Colonists

I saw yesterday that this year’s Dublin Handelfest is being advertised, and perhaps unsurprisingly I felt that same ambivalent twinge of troubled anticipation I felt last year. The festival is great, with concerts and tours and exhibitions, but too often celebrations of Handel’s Dublin sojourn, like the city’s Georgian architecture or writers like Swift and Goldsmith, go hand-in-hand with nonsense about the eighteenth century as the capital’s golden age.

Such claims only make sense if we only care about our elites, the 3% of the population who could vote and who lived in the houses we admire today. They only make sense if we disregard the vast majority of the city’s population, the mass of urban poor who lived in destitute slums, the thousands of beggars, the thousands of prostitutes, the thousands who died in the freezing famine that killed up to a fifth of the population between 1740 and 1741 in what history would record as the 'Year of Slaughter'. They only make sense if we disregard the regular riots of the urban poor that the army was called upon to suppress time and again. They only make sense if we disregard the fact that the Kingdom of Ireland was what we would now call an apartheid state, one where the country’s Catholic majority were barely tolerated, their most basic rights curtailed and denied, discreet chapels only allowed in Dublin at all when riots were feared after a house where Mass was being celebrated collapsed, killing the celebrant and nine of those worshipping. If we disregard the violence, the robbery, the overcrowding, the typhus, the open sewers.

Pádraig Daly, the Augustinian priest-poet, has a poem called ‘Colonists’, in which he reflects on how we might be tempted to celebrate the domestic glories of those who colonised Africa. It’s not long, so I may as well quote it in full:

What hits you as strongly as the first blast

Of African heat

Is their absolute presumption,

Dividing out a land

Others had wandered since forever,

Erecting fences across the paths of hippo, zebra, lion,

Calling rivers for themselves and their bloated queens,

Corrupting the names of hollows and mountainranges,

Terming the old uncouth,

Patronising,

Slaughtering, 

Teaching servitude.

The beauty they achieved in their houses

And sweeps of trees

Is by the by.

I’m not saying the beauties and glories the elite of Georgian Dublin enjoyed amongst the squalor and sorrow of those they’d dispossessed and oppressed are ‘by the by’ -- we can, after all, enjoy them now. And, in truth, we may as well take advantage of whatever good that shower did. There was precious little of it, after all, compared to the harm they inflicted. But still: let’s not pretend this was a Golden Age; what gold there was shone among the blood and filth of a boot-trodden charnel pit.