It was a strange week for me last week. Not only did I have a drink down the (British) Legion, but I sat chatting to Rangers fans and finished up by attending a Free Presbyterian Church Service.
Okay, I would not dare be so brave in Ireland but I was in another part of the Gaelic empire, Stornaway on the island of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland. We happened to be over for the Hebridean Celtic music festival, particularly the Runrig concert as the local band were back in their old stomping ground.
I knew what I was letting myself in for, but sometimes it is good to see some of our prejudices challenged. For an Irish person brought up in the North this place really was the land of contradiction.
The local MP, Aengus Mac Neil, a Catholic, is a Scottish Nationalist, wanting Scotland to break away from England and to become independent. Hardline Protestants were the ones who voted for him and supported his cause.
I was talking to some people in the local British Legion hall (where the festival club was held, really). They were every bit as radical as anyone I had ever met in Belfast, and in some ways more so. Happy as I was in the Legion there was still a niggling doubt about what to do at the end of the night. (Years ago some friends of mine had invited me to a Saint Patrick's Night Irish music session in the Legion and not wanting to be rude I went along, only to stick out like a sore thumb for not being able to mime more than one line of God Save the Queen when they launched into the three-verse version, twice).
Would we be expected to stand and sing, we asked each other under our breath? We had made contingency plans. We were there as guests in their country and we swore ourselves to secrecy (oops!) that the incident would never be mentioned again back home. But we needn't have worried.
"You'd get your head knocked off if you tried that in here," was the answer to our casual question. "Did you ever read the words? There is a line in it about crushing the Scots. People just wouldn't have it."
So there we were, about half three in the morning, listening to the Peatbog Faeries do an acoustic set in a British Legion hall that refused to play God Save the Queen.
Earlier in the night we had heard the electronic version of the Peatbog Faeries (think Stockton's Wing meets trance) do a warm-up for Runrig in front of about 6,000 people and it seemed that about half the men had Rangers jerseys on. This usually would unsettle me, but here it was fine.
The Free Church in Lewis is famous for its unaccompanied Gaelic psalm singing, where one person leads with a line and the congregation joins in after. Beautiful stuff, even though we had to sit through Gaelic sermons which damned the unbeliever to eternal damnation. Saying that, the minister and his congregation were the nicest people you could hope to meet and were very interested in Ireland and our language. Which made me think. If Aengus and his friends ever get their independence why don't they join with their fellow Gaels in Ireland? Maybe some day I will be able to enjoy a drink with a Rangers fan in Ireland.
