Raise a glass and toast the remarkable Guinness family

Friday, December 28, 2007

By Kevin Myers

The harp is internationally associated with Ireland, but through Guinness, not through any efforts of the Irish government.

Guinness has provided the brand-image, the myth, the cliche of Irishness: every Irish home rugby victory is recorded by cross-channel journalists as the excuse for the Irish to down millions of pints of 'the black stuff', (yawn yawn), or drink deep of the 'Liffey water' (ho hum).

To remove the imprint of Arthur Guinness from the foreign perception of Irishness would be like removing voodoo from the image of Haiti or clogs, dams and dope from the general view of the Dutch.

Yet foreigners may be forgiven for not knowing about Arthur Guinness, his life and times: what is rather more extraordinary is that Irish people know so little about this giant, whose vast shadow reaches down the centuries.

It has fallen to Patrick Guinness, of that family, naturally, to attempt to cast some light within the shadow and myth and falsehood and ignorance, in Arthur's Round: The Life And Times Of Brewing Legend of Arthur Guinness (Peter Owen).

Patrick is one of the cleverest people I know, and thus has every qualification to tell the tale, not merely of his family's history, but of 18th-century Ireland, especially of those Gaelic families who prudently conformed with the Establishment in order to get ahead: the Conollys, the Sheridans and of course, the Guinnesses.

The first of the many Guinness myths is their name. Like most people, I have always assumed that it was a patronymic, Mac Aonghusa, son of Angus.

But with the aid of DNA testing of the male chromosome, Patrick and his researchers at TCD have revealed that the name Guinness is not a patronymic at all, but a toponymic: it comes from a valley in Co Down known as Gion Ais meaning wedge-shaped ridge.

For, far being from high-born, the original Down Guinnesses were probably of the helot-class, virtual slaves whose lack of blood or connection meant that they were excluded from positions of wealth or influence in patrilineal Gaelic society.

What else could they do but escape those suffocating confines, and head to where they would not be known? And like 'untouchable' Hindus in India who converted to the Islamic religion of the sub-continent's Moghul conquerors, low-status Gaels would have had good temporal reason to adopt the religion of the new ruling caste.

But the brewing habit did not come from the Guinness family at all, but from Arthur's mother's side. She was a Read, an English corruption of the old Irish name, O Maoil Brighde, 'descendent of the servant of Bridget'.

The Reads, from near Celbridge, Co Kildare, also had conformed with the Established Church, and in 1690, William Read bought a licence to brew ale.

And that is where the story really begins. His daughter Elizabeth married Richard Guinness in the 1720s, and Arthur Guinness was born in 1725. They were a family on the margin: English-speaking Irish Protestants who were Gaelic in origin, living surrounded by Irish-speaking Catholics, and with Speaker Conolly's palladian pile at Celbridge nearby proof of what a thrusting Irish lad could make of himself.

And by God, that's what Arthur set about doing. The story of Arthur Guinness and the company he built is easily the most fascinating of 18th-century Ireland. Patriotism, commercial acumen, social mobility, came together in a way southern Ireland did not come close to matching until William Martin Murphy a century and a half later.

But of course Arthur Guinness was sui generis: he founded a dynasty which, for generation after generation, has been unbrokenly eminent in Ireland, and has been similarly distinguished in Britain since the end of the 19th century.

Few other families from either island can lay such a claim: which suggests that the ambition-gene is firmly lodged in the male Guinness Y-chromosome. Certainly, Arthur, and more so his wife Olivia, did their very best to spread all their chromosomes as widely as possible.

Olivia mothered 21 children, though only 10 made it to adulthood; and that, more than anything else, speaks of a world which is utterly unrecognisable to us today.

There is another vital factor here. For when Arthur Guinness moved his brewing business from the White Hart Inn in Celbridge to St James's Gate, he took with him the Kildare yeast -- very probably the one used by his maternal grandfather.

And unlike baker's yeast, which perishes in its triumphant inferno, beer yeast reproduces ad infinitum. And though the Guinnesses are indeed a great extended family, they were made so by that other extended but invisible clan of the asomycetous fungus with which the Reade family brewed their beers since 1690. Guinness has since spread that yeast around the world.

The Guinnesses are the single most interesting family in Ireland, and Patrick of the clan has finally told the true story of how the family and their company started: an utterly compelling and irresistible tale, brilliantly told.