Horseplay in Hibernia

Seán Moran explores equine escapades in Eire and elsewhere.

- Seán Moran

‘Hibernia’ is the Latin for Ireland. The Romans didn’t use the word much though, because (unlike our neighbour, Britannia) they never invaded Ireland. Perhaps they were scared of the dancing girls with their long curly wigs, kitsch Celtic dresses, and ferociously competitive mammies. In any case, they had a cheek naming our country Hibernia, which literally means ‘Land of Winter’. They seem to have mixed us up with Narnia. We actually have four seasons – admittedly sometimes on the same day.

When present-day Romans visit for a summer holiday, they soon discover that Ireland loves horses. This national characteristic runs across all socio-economic classes. When Queen Elizabeth came to Ireland, she made a pilgrimage to my home county of Tipperary, to admire the thoroughbred racehorses in the paddocks and stables of stud farms. Horses are also found in impoverished Dublin housing estates, and in Traveller encampments around the country. The young charioteers in my photograph are members of the Irish Traveller community. A similar image of a charioteer struggling to control recalcitrant horses appears in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus – though in Ireland we call a chariot a ‘sulky’, and the minor drama depicted in my photo took place in a cloudy Tipperary town, not under the blazing sun of Athens.

In Plato’s allegory, the chariot of the soul (psyche) is pulled by two horses, one mortal, one immortal. Both horses have wings, but the mortal one is a “crooked lumbering animal… hardly yielding to whip and spur” (Phaedrus, 253). This steed represents our desires or appetites (