Being Irish and liking The Beatles

The original Dubliners

Here I am again – thinking; well I was thinking about something and what it is that identifies us to where we come from; I mean why are some people, a whole race of us, Irish? It's something in us isn't it's something in the soul – or even the sole.

The Welsh, Irish and Scots are basically Celts although there will be somebody to argue with that and say that the Celts are in the Baltic states or the Caucuses or some other wild place. The Celts are supposed to be wild and – I suppose I would have to agree with some of that as I've seen some really wild buggers on the west coast of Ireland and in Scotland. I don't think I've seen much wildness in Wales and there is another part of the British Isles that are supposed to be Celtic and that's Cornwall.

Up to the age of 5 I led as sheltered a life as any preschool child and spoke with the accent of my parents. We were an Irish family living in England but I only met Irish people; my parents' friends were Irish, their children were Irish and our grandparents were Irish and we all spoke with Irish accents; what else?

Then when I went to school I suddenly found that the kids and the teachers spoke differently; what was that strange way of speaking? They had English accents and I had an Irish one. So started my life of mimicry, I suppose, as I didn't want to stick out as being different.

I spoke with an English accent at school and an Irish accent at home; when I went to Ireland, which we did 3 times a year, they would call me English; that was my nickname. When I played football in the streets the other players would shout at me to pass the ball “Over here English!” they would say.

I would shout back “I'm not English, I'm Irish!”

Then I would return to England and school with an Irish accent again and when we played football and they wanted the ball off me they would shout “Over here Irish!” and I would shout back “I'm not Irish – I'm English!”

Can you blame me for growing up confused?

After a while what I was didn't matter; I got on with life till I was asked what I was and I had to say – Irish.

It's in us we're Celts.

In the 1960s my cousin loved The Dubliners and I loved The Beatles. I don't know if he'd ever seen The Beatles, and I'm sure I'd never seen The Dubliners, but we went our separate ways loving our Beatles and our Dubliners.

Even though I felt Irish, when the chips were down, and I had been thrown out of one or two pubs for rowdy behaviour – sometimes with my dad – I suppose I felt English till I actually discovered The Dubliners just like my cousin Eamon; they were magnificent.

I bought as many of their records as I could and that led me on to buying a lot of other Irish stuff.

I saw The Dubliners at the Barbican in London and people of all ages were actually dancing in the aisles. The rhythm was so infectious and tribal that I couldn't help but get out of my seat and kind of 'move' – it wasn't dancing but the whole of my body felt stimulated by this bunch of bearded big bellied middle aged men.

So I think the big thing about identity and knowing who you are owes a lot to the cultures of where you are from - namely the music.

I went from there to learning a lot of Irish music so I could sing it and accompany myself on my guitar and banjo; I was never a singer but I learned to sing and eventually made a CD – A Bit of Irish which is 16 Irish favourites but I had to lie about them being favourites as one of the songs was The Wild Colonial Boy, which I think is Australian and another one The Coombe I wrote myself.