‘Our boys went to Lebanon and trained Hezbollah!’ shouted the drunk Irish lad in the fish and chip shop as an Indian man behind the counter silently fried chips.
‘Chucky ar la!’ the lad shouted, or Tiocfaidh ar la, to correctly spell in Irish the slogan of the IRA, meaning ‘Our day will come.’ And he went on shouting this, over and over, as the Indian fellow stared down into the fryer, and the Friday night customers formed a queue in this small fast-food joint in a West Cork harbour town.
The Irish lad was not getting the message that the Hindu chap frying chips was probably not a massive Hezbollah or Hamas supporter, and he carried on shouting about Gaza and inviting the man behind the counter to join in with him.
The long-standing allegiance which the Irish feel for the Palestinians is becoming hysterical. This is probably why the authorities have just had to slap terrorism charges on a member of the scuzzy Northern Irish hip hop band no one had heard of before, charmingly entitled Kneecap, in honour of the way the IRA used to administer justice, after he allegedly waved a flag in support of Hezbollah, a proscribed organisation, at a London gig.
All over West Cork where we live, the Palestinian flags fly, including on farms. You are more likely to see the red, white, green and black flying than an Irish tricolour. In this, our nearest fish and chip shop, there are Palestinian flag key fobs for sale on the counter. We try to ignore them as we order, but their presence puts me off my cod. If there were somewhere else to go, I would.
To the drunk Irish lad, the key fobs were evidence that the men behind the counter were Palestinian. That and the colour of their skin, which is what should pass for racism, but doesn’t.
Crashing through the door, beer can in hand to order a burger, he could not work out the difference between Pakistani, Palestinian and Indian – no more than he could tell the difference between himself and the harder men of his father’s generation who did fight for the IRA, may well have trained Hezbollah and certainly did not shout about it in chip shops.
The BB said it was probably best that we ate our fish and chips and ignored the whole geopolitical key fob problem
Matey saw the Pally flags, got overexcited and started telling everyone in the queue everything he knew about freedom fighting, which wasn’t much. ‘Chucky ar la, lads, yeah? Bobby Sands said that!’ he shouted, referring to the hunger striker as customers perused the menu on the wall and debated whether to have cod or fried chicken. It was all very ill conceived, really.
In fact, a few months earlier, we had been in this place when the instigator of the key fobs had come through the door to replenish them and to take the money from the donation container.
He was a long-haired Englishman, rather grubby in that way the English blow-ins are, for they often come to West Cork to not wash and live up a hillside, foraging and hiding from the nuclear winds of the dystopian future they envisage in the only bit of Europe reputed to be outside the fallout zone, allegedly.
These dropouts come down off the hillsides periodically to visit town squares and wave the flags of their causes, usually Gaza or Ukraine.
This particular one has a huge Pally flag which he flies like a pirate in the square by the harbour, and as the cars go past, some of them pip their horns. He will stand there until after dark if people are pipping.
It was during a quiet evening of no pipping – and me heckling out of the window of my Suzuki as I passed him – that he gave up and walked into the fish and chip shop to replenish his Pally key fobs on display there.
He got more fobs out of his environmentally friendly hessian bag and, without a word to the owner about this, put them down on the counter, then shook a few coins out of the end of the donation container, surveying them gloomily. As he did so he ordered a fried chicken meal and, when it was ready, went and sat in a corner to eat it.
We ended up sitting next to him and I had to stuff my cod and chips in my mouth at speed to stop myself telling him what I thought of him. The builder boyfriend told me to leave it. But I wanted to ask him what would happen if I wanted to sell some Israeli key fobs.
Then I hit upon the idea of asking the owner whether he would let me do this, in the interests of balance. But the BB said it was probably best that we ate our fish and chips and ignored the whole geopolitical key fob problem, for now.
And so the poor Indian chap who copped for the Hezbollah training lecture remained silent as the drunk Irishman ranted about the IRA and how the lads were behind him in
his struggles.
‘Chucky ar la yeah!’ he started shouting again. And the Indian chap passed him his order, looked him in the eye and, in a thick Indian accent, said: ‘Ketchup?’
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