Separation Anxiety (3)

In an unpublished document written in December 2017, I wrote as follows:

‘Sheikh Khalid bin Mafouz, who died in 1989, a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, was apparently a naturalised Irish citizen.  He purchased Irish passports and citizenship for himself and eleven other members of his family in 1990 via Charlie Haughey.  Now this doesn’t particularly irritate me—I have neutral feelings on it.  But the question keeps nagging at me: Is possession of an Irish passport actually sufficient to make someone Irish, other than in some purely legalistic sense?

If you were asked to think of a typical Irishman, would a picture of Khalid bin Mafouz, or someone like Khalid bin Mafouz, spring immediately to mind?  Or would the imagination be more likely to produce an image along the lines of, say, some notional big red-faced farmer with a hurley in his hand down in Tipperary?

If Adolph Hitler had been able to escape to Ireland at the end of the war and get a passport would that have made him Irish?

Is the nature of being Irish dependent on nothing more than the random possession of a piece of paper?  Are we to be defined purely by our passports?

The fact is that the quality of being Irish or German or Yoruba or Ibo comes from the possession of a shared culture.  Tribes and nations have individual and unique cultures, different from other cultures, without necessarily being in any way inferior or superior.  A culture is what you are steeped in from the moment of birth, as were your parents and generality of your forebears before you.  It is something that you unconsciously assimilate in much the same way as you come by language.

A culture is impossible to define—as most attempts to do otherwise so amply show.  A culture is a living and rather sedately evolving organism.  It is like a giant tapestry to which each of us individually may contribute our few stitches without at all affecting the overall meaning.  It is our shared ground of reference.  It is, in our case, what makes us Irish . . .’

I quote this now in the context of the ongoing discussion of the psychological effects of the loss of kinship-based social systems.  Whilst Irish society may no longer be a strictly kinship-based society, it is nonetheless something analogous to it, in a way that, say, American society certainly isn’t.

More anon . . .