The Gospel According to the Parish Pump

---

Unity, that supposed virtue of nations, is in truth the hobby of despots and dullards. The larger the banner, the greater the fool who waves it. I stand proudly in favour of Partition — and not merely the historical one that saved Ulster from the tedium of Dublin’s moralising — but of many partitions: domestic, spiritual, and conversational. Every parish should be its own republic, every bar its own parliament, and every family dinner its own secession crisis.

We were Gaels before we were Irish, and the difference is not pedantic but profound. “Irishness” was invented by mapmakers of an English persuasion who could not tolerate the idea of tribes. They preferred a single colour to fill a page. But the world was not meant to be coloured in; it was meant to be argued over.

Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal — which is to say, he cannot resist an argument. Yet there is such a thing as proportion. The Táin Bó Cuailnge was an entire war over a borrowed bull and wounded pride; it left perhaps a hundred corpses and a thousand songs. Compare that to the so-called Great War, with millions of dead and not a single verse worth humming in the snug.

The smaller the polity, the kinder the quarrel. When we fight our neighbours, we must meet their eyes the next day. When we fight abstractions — “The Nation,” “The Market,” “The European Ideal” — we end up slaughtering strangers to prove that strangers matter. Give me the parish pump over Parliament any day; the former leaks, but it still gives water.

There are those who go looking for God in Rome or Canterbury or on the far side of death; I have always found Him loitering nearer home. He hides in the mists over the harbour, in the lowing of cattle, in the glint of a trout before Saint Pierian’s well. I see His blood upon the rose, His body in the loaf of Mrs Dooley’s bread, and His mercy in the forgiveness extended to a drunk who has said too much before last orders.

Meister Eckhart once said — and I paraphrase the good Rhinelander — that it is no use Christ having been born of the Virgin Mary thirteen hundred years ago if He is not being born in us now.

“We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.”
(Meister Eckhart, “Sermon 1: The Eternal Birth,” trans. Raymond B. Blakney, 1941.)
 

If that be true, then divinity is as local as gossip, as immanent as laughter, and as urgent as the next confession.

Patrick Kavanagh understood this perfectly in Epic:

“I have lived in important places, times / When great events were decided: / Who owned that half a rood of rock…”
 

That half-rood of rock was Ireland’s Ilium, its Waterloo, its Dáil Éireann. Greatness, Kavanagh reminds us, is not measured by acreage but by argument. The pitchforks of Monaghan had more moral force than the armies of Brussels.

So let Ballymagaleen be content in its importance: one parish, two churches, three pubs, and more saints than sinners. Each of us is both electorate and opposition. The village meeting is our senate; the backroom at Dooley’s our upper house.

1. All politics to be conducted within walking distance. Beyond that, tempers cool and lies travel.
    
2. All theology to be practised at the Holy Well, or failing that, over a pint.
    
3. Borders to be defended, invented, or adjusted as necessary — between fields, neighbours, and occasionally lovers.
    
4. Every soul to find God where they stand, whether knee-deep in turf smoke or in the back pew of the wrong church.
    
5. Unity to be opposed on principle, for in difference lies delight.
    

If we must have a constitution, let it be unwritten, unratified, and largely ignored. Let us live as a republic of small things — trout, turf, talk, and forgiveness. Let the world roar about sovereignty and union while we attend to the divine labour of mending fences and brewing stout.

For the truth is this: heaven was never distant. It has always been immanent, local, a whisper in the hedge or the warmth in a neighbour’s hand. God, like good manners, exists only where men and women remember to practise Him.

So let Ballymagaleen remain divided, gloriously and mercifully so — a confederation of sacred quarrels, held together by laughter, whiskey, and grace.