I’d biked into work, and I was listening to NPR in the shower. “We are getting reports that a small plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center in downtown New York…” Did he really say “small plane”? I believe he did, and that he repeated it several times, programmed, no doubt, by images of a plane sticking out of the Empire State Building, of Cessnas splintering against concrete walls.

At Vindigo, we straggled around our desks. We were still at the getting-coffee morning warm-up and half the staff hadn’t arrived yet. Should we get to work? We waited for a signal from Jason and the managers. CNN.com and MSNBC were overwhelmed, so there was no news from our desks. Eventually, we drifted into the foosball room to watch the local CBS affiliate, the only station still broadcasting.

A panicked mom called from the midwest: does anyone know where David is? Is he all right? David had left Vindigo a month before but she couldn’t reach him at his new office, a block from the Trade Center. Someone had heard from him, he’d had a doctor’s appointment uptown and he was fine. “Thank God, thank God,” she said, close to sobbing. Then her maternal antennae twitched again. “David is at the doctor? Why is he at the doctor? What’s wrong with him?”

Marci was headed to a meeting in San Francisco. Her flight had left Newark from the gate next to one of the doomed planes. She eventually got cranky word to the office that she’d been diverted to the middle of Ohio with no explanation. “Marci’s okay!” After a few days on airport Cheez-wiz, she got a ride back to New York a in a limo hired by a fellow passenger, a woman who produced Richard Simmons workout videos.

We got a group mail from a distant former co-worker: “We’re all fine in Queens!” In Manhattan, we snorted. Bully for Queens.

I felt outside it all, an imposter. Instead of horror and grief, I felt weirdly thrilled as the great dramatic event unfolded, caught up in silently practising “I was there that day, you know…“. I watched my friends’ stricken reactions and tried to mirror them, the strategy of a good immigrant. No one knew what to do, not the fluff-trained newscasters, not the Manhattanites who watched the TV towers fall over and over just a mile or two from reality. They groped for narrative sense. “It’s like…” “It’s like…”

I was angry at the co-workers who went on the roof to take photos as the towers collapsed. Ghouls, I thought then, though that makes no sense to me now. If we wanted to help, I said crossly, we should give blood. I wanted, in fact, to make a big show of being normal, practical, of getting on with things. I went back to my desk to send ostentatious business emails. I dug these out of my Outbox months later and sat amazed at these fatuous messages, requests for copy approval on a newsletter that would never be sent. Did I think it would make me seem hard-nosed and professional, a real New York pro?

By lunchtime we had figured out where to give blood, at the Red Cross Center on the Upper West Side. It was one of those perfect days that was too hot for me, and I worried about my face burning as we walked fifty blocks north in a straggly group. Everyone was moving north. I saw people eating icecream and wanted some, but it seemed faintly sacriligious. Outside the Red Cross there was chaos. People yakked on the few remaining cellphone connections. Volunteers handed out forms and told us to come back tomorrow, they were awash in donated blood. They didn’t want mine anyway; I’d lived in London and might have a mad cow taint. Instead I drifted towards Central Park to meet my sister, needing the company of a fellow faker. Then I walked back to collect my bike from the office and sat down to write a few more self-righteous business emails.

I remember the smell of the burning. I remember the thrill of the carfree streets, the Manhattan Bridge choked with dazed pedestrians who kept craning back to look at the clouds of smoke coloring the sun a sunset orange in the middle of the day. I took photos on my digital camera, lost now, and tried to hide how festive I felt, excited by a carnival world where rules were turned upside down.

In the weeks afterwards we were afraid. The first round of anthrax letters were processed through the post office on 30th Street, a block from the office. Subway stations were pits of fear. Heads snapped up when the F16 fighter jets flew overhead. People were evacuated from their buildings, over and over, for weeks, and I was relieved to sleep in Brooklyn every night. At the weekend we lingered by the railings in Brooklyn Heights, reading the messages of grief tied to the bars in sight of the gaping lack still marked by plumes of smoke. Candles dripped wax all over the promenade, bouquets of rotting flowers were stacked high. We wondered if downtown would always smell of acrid smoke. We wondered if it would ever rain again.

In Brooklyn, charred words floated in the streets: burning Dilbert calendars, safety memos, meeting notes. Four doors down, someone had lost a son. We passed the grieving friends and neighbors quietly, heads down. Gennie Gambale had lived on the block behind ours. Now she smiled out of thousands of posters pleading for information on where she was. Her family had plastered every block in the five boroughs, it seemed. Gennie smiled from the TV coverage, from the New York Times, literally the poster girl for the missing. Every night for weeks neighbors gathered at the gate of her family’s home, staring up at the candles in her bedroom window. I could hear the sobbing as I rode my bike home.

A few days later I sat next to a Ground Zero worker on the subway. His overalls and safety boots were covered in dust, and he wore them proudly; people thanked him for helping. He was a metalworker. The money was good, he said, and it looked like it would keep going for months, great for the family. The food was fucking fantastic. All these restaurant people were bringing food every day, as much as you wanted. And bagels, Danishes, all day long, you could barely move with the food.
Then his voice dropped. They weren’t finding bodies, he said. Just parts.

The New York streets were like Babel before an angry God introduced tongues. Every knot of people was telling the same story; only the accents and the details differed. Every day brought new details: the firefighter’s funeral on 30th Street, station colleagues lined up in dress uniforms while a single trumpet played. Numbers of the missing were revised down or up, friends of friends added to the list. There were subway evacuation scares. Calls to accompany Muslim women shopping on Atlantic Avenue, where they were too frightened to go out.
“I was in the subway…”
“I was supposed to be doing a Series 7 exam there next Tuesday…”
“I had a shrink appointment in midtown, otherwise…”
“My neighbor’s brother…”
“My friend’s sister…”

All over the world, people have wanted to tell me what they were doing when they heard that the World Trade Center had been attacked.
“I was at the Home Hardware in Kitchener getting drywall. The girl at the checkout told me.”
“We were on holiday in Greece. We were having coffee after lunch when the people at the next table told us. It didn’t make sense”
In a hilltop monastery in Burma, a country cut off from the world for over over forty years, a Buddhist abbot carefully explained to me what had happened. There were two big houses in America, and they fell down and many people died. Now there was soon a war to punish the people who made them fall…

When you tell a story over and over, it becomes a part of you. The meaning surfaces from a place deeper than a watchful mind can reach. The grief for all those lives, for all that my city lost, for the painful changes it brought, was slow to percolate. Now it grabs at my heart from unexpected places, like a cinema in Mexico City, watching the credits for Scorcese’s Gangs of New York. It was months after September 11th when I found that even a picture of the towers would bring fast, hot tears. It was perhaps a year before I realized how much it had changed my life. I am still telling myself this story.

This summer I found a picture taken at a SoHo roof-garden party in June 2000. We were celebrating a round of big-bucks funding in an optimistic time. I am beaming, and the Twin Towers sprout from my head; glorious, silly, silvery Deely-boppers. Look, ma, I’m on top of the world.

Mark’s photos of September 11th.

I asked Canada for a driving licence, and they fell for it. (Yes, with no more than tourist status and two pieces of foreign ID, I can legally get a licence here. Heartening for me, terrifying, I imagine, for North American citizens on both sides of a porous border.)

On my second-last trip to the big city, I speed-read the Ontario Driver’s Handbook in the car, then lined up to take a written test with a clutch of surly teenagers and a few bewildered dodderers. I passed the vision test with a LASIKed squint and gave them one hundred Queen dollars, my passport, a credit card, and my sister’s address. They gave me an Ontario Driver’s Licence, Class G1. Now that I exist officially, I will use this little plastic card to jimmy the doors to Canadian success.

It was always humiliating to be asked for identification in the US, though I miss it now I’m a raddled spinster.
   “Driver’s licence,” the guy on the velvet rope at Chelsea Billiards would say.
   “I don’t have one. Sorry.”
   “I can’t let you in without proof of age. You don’t have a driver’s licence?”
   “I can’t drive.“
This was a bizarre admission in the United States, even in New York. Like saying “Sorry, I never went through puberty” or “I never learned to wipe my ass.” Outside New York, it would have be easier to explain that I’d never bothered learning to walk; a less useful skill, surely.

Thing is, I did know how to drive. My Dad taught me when I was seventeen. Stick-shift, too: we don’t hold with wussy automatic transmissions. When my learner’s licence arrived, Ranger Tim volunteered to let me drive him to the big city in his Honda Accord, which rolled off the assembly line soon after my first driving lessons fourteen years ago.

Though I never passed (or sat) a test, it’s just like riding a two-ton, fume-belching bicycle. It took a few attempts to reverse down the dirt track and around the big red pine, and then—oops—I drove up the left side of the gravel road to the highway. But after these hiccups I was disappointingly competent. No comedy gear-screeches, no amusing dings and scrapes, no juddering down the highway in the wrong gear, wailing apologies. I pulled into and out of the petrol station without incident, and even avoided the two deer out for a stroll on Highway 17. I drove all the way to Sault Sainte Marie and through the first set of traffic lights before we swapped seats for in-town safety. My only eccentricity on the open road is playing a 40-kilometer speed band like a scale. In real life I’m a cautious scaredy-cat, but in a car it turns out I drift towards 120 kph.
   “Speed, Dervala, speed,” muttered Tim as he tapped the invisible passenger brake.

Driving is fun, sort of. It’s a game, except when I remember that I have charge of enough speeding metal to maim and kill far more people than I could otherwise. Other drivers aren’t quite human, they are fellow car operators in a private world with a private soundtrack. We don’t greet each other or check out each other’s clothes, and they look straight ahead when they overtake me. The countryside is no longer real either; it’s a backdrop that passes quickly on a screen. I scan it for obstacles, and deer appear in my peripheral vision like Space Invaders. Pow. My side of the road switches from one lane to two, and back to one, and I try to colour inside the lines with the tip of my car. I can’t imagine doing this for several hours a day just to get to and from work; how lonely.

My Dublin friend Joy had just sent me a rant about a miserable holiday on Cape Cod (made worse because she had ripped off a toenail in a fall from her bike the day before she left, and is too pregnant for painkillers):

We foreigners seem to be slow to adapt to America’s autocracy. Justin, another Dub and a California transplant, writes:

That is our difficulty. Europe isn’t a paradise of villagers strolling from boulangerie to boucherie, pausing to chat in the village green. Of course we drive everywhere—just look at our newly fat backsides. What we can’t understand is how people could accept that cars should shove everything else off the road: bicycles, walkers, runners, rollerskaters, Vespas, baby buggies. A cyclist in the US is six times more likely to get squashed than a European riding a bike, quotes the Philadelphia Inquirer (via Justin), and as a former bicycle commuter, it feels true. It’s not malicious, but American drivers don’t expect to have to share the road. The absurdity of people driving to a gym to walk on a treadmill because they have no footpaths in their suburbs is depressing. It’s a degradation that would seem cooked up by the car companies and the anti-depressant makers if it weren’t apparent just how willingly we are seduced by the ease of the car.

One reason I never took a driving test, I think, was a superstitious hope that my lack would protect me from living like that. I’m drawn to the lure of the car. It would have been a burden in my butcher-baker-and-candlestick-maker Brooklyn neighbourhood, but just about everywhere else it’s addictively handy, if not essential. I turn into a sloth as soon as I’m behind the wheel: I want that parking space at the door of the shopping centre, and I’ll prowl the car park to get it. Stepping out, my legs feel boringly slow, as if I’d taken off RollerBlades. (For much the same reason, I don’t own a television: I like it so much I turn into a glazed TiVO donut.)

Without a driving licence, I had to live in places with good public transport, good street life, plenty of small shops. They were densely-populated, so I had to live in small spaces. This was fine—without a car, you can only drag home as much stuff as you can carry, or fling into a taxi. Without a car, I couldn’t accumulate the mound of stuff and consequent responsibilities that I would have used as an excuse not to travel.

But Canada is just too damn big for even my patient legs, and the nearest grocery is an hour and a half from my log cabin. I even concede that some people in these parts, chugging up the unmaintained Frater Road in winter, say, might actually need those great big SUVs. And to all the people who have patiently chauffered me for the past 31 years, thank you. I’ll do my share of the driving next time. I know I can’t rely on freeloading charm and beef jerky bribes forever.

Further reading:
“As Suburbs Grow, So Do Waistlines.“—New York Times
“First comes the suburban sprawl, then the spread“—Philadelphia Inquirer

Our young friend Ella, freshly three, has suffered nightmares on her last few sleepovers at my sister’s house. But it’s hard to keep a straight face on the midnight comfort runs when Ella sobs “Little pigs are trying to tickle me.”

How fast I switched off NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion was a measure how alert I was on a given Sunday morning in New York. Sometimes I caught the theme music: click, and it was gone. Mostly I became aware of a creeping irritation that I eventually traced to Garrison Keillor’s undertaker’s voice and folksy—bleurgh—wit. I read a few pages of one of his books and felt the same way.

But I loved his Salon advice column, Mr. Blue. The same codger who produced unfunny Olde Tyme radio skits every week turned out to be wise, sympathetic, human, and witty when asked for help. His replacement, Cary Tennis, does a fine if eccentric job, but I miss Mr. Blue and was glad he was back in a one-off interview in last week’s Salon. (Promoting a new book based loosely on the Mr. Blue column.)

Yesterday I learned how to tie a clove knot. The purpose of the clove knot was to string a white bedsheet between two trees outside the Pilot House cabin. The purpose of the bedsheet was as a screen for projecting National Film Board of Canada shorts. I was planning a big night’s entertainment with my ranger pals.

The bedsheet hung in front of the newly-chopped September woodpile, and made the cabin look even more like a jaunty wooden boat. I swept the porch while Ranger Tim balanced the projector and the DVD player on a home-hewn chair. We flipped through the borrowed films: Leonard Maltin’s Animation Favorites from the National Film Board of Canada, Best of the Best: Romantic Tales (and who could fail to be stirred by The Romance of Transportation in Canada? ). I was all set for a campfire singalong to The Log Driver’s Waltz. I was ready and willing to get excited about shadow puppetry, if it came to that.

Dear God, what has happened to me? I am a page of the Utne Reader made flesh. I am Laura Fecking Ingalls Wilder. Is the next step knitting jumpers out of yoghurt? Starting a national wood-chopping fitness boom? Whittling?

I used to get my eyebrows waxed. I used to wear a little spandex unitard to spinning™ classes at the gym. I could live for a year in the woods on what I once spent on Prada shoes. I used to go to openings. (I don’t remember what was ever opened, but I distinctly remember openings.) I saw two movies a week: proper, at-the-cinema movies, not DVDs. I chewed through braised lamb shank after braised lamb shank at posh Manhattan restaurants. There were book parties, and also real parties. I spent a lot of money in Sephora on creams and powders to give me pink cheeks. You don’t get much change from fifty bucks when you’re shopping for pink cheeks in New York City.

But signs of my troublesome wholesomeness were already evident. I once went to a live taping of public radio’s This American Life show. I refused to buy “coffee drinks”. I canoed on the East River, an unlikely Brooklyn Pocahontas. I would have read The Gawker every morning if it had existed then, but I know it would have left me feeling as icky as an it-drink hangover. I refused to spend any time in art galleries unless there was a free bar. Sometimes I cooked to eat, not as performance art. Twice I baked.

So my golly-gosh transformation in the Canadian north woods is not a shock. I’ve spent the last two years chipping away at the polish I’d carefully lacquered on since the age of sixteen. Still, though. National Film Board of Canada marathons. This is the X-treme sport of wholesome dorkiness.

My Toronto buddy Rosalinda sent an email spanking the last time I slagged off these films.

I know now that these are beloved cultural artefacts in these parts. Mark, a Canadian curmudgeon from my Brooklyn days, once surprised me by launching into an NFB cartoon song in Sparky’s:

“Oh the cat came back
The very next day
The cat came back
He never went away…”

Rosalinda again:

Well, I watched three DVDs straight through last night, and if I were eight years old, I would still feel crushed whenever RTE showed these instead of Bugs Bunny. But as a dorky adult, I like them. They are sweet, often entertaining, too often worthy, usually strange. They’re not for kids.

My favourites are the straight narrations, like the 1974 film The Family That Dwelt Apart, where EB White reads his own story, a funny-sad parable of the disasters that follow well-meaning American intervention. There’s a cartoon of a Stephen Leacock story, “My Financial Career“, that I’d first seen quoted in full on Ftrain. A Mordechai Richler story, “The Street” of a young boy waiting for his grandmother to die so he would get his own room. There’s a cartoon song about the tormenting blackfly of “north Ontar-eye-air-eye-o”; we groaned and scratched along to it. And a wonderful deadpan version of Cinderella starring medieval penguins in wimples, and a glass flipper.

The House That Jack Built was one of several late-Sixties indictments of the evils of capitalism, smoking, and cars. “Tax-funded pinko commie Canuck propaganda,” I taunted, but the placid rangers just smiled and drank their beer. We watched George and Rosemary, a story of midlife love where the protagonists lived “reasonably happily” ever after: only in Canada. And then there was weird stuff: in early CGI an operatic nerd built machines to fire cows at his kitchen wall. We learned to flick straight past the CGI shorts; too much form, not enough function.

What I admire most about these films is the breadth of styles and voices, and that they are not afraid to be dark. In a for-profit studio system, like Hanna-Barbera, there’s an instantly-recognisable house style, but the NFB paid artists and filmmakers to experiment. Broadcasting may be the one area where government funding of the arts doesn’t create comfortable, dull work.

Welcome to dervala.net, Halley-buffs. But really, you should head right back there and read her posts on getting cataract surgery after thirty blurred years.
If you don’t know Halley Suitt, well you should. And hey, she’s another scatty, chatty ENFP too.

Autumn graciously hung back and allowed summer to run a last blue-sky Labour Day weekend. The summer people have headed south. Yesterday the highway was clogged with camper vans; today there are only the familiar trucks. Beth and the maintenance crew are scrubbing down the primly-named “comfort stations” for winter storage, clearing out the fire-pits, chaining the gates to the campsite. The contract naturalists have packed up their slides and unclipped their nametags. The rest of the staff, freed from preparing endless talks and nature hikes, have time to play.

In the afternoon I tried to find the old Frater trail with Ranger Tim and Chris, another naturalist. Earl Devlin, who settled this little Beaver Rock cove in the twenties, had cut this trail himself. It ran four miles uphill to the train station at Frater Junction so the family could collect supplies on foot. It’s so long out of use we never knew if we’d found it or not as we bushwhacked and followed old logging tracks, stepping over bear scat and mounds of moose droppings. Fresh moose dung looks just like chocolate-covered almonds, a thought which had tormented me on the Coastal Trail some weeks ago. Bear scat looks like small cowpats.
   “Is that because of all the berries?” I asked.
   “No, bears shit soft no matter what they eat,” said Tim authoritatively. I was glad I’d had the foresight to pack two naturalists.

We pushed through stands of balsam fir and crossed a gravel pit and then a creek, picking the last of the raspberries. Up on the ridge stood massive yellow birch, somehow missed or left by the loggers in this new-growth area. From the rotten stump of one giant grew three saplings: a maple, a white pine, and a red pine. The white pine had been cropped by a beaver.

Tim gave me jewel-weed tubes to chew, each tiny, saffron-like thread pinched off the end of a red-orange flower that looked like an orchid. The drop of nectar sweetened my tongue. Hummingbirds love them. Then he gave me small twigs of yellow birch to chew: wintergreen again. Manufacturers used to extract it from wintergreen leaves, then from yellow birch (it’s synthesized now). Snowberries have that exact flavour, too. Why is it so common in nature?

Chris caught a tiny spring-peeper tree frog, bleached as a sand-crab, with suckers on each exaggerated finger. I popped a puffball to see the spores rise in a dusty cloud. We picked some morel-like fungus with an intense mushroomy scent to identify later, not realising we’d be too drunk and lazy to pull the books out. Tim wrung a cup of water out of a clump of spagnum moss, a naturalist’s party trick after five dry days. They confirmed each other’s species-identification in a comfortable shorthand while I lagged behind twenty-year-old Chris, as unsure of this jargon as if he were discussing his favourite PlayStation games. The blackflies chewed at the tops of my ears while I swatted uselessly and shouted “Feck off! You should be dead! It’s September.”

We turned back after a few hours being happily lost. A defrosted chicken and a glass of wine called, along with the promise of a fine beach sunset to drop the curtain on the summer. It was warm enough to be still giggling there after dark, a demolished bottle of Viognier and some beers stuck neck-down in the sand, while the chicken managed alone in the barbecue. A yellow crescent moon hung dead-centre in the lake and lit a tempting canoe trail to the horizon. Stars shot towards the water. My warmly-lit log cabin sent a homesteader’s welcome from the little hill.

I’ve always loved September, a month studded with more new-year possibilities than dreary January. I love every megabyte of the first-day-at-school pictures my teary friends send of their kids. I am fizzing with ideas for the next few months—a visit from Leelila? from Adam? October in Ottawa with Claire? A roadtrip down the west coast from Vancouver to San Diego? Winter in Ireland? Or in a cottage in Spain? A book proposal?

Oh, lordy, it is great to be poor, and free, and rich in friends.

I’m still co-habiting with various voles, shrews, and deer mice. They run energetic circuits around the one-room cabin: behind the sofa, up the printer onto my desk, down to the floor, across the shelves, over the linen-chest, and across the fireplace mantel, where they peep out from behind the bowls and trinkets. Then hop! down onto the stereo and around again.

Brewing coffee in a little in-cup drip filter last week I noticed that one of the coffee grounds was not a coffee ground, after I’d drunk. I didn’t gag: I’ve seen enough restaurant kitchens to know I’ve consumed worse. In the staff kitchen pantry, they peeled off and shredded the label from my sesame oil to make a nest, and chewed holes in a ziplock bag of coffee I’d left out by accident. I emptied the shelves, swept off the droppings and swabbed down with bleach while I pictured my caffeinated mice wired up for a brainstorming session on how to breach those metal towers of food.

Some nights they party in my cabin like Bush Jr. at Yale, and I lie awake listening to them snuffle around the traps. I feel the self-pity of the killer as I hold my breath before the metal bar smashes them: they made me do it. They are unsentimental creatures. When a trap is sprung, a mouse will lick the peanut butter clean from under the warm, dead nose of its fellow rodent. I respect their respect for the primacy of the living.

I am now able to empty and reset the snap-traps, though I prefer cajolery when possible. To empty the traps I hold them upside down through a tissue to avoid contact with my victims’ popping, accusatory eyes. I try not to brush the whiskers, and I never touch the tails. In the charnel ground behind the cabin, I prise up the metal bar with another tissue and shake the trap out. The stiff little bodies with dented heads plop onto the duff, and I shout a ritual incantation: “Oh Jesus I’m sorry sorry sorry little mouse!” Then I sprint to the staff kitchen to wash my hands.

Two days ago I abandoned a trap up there: a mouse had clamped his teeth around the metal bait-holder, and I wasn’t about to pry his jaws from his last meal. When I confessed, Ranger Tim retrieved it, quietly contemptuous of my simpering. I can only deal with the neatly dead. Since then he has had to de-trap another creature who haemorrhaged under the stereo, and stomp a squeaking mouse who was pinned by the ear. At the Frater cabin one morning I squeaked myself when I was greeted by a live mouse, sitting in the kitchen sink pinned by the tail. I am ashamed that my inner Carrie Bradshaw has not yet been snap-trapped by rural life. But oh, the rodentry.

If you leave them in the trap for even half a day, the carpenter ants take a break from chomping through the ceiling beams and troop down to swarm the corpse. When the mice are deposited in the charnel ground, the cadaver beetles are ready. They are fabulously industrious creatures. Our mice are usually buried within 12 hours, ready to host beetle babies. Life goes on.

Collaborators and requests welcome.
Crack/craic
Noun/adjective. I hardly ever use this one, but it came up the other day. Ríona’s definition:

A person can also embody craic. “Oh, you’ll have to meet so-and-so, she’s great craic.” A very high compliment.

Faff
Futzing, messing around on filler activities, procrastinating. Usually indulged in before leaving the house to do something unpleasant. Often the opening salvo in a domestic battle:
“Would you ever stop faffing and get in the car!”

Feck
All-purpose, indispensable term. Milder than “fuck”, closer to “frick” but more versatile. “Well, feck you anyway. You just fecked off this morning and left me no fecking cornflakes.” Old ladies can safely say this in Ireland now. Reached its most inspired use on the lips of Father Jack in the Channel Four series Father Ted.
There’s also an old Dublin use of “feck” to mean pilfer: early in Joyce’s Portrait, boys run away from school because “they had fecked cash from the rector’s room”.

Witter
Verb. To ramble on inanely.

Personal injury law is one of Ireland’s chief industries and entertainments. Drunks stumble on the pavement and sue the local corporation for thousands. A kid trips in the playground and the parents score a college fund at tax-payers’ expense. Our fat-cat class is not corporate CEOs but top barristers, who grow rich and pompous on fees from tax-funded public tribunals. (Meanwhile, their junior colleagues earn almost nothing for the first five to ten years. This effectively restricts the profession to the kids of the Dublin middle class, who can scrape by in one of the most expensive cities in Europe by living with their parents until the big briefings come through.)

The thirst for compensation is deep in our culture. It’s not at the sueing-MacDonalds-for-spilling-hot-coffee-in-your-lap-while-driving level, but it’s close. If you burn your finger at a neighbour’s barbecue, some wit will shout “Compo! Compo!” I hadn’t realised this obsession went deeper than a state-of-the-art culture of complaint until I started reading the Brehon Laws.

Ireland had an extraordinarily sophisticated canon of ancient law, the oldest in Europe and among the oldest in the world. From the first century AD on it was passed down orally in verse by the bards. In 431, the High King and St. Patrick called a committee of nine learned men, including themselves, to collect and codify existing laws. They worked for three years, removing anything not in keeping with Christianity, and wrote them down in archaic Irish on vellum manuscripts. This was the Senchus Mór, the first written compilation of the Brehon Code.

By the ninth century, the code was more or less complete. It is an intellectual wonder; comprehensive, ingenious and enlightened. It survived intact and in use (through abolished by statute by Edward II in 1367) until it was finally outlawed for good by Elizabeth I, who planted Ireland with English settlers.

Brehons were a lawyer/judge class, equal in stature to bards and chiefs. There was a long and defined course of study to master the complex body of law, and interpretation was at their discretion. They were the appointed wise men, and in very early times were considered almost as mystics or shamans. They needed to be wise: Brehons themselves were liable to pay compensation for wrong judgments. I’d like to see, say, Rehnquist fork out his retirement fund for giving the 2000 election to Bush.

Brehon law sat on top an intricate social structure of families, clans and tribes. There was no institutional policing or incarceration system, so laws were enforced by sanctions and boycotts (“Boycott” is an Irish term for an Irish practice, named for a particularly cruel rackrenting estate manager in the famine era who was driven out when an entire town in Wexford refused to do business with him.) Social sanctions are very effective in a small, homogenous society: we could have had shunning championships with the Amish.

Compensation for all kinds of losses from property to injury was covered by the Brehon laws. There was a set amount for murder, manslaughter and accidental death. The compensation for losing a limb was a related fraction of that for death, but combined amounts for several limbs could not exceed the compensation for a death. Damages were less for injuries to parts of the body normally covered by a garment. There were other punishments too: in the case of involuntary manslaughter, the convicted defendant might be pushed out to sea on a boat with no rudder or oars. If he was lucky enough to wash up on shore, he became the property of the person who owned the closest stretch of land unless a fine was paid on his behalf.

Sometimes defendants refused to pay the adjudicated compensation. Several remedies were defined, including much-feared satire. “The selfish man, who thinks only of his cows and his fields, and not of his fellow human beings, may be insulted without risking a blush fine.” A professional satirist would write verses that would follow your family for as long as people cared to remember. Few could withstand the threat of such a slagging. My favourite remedy, though, is the Procedure by Fasting, described here by PJ Joyce:

The Irish were taken, in particular, with aphoristic judgments and wordplay, and many of these were written down.

Women’s rights that were enshrined by Brehon Law were later lost for centuries. In Brehon Law, rights and responsibilities were taken equally seriously—imagine that! Humane responsibilities were codified between master and student, landlord and tenant, husband and wife, parent and child. Children, for example had the legal responsibilty to wash an aging father’s head once a month.

It’s hard not to become a ditzy, Enya-addled Celtophile bemoaning a misty utopian past. The practical, pagan justice of these laws has great charm, if you can overlook period ugliness like slavery laws. (Did you know that it was once custom for the English to sell their children to the Irish for slaves? The great slave mart was at Bristol, and there was some speculation that Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights was an escaped slave. Or perhaps I made that bit up.)

We were a most civilised people on our own terms once. A people becomes childlike under colonial rule, and has to grow up all over again at independence. I am sorry for the loss endured in between, and grateful we have the written remnants of a fine old culture.

References:
Brian Walsh’s web introduction to PG Joyce’s A Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland (1908)
“The Brehon Laws“ by L McDonald in Dalriada magazine.
“Brehon Laws“, by Loretta Wilson for The Irish Society
Traditional Irish Laws by Mary Dowling Daley, Appletree Press.