Revisiting Ireland
We’ve been back from Ireland for over a week now, catching up on the mundane of existing in Okemos. Things like paying bills, organizing photo, volunteer commitments, getting the lizard to like us again, etc.…..
Where to start with Ireland? This is one of those trips that it takes a while to process. It’s something you have to mull over, like a glass of Jamison’s Black Barrel whiskey. Something to savor, not to chug like a cretin frat boy.
This was a very different trip for me, one that I’m not entirely comfortable writing about. Both Lise and I have some genetic ties to Ireland. Most of the U.S. population probably has some tie to Ireland. At least if they’re lucky.
I am not much into the ethereal spiritual kind of stuff. I really am a “I am what I am, and you get what you see” kind of person. But there were places in Ireland where I thought, “OK, this is weird, I’ve been here before.” This isn’t because I had seen pictures in a travelogue somewhere. This was driving along and saying, “I going to walk to the top of that hill because I know that hill. I’ve been there before”. This was a little spooky but at least I didn’t walk up there barefooted.
When you start analyzing a place, its history of a place is always a good place to start. In Ireland, you can’t swing a dead cat around without hitting something historic. It might be 5,000 years old historic, it might be 100 years old historic. You’re driving along and there’s the ruins of a 3,000 year old stone ring fort in someone’s back yard. Or a music school from the 1400s and two blocks away a pub from the 1600s. Or the remains of stone cottages abandoned since 1840’s famine. Or a marker from the 1916 Easter Rising. You can’t look at the Book of Kells, or walk through St. Stephan’s Green, without being moved.
A good part of Irish history is tragic at best. Christianity may or may not have been a good thing for the Irish. The British were very decidedly a bad thing. You learn to not like the British early on in a trip to Ireland. The British have screwed up pretty much every part of the world they’ve come in contact with, but it seems they put extra effort into screwing Ireland.
Interwoven with Irish history is spirituality and culture. They can’t be separated. We spent two nights at Hopewell Retreat, site of a spring used for a couple thousand years. We met the owner, your basic Irish farmer in rubber boots and smelling like manure. He is convinced there is something spiritual about the water and built a place worthy of it. He could have just set up a wooden shack, or just pumped water out of the spring. Instead he built something fitting the spirituality of the place. As he said, “something the old ones could appreciate.” That Irish farmer with dung on his boots was also more literate about the American political system than most Americans are.
Pubs are an integral part of Irish culture that I rather enjoyed. Pubs are an Irish way of life. Not the tourist pubs of Dublin’s Temple Bar district, where tourists go to get drunk. Every neighborhood or village has at least one pub, usually more. Places you can walk to and be welcomed in, even as a stranger. Irish pubs are very different from American bars. These are meeting places where the whole family comes. You don’t drink until the wee hours of the morning, just to get blitzed. You come for a pint, and maybe grab a bite to eat. Maybe watch a hurling or Gaelic football game on the tube. Most pubs close around 10:00 or 11:00.
The Irish also do whiskey in a good way. They didn’t invent distillation. That goes way back, probably to Mesopotamia. Good arguments can be made for the Irish inventing whiskey, though the Scots seem to think they have a lock on it. Either way, whiskey has Celtic origins. The English word for whiskey is derived from the Gaelic word Usque baugh, meaning water of life.
As usual with the Irish things seem to go boom and bust. Whiskey distillation was going fine, then the British put tax and tariff penalties on Irish whiskey to prevent competition with English and Scotch whiskey. This effectively locked the Irish out of the British and European markets. Some legal Irish whiskey making still persevered, marketed primarily to the U.S. Then along came the American prohibition. With all their eggs in one basket, most legal Irish distilleries went out of business. There was something like 30 plus distilleries pre-Prohibition, and only three survived Prohibition. They’re coming back though, and in fine form too. My favorites are Tullamore DEW or Jameson Black Barrel. Either is a fine sip that I’m more than happy to have in my cup.
Everyone, everywhere, was friendly. Whether in metropolitan Dublin, or out in some fishing village, everyone was nice. I’m sure there are bad people in Ireland. There are jackasses everywhere. But we didn’t meet any during our trip. Well maybe a few tourists, probably French. Everyone was nice and friendly. Even when I blocked traffic by stalling the car in the middle of some god-forsaken traffic roundabout, at worst I would get a little toot from a horn.
For me, the friendliness was epitomized in a pub right before we left. It was a little place, close to where we were staying. Came time to pay and they didn’t have a charge card system set up. We didn’t think we had enough Euros so the bartended just said, “Don’t worry about it. If you’re coming back tomorrow you can just pay me then.” He said this to two total strangers he knew didn’t live thereabouts. Where in the States is something like that going to happen?
To describe Ireland, I think of the Jill and Leon Uris book, “Ireland, a Terrible Beauty”. Ireland is a sublimely beautiful place, where every stone has seen its share of history. A place that takes friendliness to an extreme, where everyone is welcome It is also a tragic place, where many of the tragedies can be laid at the feet of the British. Whether entire villages massacred by Cromwell or preventable famines, the Brits have systematically tried their best to destroy Ireland and Irish culture. The Church hasn’t helped much either.
Ireland is a hard place to make a living. Given it’s tragic past, it’s easy to see why, for hundreds of years, Ireland’s chief export has been people. Whether it was the Flight of the Wild Geese, Irish men going to continental Europe as mercenaries, or Irish penal ships populating Australia, or modern immigrants leaving for economic reasons. But Ireland is also a place of history, beauty and spirituality. As hard as it is to live there, some have always stayed and continue to stay. I raise a toast to them. And I will be back there. If not in body, in spirit.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 