Tuesday Voice: Ireland, Part 2

More Blarney

By James T. Carney

[Sequel to "In Erin (Against Ireland)"]

The guidebook recited the following famous rhyme about Blarney, which is near Cork and on the River Lee:

    On Galway sands, they kiss the hands,
They kiss the lips at Carney,
But on the Lee, they drink strong tea
    And kiss the stone at Blarney.

Unfortunately, I could never find anyone who had ever heard of this rhyme. My son Jim and I tried the library in Killarney without any luck. Even the souvenir shops and the sign-making shops had never heard of it. My sister, Beth, has been to Carney, but suggested we skip it. We did. For the reasons set forth above, it is doubtful that we Carneys came from Carney.

Blarney Stone sign
(not the stone)

    Now, at Blarney they do not let you kiss the stone anymore. They are afraid that you will fall off. (There are lawyers in Ireland too.) So they line you up so you can kiss the stone above the Blarney stone—which I suppose makes it the real Blarney stone. My sister can probably explain this after she is done telling you why The Odyssey was not written by Homer but by another Greek of the same name.

Blarney Castle

    Blarney Castle was held by the same family for almost five hundred years which is certainly a tribute to their ability to accommodate themselves to the winning side, or perhaps to the wisdom of some of their relatives who chose the winning side. One of the few people to resist the temptation to kiss the Blarney Stone was George Bernard Shaw, who begged off stating, “Many people believe I talk too much already.” Certain less than admiring friends and relatives have said the same of me.
    One interesting thing that we did after seeing Blarney Castle was visit the mansion house of the people who bought Blarney Castle. It was filled with eighteenth century furniture, which I found quite interesting because it was quite similar to much of the 18th century American furniture that I had seen in my college roommate’s (Dean Levy’s) antique store.

Then, amidst rain (that goes without saying), we went on to the shrine at Glenflesh—the ancestral home of the Glenflesh O’Donoghues—to be distinguished from the Killarney O’Donoghues or another branch of the O’Donoghues up north. Jim is becoming a DNA expert and by taking my father-in-law’s DNA—and sending it to the O’Donoghue society—had found that all the O’Donoghues with whom the DNA matched almost perfectly had come from Glenflesh. In addition, a cousin on his mother’s family had visited the Killarney area years ago an apparently found some third cousins—which was more than we managed to do. Any picture that one has of the Irish welcoming American cousins and assisting in the search for common ancestors was the result of someone’s overindulging in Guinness. Irish, as the local priest told us, are not interested in genealogy and the parish records we looked at all postdated the departure of Jim’s ancestors—and were generally illegible anyway.

Killarney

    Indeed, the Irish are awfully ignorant of history. A la Kipling, I took up the Englishman’s burden and made a number of attempts—totally in vain as Jim and his wife Nina predicted—to educate the natives by (1) taking to the Killarney tourist office—from what they called the Genealogical Society but was actually the Bureau of Vital Statistics—a notice indicating what records were available—after 1864—so that poor benighted Americans like us wouldn’t have to hike over the town hunting for information that was not available, (2) explaining to the tour guide at the Mansion House outside Blarney Castle that the Edwardian era had ended with the death of HRH Edward VIII in 1910 and definitely did not continue until 1920, and (3) explaining to the folks at King John’s castle in Limerick that their sign stating that Richard III had been born in 1485 was less than accurate since he was killed at Bosworth Field in that year.
    At least it was dry in the parish house, as it was not in Killarney or any place else as we spent the next day chasing O’Donoghues. It did not improve my mood any that after we hiked to Killarney town in the rain (we were staying outside), we found the place in a state of evacuation. The natives informed us that some drunk had hit the major transformer and knocked out power all over the country. (Apparently, this was not an uncommon occurrence.) Jim and Nina ran back to our hotel (a mile an half a way), but as befitted someone of my rank and station, I proceeded at a more dignified place, finding along the way the one store which had its own generator, buying the three b’s which are necessary to sustain life—bread, butter, and beer—and bringing enough back for dinner.

    Even in Ireland, it can not rain all the time, so the next day it was sunny when we drove around the Ring of Kerry. (Nina did the driving so I had to listen to Jim yell at her rather than me about being too close on the left. Irish roads—like English roads—were not built for automobiles.) Certainly, this day was the nicest day of our trip because the weather was great and the scenery was beautiful. (In general the Southeast and Southwest of Ireland, along with the Midlands, consist of plains and somewhat rolling hills, which are nice but unremarkable and indeed remind me very much of old England. The Ring of Kerry is quite different since it oscillates between high mountains and a rugged coastline.)
    We visited a recreation of an old Irish village that was quite interesting, although not as uncommon as I would have thought. (We saw similar recreations the next day when hiked around Killarney and also on the following day when we went to Banratty Castle, which is right outside Shannon airport.) We stopped the car at one point and went down to the sea. I picked up a rock to take back home for the garden. It had beautiful green rings on it, but lost them in Pittsburgh. I suspect that the colors are brought out only when the rock iswet.) We also visited a prehistoric fortress on this day. I spent the evening in an Irish pub that actually had Irish music and a few patriotic tunes—“On the one road” and “Johnson’s Motor Car.” This was definitely the high point of my trip in honor of my Fenian ancestors who wanted to invade Canada and trade it off for Ireland. No one in the family had any business sense.

The next day we hiked around Killarney and visited a recreation of Irish farms from the 19th century to the 1950’s. One thing that puzzled me was the smallness of the peasant cottages. Since they were built locally out of local materials, I wondered why they were not made bigger since the peasants would have built them themselves (except for the roofs, which were done by a specialized roof thatcher). Clearly, the better off one was, the bigger a cottage one had, so that one could have two rooms instead of the one room that seemed customary. Many of the tools and other household belongings were virtually identical with those at my great-grandfather’s log cabin, was built in the 1880’s in the Adirondacks.
    We headed off to Limerick and had a good dinner in a small town along the way. Generally, Irish food was not particularly remarkable—I had better meals in England, and English cooking is not supposed to be good. On the other hand, I did manage to lose some weight, which shows that there’s a silver lining to every cloud. We got to Limerick to stay in the Best Western, which was the only hotel in Ireland to have free internet service. (Otherwise, one had to go to internet cafes and pay.) If Cork resembled McKeesport on a rainy day, Limerick, which is the third biggest city in Ireland, mirrored East McKeesport on the same day.

Banratty Castle

On our final day, we visited Banratty Castle and also King John’s castle in Limerick. The latter was a real Norman castle, which meant that it was quite large and quite impressive. We learned a lot about the siege of Limerick in the Williamite wars. Good King William, whose Dutch general negotiated a generous treaty with the Irish rebels only to have the treaty rejected by the Irish (Protestant) Parliament after the Irish rebels—the “Wild Geese”—sailed off to Spain and France.
    One of the interesting things about Irish resistance to the English has been the role of the Catholic Church, which has been generally pacific and opposed to resistance. I suspect that this reflected recognition that Irish ruled by English Protestants would be more devoted to the Catholic Church than if they lived in a free Ireland. Certainly, one had the same type of development in Communist (and Russian-controlled) Poland. Clearly the results of national liberation have proved the same in both countries, as churchgoing has fallen off remarkably in Poland as in Ireland.
    The next day we went to Shannon Airport. To paraphrase James Boswell, the best sight in Ireland was the airplane leaving for America.
_______________
Copyright © 2013 by James T. Carney

Please comment