On Tara's Arms

"The harp that once through Tara's halls the soul of music shed" last week became belatedly the official coat of arms of the Irish Government. But the old instrument, concluded Dublin's newspapers, was still as mute as the poet said. One trouble was that in all Eire there were only eight people bothering to learn to play the thing.

To be sure, said one paper, there was a good harpist at the Royal Dublin Society's concert, but she was a Russian. Besides, said another, the traditional harp of the great Brian Boru had 30 strings, and this heraldic harp had only 15, for all that they were silver. And anyway, wasn't it the Sassenach heretic King Henry VIII who made the harp Ireland's official symbol in the first place when he decided that the three crowns of ancient Ireland looked too much like a Popish tiara?

At this, some were for dropping the harp altogether and substituting, say, a picture of Kathleen ni Houlihan. But Kathleen's traditional picture turned out to be posed by a mistress of King Charles II, the very Duchess of Richmond who posed as Britannia.

Kathleen was dropped like a hot spud. In the midst of the gloom the Irish Times at last found a good word to say for the harp. To Irishmen good, black Guinness stout is "the wine of the country." Like Eire, Guinness uses the harp for its emblem. "They have 25 strings to their harps," wrote the Times columnist helpfully. "If you can count them, you can safely order another bottle."

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