princess accepted it courteously, then summoned the

maidens from the kitchen and, without showing the slightest interest
in the contents, gave it to them.
The queen could hardly smother her indignation and surprise, as she
announced: “The prince, my dear young lady, sends you his very
special greeting and is very desirous of meeting you. What answer
shall be returned to His Royal Highness?”

The princess seemed lost in such deep thought as to be unconscious

of any presence; and did not recover herself, although the queen
addressed her twice.

After sitting some time the royal visitors returned to the palace,
where the queen said to the prince, in great anger: “My son, I gave
the box of jewels to the ridiculous young person in question; and,
while she was courteous in receiving it from me, it was given at once
to her kitchen servants. After that, no matter how I addressed her,
there was no answer vouchsafed. She seemed unconscious,
absolutely, [221]of my presence. I was obliged to return without an
answer for you. My son, you are no longer a child. Henceforth you
must attend to your own heart troubles.”

The prince retired to his own room and grieved all that day. The next
morning he approached his mother again and, after kissing her hand
three times, said: “O, my most revered queen mother! You hold my
fate in your hands. You are a woman. Can you not find some way to
the heart of this other woman for me?”

It was her only son who pleaded before the queen; and she, loving
him greatly, turned the matter over in her mind, until thoughts of a
very valuable string of pearls—which were her own private property
—came to her.

“I will give her the pearls,” she said to the prince. “We will see what
she will do with them.”
The grateful young man kissed both of his mother’s hands; after
which she laid the pearls out beautifully in their casket, called her
minister of state, and again went to the house across the way.

As upon the previous occasion, she was received with grave courtesy
by the young princess; to whom she delivered the pearls, along with
a more pressing message from the prince.

The young woman received the casket most graciously, [222]opened

it, turned to her pet parrot—which hung in a cage near at hand—
held before it the box in which the beautiful pearls were lying, and
waited, silently, while the bird ate every one of them; grinding each,
with a crackling sound, in his bill and swallowing it as if priceless
pearls made his regular morning repast.

In open-mouthed astonishment the queen looked on; then, without

having the ability to utter a word, she arose, swept from the room,
and, with her minister of state, returned to the palace, from which
the prince came running to meet her, saying:

“Ai, mother, most honored and beloved! Hasten! Tell me what thou
hast to tell this time!”

“Ai, my son! Conquer this foolish madness, or no one is wise enough

to foretell what will become of us. When I gave the matchless pearls
—my most precious possession—into the hands of this mad
creature, she received them courteously, but immediately fed them—
as if they had been so many kernels of wheat—to her parrot, who
swung in a cage near at hand. I could not speak for rage!”

But the prince cared for the maiden. Pearls were of no account to
one in his frame of mind. “Calm yourself, mother dear and honored!”
he said. “It was but an evidence of girlish waywardness. It proves
how unworldly is this maiden. Do [223]not be offended, I beseech
you! Remember! I am your son!”

All that night he lay, or walked the room, sleepless, and when
morning came went to the queen in a most humble and beseeching
manner. “Reverend and, indeed, beloved mother! I have here a most
holy book. If you will deign to comfort my heart by taking this to the
maiden, I trust that its sacredness will insure more reasonable action
from her.”

Truth to say, the womanish curiosity of the queen was aroused.

Without at all suspecting it of herself, she had become interested in
this very surprising young person, and, consequently, persuaded
herself to set off again, with her minister of state, to the house of
their neighbor across the way.

At this visit the young princess, herself, came down the stairs to
greet and escort the royal visitor into her drawing room. This
surprised and gratified the queen, who, straightway, put her hand
into her bosom and drew forth the Holy Book. It was received with
reverence, kissed three times, and laid carefully away.

At this the queen was emboldened to press the suit of her son. “O,
my dear young maiden!” she said, “since seeing you, my son, the
prince, neither sleeps by night nor rests by day, for thinking upon
[224]you. If he continues to be affected in this way, his days are
numbered. Whatever happens, his fate rests with you. Will you
kindly show your face to him once more and permit a little joy to
come into his soul?”

When she had spoken thus the one addressed answered: “For no
ordinary matter will I permit myself to be looked upon by the
prince.”
“Ai, my child!” urged the queen, “order whatever pleases you. If it
be possible, it shall be accomplished.”

“Verily,” was the reply, after long and slow thought, “let the prince
have a golden bridge builded, with roses planted upon either side.
Let him provide a seat at the farther end, in which, if he await me, I
will come to him there.”

“Very well, my daughter, I will report your decision,” answered the

queen. Then she returned, and, upon meeting her son, said to him:

“Of a truth, the sphinx has broken silence. But her demands are
most extraordinary. If you would see her, you are to build a golden
bridge, plant roses upon either side, prepare a seat for yourself at
the farther end, from which, if you will await her there, she will
permit you to gaze upon her. Now it is for you to say, my son,
whether this extravagant request of one who came to our shores in
a ship [225]incrusted with diamonds shall be granted. There’s no
divining her next demand.”

But the prince was blinded by love and saw nothing impossible
which would bring the object of his affection nearer. He caused the
bridge to be builded—as she had desired—the borders of roses
planted, and a seat prepared at the farther end. Then, after sending
respectful assurance that all was according to her requirement, he
hastened to the place of waiting.

Thereupon the princess caused herself to be arrayed beautifully and,

accompanied by her maidens, went to the bridge. But, in some way,
as she was crossing it, a branch from one of the rosebushes was
blown out by the wind and pricked her in the face. Upon that she
complained of being hurt, turned, and went back to her home.
Now, the prince had been waiting, in great eagerness, to see her,
and was heartstricken when she turned back. Returning to his
mother, he exclaimed:

“Everything was done according to her command; but, alas! she

went away before I could fix my eyes upon her face. I need not put
into words that which my mother can read upon my heart.”

Thereupon the queen became indignant and [226]hastened, of her

own will, to the house of their neighbor, where, after she had been
greeted, she asked why, with one half of the agreement fulfilled, a
prince should be made to wait in vain for a simple glance at a
maiden’s face.

“Ai, queen mother! I cannot go where thorns are placed to prevent

my passing. I release all claim to the bridge as well as to the prince.
Henceforth he need not vex his soul concerning me.”

“Ai, my girl!” exclaimed the distressed queen, “why will you put us so
to shame? There must be some reason for these ruses. Be gracious!
Unburden yourself to me.”

Then came this answer: “Verily, queen mother, since you seem to
believe the matter unintentional, I will speak the truth with you.
Make a golden bridge. Upon one side of it place golden and upon
the other silver candlesticks. Then let the prince die and be buried in
a tomb at one end of the bridge. Afterward I will stand beside his
head and his eyes may fix themselves upon me.”

Then the queen arose and hastened away in great anger.

“My son,” cried she, “the maiden, because of whom we are so put
about, went home because a thorn pricked her cheek!”
“Alas, that it should have hurt her sweet face!” [227]sighed the
prince. Then, arousing himself, “But what are we to do now?” he
asked.

“The final answer of this young vixen is this, my son—ah, woe is me

that the diamond ship visited our shores!—you are to build a golden
bridge, as before, and place golden and silver candlesticks upon
either side.”

“That is not difficult,” interrupted the prince.

“Wait! After that—what think you? My son, you, the prince, are to
die and lie in a tomb at one end of the bridge; after which she will
deign to come and stand at your head! O, my son! my son! Cease
this madness! Let me prevail upon you.”

But the prince became jubilant. He kissed both of his mother’s hands
three times, crying: “So she will come and stand beside me! Have
patience, my honored mother! All will be well. I will pretend that
grief for her has broken my heart unto death. For her coming one
can wait—even in a tomb!”

“Verily,” answered the queen, “you are the prince. You will have your
way. We shall see what will result from all this.”

The next day gold and silver candlesticks replaced the rosebushes
along the bridge’s sides. A tomb was built, and the prince, arrayed
as for burial, was borne upon a litter and laid therein. [228]

Let us return to the princess.

That night she asked permission from the director of the port, who
granted it, that her ship be taken from its moorings in the harbor. All
that had been carried from it into the house was returned thereto.
Then, with her attendants, she went upon board and sailed near to
the tomb in which the prince was lying. The ship ceased plying for a
little, and, when all was still, the princess stood at the bow and
called out:

“Ai, my prince! Here is the ship, and yonder is Stamboul!”

Then all sail was hoisted, and the ship sped away.

The prince, who was listening for a light footfall, heard the words of
the princess-captain. He arose hastily and stood up, in his burial
clothes, to see the ship sailing away. When he felt assured that it
was making off, he sank down in deep despair.

Arousing himself at last, he was borne to his mother; and when she
began to pour forth her indignation he prevented her, saying: “Alas!
alas! Now am I enlightened! The fault is my own. I have been loving
the same maiden all of the time. You have known, my mother, how I
was induced to leave the weeping princess in the crystal kiosk? This
is that one, come to avenge herself. Because of my former love, this
latter has been intensified. [229]Now do I understand why it has so
swept away my reason.”

The enlightened prince went to his father, kissed his hand, and
asked: “O, king! my most honored father, once more wilt thou grant
permission that I go abroad?”

“Most willingly, my son. Only, I pray thee, have a care for thy most
precious life! Go, and may happiness attend thee!”

Then the young man returned to the queen and said: “The way has
been made plain before me, O, my honored mother! It removes me
from the favor of thy presence for a little. Give me thy blessing, I
pray!”
The queen kissed both of his eyes, gave him her blessing, and he
went, at once, to set sail upon a ship that belonged to the fleet of
his father, the king. It is needless to state that its course was
directed toward the crystal kiosk. Arriving there, he dressed himself
in princely apparel, alighted, and went directly to the radiant
dwelling of the maiden.

Now, the princess had seen the approach of his ship, and, when it
drew near, she recognized the prince. With her maidens she met him
at the outer door of the kiosk and escorted him up the stairs.

When they had entered, he stood before her and [230]asked: “Ai,
adored princess! was it not grievous of thee to make me do all those
useless things?”

“Ai, my prince,” answered she, “was it not grievous in thee to come

in thy ship, to make me love thee, and then to sail away with those
cruel words? How does that matter stand before Allah? Was it just?”

“O, my beloved one! guilty, indeed, is he who seeks thee. But I have
suffered a hundredfold for all my fault toward thee. Is thy heart
stone? Canst thou not forgive? See, I am kneeling before thee!”

Then they embraced each other and were very happy.

Afterward the princess led her lover to the king, her father, and
related all that had passed. When the king had conversed with the
prince and found him to be just, honorable, and very greatly in love
with his daughter, his heart became glad. He thanked Allah that all
had turned out so happily.

The next day they were married, and the wedding was celebrated
during forty days and forty nights. Afterward the young couple spent
one half of each year at Yemen and the other half at Stamboul, to
the great delight of both kings. Thus two kingdoms were united and
all became peaceful. Salaam!

The End
 Colophon

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Told in the
Title: gardens of
Araby
Izora Cecilia
Author: Chandler (– Info https://viaf.org/viaf/311835681/
1906)
Mary
Williams Info
Author:
Montgomery https://viaf.org/viaf/541151246516744131118/
(1874–)
File 2024-03-23
generation 21:11:38
date: UTC
Language: English
Original
publication [1905]
date:

Revision History

2024-03-15 Started.

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