What would happen, I wonder, if Michael Healy-Rae went to Europe? As an MEP? The comic possibilities would be endless – but would it change the bould Michael? Because rather than Irish MEPs changing anything in Brussels,the time Irish MEPs spend there definitely has an impact on said MEPs.
They may arrive in tweed jackets and chaotic collars and neckties,but by the time they’ve put in their stint they tend to return home transformed. The men in nice-quality shirt and jacket, their hair nicely arranged, and if you were close to them you’d almost certainly get a whiff of pricey men’s perfume.
Enda Kenny, we hear today has been given the inaugural Trinity European Inaugural Award in appreciation of his presidency of the EU in 2013. He looks somehow softer,more genial,more…poised as he holds his trophy aloft.
So does that mean we’re closer to Brussels than Boston?That’d depend on what you meant by closer. Europe, for many Irish MEPs, gets them away from the parish pump and gives them a sense of what a united Europe could look like. Boston, in contrast, takes us back.
I’ve been in Boston several times and I love it. The history of Ireland could be written using the city, such has been the Irish impact over the decades and centuries. They don’t wear patches on their elbows or embarrassing glitzy jewellery, but there is a sense of a city steeped in historical Irishness. And the weather can be great and it’s full of amiable young people eager to talk. What’s not to like?
Brussels I’ve never been to . I remember a colleague talking about how difficult it was to travel there, although that is probably sorted by now. I’m sure there are lots of people who speak English in Brussels but it’ll often be with the halting formality of someone whose mother-tongue it isn’t. And while the EU has done wonders for Irish infrastructure and Irish wealth, Boston has given Irish people an idea of how their ancestors helped shape the US. And many of us remember the magical wonder when a Parcel from America arrived. The clothes it contained would be cast-offs, but to us they were messages from a bigger, wider world.
So yes, we probably are closer to Boston than Brussels. We know the US president only too well, but can we even say the name of the president of the EU without resort to Chatgpt?
To sum up: Boston gives us the reassurance that the Irish were an important part of the development of North America, and who doesn’t love their movies and their pop songs? Brussels, however, is the doorway to a place which (pace Saint Brendan) we didn’t help develop but which has helped us to develop, at least in our thinking.
So while our relationship with Brussels points us the way to a new future, Boston is the place you go to get huge portions in restaurants while in the background they’re playing ‘The Boston Burglar’. Both places have a lot to teach us about lifting our gaze from our local parish and realising that while we’ve given much to the wider world both east and west of our island, we have much to be grateful for from both places. And if Trump keeps up the way he’s going, we’ll find ourselves growing ever closer to Brussels.
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