Clown Cars Parked All Over The Front Lawn

 

I heard comments from American friends and in American media that the Irish were pretty happy about Queen Elizabeth’s death.

They are not.

This, despite articles like “Royalists Very Angry at Reaction to Queen’s Death” which say that people are angry about other people's reactions, but reports no actual reactions that would anger anybody.

That’s because the reports were fake, like the video of Irish men dancing to “Another One Bites the Dust” in front of Buckingham Palace. They released the video months ago.

Most Irish people don’t care about the British monarchy. This essay in the Times, on the occasion of the Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah, expresses a common perspective. 

Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

The essay concludes:

Over the course of the interview Harry and Meghan, who are charming, clever and good at being celebrities, make the monarchy look like an archaic and endemically racist institution that has no place in the modern world. Well duh. And despite all the outrage you might read in the UK tabloids right now, they also did something else that renders everything else irrelevant: they officially launched themselves in the United States.

The best authentically angry outrage I heard was: “They replaced the Queen with a MAN.”

The Queen visited Ireland once. She spoke a few words of Irish, which was a big deal, but really shouldn't have been since Irish is spoken by many thousands of people in Northern Ireland, a country for which she is the Queen.

There's another famous essay, a speech delivered by Olivia O'Leary on the occasion of the Queen's visit to Ireland, where she discussed the curtsy and other Hiberno-Anglo unspeakable anxieties.

It's about ten minutes long, and she addresses all the unsayables.

Now that this Great Misinformation War has waged since 2014, I hope we can defend ourselves against any news story that attempts to rile people up.

Is it true that the Irish rejoice at the Queen's death? If true, how would it make you feel? Tribal solidarity and moral outrage? If so, then those are the emotions that keep your eyeballs on the adverts, not your evolved enthusiasm for truth.

In a bonus episode of my favorite podcast, The Irish Passport,  "The Irish Reactions to Queen Elizabeth’s death" ($1 to subscribe) they discuss the harm Americans inflict when amplifying fake news about Irish people. Even if Irish people were sharing anti-monarchy memes, they would be very few Irish people, compared to the millions and millions of Irish Americans. When those Irish Americans act from tribal solidarity and outrage, it is their voices which are heard in the North, not Irish journalists joking about clowns. People in the North then see this American reaction and fear their neighbors.  It's not helpful.

An Irish Passport episode you can listen to for free is their coverage of King Charles's meeting with Northern Ireland politicians. Authentically awkward!