The Last Storyteller by Frank Delaney Read Free Book Online Page B

was worse than ever. We used to have a joke:
What are the two things you know about the Dublin-to-Cork train? Answer: That it’ll break down on the way to Cork. And that it’ll break down on the way back to Dublin
.
    We were a makeshift people. In a makeshift nation. We were a curious hybrid; we came from a glorious ancient past, and yet we looked and acted like a recently discovered tribe, settling our disputes with our fists and eking out, for the most part, an existence with few comforts. No wonder the Catholic Church throve—as do all major religions where affluence has not yet arrived.
    Our food, too, reflected our state of undeclared poverty. The national diet continued: centuries of meat and starch, either bread or potatoes, with little variation. Some housewives cooked excellently, but from their mothers’ and grandmothers’ recipes, not from any new, cosmopolitan information.
    And this island nation still hadn’t discovered fish—which would have saved its people during the famine of the 1840s. On Fridays, when meat was forbidden by the church, eggs took over. Baking flourished: soda bread, pastry for pies, “shop bread” for sandwiches. Little else. The term “health food” had yet to reach Ireland—or perhaps even to be coined.
    In the clothes of the adults you’d have found not a ribbon of chic. A handful of women, from old money, shopped in London. The rapacious
nouveaux riches
, the green greed crowd, hadn’t yet been spawned, and if Dublin stores carried outfits for the wife of the surgeon, the barrister, the company man, they were rarely
haute
and never
couture
. In any case, fine dressing earned disapproval, because display of the body might lead to what the priests called, with a sinister grunt, “other things.”
    Those clergy—they had an absolute grip. They took command of the crucial arena between thought and feeling. Controlled both. Thomas Aquinas was the moral gold standard, with brides told, “No sex unless you’re trying to conceive. Otherwise you’re committing sin.” The subtext was “Have as many little Catholics as you can, and to hell with the family economics.” I visited a family once out in Barna, beyond Galway, the Quinlans—twenty-five children in a two-bedroom cottage.
    The bishops called it “faith,” but they told us what to believe in: heaven and modesty; the infallibility of the pope; transubstantiation. And of course all non-Catholics went to hell. “The big H,” you’d probably have called it. Yes, that truly was what it was like, a revolution waiting to happen.
    The politicians went along with it. They allowed a kind of social power vacuum, which the church filled. And as the church controlled most of the education, so the priests patrolled that fence, too.
    Some of the support for them came because people felt they owed the church a debt. After Irish Catholicism was decriminalized, in 1829, the priests seized the moment. They rallied the people. They led the campaign to take back the land. On ramshackle village streets they gave fiery, dog-collared speeches. When they had condemned the English landlords,the priests then carried the fight to the parliamentarians. And won—and in 1956 the Catholic Church still held that intangible but real power.
    Signs, though, had begun to appear, stirrings from the caves of the sages. The poet Yeats, the exile Joyce—even though dead by now, they had been pathfinders; they’d shown an entire people that the world of ideas belonged in the light of the sun and not in the dark of the pews.
    To retaliate, the bishops increased the pressure for censorship. The government censor banned Irish novelists as a monthly routine. Newspapers published the lists, and we laughed out loud, because the works of serious writers appeared alongside
Playboy
, or
Madam Lash
, or
Lurid Girls in Wet Rubber: Issue 14
. Yes, we were makeshift all right.
    You could see it everywhere. Consider that bunch of us in Randall’s house. He came from