Agus Duirt Dia Leis An n'Gaeilge

When the Good Lord was creating this world with his palette of many colors in his nimble hands, He saved Ireland for the end-part of His creation, for the best oft comes at the last. And so doing the Lord said to the people He placed therein, “I shall make for you this verdant land of hills and cliffs, bogs and forests, yet I shall sow unto the soil rocks in plentitude so that though you dwell amid beauty your toils in the field shall be manifold and the sweat shall run down your brow. And I shall grant you beauty, yet I shall also set beside you over the low hills to the east a greater people than yourselves, who shall never be able to stay at home or keep their long noses out of your business.”

“Oh, that is harsh, Lord,” sayeth the Irish. “Can you not perhaps keep those folk at a distance?”

So hearing this prayer God with a swish of His finger created the Irish Sea, which served to stay the arrival of the questing Eastern folk for a small time longer than had been His plan.

The generations passed and the Irish survived though never thrived there on their harsh little island of beauty and pain, worshiping the moon and mistletoe and springs which welled from the belly of the planet, and they called up to God All-Powerful, “Lord, You have crafted our toils to be too hard. Our harvests are scant and gotten only at the cost of blood and exhaustion. Can we not get some relief for our weariness?”

So it was God gifted them with uisge-beatha, which the unlearned who came to Ireland and took this elixir home with them wrongly dubbed “whisky.”

Yet as was always the case in God’s dealings with the Irish, this gift came with a sharp second edge, and drunkenness and indolence, feuds and rapine, arose alongside the merriment and relief from the pains of weariness that also flourished with the partaking of this gift of burning water. Finally the Irish called up, “Lord, our ills are such that even the sacred amber dew born of the marriage of fire and water salves our hearts no more.”

So it was God sent a teacher, Saint Padraig, among them, in His joke making Padriag an Englishman, to teach them about salvation and the Heaven that lies beyond the mortal heartbeat, and for long and long did this oriental faith of sternness and glory, and virginity devaluing fertility, medicate Irish souls. But then the Eastern folk, never given to being content, as decent folk should, to stay at home on their own pig-shaped island, came unto Ireland, drawn to its beautiful scenery and its still more lovely womenfolk, and the Irish rose up in resistance and drove the Easterners home, yet when did a serpent ever truly depart from a garden? The Easterners came again and again, their numbers greater, their coffers richer, their arts those of trickery, bribery, guile and the ways of war which set brother upon brother, and in their wake was an inheritance of misery that was to plague the Irish for eight hundred years.

Their suffering was such that all the Irish could do was drink uisge to drown their sorrow, pray for entry into Heaven where tears would flow nevermore, and breed children, who, though born into hardship, would seed the future, waiting for a day when things would grow better and the Eastern folk be sent home again. And in these cruel times the Irish cried to God, “Oh, Lord, how might we tell the stories of our past, that we may remember that once we were free, and how might we sing the songs of our dreams of freedom on some brighter morrow?”

And God said, “Children of Eire, I will grant you mellowness of soul and eloquence of tongue beyond that of all other people upon the earth great and wide, that you might mourn through your voices and spirits, and with wit of heart and grace of tongue tell of your sorrows.”

And so it was that the bards and poets of Eire gained note across every land, singing songs of the devil’s burning years, of Cromwell the slayer, and the famine times, and of the generation of ghosts who dwelled among the bare stone cottages of Connaught, keening songs of their brethren who departed for other shores, never again to be seen in this hollow life, brief as lightning in the cloud-tops.

Then when the day came and freedom, so long a phantom’s dream, was won, God said to the Irish, “When have I ever granted you all your desires, but only a salve for your wounds? No more shall your island be as one, but divided head from heart it shall be for ages long and long, perhaps unto forever, and blood shall be shed over this parting, and hearts shall be broken. For this is My will, ever cruel and absolute, written into the laws of men, and so shall this stand.”

And so it was and so it is, yet one last gift did God the Irish grant, He telling them: “Greater than the fairness of the land, more soothing than a draught of uisge after hard labors, rising higher than the songs of your heart’s sorrow, and lovelier even than your womenfolk, shall be the wisdom I grant to you rooted in the thousand generations who have tilled and woven and fought and died there for your island, for you shall be the deepest of all my children, and this is the gift born of ten-thousand hardships I place within you, my chosen Irish.”

And so God said, and so ‘tis.

Amen.