England has its lions; Wales, its red dragon; and Scotland, its unicorn; but there’s no national animal of Ireland… So what should it be? The great Irish elk (which wasn’t exclusively Irish or, indeed, even an elk)? A hare, a stag, or maybe a wolfhound? Well according to Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Ireland ‘is the old sow that eats her farrow’ but that might be a bit too grim to stick up on a flag…
Myles na gCopaleen took a (typically) more creative approach in his novel ‘An Béal Bocht’. Flipping the island on its side, the writer located in its western peninsulas the legs of a great ‘sea-cat’ whose head was located in Ulster and in Wexford, its tail. In a footnote, translated from the Irish, the novel’s ‘editor’ informs us that ‘it is not without importance that the sea-cat and Ireland bear the same shape and that both of them have all the same bad destiny, hard times, and ill-luck attending them’. Hmm… well that doesn’t sound great, but that was ages ago!
It’s been 85 years since the downtrodden civil servant published his critique of insular, nationalist Ireland and things couldn’t possibly have changed more. Na gCopaleen never could’ve conceived of this sea-cat’s transformation into the gloriously affluent Celtic Tiger of the late 1990s. Indeed, if I’ve learned anything from my many childhood hours playing Pokémon, the Irish sea-cat is due one more evolution. So what are we now?
Full column in this week’s Print & Digital Edition.
