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Previously:
Altogether, I’ve been across the pond to visit Ireland 14 times. This manuscript covers my first two Irish sojourns. The first segment (MY IRISH LASS) covers the events, impressions and feelings of 17 quick but meaningful days in the early autumn of 1993, falling in love with the country and my traveling companion at the same time. Heavenly! The second segment (THAT CELTIC SUMMER) recounts the highlights of an entire summer spent fruitfully immersing myself in the Irish culture.
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> Like most Americans- probably like most foreigners- I thought I knew Ireland by its cultural icons. (Lord what arrogant bastards these Yankees be!)
Throughout my upbringing, the TV flashed me images Irish: the shillelagh and the shamrock, kissing the Blarney Stone, the luck of the Irish, Saint Patrick’s Day, and the Lucky Charms leprechaun searching for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! Though fun to indulge in, these stereotypes do a disservice to all that is Irish. They bear as much relevance to the Irish national character as Hollywood does to everyday life. When you deconstruct the media mythology, what remains?
Let’s break it down: starting with the Shamrock… Isn’t that a four-leaf clover- a rare mutant, and thus all the more special. The shillelagh… Wasn’t that a good thick stick with a knob on one end, once used as a battle-cudgel, now usually employed as a walking stick, useful for warding off unwanted fairies and sprites. And then there’s kissing the Blarney stone of course: said to imbue one with charm, a wealth of wit and the gift of loquacious gab. Once a year, the entire world celebrates Saint Patrick’s Day. In America, we observe the occasion by going pubbing with our mates and overindulging in the Beer Arts. All we know about Patrick was that somebody said he was a saint. He drove the snakes out of Ireland with his divinely-inspired super-powers. It wasn’t until I visited Ireland myself, that I began to see Saint Patrick in an altogether different light. In Donegal, Irishmen with weathered faces and dog-eared caps, swore to Hell and back, that the ostensibly pious saint was actually a despot Englishman, a lunatic cleric who embarked on a mad mission to ethnically cleanse the native Irish of their spiritual order. According to their view of history, what the Celtic people saw as their folk-religion, the Catholic church saw as amoral paganism of the most depraved sort. Communing with Earth spirits! Cavorting around fires! Worshipping nature! In this story, God told Saint Patrick, while deep in the throes of a crazed fever, to go forth across the Irish Sea and begin the church’s barbaric re-education of the sinful isle’s misguided peasants, and replace a belief-system that had evolved through the mists of time, with a stiff shot of ascetic Christianity. (All this, should it be closer to the truth, making Saint Patrick a curious figure for an American hero, I think- considering that freedom of religion was one of the principals the U.S. was founded on.) Which brings us to the luck of the Irish, a shockingly inappropriate aphorism, given Ireland’s tortured history of invasions by Vikings and Christians, Normans and Saxons, blights, potato famines, plagues, McDonalds and Microsoft! Until very recently, when economic prosperity and European unity has proffered unprecedented Irish wealth and comfort, those poor bastards have had one hell-of-a time of it. Not the kind of luck I should like to have!
I suspect it’s more than luck that I should be part Irish. I mean- who isn’t? Those people propagate like rats! (Just kidding- but they are mostly Catholic and Catholics do tend to reproduce.) Since the potato famine, the Irish have taken the world like a virus. Fleeing that cursed luck of the Irish, they emigrated in wave after wrenchingly painful wave, scattering around the world and carrying on- until now, there are at least three times as many Irish worldwide as there are in their tiny homeland.
Though divided politically into Northern Ireland and the Republic in the south, another less dramatic but equally significant division runs up the center of the isle. The east is heavily populated, dominated by teeming Dublin- the west, still considered a frontier. The east-face of Ireland stares-down historical nemesis England, the West gazes out towards the unforgiving Atlantic. Take my word for it: If you’re looking for unbelievably resplendent vistas, majestic seashores, and quaint villages- if you want to experience the real Ireland- not the commercial blarney, but the modern practice of an ancient way of living, if you want to meet people whose destiny has been tied to the tenuous land and the insistent sea for untold generations- then the West is unquestionably the best. Travel the Ring of Kerry (preferably in the off-season, when the road isn’t choked with gargantuan tourist busses.) Visit counties Clare and Galway, to hear the fiercely feisty traditional music of the Gaeltacht: Ireland’s Gaelic-speaking regions. Visit pristine Connemara or the glorious Dingle and Beara peninsulas. Relax in the perfect little Mayo town of Westport. Thrill to the wild country of Donegal.
– But wherever you choose to travel, leave your preconceived notions at the airport, and trust in Ireland to fill your vessel…
Next up: We begin MY IRISH LASS with: “From Dreams to Reality”
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