Category Archives: Cultural identity

My gift to you for Celtic-Canadian Heritage month: A free book

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The Mary O'Leary Story

March is Celtic-Canadian Heritage month. If you, like me, are one of the 10 million Canadians who claim full or partial Irish or Scottish descent, this month gives you an opportunity to proclaim your heritage and celebrate it. I have already done so by publishing two books. One – Songs of an Irish Poet: The Mary O’Leary Story – tells the story of an ancestor of mine who was a renowned Irish-language folk poet of the 19th century. (Her name in her native tongue was Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire.) Normally, this book sells for $20 CAD plus $3.50 for shipping and handling. But as previously promised in the post below, I will give away a free personally autographed copy to the first 15 readers of this blog who get in touch with me during the coming days. If you are one of those lucky 15, you only have to pay the $3.50 cost of the envelope and postage to receive a copy.

Why am I doing this? Where’s the catch? Well you may ask. Let’s say that this is my way of giving something back, of sharing a part of my heritage with some of my fellow Celtic travellers. I only ask that in return you tell your friends about the book, mention it in your blog if you have one, send me a message saying what you think of the book, and perhaps post a review of it on amazon.com. I would also encourage you to check out my other Irish book, my recently published volume of memoirs, Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way from Ireland to Canada. Both of these books are my way of celebrating where I came from and how the fact of being Irish has shaped my life. I am very proud to be a Canadian – I have lived in this country for 45 years and been a naturalized citizen for more than 40 – but I also maintain with the old country a strong connection that can never be broken.

If you would prefer to receive the Kindle edition of Songs of an Irish Poet, you can get it from amazon for just $0.99 by clicking here. This might strike some as being a better deal because you don’t have to pay for shipping and handling. However, you should know that the Kindle edition is the “lite” version of Songs of an Irish Poet. For formatting reasons it does not contain the original Irish versions of the Mary O’Leary poems, nor the sources, references, tables, and explanatory footnotes contained in the print version.

Time is of the essence so act now. Get your free copy of Songs of an Irish Poet by clicking on the “Buy Now” button below. Enjoy! And do raise a glass to me on the 17th!

Calgary’s economic boom of 1912

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Eighty-nine people have already registered for the Community Heritage Roundtable on Wed. Jan. 25 when Don Smith, Aimee Benoit and I will talk about Calgary’s economic boom of 1912. It’s great to see so many people interested in the history of our city. This is the first of several centennial celebrations that have been planned for this year. Watch for future announcements regarding the centennials of the Calgary Public Library, the Stampede, the Grand Theatre, and other local institutions.

Where the heart is

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“Would you ever consider moving home again?” asked the cab driver as we made our way out to the Dublin airport after a short holiday in Ireland.

Home? I’ve lived in Canada for almost 45 years. I spent just 23 in Dublin. Much as I still love it, I haven’t thought of it as home in a very long time.

It is quite a different Dublin now from the city I left behind in 1966. The restaurants are more appealing, the public transit system more efficient, and the place is crawling with tourists, even in rainy June. They crowd into Bewley’s Oriental Café and convince themselves the coffee served there is better than the caffè misto brewed at Starbucks. They have their pictures taken with the statue of “Molly Malone” at the bottom of Grafton Street just like they have their photos taken on the Spanish Steps in Rome or with Eros at Piccadilly Circus. The Irish go to Bavaria for their vacations while the Germans come to Dublin. Go figure.

Molly Malone is the tragic heroine of a popular Dublin anthem called “Cockles and Mussels.” It’s not known if a real person by that name ever existed. Doesn’t really matter. She lives on in song and story like the heroes of renown. The locals, in typically irreverent style, refer to her statue variously as “The Tart with the Cart” and “The Dish with the Fish.” Dubliners love to give catchy names to public monuments. When a bronze statue of Anna Livia (representing the River Liffey) was unveiled in O’Connell Street in 1988, they dubbed it “The Floozy in the Jacuzzi.” Even the sculptor got a kick out of the name. The “Floozy” has since been relocated to make room for a singularly unprepossessing monument called “The Spire of Dublin,” which stands on the site formerly occupied by Nelson’s Pillar. Nelson was blown to kingdom come in 1966. The IRA claimed responsibility but charges were never laid. Nobody expected they ever would be. There was cheering in the pubs the night after the old admiral was finally toppled from his perch.

I climbed the Pillar once. Dubliners used to let the visitors indulge in that sort of activity, like kissing the Blarney Stone or riding in a horse and trap around the Lakes of Killarney. But I wanted to see the view from the top. Joyce used to say that if the British ever bombed Dublin, it could be reconstructed brick by brick from the descriptions in his books. I wonder if Joyce ever climbed the Pillar.

The Pillar and the Theatre Royal are gone, as are the Metropole Cinema and the venerable “Bono Vox” advertising sign on O’Connell Street from which the lead singer of U2 famously derived his stage name. But some things remain the same. The eyeless Bank of Ireland still has bricked-in windows all around, the locals still feed the ducks in Stephen’s Green with stale bread crumbs, and the traditional musicians still jam nightly at O’Donoghue’s Bar in Merrion Row hoping to follow in the footsteps of Christy Moore and Ronnie Drew.

Drew was an unlikely pop star, a basso profundo ballad singer who performed as front man for The Dubliners and knocked the Beatles off the Irish charts with his gravelly renditions of “Nelson’s Farewell” (celebrating the demise of the iconic Pillar) and “Seven Drunken Nights.” The Clancy Brothers did the same, topping the charts with such rebel songs as “The Rising of the Moon” and “The Foggy Dew.” Both the Dubliners and the Clancys wrote the soundtrack of my life during the 1960s and gave me a greater sense of my Irish identity than any of the historical propaganda drummed into me by the Christian Brothers through 12 years of schooling.

Dublin in the 1960s was a sleepy provincial backwater on the western outskirts of Europe. Dublin today is connected, cosmopolitan, and aware of what’s going on in the rest of the world. I like it better now than I did when growing up.

Would I ever consider moving “home” again? In a way I have, by writing about it. My memoirs will be published this fall by RMB. But my true home remains in Canada, in Calgary, where I have lived most of my adult life. Dublin bore me but Canada made me. It calms my nights and invigorates my days.

In praise of Cowtown

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A Los Angeles firm hired to replace “Heart of the New West” as Calgary’s slogan has produced what it calls a “brand positioning statement” identifying Calgary as “Canada’s most dynamic city.” How boring.  How generic. If tedious is what they wanted, why didn’t these American branding experts go with “Canada’s most entrepreneurial city” or “Canada’s most can-do city” or one of those other clichéd rah-rah phrases that  local mayoralty candidates include in their campaign platforms as if they actually believe them? How do you quantify such generalized claims? They are nothing more than examples of marketing-speak at its most banal.

I will admit I’ve never been a big fan of the “Heart of the New West” slogan.  It does have a nice hip, modern ring to it, but it’s fundamentally meaningless. What exactly is the New West? How does it differ from the Old West? Where are the boundaries? Is British Columbia included? Do you have to wear cowboy boots to qualify for admission? Does anyone, aside from the people at Tourism Calgary and Calgary Economic Development, actually put the phrase on letterheads. The Telus Convention Centre people flatly refuse to use it in their marketing materials, preferring to go with “Yes, it’s Calgary!” This unintelligible “Heart of the New West” slogan definitely had to go. We needed something better.

The American firm, Gensler, was paid something like US$200,000 to come up with a new slogan. For that kind of  money, surely it could have produced something more imaginative than “Canada’s most dynamic city.”

Let me offer, at absolutely no charge, the following as an alternative:

“Canada’s original Cowtown”

Yes, I know it’s a throwback to the 1950s. Our look-to-the-future civic dignitaries will undoubtedly cringe and reject this cowboy-hatted stereotype as corny and dated. They seem to be faintly embarrassed by the fact that we actually have a western heritage in this town. Yet they still hand out white cowboy hats to every visiting potentate and former American president. Because, let’s face it, this is what defines us and separates us from all the other major cities in Canada. This is what establishes our cultural identity. Ask anyone in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver where Cowtown is, and they know immediately what city you’re talking about. Ask them where the “Heart of the New West” is and they scratch their heads.

We have tried the ‘Heart of the New West” slogan for nine years. It was the chosen replacement for “Home of the 1988 Winter Olympics” and it simply hasn’t worked. The stylized cowboy-hat logo does offer a clue to what Calgary is all about, so it could be retained. But let’s replace “Heart of the New West” with a slogan that actually means something; one that salutes our frontier past. Yes, we could also recognize the fact that Calgary is the capital of the oil industry in Canada, or perhaps the head-office capital of Canada. But first and foremost we are the once and future Cowtown. Every Canadian knows that. Everyone who comes to the Stampede knows that. Everyone who writes headlines for The Globe and Mail knows that. Let’s celebrate that fact, embrace our western roots, crack open another can of Grasshopper, and throw another steak on the backyard barbecue.

Being Irish and being Canadian

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Here’s what I didn’t do on St. Patrick’s Day. I didn’t call it St. Paddy’s Day or the 17th of Ireland. I didn’t wear a green tie or sweater. I didn’t drink green beer (yuck!) I didn’t wear a button saying, “Kiss me, I’m Irish.” I know people who do these things. They have about as much connection with Ireland as I have with heavy lifting.

Here’s what I did do on St. Patrick’s Day. During the supper hour, I drank home-made wine and listened to John O’Conor, the great Irish pianist. He was playing nocturnes by John Field, the great Irish composer who showed Chopin the way. After supper, I watched a feast of Irish music programming on PBS, and marvelled at how the music seeped out of the kitchens and the pubs, and made its way into the arenas and concert halls of the world. I then re-read bits of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and remembered again that many of us leave Ireland because we beg to differ.

I begged to differ when my parents told me that a civil service posting was the best white-collar job in Ireland. I tried it for five years, and then fled. I was 23, and wanted to see what the rest of the world had to offer.

I arrived on Remembrance Day, 1966 – it’s hard to forget that date – and settled in Vancouver, where they said the weather would be the same as in Dublin. It wasn’t. Vancouver was wetter. Between November and Christmas, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. But I didn’t mind. I was in the New Land, and having the time of my life.

In Ireland, I had never thought of defining myself in terms of my ethnic origins. I was Irish, and that was that. There might have been some Danish or Norman in my background, but those long-ago invading Danes and Normans had checked their identities at the door and become more Irish than the Irish themselves. So we had been told in history class.

The Irish settlers, from the Celts to the Vikings to the Normans to the Scots, all became the unhyphenated Irish. Not so the Canadian settlers. They saw themselves as French or German or Ukrainian, depending on where their parents or grandparents came from. Being Canadian, it seemed, was not sufficient in this country. In a community of communities, it was important to known which community you belonged to.

Because I had just recently arrived from Ireland, my new Canadian friends expected I would want to become part of Vancouver’s Irish community. They invited me to attend an Irish dance contest, to audition for an Irish theatre group, and to meet an expatriate Dubliner who was singing Dennis Day songs at a pancake house in Burnaby. I passed on the dance competition and the acting opportunity, but I did meet the Dubliner, Shay Duffin. We formed a musical partnership, named ourselves the Dublin Rogues, and hit the road.

It was a great way to see this land of ours. Between the beginning of 1967 and the middle of 1968, we travelled the length and breadth of Canada. We played the Palace Grand Theatre in Dawson City and the Black Knight Lounge in Halifax. We shared stages with Anne Murray and John Allan Cameron.

I never gave any serious consideration to going back. Ireland might have formed me, but Canada had made me. It made me a musician, a writer, a broadcaster, a husband, a father, and a Canadian. Ireland was my birthplace, Canada is my home. It will always be my home. The winds may sure blow cold away out here, but they also blow warm with the promise of another spring.

Ireland, for me now, is as much a state of mind as an actual country. That’s why I didn’t wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. I didn’t have to do that to connect with my roots. I just had to close my eyes and remember.

Part of the remembering is the writing down. I hope you will be as excited as I am to know that my memoirs are going to be published next year. Yessss! Stay tuned.