‘Would you die for Ireland?’ Notes on a masterpiece of video art
Irishness – like Britishness – has changed radically even since artist John Byrne posed the ultimate question to Irish men and women in 2003
This past week, the UK has been on fire. Across the country, gangs of anti-immigration protesters have attacked mosques, legal centres, people and police, spurred on by fake reports initially stemming from the deadly attack on three schoolgirls in Southport, outside Liverpool. The nightly news has been almost schizophrenic with two opposing images of the country – one, a diverse and successful place which writes a new success story each day in Paris, at the Olympics; the other, a troglodyte hate-nation with recidivist tendencies towards black and brown people.
This contradiction is nothing new. The UK – but England in particular – has never really been any one thing, but several different countries at once, depending on its mood and who’s asking. The American travel writer Paul Theroux1, who spent a lot of time here, knew this better than anyone else. In 1982, he travelled around the entire coast of Great Britain and Northern Ireland by foot and train, applying an outsider’s anthropological eye to a country that wasn’t used to it, then wrote a book about his experiences called The Kingdom by the Sea. Spirits were high that summer, as Prince William had just been born and Thatcher’s expeditionary force had just been sent off to retake the Falklands from the dastardly Argies, which they did by mid-June; imperial nostalgia was in the air, and on the front page of every tabloid.
Nonetheless, Theroux found that there was still oddly widespread suspicion towards outsiders, even from as near as the next town along the coast. In fact, people often seemed to be more hostile to their neighbours than to him, a Yank, presumably because his ignorance and foreignness excused him from small local rivalries. They told him stories which confirmed their local prejudices, and would recommend he entirely bypass the next town along the seaside on his trip. “Nothing was unknown in England,” Theroux wrote. “It was just variously interpreted.”
The UK has always worn many different masks. The country is both that progressive Olympic nation and those brick-throwing atavists, at once.
i. Translations
Let me pitch an idea. My idea is: Ireland is not like this, despite being the only country with which the UK shares a land border. I’m not going to make any huge claims here about Irish political nationalism – I think that’s for Irish people to do2 – but I think it’s hard to emphasise how strong Irish cultural identity is, in comparison to the malleable Britishness which, for better or worse, has been informed for several centuries by the fact that Brits subjugated a good quarter of the planet, first obliquely, through exchange, and then directly, through migration.
That subjugation fed back into the country: cummerbunds and gin and tonic are part of aristocratic affectation because of the conquest of Persianised north-west India; the rattan furniture on your porch was originally Burmese; those thugs burning down libraries in Liverpool get their name from a Mughal-era gang of murderers. British identity has always been an (admittedly rather long) two-way street.
But if Britishness has always subsumed and absorbed, Irishness has very often been defined by opposition to it. The Irish were the first people to be colonised by the Brits – so long ago, in fact, that there wasn’t even an English identity, let alone British. The first knights to invade Ireland from what is now mainland Britain were a ruling class of aristocrats who spoke a type of proto-French, not Anglo-Saxons. As such, you could argue that Irish identity from, say, 1170 to 1921 (and perhaps more recently…) was besieged, crystallised and tempered by attempts to eradicate it – coal turned to diamonds by the pressure of the mountain on top of it. It’s notable that the greatest play to come out of modern Ireland, Brian Friel’s Translations, follows the rationalising, post-Enlightenment attempts by the British Army to map Ireland, and rename places for Anglophone ease. In the play, the fictional village of Baile Beag becomes Ballybeg; in real life, Uíbh Fhailíi became Offaly, then King’s County. Loígis became Leix, then Queen’s County. Everywhere had an English name foisted upon it.
These centuries of antagonism have resulted in something tight-knit and defined. Years of attempts by the Crown to wipe it out – often literally, through force – have made it all the more important for Irish identity to be clearly demarcated and, where insufficient, invented. “Fields of Athenry”, that folk song which so movingly deals with the famine, and the subsequent imprisonment and transportation of a young man who steals “Trevelyan’s corn” to feed his family, was written in 1979. “On Raglan Road” was first set to music in 1971. Half the songs you think are timeless anthems of Irish defiance and romanticism were written in Dublin pubs at the height of the Troubles. (In recent years they’ve become a little more tongue-in-cheek; Christy Moore has a great song, “Joxer Goes to Stuttgart”, about the aberration that was Ireland beating England at Euro 1988.)
The whole point of Ireland is that it has historically developed massive cultural clout – the country surely exports more authors and actors than any other in the world, per capita – to survive the depredations of a bigger neighbour. It couldn’t afford half measures. Ireland has a recognisable canon, one which goes far beyond that of other countries, to the extent that it can be easily parodied by its own largest diaspora, every year. Everyone knows that the futher a man goes from his homeland, the more vigorously he will defend it.
ii. Dearcadh
All of this is to make the long-winded point that it was against this background that Would You Die for Ireland was created. WYDFI is a 13-minute video artwork by the Irish artist John Byrne, who put it together for an exhibition called Dearcadh – meaning “beliefs” – that was held at Kilmainham Gaol in 2003. Kilmainham is now a public museum, but in 1916, it was the site of a long tradition of executions of Irish revolutionaries by the British state, to which those who led the Easter Rising were duly added. Aptly, then, Byrne took to the streets of Dublin and other towns on the island to ask people a simple question: would they die for Ireland? There was no context, no follow-up – just a simple inquiry.
It’s worth a watch, if you have a moment:
Like I say, I don’t really have a strong political point to make about this video. I just really like it. I like how lots of the people Byrne asks are a little abashed, often answering with a laugh or a joke. A few don’t have to think about it at all, and reply with deadly seriousness – yes or no. Some get the joke immediately, like the orange-haired woman who says ruefully: “I am dying for Ireland. Bit by bit, it’s taking me, every bit of my body.” (Irish people are very funny!)
I like how people in the video have bad teeth and weird hairstyles, as real people tend to. And how they instinctively justify their answers – early on, a kindly-looking young garda chuckles and points out he could “die any night of the week” for Ireland, which is surely a slight exaggeration. One guy says he would die for Ireland, because “it’s a great spot”, which seems like the best and only real reason, while another says he would, yes, if he was a soldier, because “it’d be my job to” – but otherwise, no. Later, when actual soldiers are asked the question, they solemnly explain that “when you join, on your first day, it’s one of the first things you sign up for.” It’s somehow very funny, but also quite earnest at the same time, a little poignant.
Byrne, who was born in Belfast, also addresses the North in his video when he goes across the border and talks to unionists and republicans, including couple of middle-aged Orangemen. One talks about “fighting a rear-guard action for 200 years”, while the other notes that though the Irish are his neighbours, he wants to be British, and “British is an unfashionable word, even in the United Kingdom.” Nonetheless, everyone in the video is remarkably good-natured.
Around six minutes in, the Taoiseach3 Bertie Ahern appears. What a nightmare for his PR team, to come up with an answer that satisfies everyone. (Can you imagine the thinkpieces that would be written about Keir Starmer’s response to whether he’d die for Britain, no matter how he answered?) But it seems Ahern is alone, thinking on his feet, and his response is typical of a politician; he answers a different question to the one he has been asked, and he answers it several times:
“I think, in different situations, anyone would die for their country, if the situation was different. I mean, my father fought for his country, but I think that the fighting we have to do now, is to try not to achieve it through martyrdom, and that was – huge admiration for the people that had to do that, and the huge sacrifice [mumbles]. But I think the challenge now, for us to do, is for us to try to achieve what they had not finally achieved, but to do that by peaceful means.”
Honestly, Bernie, you can just say no. It’s fine.
iii. King and Country
Is this all a bit ridiculous? You know – men in GAA shirts seriously declaring that they would give their lives to the cause, if it came to it?
Obviously, people have died for Ireland, in great numbers, and not that long ago. I rewatched this video shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in earnest, and what struck me was how the question is both very silly and very important, at the same time. On the one hand, Ukrainians don’t get a choice in their answer – literally, since mobilization was introduced for all men between 18 and 60 in 2022. On the other, Brits and, say, Americans like Paul Theroux will never reasonably have to make that choice. But the Irish are (perhaps) in that weird in-between ground, independent for just a hundred years, on an island that is still divided – wrongly, many believe – but also realistically not heading into any sort of existential war in the near future.
Would you die for your country? Do you even live in a country where that makes sense, as a question, in 2024?
Byrne’s video reminds me a little of the infamous “King and Country” motion passed by the Oxford Union in 1933. The university’s world-famous debating society voted in favour of the motion “This House would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country”, 275 votes to 153; the result outraged the British press, and is apocryphally said to have given Hitler the motivation to act aggressively in mainland Europe, in the belief that the UK did not have the stomach to stop him. I wonder what sort of answers you’d get if you asked people in Oxford Circus how they’d vote, today. What you’d get back if you asked people in Blackpool or Margate or Scarborough. What you’d hear if you asked those men so enthusiastically burning down Merseyside’s libraries.
Something else that is striking about Byrne’s video is how uniform the people he talks to are, in certain ways. Byrne only asks three non-white people in the 12-minute video, including a black woman who says her children might die for Ireland, because they were born there, and a South Asian man who says that he’s a long way from home, but now that he lives in Ireland, he would die for it, because the people are nice. I think that ratio might look very different, even 20 years later. For hundreds of years, Ireland had been a country from which people left in great numbers; today, twenty per cent of people who live there were born in another country. Byrne’s video is nothing if not a time capsule.
And, in fact, the Irish have more in common with the English that they might like to admit: their own nativist thugs also go around looting shops, attacking accommodation put up for refugees while streaming it on TikTok, and rioting in Dublin. Turns out, they’re as bad as the rest of us.
I digress. Every country has a swathe of people who will embarrass them, if they put their minds to it. Would You Die For Ireland is still an interesting artefact, both of the past, but also of the present and perhaps – although I hope not – the future. Like all good works of art, it still raises pertinent questions. Even beyond the obvious one.
Yes, he’s the father of Louis.
Christ alive, I’m nervous enough as it is, writing about Irish identity as a Brit…
The Irish PM.