If Morrissey and Marr are part Irish, does that mean that the property of 'Irishness' is genetic, if not, how was this 'Irishness' passed on to them?
Through family, culture, experience, socialisation, music, literature, identity, etc.
1. Morrissey
Morrissey’s parents, who were both from Dublin, settled in the Hulme and Moss Side districts of Manchester in the mid-1950s, where Morrissey was raised in an extended Irish family of uncles, aunts and grandparents all living on the same street. The singer has explained that he ‘grew up in a strong Irish community’, adding: ‘We were quite happy to ghettoise ourselves as the Irish community in Manchester, the Irish stuck rigidly together and there’d always be a relation living two doors down, around the back or up the passage.’ This Irish dimension ‘steeped’, as Morrissey puts it, ‘into everything [he] knew growing up’. He recalls that he ‘was very aware of being Irish’, noting ‘we were quite separate from the ... kids around us – we were different to them’. This awareness of Irish difference was underlined by trips to Ireland (a place that Morrissey found ‘immensely attractive’), as well as by his experience of anti-Irish prejudice, not least being addressed as ‘Paddy’ when it served as a ‘bitter and malevolent slur’. Perhaps it is no surprise that the youngster felt a distinct sense of ‘unbelonging’ in 1970s Manchester: ‘with so much Irishness around us’, Morrissey says, he ‘never really felt’ Mancunian. Morrissey also became interested, under the tutelage of his librarian mother, in Irish writing. While his mother would afford him access, through her own interests, to ‘masses of books on Irish politics and Irish history’, it was a specifically (Irish) literary interest that Morrissey acquired from his mother. ‘She instilled Oscar Wilde into me’, he later explained, noting that this process had begun before he reached adolescence. The young Morrissey certainly made a positive identification with Irish writing, and came to reflect that ‘most of the people I ever cared about in literature came from Ireland’. This literary interest had the effect, as Simpson suggests, of marginalising Morrissey – within his working-class Irish milieu – as ‘a mummy’s boy and a bookworm’. Thus, if the singer felt somewhat alienated from the host culture, he was also at odds with certain aspects of his Irish milieu (unlike his sister, for instance, he eschewed the social rituals of the local Irish club). In this context, Morrissey explains that the experience of growing up second-generation Irish was, for him, ‘confusing’.
2. Marr
Johnny Marr’s parents left their home in Athy, County Kildare, in the early 1960s before settling amongst an extended Irish family on two adjacent streets in Ardwick. Marr has explained that he was raised in a ‘young Irish community’, and was ‘surrounded’ during his formative years ‘by Irish culture’, stressing that ‘it does rub off ’. This aspect of Marr’s upbringing was enhanced by frequent trips to Ireland (where he spent several months of each year), as well as by his experience of anti-Irish prejudice, with the youngster becoming ‘accustomed to being branded an “Irish pig” at school and on the terraced streets of his native Ardwick’: ‘I was called “Irish pig” all the time, even by a couple of teachers'. Marr recalls having ‘to put up with an awful lot of snide remarks and false media reports about the Irish in England’, and adds, ‘I certainly did feel very different from the rest of my friends.’ Being of Irish descent was, then, a central part of Marr’s sense of self: "There was without a doubt a sense of that being part of your identity. There was no way that you could ignore it, either from an internal point of view – like within your household – or an external point of view from the messages you were getting from the people outside of it. We subjectively were aware that our [English] friends had a different kind of experience and a different kind of lifestyle than us."
Consequently, the young Marr, like his future co-songwriter, felt somewhat at odds with the host milieu. ‘Just like Morrissey will tell you, growing up in an Irish family in Manchester in the 1970s you did feel at a bit of a remove.’ The guitarist’s family regularly performed Irish songs at social gatherings in the Maher household. There was, he says, ‘a lot of melancholy in the music, which I was really drawn to’, pointing in particular to ‘melodic Irish ballads, like “Black Velvet Band”, which I used to love’. Marr recalls hearing accordions and penny whistles, as well as records by Irish showbands such as Big Tom and The Mainliners. Marr’s family were ‘very happy’ to be in England, and brought him up, he explains, ‘to be suspicious of people who’, in his words, ‘do the “old country blarney” thing’. Reflecting on this point, Marr suggests that his upbringing was marked by a certain ‘schizophrenia’, a term that has been used by second-generation Irish people to denote ambivalence or duality. ‘I had this schizophrenic kind of upbringing’, the guitarist recalls, citing his family’s ‘overt pro-Mancunian sensibility’ and his own ‘awareness of all the advantages and opportunities of being brought up in [England]’, whilst noting that this was offset by the ‘super-Irish environment’ in which he was raised, which ‘you couldn’t escape even if you tried ... plus I was there [in Ireland] a few months [every] year.’ (Marr explains that he missed ‘chunks of school’ whilst on trips to Kildare with his ‘homesick’ parents.) Thus, while Marr viewed England and English culture as ‘this incredible opportunity and adventure’, he was at the same time ‘steeped in’ and ‘swimming in’ Irish life. He recalls the ethnic iconography with which he was ‘constantly surrounded’ – including harps, shamrocks and ornaments inscribed with ‘Éire’, as well as Irish tricolours and Sacred Heart images – and describes his early environs as ‘super-Catholic’ and ‘super-Irish’. It is clear, then, that while Marr would learn – from his parents – to be ‘very pro-Manchester’ and to ‘appreciate the opportunities we were being given in Manchester’, he was simultaneously immersed in Irish culture, not least via his parents’ home, with its ‘strong Irish Catholic symbols’. Marr’s investment in Manchester was consequently offset, he suggests, by an ‘appreciation of Irish culture, music and iconography’. In this context, Marr notes the repulsion that he felt towards British nationalism, stressing that he ‘never felt an affinity’ with the Union Jack. ‘I’ve always hated that flag’, he says, seeing it as ‘a sign of aggression towards immigrants’, including the Irish. At the same time, though, Marr saw little value in the ‘hokey, bullshit Irish romanticism’ expressed by sections of his migrant milieu. The young Marr thus accrued a certain ambivalence, seeing himself as ‘[not] quite the definite article’. (He tellingly views his Irish-English peer group as a ‘floating generation’: ‘we are on our own’, he suggests.)
For more on this, see
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Irish-Blood-.../dp/1859184901
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