Tuesday Voice: Ireland, Part 1

In Erin (Against Ireland)

By James T. Carney

“Veni, Vidi, Visa” (or to paraphrase one C. Iulus Caesar of Brutus fame),| “I came, I saw, I used my Visa card.”
    There’s an old Irish song that tells it all. The first verse goes:

I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand,
And he said, “How’s poor ould Ireland, and how does she stand?”
She’s the most expensive country that ever yet was seen
For they’re hanging men an’ women for the lacking of the green.

    Napper Tandy was a 1798 revolutionary who fled to Paris after the rebellion failed. In 1828, a fellow mick by the name of Paddy Donoghue came to see him and suggested that he return to ould Erin. Napper Tandy promptly shot and killed Donoghue. He was acquitted of murder by a French jury on the grounds that Donoghue was a man of such obvious insanity that Tandy had reason to fear for life and thus acted in self-defense.
    Now, there are some Americans who will love Ireland:

If you are from Seattle, you will feel at home in the rain.
If you are from San Francisco, you will feel at home in the cold.
If you are from New York, you will feel at home dealing with the waiters.
If you are from Washington, you will feel at home dealing with the traffic.
If you are from Los Angeles, you will feel the prices are normal.
If you are from Boston and looking for relatives, you will be locked up in the nut ward.
If you are from da Burgh [Pittsburgh], you will vow to go to Slovenia on the next trip.

    In all events, the intrepid trio of my son Jim, his wife Nina, and I arrived at Shannon airport early one Friday morning to renew my acquaintance with driving on the left-hand side of the road. (It is an inexplicable mystery to me why the Irish, who had centuries to adopt the customs of civilized Britain, managed only to pick up on the trick of driving on the wrong side of the road.) Naturally, it was raining—something which continued during our four-hour drive to Dublin. We stopped off at The Rock, which was the site of the first castle given by the Irish to the first English invaders (who were of course invited to come by one of the warring factions).
    The great thing about the Irish is that they are their own worse enemies and made British domination simple by destroying their own leaders from Parnell to Michael Collins and Jack Higgins. The Rock did dominate the countryside and gave one a great view—that is, if one is enamored of green fields, black cows, and white sheep. The castle was being preserved by funds from the EEU—which was true of most historical sites in Eire. I thought maybe the successor to Bush should apply to the EEU for funds to preserve our national parks since we are certainly poorer than Ireland.

Eventually we found Dublin, where one of the few four-lane roads in the country had traffic moving at a snail’s pace. We found our hotel and all went to sleep since we had been up all night by our time traveling to Dublin. After several hours, we went off to see our first Irish pub and meet the friendly citizens—who it turned out had exactly zero interest in meeting us. Jim and Nina drank a lot of Guinness on the trip. I stayed with Harp or anything else that was a lager or a light beer. That evening we dined in an Italian restaurant in tribute to the other half of Nina’s heritage.

Bloomsday performers
outside Davy Byrne's pub

    Like the Merry Ploughman of the old song, we were “off to Dublin the very next day,” although not to join the IRA. Instead, we hit the literary circuit. We were in Dublin on June 16—the anniversary of Leopold Bloom’s famous walk. (Indeed, I reread Ulysses—a dubious accomplishment on the plane going to and fro. I didn’t understand it any more this time than I did when I was in college. At least I am not getting any dumber as I get older.) So we headed to the Joyce Center (and later on went to Number 7 Eccles St., which was the fictional home of Bloom—and exists no more than 21 Baker Street for you Sherlock Holmes aficionados). There was a great crowd there, consisting of the ambassadors of a number of foreign countries who were Bloom fanatics and read sections of the book. Indeed, there was even a group there from Slovenia (Trieste belongs to Slovenia) because Joyce had spent most of his adult life in Trieste. (Cheaper than Dublin.)

    We then proceeded to the old Jameson factory, where we had a tour to learn how to make Irish Whiskey. Then back to the Joyce Center, where we saw a woman act out from memory Molly Bloom’s hour-and-a-half stream of consciousness monologue, which appears at the end of Ulysses. Bloomed out as we were, we wandered back over the river and through Trinity College to O’Donoghue’s Saloon, where we drained a few pints in honor of my father-in-law. Without further misadventure, we made it back to the hotel, passing another Church of Ireland church on the way. One interesting thing that we observed was the number of Church of Ireland (Anglican) churches. This reflected the fact that all of the old churches in Ireland were Anglicized at the time of the English conquest, which, despite all of the claims of 800 years of tyranny, did not occur until the 17th century, with the key battles being Kinsdale in 1601, Cromwell’s conquests in 1652-3, and Boyne in 1691. There seems some question as to how Protestant Ireland was during the Protestant Ascendancy that followed, but the best numbers I have seen suggested 20 to 25%.
    One interesting thing is the adulation that some English historians have accorded Oliver Cromwell. Maurice Ashley, who was one of the most prominent English specialists on the 17th century, authored one book entitled The Genius of Oliver Cromwell. As far as I can see, Cromwell seems the forerunner of modern dictators and ethnic cleansing. If that is the creation of genius, we could have done without it. Thank you, Mr. Ashley.

On Sunday, another overcast day, we went to the Kilmainham prison, where the rebels of 1916 were shot. Of course, one of the ironic things about the prison was that a few years after the British had used it to imprison and execute Irish rebels, the Irish Free State was using it to imprison and execute other Irish rebels. Mutatis mutandis.
    We had planned to see Dublin Castle on Sunday but found that it was closed for the three days that we were in Dublin. We dined at a restaurant called The Pale and met without doubt the rudest waitress that I had met on the seven seas. She deliberately waited to attend us until the kitchen had closed so that she could then have the malicious pleasure of telling us that there was no service.

    We went to the Guinness factory and took the tour. I would say that three-quarters of the beer drunk in Ireland was Guinness although I could not stand the stuff myself. It was interesting to observe how the process of both whiskey and beer-making was identical for about half the process.
    I found Dublin interesting and would have liked to have stayed a little longer. Jim had planned our tour to go to Cork next. Cork was said to be the finest city in the world accordingly to one of its citizens who must have been drunker than the drunkest Irishman we saw in the streets—and we saw a fair number. Actually, Cork looked like McKeesport on a rainy day and it rained constantly both the day we went to Cork and the day we left Cork.

On the way to Cork, we stopped at the Rock of Cashel, which again is a high place on which St. Patrick built a church when he was Christianizing Ireland. St. Patrick [who will be commemorated by this coming Sunday’s holiday] certainly recognized the strategic need to seize the high ground. The Rock of the Cashel has the remains of an old cathedral that had been burned to the ground by one of the local nobility who later explained that it had been basically an accident; “he had only intended to burn the archbishop,” who unfortunately was not in residence.
    We found a member of the house of Carney buried inside the cathedral. According to the local heraldry business there were several branches of the Carney family, including a Scottish branch that is interesting since one of the censuses has one of my great grandfather Carney’s parents listed as having been born in Scotland. We may be more Scotch than Irish depending on how the DNA works out. I did do the DNA test but all that I found out was that the patriarchic line seems to have been composed of non-prolific mutants.
    Anyway, we went on to one of the main scenes of our pilgrimage, the Waterford Crystal factory, which was, not surprisingly, in Waterford. We had an interesting tour of the factory. I wish we had had more time to watch the actual glass blowing. We got a fine Waterford bowl, which we had shipped back to my wife, Jim’s mother, Donna.

    We then drove along the coast to Cork. We had dinner in what had been a little fishing village but was now a major retirement community—although not for Americans who could not afford it. I bought my only full dinner on the trip—liver, which tasted somewhat like shoe leather and about as tough. Having traveled in third-world countries for United States Steel, I had learned from experience and generally subsisted on soup and bread. Then we went on to Cork, where we saw—besides an umbrella store where I bought an umbrella that I was forced by airport security to abandon at Shannon airport—the road to Blarney Castle.

Next tuesday: More blarney
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Copyright © 2013 by James T. Carney

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