The Fire Fades

The end of fireplaces in new build houses means the end of a version of Irish life

It never occurred to me until I had my own place that my default vision a comfortable, stable home is of my mother falling asleep by the fire, in front of the tv, on a winter’s evening.

If I fix that composite image in my mind I can dissasemble the individual elements. The TV can be on or not (Gay Byrne -era Late Late if so); she can have a drink (gone-cold cup of tea with the tea bag still in it) or not; and to be honest it doesn’t matter if it’s winter either - in our house the fire was going from August to May. (It still is!) What defines this sense memory is the fire itself - that is the indispendible centre of the image. The fire is the home.

Every Irish person has been asked at some point to say something in Irish for the benefit of a foreigner who has never heard the language before. There are two stock phrases an Irish person uses in these circumstances. The first is the jokey “an bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas”. The other is “níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin”. Again: the fire is the gateway.

Here is how Bord Na Mona (the semi-state body that makes the briquettes irish people burn in their fires) advertised it’s products in the 1990s:

You can read too much into an ad, which is ultimately just someone hoping to trick you out of your money by confusing your brain with an emotional image. But why *these* images? The landscape, the land, poetry, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, pubs, music, the plantations - this is deep seam to mine, and it’s as good a 30 second summary our of national iconography as you could hope for. It’s corny and thick with clichés but something more than clichés too, and an Irish man or woman far from home who doesn’t get emotional seeing and hearing that isn’t Irish. Fire and home are synonymous.

The fire is a glowing thread you follow that leads you back into Deep Ireland. Past your parents and your grandparents. They tried to get Irish peasantry to bake bread during the famine but no one had an oven, only a fire. The oldest bodies that can be found on this island are not buried in tombs but under metres of peat, and are often discovered by Bord Na Mona.

If humanity can have a Collective Unconscious - a library of primordial images that everyone recognises without ever having learned them - I don’t see why there can’t be regional branches of that library. The Fire is the central Jungian achetype of the Irish Collective Unconscious. If the world was arranged along Irish preferences it would be a Tarot card and a zodiac sign.

Which is a shame, because in the present day, changes to planning laws mean that open fireplaces will increasingly be a thing of the past, nostalgia be damned. It’s not that they’re banned as such; it’s just that all new builds will need to meet a certainly level of energy efficiency - and a fireplace and chimney are basically just a massive hole in the top of your house. Sales of existing houses will also depend on energy efficiency ratings, meaning that existing fireplaces will be sealed/ bricked up. The commercial sale of turf is to be banned, and Bord Na Mona’s peat harvesting is also being wound down for envirnomental reasons. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

While not everyone will agree with my winsome, faciful ramblings about anscestral fire-memory, people are genuinely upset and restive about these changes. Eamon Ryan, leader of current coalition partners the Green Party was sufficiently perturbed by “misniformation” on the subject he had to announce that “we won’t put your granny in prison for burning turf”. (For the record I think he asbolutely would do that, in a heartbeat. The fact that he even said it means he’s been thinking about it.)

I put the idea that fireplaces might soon be a thing of the past for environmental reasons alongside the idea that the Angelus might soon be a thing of the past. In practical terms it’s probably not the biggest deal. But in the aggregate, and in emotional terms, to continually chip away at the people’s sense of orientation, uniqueness and familiarity and while replacing it with nothing *is* a big deal. Eventually one of the small things you take away will also be the last thing.

I complain about Ireland a lot but when someone asks me what my favourite thing is, I usually tell them it’s the smell of fires in the autumn. Every Irish person knows this phenomenon. One day it’s temperate late summer, and the next the temperatue has dropped five degrees, the fires are lit, and suddenly that sweet, sulphrous, nostalgic and otheworldly scent is suffusing everything - even where I am in the deracinated suburbs. The idea that smell could go away, or that a generation of Irish people could someday grow up not knowing it, feels like the loss of something deeper and older than mere warmth.