SEANCHOICHE - TOGETHERNESS
I performed this at the All Together Now Festival as apart of Seanchoiche. Thank you to everyone who came down to support me. The piece is intended to depict how festivals can foster togetherness.
Part 1 - History
Festivals have been an integral part of Irish culture for centuries. Years and years ago, a long time ago, there was a festival and its brutality still haunts the hills of Leinster to this day. If I recall an account I read correctly from that of a poor farmer who claimed that people travelled from every inch of the island to attend. According to him men and women lay naked in filth, paganistic sacrificial rituals were held and demons took hold of patrons bodies and they danced to a satanic drum... but then they just cancelled Oxygen after 2013 which is a shame because it sounded like some fucking craic going by what your man said. But even further back than that festivals have been important to us. Ancient Ireland was a much different place than it is today, except for the midlands that has remained essentially the same and in some parts its even worse.
Around 1000BC, Ireland was fragmented politically. The island was divided into many warring factions, overseen by local Chiefs. Yet, they would all come together for one festival each year: Lughnasa. Lughnasa is a festival marking the beginning of the harvest season. The pagan festival is named after Lugh, the Celtic god of the sun and light. The Celts believed that Lugh fought two evil deities each year to guarantee a warm summer and a successful harvest for his people. Lugh must be getting the shit kicked out of him the last couple of years because our summers have been cat. Lughansa had a lot of strange traditions. There was a matchmaking component where young couples would marry a completely unknown person. This marriage would last for a day and a year and after this time it could be made permanent or expunged with no consequences. As someone who is allergic to commitment that sounds fuckin class. There was also a custom that if you had wronged someone or offended someone, you could make it up to them by ‘sucking their nipples’. Genuinely, a thing in ancient Ireland, you would essentially suck someone’s nipples to say sorry. Its good to know they had MDMA back then too. MD (I’m told) can make a man do strange things – like tell his closest friends that he loves them UGHH YUCK! I prefer people that are on coke because they may try to fight you but then they just get distracted telling you a 20 minute story about how they should of started that U16 final in 2008. Nonetheless, the celebration of Lughnansa is a bedrock for Irish culture. It is so woven into the fabric of our history that it’s meaning has carried onto this day with festivals like the Puck Fair. For those who don’t know the puck fair is a festival held in the idylc Kerry town of Kilorglin. Its 3 days of music and drink and at the head of the town there is a massive scaffolding with a man in a goat costume at the top. I know what you’re thinking: but Fionn that’s not a man in a goat costume that’s an actual Iive goat. To that I say no, it’s a man in a goat costume.
Part 2 - Identity
Festivals can be a source of identity. Ireland wasn’t always the economically crippled tax haven it is now, only twenty five years ago we were an economically crippled tax haven with bombings. The North of Ireland was once the antithesis of ‘togetherness’ and in modern times the scars of vicious war still remain both physically and psychologically. Bit of a backstory, my Father is from Laois and my Mother is from Tyrone so I have the perfect blend of ignorance and intolerance to discuss these subjects so, be at ease.
For such a small island, its amazing how removed the south can be from the realities of the North. I think this is epitomised in our flippant views of cultural celebration. In recent years as we Irish shed the belagured skin of the drunken, bowzy fool amoungst our European counterparts we were born anew on to the International stage. We stepped into the spotlight and allowed ourselves to be drenched in the warm glow of GDP growth and island kitchen countertops. And why not ? Beaten and bent for as long as we could remember we deserve to be respected as a driving force in the 21st Century… but that desire for expontential growth can leave the soul neglected. In recent years, you can hear people claim that St Paddys day isn’t for us, its for the Americans, it’s for the tourists, its an excuse to get stocious and rowdy and antisocial. St Patricks Day is nothing but Paddywhackery they say. But to my cousins and family in Tyrone nothing could be further the truth. To them the festival of St Patrick is a day when they can openly and freely celebrate their Irishness when it has been systematically refuted for centuries. It is a time when they can see their national flag fluttering in the wind without provocation or protest. It’s a time where they can speak using their national tongue without it being weaponised or being politically severed from their mouths. The majority spend their lives quiet and humble in a suppressed Irish existence. That is something a lot of us know nothing about. So I would disagree with the talking Ralph Laurent quarter zips and say St Patricks Day and festivals like it can play a pivotal in bringing a fragmented community closer together. Of course, their is a casm of disagreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP but perhaps a festival is just what they need to bring them together. Maybe they could go bowling or paintballing? I personally would love to see them go paintballing just to watch Sinn Fein TD’s pretend like they don’t know how to use a gun. Gerry Adams being like “oh is this how you aim?” and then getting more headshots than John Wick.
Part 3 - Wildness
It is ironic that I’m speaking about ‘Togetherness’ today given that I am at my third day of the festival and I am currently being held together by cigarette smoke, sweat and fear of the afterlife. The fear isn’t so much if there is an afterlife or not, more will I have my own dorm in Hell or will I have to share. On Friday, I was making my way in here and as you do, I was kind of in my own head thinking, and I wondered what the crowd will be like, will it be rough? And then I heard one guy turn to his friend and shout: “Fiachra, surely were going to decanter our wine before we head in?”. I don’t even know what decanter means. It reassured me.
These kind of festivals play an important role in our society. I feel like in modern times the lines between wildness and madness can become blurred. I’m from a small town in Laois called Mountrath and this is very much the case. To provide some context Mountrath is the type of place that if you wear a scarf and there isn’t a soccer team crest on it, its classified as news. The average person in the Mountrath thinks polyamorous is that white adhesive stuff that goes around your window. If you even ask Ciaran, Mountrath is most renowned for being “a good town to drive through”. That’s like saying “oh yeah he’s a sound fella over zoom”.
My town like every other town in Ireland is filled with men and women who drift between the realms of madness and wildness on an almost hourly basis. You know those people that are so mad that their elbows are twisted, their back is bent, toes curled. Its almost as if the physical atomical vehicle of their human form can no longer contain the volcanic lunacy inside them and they could burst into flames at any moment…. And then they’ll go into Centra to buy salmon and asparagus for dinner while continuing to be a member of the community. What if madness was only wildness that we don’t understand yet? What if we all have it in us?
Its why we come to festivals like this. It’s a brief window of opportunity to strip ourselves of the shirt and tie, the hellos and how are ya’s and just go out and be an absolute fuckin freak. I say freak in the most complimentary way possible. There is a sense of liberation that we feel at a festival which is unmatched in our day to day. I was at Electric Picnic and I saw a lad cleaning his shoes with a toothbrush… now he may of just been cleaning his shoes or he may have been losing his mind, and I like not being able to tell. This concept of wildness intrigues me, so much so that I often think about the man in the goat costume caged at the Puck Fair – as I alluded to earlier. I spent endless nights toiling and tossing in my bed wondering why he does it. I could take it no more, so I journeyed down to kilorglin to interview him for my news website, www.goatmyarse.com. I later realised that goatmyarse can be misconstrued as go-at-my-arse so I have been inundated with lude videos and requests ever since. When I got to the Puck Fair I pulled some strings to get a face to face meeting with this imposter, mainly because his handler was a fan of my website – for the wrong reasons. I asked him hard hitting question after hard hitting question for hours and he rebuffed every single one with some authentic and impressive goat like baa’s and groans. “This guys a pro”, I thought to myself. He stayed flawlessly in character for hours. His handler was in on it too, he would tell me repeatedly: ‘That’s a goat bai’. I realised they weren’t going to crack but I needed to figure out why the man in a goat costume wears a goat costume and I imagine this is what he would say:
“A town whose roads are usually free from the weight of passing cars, whose footpaths are bare and the loudest noise is the clang of the church bell at dusk. It now relinquishes its tranquillity for a few days in celebration. Celebration of what you ask? A celebration of you of course Puck, nay. I am but a vessel. I am but a lightning rod to channel your inner wildness. You say that I am a man in a goat costume but perhaps it is you all that are goats in people costumes and this festival and all festivals is our opportunity take off our false robes and be our authentic selves… and authenticity amoung others…that is heaven…that is peace…that is togetherness.”
Up paganism. Up Sinead O’Connor. Up Laois.
Thank You.