As choirmaster at St Ann’s Dublin, now many years ago, I inherited a set up that was still very much in thrall to the choirmaster who died about a decade before. Many Irish church musicians have reason to be grateful to what he taught them. He’d been in post so long that I suspect the men of the choir, who had grown up with him, were still mourning his passing. I arrived on the scene and it was soon made apparent to me that I would never measure up to his memory. My feet were in my shoes and not his, so I just about withstood the onslaught. Since his death there had been a succession of choir directors, none of whom had stayed more than a couple of years, and pretty quickly I understood why—there comes a time when you realize that bashing your head against a brick wall is unproductive. A particularly fond memory was hearing that as the men were queuing up to enter the church, they were kept waiting by someone or something, and were muttering about how long they’d been there. My 16 year-old son, irreverent and fearless, who had been drafted in to lend some accuracy and quality to an otherwise rather wet-dishcloth-like tenor line, could take this no longer and said, very loud, ‘and I’ve been here since 1654’. I suppose you had to be there.

Anyway, the point I’m getting round to is that here I’m much more aware of ‘the way it used to be’ than ever I was in England. This is surprising in a way, for the culture in which I grew up was almost Wahabbi – rural, isolated, conservative, women largely confined to kitchens and bedrooms. In church terms, while women make up the bulk of the congregation, and do most of the work, in some parishes and church institutions it’s all but impossible to get people to vote for them. I refer you to the blog of a neighbouring Rector who is much more trenchant about this than I am.

It’s a human characteristic to hark back to glory days that never existed, but some people seem very good at it. Perhaps it’s because in the old days the tribes were more clearly defined, and comfort was to be had within the fences they provided. The trouble is that the fences are pretty scrappy now: the trumpet blast of increasing transparency and mobility has brought down the walls of Jericho. And a good thing too, for such conservatism, whatever its benefits, stifles creativity and imagination. It can even be dangerous when its adherents refuse to accept that what was appropriate years ago may, because of legislation and changing standards of good practice, be inappropriate now.

To finish the story about St Ann’s, I quickly came to see that the choir of men and boys had had its day. Recruitment of boys was a mug’s game, what with changing family expectations and the move of schools and people from the city centre. Girls were introduced. Mutter mutter grumble grumble. Even that was not sustainable, so a semi-professional group was employed and the Vicar retired the men. I think, on the whole, they were relieved. There comes a time when enough is enough and we grudgingly have to accept that a decent burial is the right thing. In Jesus’s words loosely paraphrased, there’s no point flogging a dead horse*: move on, there’s work to be done.

* though quite a lot have been flogged – as beef.

West Kensington

Back in 1988, when I’d recently arrived from Nottingham to work in Dublin, an intellectual asked me why I’d come to Ireland to take a job that could have been filled by an Irishman. This raised questions of Irishness, charity, welcome, and his cerebral stenosis. And my sanity. Back then things were not so good economically as they became a decade later, so maybe the inquisitor was mindful of inherited notions of poverty that, if you believe what you hear, only Ireland has suffered. Self-pity is a wondrous thing. At that time we lived in a money-pit in Co Wicklow, and I worked in Dublin with, amongst others, inhabitants of West-Kensington-by-the-Liffey, whose knowledge of poverty, I can only assume, must have been truly profound. Once these people established that I was related to nobody that mattered and nobody they knew, I became invisible. This allowed me space to observe. And observe I did. Fortunately, I found good friends who had a surer grasp of Dublin’s latitude and longitude.

I come from part of England that has been trampled afoot by conquistadores from Scandinavia, Rome, Scotland, Normandy, Scotland (again and again) and Westminster. And now Brussels. The BBC thinks it’s part of the same region as Liverpool and Manchester. Other institutions regard it as part of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. People assume that my accent comes from Yorkshire. They are all wrong. The churches of the region are dedicated to people like Oswald, Ninian, Kentigern (Mungo), Hilda, Columba and—wait for it—Patrick (how that must sting!). Yet my worthy assailant felt that I was an unwelcome interloper.

I’ve been confronted by a similar question recently from someone who resents eastern Europeans taking Irish jobs. His family depended years ago on one of them finding work in London. Geneticists tell us that there is no such thing as pure Irishness, or pure Celticness, or pure anything. The Celts came from way over east. Aran islanders, I’m told, have genes from Cromwellian soldiers. This must be truly shocking. At a recent Remembrance Sunday political speech, I heard about the sufferings in the two world wars of the French, Germans, Belgians, and Irish, but only of oppression by ‘our near neighbour’. I heard nothing about the sufferings of the Russians who suffered more than the rest put together, but that’s for another day maybe. The faux-Irishness that has infected this culture seems to have grown up really as an anything-but-Englishness.

It’s undoubtedly difficult for outsiders to settle in these parts. Everyone is related to everyone else. Nobody will tell it as it is for fear of offending neighbours and relations. Valley of the squinting windows. This is all the more reason why outsiders are needed—to point out what needs to be pointed out, because locals won’t. Yesterday we heard that Jesus was hounded out for daring to tell his folks that they were getting no special favours from him just because they were his kinsmen. Scriptural readings emphasized that we are all in this together. Plus ça change …