Eight suggested rules for good manners in leaving the golf club … or negotiating a Brexit deal

Patrick Comerford

I have not played golf since I left school. But when ‘Brexiteers’ draw parallels between leaving a golf club and continuing to pay into the EU after Brexit, I am aware of a few points of good manners:

1, If you have been a member of a golf club, when you leave of course you don’t have to continue paying your membership fees. But you do have to pay any debts you have accrued, including your bar bill … and that includes the drinks you bought for others and put on your tab.

2, If you leave, you can’t keep your parking space, even if that may include the parking space for past presidents.

3, If you want to set up another golf club, you cannot expect to make up your own rules for a new game, still less expect to call it golf, and that you can then enter inter-club competitions with other golf clubs without playing by the old, accepted rules. You can’t say that even when everyone else plays by the rules they don’t apply to your new rules, and still claim you are a golf club.

4, If you still set up that new golf club, and you want to share the grounds of your old club, you have to respect the rules of the old club. And that includes not picking and choosing which greens you are going to play on, and not dictating when you want to use the car park and the 19th hole.

5, You have to extend the same courtesy to visiting players and members of other golf clubs as are going to be extended to your players and members when they visit the old club.

6, You still need to have good manners, and stop arrogantly claiming that your new club is, has been, and is always going to be better and snootier than all the other clubs in the neighbourhood. Wake up, it’s a long time since you were at school and could threaten other children with the trump card ‘My daddy’s a policeman.’

7, You need to remember that in the old golf club certain sorts of riff-raff were not allowed in … neo-Nazis, KKK members, BF members and other forms of low life. If your new friends like them, and keep tweeting about them, be wary about inviting them to cross the Atlantic to visit you when no-one else wants them, let alone would consider signing them in on the visitors’ book in the bar … where you still have to pay your bar bill.

8, Remember to clean out your locker when you are leaving, return anything that you got from other members, and don’t leave behind any dirt or rubbish for the remaining members to clean up. But also remember that you may quickly regret all the benefits of past membership, Interpol, Euratom, Erasmus, systems to protect minimum wages, children’s rights, women’s rights, educational and professional exchanges. You don’t see the place for them in a golf club? Wait till you stand on your own, all alone, ready to tee-off, and find you have no caddy, no-one to play with, and no prize for the winners at the end.

How far west is the most westerly point in Europe?

The Cross at Slea Head, Co Kerry … but is this the most westerly place in Europe? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

When I was a teenager and spending a summer in Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry, I was told that the Skelligs Rocks off the Kerry coast formed the most westerly point in Europe and that it was the next stop before America.

Later, when we spent many summer weekends and weeks on Achill Island, Co Mayo, we heard the islanders boast that Achill was not only Ireland’s largest offshore island but also the most westerly point in Ireland and the next parish to America.

Mayo and Kerry are good at setting up contests like this. After all, John Millington Synge set his play, The Playboy of the Western World (1907) in Co Mayo, but he wrote it after visiting the Blasket Islands, and the movie was filmed in 1962 on the Dingle Peninsula.

Then, as we headed west along the Dingle Peninsula in a family group two weeks ago, we were told that Dingle was the westerly town in Europe, and that a point on Slea Head, facing the Blasket Islands was the most westerly point in Europe.

Most of the tourists on the bus risked life and limb as they hopped off at a blind twist on the road to be photographed beneath a wayside crucifix, willing apparently to risk their own deaths to be photographed at the point the bus guide told them was Europe’s most westerly point.

Where was my certificate to prove I was here?

Google Maps were telling me there were a few places further one that jutted out a little further into the Atlantic, albeit by a metre, or a kilometre, or a fraction of something.

Is Cabo de Roca at the most westerly end of Europe? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Is the territory of Saint Pierre and Miquelon part of Europe? It is, after all, part of French sovereign territory. The Overseas Collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon is in the north-west Atlantic, near the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, but uses the Euro as its currency.

Guadeloupe is an insular region of France in the Leeward Islands, part of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. Administratively, it is an overseas region consisting of a single overseas department, and the largest and most populous EU territory in North America. It too uses the Euro.

But Iceland is also European, even though it is not a member of the European Union, while Greenland, which may be part of the North American continental land mass, is still technically part of Denmark.

Is Greenland in Europe or in North America?

The other claimants to the status of the most westerly extreme of the European continent include Monchique Islet in the Azores Islands, which is part of Portugal, and could be considered part of Europe, although it sits on the North American Plate. The Capelinhos Volcano on Faial Island is also in the Azores Islands, but claims to be the westernmost point of the Eurasian Plate above sea level.

I suppose it all depends on how you define the European continent.

It must be a peculiar part of speech in both England and Ireland to speak of the ‘Continent’ or ‘Continental Europe’ as a landmass that includes all of Europe apart from the islands of Britain and Ireland, but including islands that are part of Spain, Italy, Greece and the Swedish archipelago, while excluding the Azores and French islands in places far flung and beyond – and with some additional questions about Cyprus, if only because geographically it lies off the coast of Turkey … as, indeed, do many Greek islands I have visited, including Rhodes, Kos, Kalymnos, Pserimos, and especially Kastellorizo.

Which leaves me without any proper definition of Europe or the Continent, and most certainly still without a clear definition of either Europe or a way of defining the limits of the European Continent.

Cabo de Roca is the western-most point in Europe (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

I suppose I am going to have to settle for Cabo da Roca in Portugal as the western-most point on European landmass. This cape forms the westernmost extent of mainland Portugal and continental Europe, and, by definition, the Eurasian landmass. The cape is in the Portuguese municipality of Sintra, west of Lisbon, and forms the western-most extent of the Serra de Sintra.

And I have the certificate to show I was there three years ago, without risking life and limb crossing a narrow, twisting road overlooking the Blasket Islands and looking out to Skellings.

But, just to be clear, the westernmost point on the island of Ireland is Dunmore Head, at the tip of the Dingle Peninsula in Co Kerry but north-west of that wayside crucifix at Slea Head, and the most westerly point in Irish sovereign territory is the Foze Rocks, also in Co Kerry, but out in the Atlantic Ocean, 17.1km to the west-south-west of Dunmore Head, marking the westernmost point in Ireland as a whole.

An unusual certificate in a remote outpost of Europe (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Greeks have a word for it: (15) Europe

A troika of flags at the entrance to Arkadi Monastery: the European Union, the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Greece (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

Outside the castellated walls of the Monastery of Arkadi, three flags fly side-by-side in the summer breeze greeting new arrivals at the car park: the flags of the European Union, the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Greece.

The middle flag is an interesting reminder that this monastery and the Church of Crete are not part of the Church of Greece but come under the direct jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.

Irish people who are concerned with the symbolism of flying national flags on church premises today [12 July] may take a second look at a national flag flying so proudly at the entrance to a monastery. But Orthodoxy has always been intertwined with Greek national identity and pride.

The Greek flag is known popularly to as the ‘sky-blue-white or the ‘blue-white’ (Γαλανόλευκη or Κυανόλευκη). Its nine stripes of blue and white represent the nine syllables of the slogan Ελευθερία ή Θάνατος (‘Freedom or Death’). These are the words said to have been on the lips of people who died in Arkadi in the horrific explosion in 1866. Captain Michalis, the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis on the Cretan struggle for independence, was subtitled Freedom or Death, and it was published under this name in Britain and other countries.

The EU flag may also come as a surprise to some visitors. Greeks have suffered severely under the present programmes of austerity, and when they do not blame corruption in the public sector for their present woes, they regularly lay the blame at the Troika, and more particularly at the EU, especially Germany and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

But like many public projects in Greece, the restoration of Arkadi and the opening of the monastery’s new museum last year would not have been possible without strong funding from the EU. Greeks know any public spending project is heavily dependent on EU funds, and despite talks of a possible ‘Grexit’ a few years ago, Greeks remain determinedly loyal to the European dream.

Greeks will casually point out that not only did they give Europe democracy, but here in Crete they even point out they gave Europe its very name.

In Greek mythology, Europa (Εὐρώπη, Eurṓpē) was the mother of King Minos of Crete, a woman with Phoenician origin, and the story of her abduction by Zeus in the form of a white bull is a story in Cretan mythology.

The earliest literary reference to Europa is by Homer in the Iliad, which is commonly dated to the 8th century BC. Another early reference to her is in a fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women discovered at Oxyrhynchus. The earliest vase-painting securely identifiable as Europa dates from mid-7th century BC.

The Greek word Εὐρώπη (Eurṓpē contains the elements εὐρύς (eurus), ‘wide’ or ‘broad,’ and ὤψ/ὠπ-/ὀπτ- (ōps/ōp-/opt-) ‘eye, face, countenance.’ It is common in ancient Greek mythology and geography to identify lands or rivers with female figures.

Europa is first used in a geographic context in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, in reference to the western shore of the Aegean Sea. As a name for a part of the known world, it is first used in the 6th century BC by Anaximander and Hecataeus.

The name Europe, as a geographical term, was used by Ancient Greek geographers such as Strabo to refer to part of Thrace below the Balkan mountains. Later, during the Roman Empire, the name was given to a Thracian province.

The use of the word ‘Europa’ in Church documents from the eighth century for the imperial territory of Charlemagne provide the source for the modern geographical term Europe.

The first use of the term Europenses, to describe peoples of the Christian, western portion of the continent, appeared in the Hispanic Latin Chronicle of 754, in a reference to the Battle of Tours fought against Muslim forces.

The EU also used Europa as a symbol, depicting her on the Greek €2 coin – replaced by an image of Arkadi on a special commemorative €2 coin last year – and on several gold and silver commemorative coins. The second series of euro banknotes is known as the ‘Europa Series’ and her image can be seen in the watermark and the hologram. Which brings me right back to spending Euros and flying the EU flag at the gates of Arkadi.

Europa on the Greek €2 coin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

‘Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night’

‘… you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back’ … on the shore at Bray, Co Wicklow, this evening (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

If I were to take the temperature of Ireland this evening, I would say the overwhelming majority of us are in a state of shock, if not disbelief, after the result of yesterday’s referendum on British membership of the European Union.

Our nearest neighbour and best friend has decided to walk away.

Of course, I accept democracy and I cannot say that the majority of British voters who voted for a Brexit are racists. But when I look at who is happy – Marine Le Pen in France, Gert Wilders in the Netherlands, Donald Trump who is now in Scotland, and smug Nigel Farage in London – I fear the rise of the far right who smugly widen their voter base on the evils of racism and nationalism.

I fear a land border been created between Ireland and the UK, running from Derry to Newry. Imagine replicating the razor-wire border that runs the northern border of Greece, separating it from its non-EU neighbours in the Balkans, and think of the faces of those desperate refugees that Farage abused in his racist poster last week.

The young generation, the future of Britain and the future of Europe has been sacrificed on the altar of political ambition where the high priests are Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.

Nigel Farage has a German wife who can help him to find safety in the EU if he ever needs to in the future. Boris Johnson is never going to give up his US passport. But the next generation of promising young British citizens will find that these middle aged politicians, in their smug ambitions, have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.

Europe has guaranteed a minimum wage, health care rights for travelling Europeans, workers’ rights, women’s rights … the future seems dismal this evening.

New border controls may mean Irish business travellers each having to queue for an extra half hour each morning on landing at Stansted, Heathrow and Birmingham, and repeating the same exercise before they catch the last flight back in the evening.

I fly on one of these routes at least once a month on average. The corridor between Dublin and London is the second busiest international air route, following closely behind the air corridor between Taipei and Hong Kong. Consolidate and quantify these waiting half-hours and we can only imagine how much this exercise alone is going to cost business.

Now why should the French bother spending French taxes on stopping refugees at Calais making their way to Dover. Unwittingly, Farage and Johnson may find they have brought upon themselves the one problem they do not want to face.

I tried to clear my head this evening by taking a walk before dinner along the pebble-strewn shoreline at Bray, Co Wicklow. And I found that in my head I was going over and over again the words of Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach first published almost 150 years ago in 1867 in his collection New Poems.

Matthew Arnold was the godson of John Keble, and his father was the headmaster of Rugby.

In Dover Beach, Arnold is on the shore at Dover, facing the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the Channel across to Calais. Arnold sees in the retreat of the tide a metaphor for the loss of religious and faith values in Victorian England. But he could be reflecting on the loss of social and political values in England today and the way that this may end in a bloody conflict in which people slay not their feared enemies but their own friends, neighbours and colleagues.

The beach at Dover is bare, with only a hint of humanity in a light that “gleams and is gone.” He hears the sound of the sea as “the eternal note of sadness.” The Greek tragic playwright Sophocles also heard this sound as he stood on Aegean shores.

The final stanza begins with an appeal to love, then moves on to the famous ending metaphor. This is an allusion to a passage in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War (Book 7, 44), in which he describes a battle at night on a beach in Sicily during the Athenian invasion.

In the battle, the attacking army became disoriented while fighting in the dark and in their fear many of these soldiers inadvertently killed each other.

On this sun-filled evening, I fear so much that in the last 48 hours we have unleashed too many dark forces.

‘But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, / Retreating, to the breath / Of the night-wind’ … on Bray beach this evening (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay
. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Neighbours are good neighbours when we are good friends too

‘In England’s green and pleasant Land’ … a summer stroll in the countryside in Staffordshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

I grew up thinking of England as my second home. My generation grew up watching English television, supporting English football teams, and reading English comics magazines and newspapers. I remember school debating teams that were obsessed with British politics.

I have never felt I am an outsider in England. From my teens I was familiar with places in England associated with my family background. My first employer sent me to England when I was 18. I have worked in England, written for English newspapers and magazines, made television programmes with English production teams, and sat on boards and trustee bodies based in England.

I have preached in English cathedrals, churches and college chapels, I have shed tears in the hulk of Coventry Cathedral, I have soared to dizzying heights at Evensong in King’s College Chapel and Westminster Abbey, and I have spent time studying in Cambridge and in Birmingham.

I have found the clock at ten to three in Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester, and have had honey for tea (or at least a hearty lunch) in the Orchard after walking from Trumpington or walking along the ‘Grantchester Grind.’ Yes, I know how a jug of Pimm’s always adds to the feeling that summer has arrived in an English garden, and I also enjoy the pleasures of English cricket, rugby and soccer.

I can spend hours exploring the architecture of the churches, houses and shops of towns like Saffron Walden, Bishop’s Stortford, Calne, Tamworth and Lichfield, or weekends in search of another Pugin church in the Staffordshire countryside or another Tudor timber-framed pub in Hertfordshire or Essex.

But I have also campaigned and protested on the streets of English cities and towns against wars, the arms race and racism, and I have spoken in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square.

I enjoy strolling through the rolling countryside of Staffordshire, on Wenlock Edge, through Coe Fen, in the Cotswolds and the Peaks, by the white horses of Wiltshire, along the banks of the Tame, the Trent, the Avon, the Severn, or the Thames. I can stand for hours watching rowers and punters on the backs in Cambridge and barges on the canals around Birmingham or the Lea Valley. I enjoy summer in the countryside in what William Blake describes as “England’s green and pleasant Land.”

I enjoy strolling through the rolling countryside near Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

If you want to preserve a romantic vision of England, I understand you. But I want that England to be part of my Europe too.

I am not a foreigner in England. For as long as I can remember, I have been as at home in Lichfield as I am in Wexford or Dublin. For me, there never has been a border between England and Ireland.

In recent years, when I have been asked for a passport travelling between Ireland and Britain, it has usually been by Ryanair staff members checking my boarding pass or by the gardai at Dublin Airport.

I only travel on my Irish passport. Yet, there are countries where I have been more than happy that British embassies provide hospitality and backup when there is no Irish embassy on the ground – indeed, even where there is an Irish embassy, British embassies have been places of welcome and hospitality.

I only travel on my Irish passport (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

English culture is inseparable from my culture: poets, playwrights, composers, novelists, artists, dramatists, film-makers, television producers, sculptors, sports starts, journalists … we live in overlapping cultures that nurture each other. Who cares – who asks – whether Bob Geldof, Jeremy Taylor, Terry Wogan or Alec Guinness is or was English or Irish? Who remembers that John Betjeman wrote some of his best and most enduring poetry in Ireland? Or, for that matter, that George Herbert was born in Wales, that Vaughan Williams was of Welsh descent, and that TS Eliot was American-born?

It’s only when we get to the extremes that I get embarrassed: William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ was American-born, but was he from Galway or from England? Oswald Moseley and Diana Mitford lived in Co Galway and then in Co Cork after World War II, but no-one in Ireland would want to claim them.

In 1946, Evelyn Waugh travelled throughout Ireland in his quest for a romantic country house. In December 1946, he visited Gormanston Castle, Co Meath, and described it as “a fine, solid, grim, square, half-finished block with tower and turrets.” He made an offer to the owners of the castle, but had a change of heart and withdrew his offer when he read in a Dublin evening newspaper that Billy Butlin was planning a holiday camp nearby at Mosney, his first outside England. Had he bought Gormanston, perhaps I might have been sent to a school in England; instead, his silly snobbery made way for my school.

I do not want to see England, or any other part of the United Kingdom, leave the European Union. If today’s referendum was about the United Kingdom alone, I would not interfere. I would be an observer, a passive – an amused or bemused observer, depending on the result.

But today’s referendum is not just about the future of the United Kingdom. It is about the future of Ireland too, and it is about the future of the Europe we share together.

As John Donne, the poet and Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London, wrote:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Crossing the border between Spain and Gibraltar at La Línea de la Concepción (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Of course, I enjoy my times in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales too. I do not want to see a new border from Derry to Dundalk the replicates the only present British land border with the EU – the thin but tortuous border that separates Gibraltar and Spain.

Neighbours are good neighbours when they are good friends too. I do not want my friends to become more distant. If you have a vote in the United Kingdom today, please vote to Remain. Your European neighbours and friends want you to continue being part of our family and want to continue being part of your family

Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant Land.

Cypriot EU membership bid gets ‘full-hearted’ backing from Ireland

By Patrick Comerford

The former president of Cyprus, Dr George Vassiliou, who is on a three-day official visit to Ireland, has described his talks with the Taoiseach as “very friendly”, and says he is happy with the progress being made by Cyprus towards full membership of the EU.

Despite a warmer climate in diplomatic relations between Greece and Turkey, Dr Vassiliou said there had been no progress on the question of Turkey’s presence in northern Cyprus and the division of the island. But he was certain the accession process must continue, and insisted Turkey could not veto Cypriot EU membership.

“If nothing happens before accession, a lot can happen after,” he said. “Once Turkey realises it cannot stop accession, and the Taoiseach agrees that it is not entitled to, then Turkey will soon see it is in the interest of Turkish Cypriots, and of Turkey itself, to solve the problem.”

He said Turkish Cypriots were in favour of Cypriot accession because it would “guarantee their lives, their human rights, and give them access to vital financial support for development”. After accession, he was confident Cyprus would be “understanding and co-operative” when it came to the EU’s dealings with Turkey.

Referring to the Balkans and the Middle East, he said Cyprus was a force for stability and democracy in the region. “As the outer flank of the EU in the Middle East, we will help the EU to continue its very creative and positive role in the region,” he said.

Dr Vassiliou’s visit includes talks with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, party and business leaders and officials from Government Departments and authorities. He was president of Cyprus from 1988 to 1993, and now heads the Cypriot negotiating team for accession to the EU.

He said he had been assured that Ireland was supporting the Cypriot accession “full-heartedly”, and this had been backed up by technical help and advice and practical assistance.

Mr Cowen told Dr Vassiliou yesterday that Cyprus was well to the forefront of the applicant countries, having concluded 18 of the 29 chapters in the negotiation process. The Minister reiterated Ireland's willingness to help in the accession process, and reminded Dr Vassiliou of Ireland's full support for UN efforts to achieve a solution to the division of the island, based on a bizonal, bicommunal, federal approach.

Although the results of the Nice summit had not been greeted with enthusiasm by everyone, the candidate countries had every reason to be happy, because Nice had opened the way to enlargement, Dr Vassiliou said. “There could have been more, but this is not a reason to complain.”

Asked whether 2003 was a realistic date for Cypriot accession, Dr Vassiliou said he did not expect it was possible for Cyprus to join by then. But he looked forward to completing negotiations early next year, “ideally during the Spanish presidency”, with the accession treaties approved and signed later in the year.

Most of 2003 would be spent on ratification, “and a realistic date is January 1st, 2004, certainly before the European Parliament elections in the summer of 2004”.

This news report was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Friday 6 April 2001