How two places called Devenish stripped away divisions

An island within a series of islands within an island, actually.

That place, renowned far beyond these shores, is Devenish.

Christianity’s part in Devenish’s history probably began in the 6th Century. That’s when records suggest the first monastic site was established by Molaise, an Irish monk with a Scots connection, who later became a saint.

At that time of creating Devenish as a possible stopover for pilgrims heading south, Molaise may have been the abbot of a monastery in what’s now known as Old Leighlin in County Carlow.

In a world where we dispute so much of the present, it’s hard to be certain of anything in the past.

But we do know that Devenish as a place pre-dates Christianity.

Possibly, like many Christian sites and traditions, it has its origins in Paganism.

Before God was a man in the sky, she was an Earth mother. Even today, some indigenous cultures still revere female Gods.

However, those who follow the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have apparently moved on from all of that primitive stuff.

Imagine then what the Pagans would have made of events in the other Devenish that has made the news in recent times?

On Valentine’s weekend recently, an X-rated strip show made headlines in Belfast, when the suggestively named ‘Pleasure Boys’ performed at The Devenish Complex.

There, the show seems to have gone off script – going a whole lot farther than anything we might have seen in the 1997 film, ‘The Full Monty’.

Allegedly, it involved a group of women storming the stage and ‘manhandling’ the dancers who didn’t seem too Protestant about it all.

What’s interesting about this, for many people, is the shared outrage.

Neither Mary Lou, nor even Jeffrey and Michelle in a double act, have managed to unite people quite as much as this night of naughtiness.

But I’ve no interest in the moral side of it. I’ve forfeited that long ago, on a stag party where a group of us went to a female strip show.

We were young, drunk, and living in a time long before the #MeToo movement.

Just like the women in West Belfast, we went in to see what the craic was.

But in our case, as in most cases, male or female, it was just to watch.

One thing of note though is that several guys in our group wouldn’t go, for moral reasons.

And that needs saying, because one of the common refrains in the past days is that men are being hypocrites when they condemn events in The Devenish.

Some are – and some aren’t.

But this isn’t intended as yet another piece of tit-for-tatter, in the world’s best-endowed land of whatabouttery.

There’s something far more interesting, below the surface, something I’ve been thinking about for years, decades even.

It’s related to a change in culture that began to happen around the late 1990s, early 2000s. And maybe it was there before, but I didn’t notice it as much.

Or maybe it was upon moving to England that I really noticed it.

And ‘it’ is not an easy thing to explain, because it can sound like cultural snobbery. But it’s not intended that way; it’s just an observation.

Long before I left Devenish’s mother island, I had no interest in things such as ‘Geordie Shore’, or ‘Get me out of X-Factor Celebrity Bake-Off Dancing on Ice Before Tarantulas Knock me Off My Skates’, or whatever.

Zero interest. The same with tabloid gossip, and celebrity gossip.

I could happily watch films and football and listen to music without knowing who the stars were sleeping with, or what drugs they enjoyed.

I’d no interest in Daniella Westbrook’s nose, or Mark Wahlberg’s other bits.

And I think a lot of people are the same, but they’re fed a constant diet of this nonsense to the extent that they believe it is of more relevance than the fight for public services or better pay, for example.

In England, though, there’s a really stark divide between people who care about that aspect of Popular Culture, and those that don’t.

Sometimes, that is based on social class, but it’s also an ideological divide.

I know lots of women and men, and people of other identities, who wouldn’t go to strip shows, because they’d perceive it as ‘Geordie Shore’ or ‘The Only Way is Essex’ culture.

Class snobbery? Maybe, or maybe not.

Whatever the reasons, the objection wouldn’t generally be sexual morality. It’d be more to do with ethics, exploitation, and so on.

It’d be a decision influenced by the person’s world view, not their religion.

I’m sure the same is true of a great many people in the land surrounding Devenish, whatever we want to call it.

I guess that, in The Devenish Complex, many would call it ‘the North’, or ‘the Six Counties’.

And yet those events on Finaghy Road, whilst maybe not found in parts of Finchley, could as easily have happened in any British city.

Probably anywhere on the island of Ireland, too, and much of Europe.

Some might say, ‘Sure, that’s the proof it could have happened anywhere’.

Except that’s not true. In much of the world, within the vast majority of cultures in the world, it probably wouldn’t have happened.

It’s mostly only in the ‘free’ societies of the West that this could happen so openly.

And there’s an irony in some of the most passionate advocates of Britain’s ‘freedoms’ being so strongly against this strip show.

There’s another element that would be discomforting for some people in England. It’s the fetish that’s applied to people of colour, and to coloured skin – a topic for another day, perhaps.

But in running out of words, and with no option for an encore, unlike those dancers in The Devenish Complex, we’ll return again to that other Devenish connection, and the renowned Saint Molaise.

Aside from founding a monastic site amidst the islands of the Erne, he’s also famous for living as a hermit in a cave on Holy Island, nearby Scotland’s Isle of Arran.

Today, that famous cave is still a religious site, but it’s now used as a Buddhist retreat instead of being a Christian shrine.

It seems that on all the islands around us, the ways of the world are changing.

Stripped down to basic instincts, there’s not much difference in the people of Belfast probably.

Strangely though, it has taken those Pleasure Boys to unite them!

Paul Breen is @CharltonMen on Twitter/X.