The rural Ireland I knew is all but vanished

In their song All the way from Tuam, the Sawdoctors describe the world they had come from. Anyone of my generation from the west of Ireland who listens to that song will well recognise the place and people it describes. It is the world of growing up in the 1980s and '90s.

There is the travel to a match; the rivalries; the gossip and rumour; the flavour of the humour; the sense of everyone knowing everyone, of knowing who you are and where you are from. That world the Sawdoctors describe is also be found in N17 and I Useta Love Her; it’s there in vivid colours in their whole songbook. That world still feels very vivid, at least to me.

In All the way from Tuam, the Sawdoctors also sang of ‘Tom Murphy the footballer, playwright and singer, he left to spread his wide wings'. 

Tom Murphy certainly did spread his wings. The Tuam native is the most celebrated of Ireland’s late 20th-century playwrights. His masterpiece, The House, is playing in the Gaiety in Dublin just now. A fellow Mayo exile and I here in Dublin went along to see it last week. You don’t go to a Tom Murphy play to feel uplifted. You go to feel thoughtful. And going along last week put me in mind of many things, not least what has happened to the world the play and Tom Murphy describes?

The House was written by Murphy in 2000 but is set in the 1950s. It is a play about an old and ailing woman, Mrs de Burca, who has decided the time has come to sell the house where she and her late husband raised their three daughters. The mother and the daughters are associated with a man called Christy Cavanagh, a child not of the house but who came to it many times as a motherless boy. Mrs de Burca clearly has a soft spot for Christy. She dotes on him and forgives him much.

Christy is back from England for the summer holidays, as are many of his childhood friends. The bar in the town is full of their talk and bravado and their dynamic with the people who live at home is often tense. Christy’s desire for the house and the emotional support it gave him is set against his troubled behaviour and an unclear but murky present life in England. He wants to buy the house. More than that, he seems to want to possess it in more ways than simply owning it, and goes about that in what can only be described as an unusual way. The plot unfolds and it does not give too much away to say it is a dark and grim tale. The language in particular bristles: the energy of it will shift you off your seat.

The promotional material for the play will tell you that ‘no one wrote 20th-century Ireland like Tom Murphy’. Watching the play confirmed that for me. That was the west of Ireland that I was born into, even if I was born decades after the time in which the play was set.

It was a drink-sodden world. It was a world of returning emigrants, who were sort of welcome but where there was also relief when they left. So many of those emigrants told themselves stories about their life, their achievements and their relationship to home that made them feel better but were often – and sadly – very far from the truth.

It wasn’t just them. There was a lack of clarity and candour from almost everyone in response to what would seem simple questions. Shame hung around. There was a reality but also a falseness to many of the devotions, of the pieties, and not all of those devotions were directed to the church. The agents of the state too often spoke of duty but by it meant the protection of their position. There was the absolute emotional retardation of so many of the men, utterly incapable of expressing any feelings.

In a judgemental world, the only tolerance was for things that should never have been tolerated. There were terrible things done to the weak, things hidden from view. There was a pettiness to so much of life. There was cheapness in many, primarily because there was so little money. There was a narrowness of perspective and the fear of new ways, of both doing and thinking. There were secrets and sadnesses. And of course, there were always the great lengths to which people would go to avoid just saying what was going on – and then whispering in gossip whenever they thought the person most impacted could not hear.

And also there was goodness and decency and simplicity. There were comforts and courtesies and subtleties and strengths that the modern eye would miss. That was also in the play. You could summarise it by saying there was a lot going on just a little under the surface. And you can be sure that I missed a lot: you could watch this play many times and study it for longer and still not get it all.

It is a brilliant production by Galway’s great theatre company, Druid, and if you get a chance to go, you certainly should. But the point that struck me when watching wasn’t that it was a good play or a fine production. No. It is that it no longer represents a world that is or even recently was. Although set in the west of Ireland in the 1950s, and written as recently as 2000, it is a play from another world, a world that this modern Ireland – that this west of Ireland – no longer understands or can really relate to.

This world now is so different to the one I saw last week on the stage. People in 2024 openly talk about things that back then were actually unimaginable as opposed to unspoken. In this world now with new age spirituality, with an open focus on mental health, with a complete reversal of social attitudes to sex, with loads of money, and with a consequent materialism now that comes not from want but greed, with a diversity that would be incomprehensible to those people from the 1950s, with information now so freely available, and with absolutely no remnant whatsoever of the power of the church, it is a world entirely alien to the world of that play.

So what struck me watching it is that this tale of the west of Ireland has become a period piece. It is now like watching a play by Ibsen or Shakespeare. There is, of course, plenty of meaning and insight into humanity, but the world in which it is set is no longer familiar to us. It has become as far removed as Ibsen’s plays set in 19th-century Norway, or 16th-century Cyprus or Italy where Shakespeare set his scenes.

Or maybe all this is just me getting older, and not fully realising that this is what happens in every generation. That as we drive into the future, the past eventually disappears in the rearview mirror. Perhaps, but as I watched that play last week, I couldn’t help thinking that this fast-moving world of ours is just getting faster.

Whatever take you have on it, The House by Tom Murphy, a man all the way from Tuam, is well worth seeing.