Tipperary by Frank Delaney Page B

“blind tasting” of Charles O'Brien's nationality, a guess at his racial background from his writings could produce only one answer: Irish. It's manifested in his desire to express himself colorfully. In his willingness to see life as a drama, he likes to place himself at the center of his own stage. These flamboyances, and the fluid lyricism of how he addresses his world, do not readily hallmark other nationalities. Like all the Irish, he has a story to tell and he knows it.
    This national tendency toward vivid self-expression is much derived from Irish history. From the late 1600s, when the subjugation of the people began to intensify, new dark ages shrouded native Irish expression. The Irish “cause” had been routed, resurrected, exploited by monarchs and others with axes to grind against England—and then resurrected in many halfhearted rebellions, and routed again. As the original Irish landowners lost more and more of their territory to the English, a new class emerged: the dispossessed.
    Those leading families who were thrown off their own land, expelled from their own houses, ripped from their ancestral moorings—they either left the country voluntarily or were deported as slaves to the Caribbean and the Americas. Or they stayed in Ireland, where they traveled the roads, hunkering down to some kind of appalling and meager existence. Many chieftains ended up living in mud hovels. Some folk memories claim that they were the progenitors of today's travelers, or “tinkers.”
    Thus, Charles O'Brien was relatively unusual for his time. The “outsider” status so shrewdly pursued by his father and forefathers kept him out of the mainstream, where danger flowed. His education at the hands of his four maverick tutors turned out a boy who had been exposed to many influences.
    He had learned to read—not merely in the sense of being literate and knowing his ABC's, but with discrimination. And he had learned to write, not just headlines with Victorian sentiments in a boyish hand— “Competition Is the Life of Trade”—but also the language of an idea and how to structure an anecdote. He had knowledge of the classics and the Romance languages. And he knew something of art in varied forms.
    Therefore, whatever his misfortunes on the streets at the hands of assailants, or the view taken by the woman who was his heart's desire, this was no unlettered oaf. This was a man who, when sent out in the world, had a refinement and sensibility that would have graced any society drawing room.
    One further characteristic marks him with Irish distinction: his response to land. From childhood it held something mystical for him. To be sure, not every Irishman responds to an acre of earth with a poetic longing. Most who own land have been too busy wresting their livings from it. But their passion for their earth often transcends all other feeling. Charles O'Brien understood that and, following his father's example, saw the land, the clay, the dirt, the mud as a matter of the spirit.

    Daily, and in intimate terms, my father taught me how Ireland is formed—how, for example, the people in the North save money more effectively than the people in the South, and are, in his opinion, more trustworthy. He told me my first tales, many of which came from the world around us, gathered from the many people to whom he spoke; and he liked to speak to everybody. And he had a great number of stories, some acquired down the years and some assumed by him to have been in his head since long before he was born. Many concerned land and the ownership of land, which was the question burning through the entire country all throughout his boyhood, too.
    Thus, as other boys grew up with tales of pirates and trolls and ogres and wizards, I was raised on landlords and tenants and oppression and dispossession. Here is a story of a man who went to serve writs of eviction on some farmers over near Kilshane, about six miles from our home; I wrote it down from