Open Writing

An Irishman, Hal Roach, is one of the world's greatest comedians. I have had the pleasure and privilege of seeing him in person twice—at Jury's Hotel in Dublin many years ago and, more recently, here in Hobart. I also have six of his tapes.

I am therefore one of his countless great admirers. As well as being a superb comedian, he is also the personification of politeness.

However, although he holds audiences in the hollow of his hand and, to change metaphors, frequently rolling in the aisles, I feel he can be mildly criticised on two grounds.

The first is that he tends to exaggerate the proclivity of the Irish for alcohol and thus helps to give credence to the canard I have referred to before.

Secondly, and this is an omission on his part, while he frequently refers to some of the good traits of the Irish—their facility with words, their ability to laugh at themselves, for example—he fails to give prominence to one of their most endearing traits.

This is their innate politeness.

The following story gives a very good example of this.

It is not generally known that arranged marriages are still quite common in parts of Europe, in Africa and in Asia.

An arranged marriage is one in which a young couple are brought together under the advice and guidance of a match-maker or marriage broker—a senior and highly respected resident of the farming community in which these marriages usually take place.

The sort of thing that happens is that a farmer and his wife decide it is time a son or daughter was married and approach the match-maker about the matter.

She (it is usually a woman) consults her list, selects a suitable partner and then handles all the necessary negotiations that have to take place before the happy couple—who may not have known each other previously—approach the altar.

This may seem to be a somewhat primitive method of selecting a life partner but arranged marriages, on the whole, are happy and enduring.

To the participants, the words 'till death do us part' mean exactly that and not 'until I meet some nicer or richer or until I suddenly discover I need to find myself.'

One such couple were Patrick Spillane and Molly Murphy. They lived on small farms, not far from each other in West Cork and were 35 and 28 respectively when their parents thought they were old enough to get married.

So the two sets of parents consulted the local match-maker. She was able to convince them that, although the young couple hardly knew each other, they would be ideally suited to be united in holy matrimony.

The necessary negotiations were successfully concluded and the wedding took place on a lovely summer afternoon in the little village church.

They spent the first night of their honeymoon in a hotel in Cork City—a momentous event for each of them because it was the first time they had ventured very far outside the confines of their farms.

At this stage, an impatient reader may be thinking, “This is a nice, if somewhat trivial, story but what the hell has it got to do with politeness?”

A good question which I will now answer. At three o'clock in the morning, Patrick tapped his bride of a few hours on the shoulder and said, “May I trouble you again, Miss Murphy?”

© Tony Kearney