Grahame Morris, a political pundit and former chief of staff to John Howard, was discussing same-sex marriage on Sky News on Monday. Somehow this turned into a diatribe about Irish people.
“I love the Irish and half the parliament’s full of Irishmen, but these are people who can’t grow potatoes,” he said. “They’ve got a mutant lawn weed as their national symbol and they can’t verbalise the difference between a tree and the number three.”
I can take the crack at the shamrock, though it’s not funny. I can take the crack at how some Irish people speak, though it’s not funny. But I can’t take a sly, disgusting reference to the Great Famine of 1845-1852, sometimes known as the potato famine.
It was the greatest tragedy in Irish history. The potato crop, which was the staple diet for most people, failed year after year. One million people died and another million were forced to emigrate, which is why there are people of Irish background all over the world, not least in Australia.
This was not the decimation – which literally means one-in-ten – of Irish society, it was far worse than that. It reduced Ireland’s population by a quarter.
But Morris still finds it funny. Are there tragedies involving mass death and displacement that have befallen any other people in history he finds equally amusing?
His Liberal colleague, prime minister Tony Abbott, also finds the Irish endlessly amusing. His St Patrick’s day message to the Irish in Australia managed to insult a nation over and over again in a mere 70 seconds.
“It’s been said of us that the English made the laws, the Scots made the money and the Irish made the songs,” Abbott said, before apologising that he “can’t be there to share a Guinness or two, or maybe even three”.
Abbott is a serial offender. When opposition leader, he said the last Labor government “was a bit like the Irishman who lost 10 pounds betting on the Grand National and then lost 20 pounds on the action replay”.
Even after the international ridicule his St Patrick’s day video wrought, he couldn’t help himself. He used parliamentary question time to accuse the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, of going off the point. “Sounds a bit like an Irish joke,” Abbott said.
It’s not just Liberal politicians and apparatchiks that find something inherently laughable about Irish people. Many in the Australian media can’t help themselves either.
In May last year, Irish man Pádraig Gaffney pleaded guilty in a Melbourne court to causing criminal damage at a hotel and was fined $10,000. The Age reported the story online under the headline “Drunk Paddy in $500k flood of tears”. A day later, Gaffney took his own life.
The headline was changed, but not before a screen grab had been taken. To its credit, Fairfax allowed Ireland’s ambassador to Australia, Noel White, to address its story.
“The reaction has been a mix of shock, grief and dismay,” he wrote. “Shock and grief at a tragic loss of life; dismay at the casually offensive language, describing a young man who had expressed remorse and shame for his actions as just another ‘Drunk Paddy’.”
But if there was an internal memo, Fairfax columnist Peter FitzSimons didn’t get it. He finds the Irish hilarious. “Paddy and Margaret” are a bit thick to him. As is Paddy on his own. In fact, FitzSimons is a regular one-man Charlie Hebdo, keeping the world safe for Paddy jokes.
Irish jokes are not new; they’ve been around for more than 900 years, started by the English as a method of subjugation. As one academic put it, they depicted Irish people as uncivilised, “to show how English rule could be used to benefit the Irish”.
After the mass emigration caused by the famine, magazines such as Punch in Britain and Harper’s Weekly in America portrayed the Irish as ape-like. Up until the late 1980s English comedians such as Bernard Manning made a living telling Irish and Pakistani jokes, but those jokes died with him and his fellow dinosaurs. It seems Australia is only place in the world where you can still get away with telling an Irish joke.
