I've been Dreaming About Ryan Tubridy

I've been having dreams of late about Ryan Tubridy. Yes, Ryan Tubridy. I have been dreaming about Ryan Tubridy.

RTE was pretty central to growing up and I often listen to John Bowman and it really evokes 'the funeral (as history) in my brain'

A buzz word in my mature academic life was reflexivity - this need to be conscious of what we know, but also how we know it.

'To Brush History Against the Grain' Trying to better understand what has taken possession - the fundament ingredients of of We, You and I

So what has Ryan Tubridy and John Bowman got to do with this?

An important study in Ireland called Family and Community in Ireland from the 1940s under a theoretical lens referred to as 'a Structural Functionalist Study' examining the key spheres that moulded our perception for what constitutes Irish Identity.

As we know Dublin was a key place to migrate to; to get away from the country, and the roots of 'rural Ireland' took over many of key social positions in the civil services and the state bodies.

The historian Tom Girvan captured it well in the 1970s in the European Journal of Political Research 'Political Cleavages, Party Politics and Urbanisation of Ireland: The Case of the Periphery-Dominated Centre"

Garvin (2004) also noted how

"Emigration, mainly to Great Britain, was, almost proverbially, a way of life and it seemed to many that the entire independence project was a failure. The apparently dismal performance of the Irish Independent State belied the high-flown and ambitious rhetoric of the founding fathers and also questioned the formula of independence as the magic cure for Irish underdevelopment. The belief articulated by many eighteenth-century radicals including Theobald Wolfe Tone and Jonathan Swift that the English connection was the source of all of Ireland’s many woes seemed to be rebutted by the actual experience of political independence."

Kieran Rose (1983) talked about gays having to flee rural towns to the Cities: ‘The fact that so many gays flee to Dublin, and the big Cities of England, Europe and America, to escape the terrible fear, loneliness and oppression they experience here, saddens Kieran terribly’ (Dolan 1983).

Inglis (2005) says there was a dominance of ‘Catholic-church personnel in such key areas as philosophy, psychology, and sociology’ (p. 10).

Dr. Mel Duffy in Voices from the Hinterland: Lesbian Women's Experience of Irish Health Care, talks of curtailed versions as protective devices-a near invisibility in a social sense to adopt/survive historically.

When I started my academic and clinical trainings as a mature student in Irish Universities, The Vision for Change: Report of the Expert Group on Mental Health Policy was the Key Talking Point and its vision framework of Independence/Inter-dependence and Community and was a combination of socially differentiated spheres and our hierarchy of needs, reminding me of the study of the 1940s 'Family and Community in Ireland and it was revisited in the 1970s.

In the Lie of the Land O’Toole (1998) says of the Irish, we were

likely to be born in a Catholic hospital, educated at Catholic schools, married in a Catholic church, have children named by a priest, be counselled by Catholic marriage advisors if the marriage runs into trouble, be dried out in Catholic clinics for the treatment of alcoholism if he or she develops a drink problem, be operated on in Catholic hospitals, and be buried by Catholic rites. (p. 67)

At the time, I also started to look elsewhere TBH re 'Sanity and Insanity' - Order/Disorder - an awful lot of what was being rehashed in the educational systems, I found did not sit right with me.

Something very outsized/eulogia/romanticised; a feeling of the 'unhoused' and at times 'inhospitable' to different ways of construing emergent and transitioning experience as interlinked, but not truly nested in the territorial niche and construals of the person/interpersonal.

Instead, the procession for understanding 'the best china tea-set' in the house, the overhang of Corpus Christi, often linked to tenacious nuclear, restorative and domesticated frames of recognition for what it was like, what happened and what its like now.

Ireland is different than all the roaring factions elsewhere.

An important read for me that rubbed up against the tenacious idealism was 'Researching Beneath the Surface' and 'Hollway's Doing Qualitative Research Differently'

To conclude

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

"Optimism is a natural vice; Hope is a supernatural virtue"

And “Adorno claims Art seeks to convey resists complete expression in our concepts, in our language—but this is because what it seeks to convey is a critique of and an attack on our concepts. Artworks are true—and their truth is aimed against the falsity of our way of thinking, and designed to elude capture by that way of thinking.”

Excerpt From: Hulatt, Owen;. “Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth”. Apple Books.

As Latisha says

"Breaking the Cycles I was born into"

Latisha McCrudden, Winner, 2022 Traveller Pride Education Award