Mairéid Sullivan

Contemporary Celtic Music, Poetry, and Peace in Ireland

By Maireid Sullivan, 1998

After centuries of struggle for basic survival, Ireland had almost forgotten thenobility of herancestral heritage. When Southern Ireland became a Republic in 1949 she began to throw off the shackles of the imagination that had oppressed her for so long. Suddenly, it seems, there has been a breakthrough and now it is time for the Irish to celebrate their freedom and success.

It’s not a coincidence that Southern Ireland is undergoing both an economic and cultural revival. The Republic has taken advantage of the resources made available to it from outside the country: Just as Japan and Germany did after the second world war. Good management of these resources has created a climate where there is no fear of insecurity or job discrimination and everyone has access to higher education. The tables have turned - people from all over Europe, including the English, are coming to Ireland for work. Southern Ireland’s foreign trade with England has gone from 90% to 30%. Ireland has aligned herself with the United States and the European Community. The island is fast becoming the gateway to the European Community for the US. Southern Ireland is now known as the Celtic Tiger because of her new found economic power as one of the leading nations in Europe

Northern Ireland has been locked in time while the south has escaped its sorrowful past. At the root of unrest amongst the people in Northern Ireland is the quest for equal opportunity between Protestants and Catholics. Government services and business in the North are Protestant driven and discrimination against Catholics has been a leading symptom of ongoing struggle. Sixteen states in the US have ratified the MacBride Principle which directs US Corporations to invest only in Northern Irish business’ which do not discriminate against Catholics. Members of the Northern Industrial Complex have to prove they are employing a certain percentage of Catholics if they are to gain investment from US companies. Irish Americans have been very effective in helping to resolve the problems of the North.

The North needs to be shepherded now, politically, to rediscover its identity and to take care of its hierarchy of needs; food, shelter, self esteem and self love. In truth, it needn’t take long to achieve a restoration of peace and prosperity, as the situation in the North is not really as terrible as the world believes. For example, New Orleans, with its population of less than half a million, experiences many times more violence than is reported in Northern Ireland, with its population of one and a half million people. Canadian journalist/author, P.J. O’Rourke, in the chapter on Northern Ireland from his mid 80's book, "Holidays in Hell", reveals that the military and the police agreed that the amount of violence experienced in Northern Ireland was acceptable for a cosmopolitan community, since the activities of the community are controlled by the two armies. It is the mentality of civil war that causes pain and suffering and poisons the lives of the people. The award winning docudrama, "Children in the Crossfire", illustrates how that mentality can be turned around when enough people in the community share a common will to do so.

With this new peace treaty there is a chance that Northern Ireland can concentrate on directing its resources to the reforms that will free her people to fulfill their cultural genius. Gerry Adams, the leader of the IRA party, Sinn Fein, said, "There are good things in it and there are bad things in it that people will have to get their heads around". David Trimble, the leader of the Pro-British Ulster Unionists, said, "I see a great opportunity for the start of the healing process here in Northern Ireland". Denis Murray, Belfast correspondent for the BBC, said, "Its almost impossible to overstate what’s been achieved here. It supersedes everything - maybe going back 400 years". And Bernadette Devlin-McAlister is worried that this treaty sets in law the competition between Protestants and Catholics. To have the voting majority, they must try to out-breed each other, putting women back in the kitchen!

The most forceful motivation behind this new move toward peace is the need for economic stability in international affairs. But, there are those who do not want to be part of a united political system governed by Dublin. This is understandable. The Protestant majority, who over several centuries have immigrated to Northern Ireland and now call it home, are loyal to the Crown. This is the first time in the history of the British Empire that an external political entity, The Republic of Ireland, has been offered a say on internal matters, championing freedom from discrimination for a minority group of its own kin. We are seeing multi-party talks where all will have a say on how the North is run. The North will no longer be governed by a single, centralized government.

The concept of centralized government is traditionally a hard concept for all Celtic people. The only time it has ever been used, as a last resort, in recorded history was when the various regions had to unite to defend themselves from outside invaders. The Vikings and the English are the only two invaders to have forced Ireland into centralized political unity in over two thousand years. Large centralized government was not the trend for ancient Celtic societies.

Historical research has shown that, for thousands of years before the Christian era, the Celts lived all across Europe in state/tribe styled groups of societies, each with their own self-governing political identity but sharing language and philosophy. The various Celtic societies were more like modern states, than tribal in structure, because they held democratic elections on all levels of leadership - even Kings were elected.

The Greeks, who gave the Celts their group name, Keltori, referred to them as the first philosophers. The Celts shared a lifestyle as rich as their ancient contemporaries, the Hindus. Their languages share the same ancient Indo-European, Sanskrit, root meanings. While the Hindus sustained their peaceful lifestyle of magnificent opulence, culminating in the pursuit of enlightenment as an inalienable right for every individual, well into the end of the first millennium AD, western European Celtic people’s progress toward the same level of high culture was thwarted by the expansion of the Roman Empire.

What has been referred as the "natural philosophy of the Druids", egalitarianism, personal sovereignty and self realization, shared by the Hindu Vedic philosophers, was suppressed by the Roman Empire’s westward imperialist, patriarchal push for power and property. Only Ireland was spared from the encroachment of the Roman Empire across western Europe.

A fragile connection was established with the Roman Church, in the 5th century AD, when St. Patrick shared his enthusiasm for the New Testament with the Druids of Ireland. His experiences in Ireland are well reported in his "Confessions". In short, he was a sixteen year old youth who was taken to Ireland as a slave - tending sheep on the hills for six years - before his education was complete. Being "brought low", as Patrick says, in a strange land opened up the mystic heart of Patrick and he was later, as an adult, compelled to return to the land of his spiritual enlightenment, his vision quest, by a simple twist of fate, as the Bishop of Ireland. He confesses that his skill with the Irish language was weak and his effort to communicate with the Irish, especially the Druids, for whom rhetoric - the "craic" - was a high art, made it difficult for him to promote the Biblically based Christian religion. He survived in Ireland because he was a true mystic of poetic sensibility. Patrick’s articulation of his beautiful spiritual experience was through the wisdom and parables of the Bible. Later in his life he learned the mystical poetry of the Irish and he was able to use it to translate Christian teaching into a form suited to the Irish temperament: Celtic Christianity.

Meanwhile, on the continent and in the same 5th century, the Roman Catholic Church was undergoing serious military/political threat while the debate regarding Church dogma on Original Sin vs. Free Will was raging, with Irish and British Christian Celts finally winning the argument, for awhile, against several continental Roman Catholic Bishops who were fiercely lead by Augustine.

Ireland remained a free country until the 12th century when the first and only English Pope and the English King took an opportunity to claim sovereignty over Ireland. And, the authority of Ireland’s ancient noble philosophical heritage, which affirmed the personal sovereignty of every individual, began its decline. As a consequence of the Roman Catholic Church siding with the Irish against England as a means of carrying out the Church’s ideological power struggle with England, the Irish were converted to Roman Catholic Christianity.

The north and the south experienced this shared history for centuries before the division of the island. Beginning in the 12th century and culminating in the 17th century, the English became the vanguard of patriarchal Europe when they began the obliteration of the whole of Ireland’s cultural identity by banning the practice of all forms of Irish culture; music, dance, language, religion and education. The island finally lost it’s cultural sovereignty in the 17th century, when the Irish Intelligentsia was destroyed, and the ancient Bardic schools and Roman Catholic Monasteries were closed by authority of the English Crown.

After 700 years without a national cultural identity, Southern Ireland’s only option was to become a Free State within the British Commonwealth in 1922. It took twenty seven more years of political struggle before the Republic of Ireland was formed in 1949. Ireland’s struggle to reinstate traditional regional autonomy failed when the English Crown forced a political division which left one quarter of the island under English rule. This is the cause of the current struggle being played out on the holy ground of Ireland. It is for the memory, the hope for personal freedom, of ancient cultural sovereignty and the sovereignty of the Island, that the people of Ireland have been fighting.

Out of this history we continue to see new national boundaries and political systems develop. We are seeing the evolution of the united states of Europe. Both Northern and Southern Ireland are part of that new structure. Northern Ireland will develop a fully autonomous state within the EC if the people can raise their thinking above the discrimination that divides it. This may take some extensive reeducation but once the need to fight for political autonomy has passed, an independent relationship with the Republic could lead to mutually beneficial sharing of ideas and resources. Larger political structures such as the EC and United Nations can take care of issues relating to military defense on behalf of their members.

Now that Southern Ireland is thriving, a very new psychological spin on the old relationship between the North and the South could have a good effect on the spirit of new strategies for success in the North. And, the new international context for the North’s political and economic future could mean that the cultural life of the North will benefit from the gains that have been achieved since the South began its own national reconstruction during the 1920’s, with the implementation of its isolationist policies.

The enormous task of reclaiming Southern Ireland’s cultural identity became a political act in every sphere with the beginning of its political autonomy in 1922. Political and cultural issues were intertwined. The National Theatre Society, which founded the Abbey Theatre, was sponsored by the government. Harking back to Yeats, theatre in Ireland had been political and became an integral part of people’s lives, not just a source of entertainment and amusement, but a source of mental and spiritual well-being. Yeats, in "The Moaning", worried about his responsibility for the fact that, after seeing his plays, people were going out to fight and die for their country. In the early days of the Abbey Theatre, O’Casey’s plays caused riots when he depicted Irish people as apathetic and opportunistic looters during the 1916 Easter Rising.

The political agenda of poets, teachers, and southern Irish Anglo/Irish and Protestant/Catholic revolutionary leaders was to build an image of unity and Nationalism while the people were looting shops because they didn’t support the Nationalists politicians who, they believed, were not looking after their needs.

Amidst this struggle, the education of the masses was undertaken and the reclamation of an almost lost culture was the foundation for this new educationally focused political movement.

Even the Gaelic Athletic Association was formed as a political movement to reclaim the ancient rules of play for traditional games, such as Hurling and Gaelic Football, by careful analysis of ancient myths,

The playing of Irish music was another avenue for political action and the listeners were fanatically political. The agenda was to search out the suppressed musical tradition and reframe it. In every sphere people played only by the traditional rules and if you played any other way it was seen as anti-Irish.

With the restoration of the Gaelic/Irish language, the door has been opened to the mystical heart of the old Irish. The language shows the possibility of a different way of thinking. People are moving back and forth across the threshold of time through the poetry of their linguistic heritage. The Gaelic languages are considered to be relatively uninfluenced by other European languages and so, share the significance of meaning of the original Sanskrit root language.

Only very recently has Southern Ireland become a powerful player in the international economic sphere, with an excellent entrepreneurial and management infrastructure. And, only recently, in Southern Ireland, have the people been able to extricate national political consciousness from the arts. In 1997, fifty percent of the population was under the age of thirty. The new wave of youth are the first generation to be freed from anti-British sentiment and civil war consciousness. They are now having fun because their identity is no longer a political issue. They are exploring new expressions in music composition and instrumentation. They are invigorating the arts with a more relevant and contemporary identity. We are seeing the true beginnings of a living culture - out of the museums and unshackled by the memory of an idealist, utopian Celtic identity.

The resurgence of Celtic music and culture reminds me of the comments of Robert Johnson, in his book "We - Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love", where he points out that whenever there is a resurgence of women’s freedom there is an accompanying resurgence in Celtic culture. Celtic culture was, historically, a unique "freedom domain" for women. Now that the feminine is on the ascendant again we can expect true visionary democracy and cultural transformation; a win-win situation for society at large and a deep relief for everyone.

And, of course, we know that success breeds success. The large population of expatriate Irish, in the US, Australia and many other countries, are beginning to share in the glory of Ireland’s cultural and economic flowering. This is a very significant moment for the descendants of all those immigrants who suffered loss of homeland and self-esteem. This is a time of true celebration for all Celts.

It is no wonder that we are seeing music reflect this surprising development in new recordings of various interpretations of the musical tradition. A selection of those with the title Celtic, amongst the thousands of others, are such titles as Celtic Twilight, Celtic Romance, Celtic Reggae, Celtic Zen, Celtic Country, Celtic Requiem, Celtic Journey, Celtic Harp, Celtic Voices-Women of Song, Celtic Tales & Tongues, Celtic Women, Celtic Horizons, Celtic Music French Odyssey, Celtic Crystal, Celtic Forest, Celtic Tapestry, Celtic Moods, Celtic Dance, Celtophile, Celtic Quilt, A Celtic Evening, and I’m told there is even a Celtic Roy Orbison. It is amusing!

Then, there is the proliferation of books on every aspect of Celtic history and culture - the list of Celtic titles is as long. For the student of Celtic history, there is a brilliant "consciousness heritage" to be found in the study of the ancient Celts - fascinating information to serve many interests. For a start, the ancient philosophy shows a unique attitude to one’s own personal sovereignty, a very modern theme.

While some people are raising their arms and complaining that "They’ve turned everything Celtic into a fad" I think we can find positive reasons to celebrate this surprising development. For a start the most obvious thought is that it could well be a reflection of the need to alleviate symptoms of urban stress. This is related to the self-regulation we see in life-styles right across society where people are free to choose from a wide array of resources to make the changes they need in their lives to be happier and healthier. How many people want to finish a hard days work, face the traffic on the way home and then turn on high-energy-demanding rock-n-roll music? There is a need for the restorative powers available in the diversity of Celtic music - it is good medicine for many: And, especially suited to the life-style consciousness of women who are now a major part of the work force.

Another thought that springs to mind is that people perceive the Celtic Tiger to have survived a long political struggle to establish a better life for its entire population. While the rest of the world is divided on the idea that it is OK to let a third of their populations suffer in poverty, Southern Ireland has shown a united front on this. Southern Ireland is fast becoming a model of good management.

The brilliant success of the South, after such a long struggle, demonstrates the possibility that when the political and economic needs of Northern Ireland are taken care of, the people can begin to reform their cultural identity. Then the people can return to their poetry to achieve their inner revolution. All people want to find love and to live in good health and peace, without the poisons of fear and hatred.

The real Ireland can be heard in the voices of writers, poets and musicians, the Bards, who are expressing their songs of the soul. They cross all boundaries. On the international stage they are reclaiming their liberty. They are reclaiming their right and their freedom to sing about their joy and pain. They are singing for the whole world.

Now it is possible for all of Ireland to endorse a new political relationship with the world and a new political context in which to determine sovereignty for the island. Deep in the memory of Celtic people is the knowledge that political and economic sovereignty will not bring back peace and happiness and joy if people neglect the sovereignty of the soul.

The celebration of joy that is at the root of Celtic spiritual heritage is expressed in the diverse elements of contemporary music.

The ancient heritage of the Celtic Druids calls for a place on this beautiful body of earth where everyone participates in the poetry of the soul and we interact with each other in freedom and peace and joy. Poetically speaking, this is the first position in the dance of creativity with infinite intelligence. It is the sharing of our personal journey.
The ancient Irish Druid, Amairgen, expressed this philosophy thus:
"I am the wind that blows across the Sea; I am the wave of the ocean;
I am the murmer of the billows; …I am a ray of the sun; …I am the fairest of flowers;
…I am the god who creates in the head of man the Fire of Thought; ..."

"For Love’s Caress - a Celtic journey" …toward freedom, equal opportunity, peace and joy!

About the Author:
Maireid Sullivan is a singer, poet, writer. She was born near Bantry, in County Cork, Ireland. She has lived in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. Her work is dedicated to researching and interpreting the gifts of Celtic culture, blending the evocative feeling and beauty of ancient Celtic melodies with new expressions of poetry and music.

"Never Drift Apart", Maireid's latest recording, released in september 2002, was recorded in Melbourne, Australia. Her first album, "Dancer", produced by Donal Lunny, was also recorded in Melbourne, Australia, and her second recording, "For Love's Caress - a Celtic journey" was recorded in Los Angeles, California.

Maireid is the author of "Celtic Women in Music" published by Quarry Music Press in 1999. Her poetry collection, "Ancient Self - Memoirs" was published in the US in 1997. Her latest collection, "A Young Woman of High Years" will be publishd in 2003. Maireid is also featured on the live duet concert recording "A Celtic Evening", with The Chieftain's Harper, Derek Bell. Her songs are featured on several Celtic music compilation CDs. For further information see Maireid's website, www.maireid.com.
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