By the time you read this, another Saint Patrick’s Day will have hit the skids and the world will be full of the Irish, yet again, lolling their sad sorry heads and recovering from their hangovers. I’m Irish, the guy next to me, as I write this, is Greek and I’m telling him that even before I got up this morning I drank a beer, got into fight, gave a long speech about religion at a bus stop and that this afternoon I’m planning to write an important novel and call up my mammy to tell her how much I love her.
All marvellous cliches and everyone loves them, except the Irish. Maybe not, perhaps we hold onto a few, just to keep the interest factor ticking over. The Greeks, like any other nationality, also have their own slew of cliches sticking to their shoes. There’s the machismo thing, my balls are bigger than your fishing boat, the dancing with the arms up, the smashing of the plates, the propensity for mistaking philosophy for total bullshit, and of course that ‘fondess’ for goats. What is true I suppose, is that the Greeks and the Irish do actually have quite a bit in common.
There’s the literary tradition that first comes to mind with James Joyce Ulysses – if not literally at least poetically. But it is the ‘poetry’ that makes this common bond more believable. The Greeks and the Irish do love to talk for the sake talking and don’t mind stopping in the street, no matter what they might be doing, for a bit of a chat. Well practice does make perfect. There is a strong oral tradition in both cultures, and a written one, particularly through the monastic system, and that through those monasteries a great deal of Western Culture was processed.
There is that joke, why did God invent alcohol? – to stop the Irish from ruling the world. The Irish are not really known for their imperialistic tendencies, which is probably why they are welcomed almost anywhere. That, sadly, on a more local level is largely a fallacy. The Greeks too perhaps…maybe? But the most recent of events with the GFC, the Greeks and the Irishs are neck and neck with their economic disasters and both are being told off by the Germans to mend their ‘ways’. And that’s what both these two cultures really do share in common – that lifestyle is way more important than the bottom line.