recreational nationalism

this week: feeling feral and patriotic, up the ra

not every image i add is going to be sylvanians but this one is just so apt

Girls, new obsession just dropped. It’s the third week of my mid-year break from uni, and all the spare time has triggered an enormous spiral. The number of Wikipedia pages, YouTube videos, and Google searches I’ve got open on my laptop has me dizzy. I can’t truly relax because I feel like I’m wasting precious time, I could be gathering more information. I’m greedy for content. It’s not restful, it’s a compulsion. And this past week has been a weird one. In a move no one saw coming, I’ve become completely enthralled with ice hockey.

I do not enjoy watching sports, and not for lack of opportunity. Almost everyone in my life seems to think watching sport is the most exciting way to spend a Saturday night. But last weekend, a group of friends and I went to an ice hockey game, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I was immediately locked in. Afterwards I went home early from the pub (never-before-seen behaviour) because I was so desperate to learn about the rules, professional teams, history- any morsel of info I could get my hands on.

The specific kind of violence has me in a chokehold. A player got a puck to the nose at the game we went to, there was blood everywhere, and I loved every second. I’ve picked an NHL team to support, based entirely on vibe, how cute the uniform is, and if the players are hot- truth is as soon as they put that uniform and helmet on they all look hot?? I feel feral. I’ve landed on the Seattle Kraken and I’m counting down to the season starting (October 7th, for those interested in joining me on this journey), so I can watch more than just old games.

Aside from that, some of my more long-lasting obsessions remain, primarily Ireland based, so as promised I thought I’d write a little background on how and why that specific interest has become so all-consuming.

My paternal grandparents emigrated from Ireland to Australia when my dad was a teenager, but despite the relative proximity, we had very little to do with them during my childhood. I’ve since gathered there were some fairly valid reasons for this distance, but as a child I imagined them as the loving, attentive grandparents of my dreams. That fantasy stuck with me longer than I realised, so when both of them passed away in the last few years without me having seen or contacted them in over a decade, I was hit with a wave of unexpected grief.

I’d made a vague attempt to visit in 2020, flights to Melbourne were booked, but instead I was forced to stay home, bake bread, and smoke weed for six weeks like the rest of the country. So at the start of 2024, after four years of feeling sorry for myself and complaining to my therapist about my dead grandparents, it occurred to me that not only did I barely know anything about them, I knew even less about the rest of the Cleary side of my family. A few phone calls with my dad later, I decided to try building a family tree from the scraps of information his parents had passed on. I assumed it would be fairly straightforward. Wrong.

Most of Ireland’s accessible records are photocopied parish books maintained by nuns and priests with stupidly illegible, cursive handwriting. On top of that, in County Tipperary, where my Grandpa’s entire side is from (seemingly since the dawn of time), the surname Cleary is really goddamn common. And just about every man, woman, and child was named William, Patrick, or Catherine, including our entire family line. This project became a months-long endeavour involving countless websites, subscriptions, hours digging through burial databases (a lot of heavy lifting from billiongraves.com), and endless calls with my dad, whose patience with me is saintly. Eventually, we put together a pretty decent family tree on MyHeritage, complete with birth, death, and marriage certificates.

Had I been told beforehand that what I’d uncover would just be a long line of farmers’ sons marrying farmers’ daughters who would give birth to more sons who became farmers and married more farmers’ daughters, I might’ve been put off. But instead, I feel a strange sense of comfort. Some of these people lived through the “famine” (*genocide- fuck England, up the Ra) and chose to stay, even as millions fled or died. Our history is just generations of Irish Catholics marrying other Irish Catholics, a sprinkling of IRA members, and living in a country they really belonged in. My dad’s ancestry test results? 99% Irish.

This information-gathering triggered something I didn’t realise I’d been craving: cultural connection. Born in Hawaii to an Irish father and Scottish mother, then emigrating to New Zealand when I was six, I had four citizenships and no real emotional attachment to any of them. I felt like an alien. I was so envious of people whose families and communities were tied to a place. Now I feel just slightly more Irish than before- and honestly, really embarrassingly patriotic.

I do realise this is an arbitrary choice, I could have leaned Scottish, but for some reason I still don’t understand, I felt this enormous attachment to Ireland: its culture, its history, its language. The vibes are, I think we can all agree, immaculate.

This is where the obsession really kicked off. I started learning Irish on Duolingo. I now have a 454-day streak and know about seven words. But I’ve learned so much, not just vocabulary, but about how colonisation tried to erase the language entirely. It’s honestly a miracle it survived at all. Then, in December last year, things escalated. I came across the trailer for Kneecap, a film made in the North of Ireland by three Irish-language rappers. It immediately shot to the top of my obsession list. I won’t try to summarise the whole plot (but I could, I’ve watched it at least ten times), but it’s genuinely brilliant and worth watching, even if you’re not spiralling into an Irish identity crisis.

Since discovering Kneecap, I’ve listened to their music non-stop (no guesses what my Spotify Wrapped will look like), watched every interview and live performance available, and roped my best friend into coming to see them live, it was sickeningly good. I was depressed for weeks after it was over. Not just because of their music and film (both partially in Irish, great for my learning), but also their politics: united Ireland, free Palestine, respect for indigenous languages, they are the jewel in my obsession crown.

This phase has been a pretty public one. I think it’s probably the thing I’ve talked about most in my entire life. I’ve got a collection of Irish sports tops I wear as much as possible (not a huge ice hockey presence in Ireland, unfortunately), greet my flatmates in Irish most mornings and talk about Kneecap incessantly. I imagine I’ll only become more insufferable next year after my long-awaited trip to the motherland. I’m just trying to figure out who I am, and this Irish part of me feels like one step closer. Now I’ve got two pieces of data- I’m annoying, and Irish.

I know this is a lengthy one, sorry, I’d like to be less verbose but editing down is a skill I’m yet to harness. Next up: maybe, a deep dive into my bizarre interest in Catholicism despite being a firm atheist? A research essay on the history of Ireland? I’ve got another week of holidays to spend on the internet and the weather is too shit to go outside, who knows what I’ll find.

Go raibh maith agat (thank you),

Ro x