WAY BACK IN MY NEOPHYTE DAYS as a wannabe adventure-travel writer, a curmudgeonly editor of a long-defunct travel magazine once insisted that I should avoid all negativity in my submissions because “people reading pieces such as yours really don’t need to hear about the ‘reality’ of places—just give ’em the cheerful, positive, upbeat stuff,” he said. “Tell ’em only what they want to hear.”
In hindsight I realize that most of my erratic life has been based on the motto “learn the rules first and then break them fast.” So I begin this particular chapter awash in negativity. For example: it was not a good idea for us two neophyte “blow-ins” (tourists, visitors, and other “outsiders”) to head straight into the heart of Dublin on our first hour after arrival from New York in a hired, right-hand-drive car with manual shift and all the turbo power of an egg-laden sea turtle. In fact, following the dire warnings from the rental car staff about Ireland being one of the three most dangerous places in the world to drive in and about how all credit cards, even the elite platinum cards, refused to provide ancillary insurance coverage in the country—it was possibly not a good idea to hire a car at all.
We even began to have doubts about the country itself as we detected little from airport personnel of the “Warm Irish Welcome” that we’d been promised in all those positive brochures. And it was not a good idea for me to say to Anne, “Look, I found the street on the map where our prebooked hotel is located, so all you have to do is to guide us there.” It was not a good idea first, because Anne hates reading maps and will sit slightly traumatized staring at all the colored squiggles and barely legible type and forgetting to actually lift her head to check the passing scene for street names and the like (not that it would have made any difference in Dublin, because the street signs are either nonexistent or so small and cramped with bilingual Gaelic translations that you can’t read them from a moving car anyway).
Second, because Dublin is the proud possessor of one of the world’s most illogical and diabolically confusing one-way-street systems, which makes you wonder how even experienced residents ever find their way to anywhere around the inner city. Even the taxi drivers are flummoxed to the point where we later found it useless to request their services. They were invariably more confused by all the one-way systems than we were.
And third, because despite a very enticing Web ad that had lured us to advance hotel booking, the hotel was actually not a hotel at all, but merely a front office for a random scattering of rentable apartments all around St. Steven’s Green park. And the office, of course, had a different name from the one on the Web site. And the name-plate was so small and insignificant that when, after hours of inane looping around downtown Dublin, we were finally parked outside the office, and it was still impossible to confirm from the car that we had in fact arrived. And, in fact, we hadn’t. We signed in, parked the car in one of the murkiest, deepest subterranean garages it has ever been our misfortune to negotiate, and then followed a poor immigrant from Nigeria who had been sent to manhandle our luggage along almost half a mile of sidewalks to a tiny, disheveled apartment that was to be our home for a few days. We complained vehemently about the garage, the luggage system, and the apartment and—our first break of the day—we were rewarded with far larger and newly refurbished accommodations.
And it was not a good idea to go in search of the Irish tourist office. “Sure, it’s just a little stroll down the street and across the bridge,” said the girl at the hotel reception desk. But it turned out to be a very long hike, and the office wasn’t there anyhow. It apparently had been closed up for weeks and vanished without leaving so much as a relocation address (a rather odd debacle in a country so dependent upon the goodwill of tourists).
And it was not a good idea for me then to look at the map and say, “Well, why don’t we have a stroll into town…It’s just a short walk across St. Steven’s Green.” It was, in fact, a major ambulatory expedition along broad streets lined with officious-looking, Corinthian-columned, neo-Stalinist monoliths until—ah! the relief of it all—we suddenly entered that oasis of green calm. There were bubbling fountains, chirpy choruses of birds, and cool shade beneath enormous oaks and beech trees whose branches curved gracefully to caress velvety grasses and vibrant flower beds. A small sign announced we had discovered—almost by chance—this beautiful twenty-two-acre Manhattan Central Park in miniature created around 1880 courtesy of the Guinness family, prime doyens of Dublin’s affluent aristocracy.
Statues abound here—including (of course) James Joyce, a Henry Moore memorial for W. B. Yeats, and a huge monument to Wolfe Tone, one of Ireland’s greatest nationalistic leaders. A band was tuning up on the delicately filigreed bandstand. But most appealing were the people—locals sprawled on the lawns eating their sandwich lunches, lovers nestling and nudging beside the winding footpaths, travelers of all ethnic and national origins slowly wandering and wondering at the encyclopedic array of plants and trees—and Anne and me, utterly beguiled by this mellow, magical place.
The mellowness ended abruptly as we emerged on the pedestrianized Grafton Street, whose gay (in all its interpretations) intimacy, retail hoopla, street-busker rowdiness, and crowded youthful brouhaha, complete with tumults of giggling teenettes zigzagging about with hen-party abandon (if you’ve never seen one of these events—don’t!), made us realize that, finally, we had found the heart, or at least one of the three hearts, of Dublin. And although it was not a good idea to have left the umbrella back at the apartment because of regular tumultuous downpours of spring rain, we still laughed and hugged in delight at finally sensing the enticing people-powered spirit of the city.
And where better to celebrate our belated arrival in this place of creators, writers, con artists, and cock-a-jays but at John Kehoe’s little pub on Anne Street South right next door to the tiny and oh so gorgeously redolent Sheridan’s Cheese Shop. (This immediately became our favorite retail focus, with the possible exception of the nearby Marks & Spencer Food Hall.) And what a greeting we received at that pub, one of over a thousand within Dublin’s city limits. People turned and smiled; the barmaid welcomed us as if we’d been regulars for years, and in no time at all, our very first beautiful, black, smoky-flavored, cream-topped pints of Guinness were set before us. Although here I exaggerate a little. It wasn’t really “in no time.” It was actually quite a few expectancy-laden minutes because we’d forgotten the ritual three-stage (sometimes even four) process of stout pouring, whether it be Guinness, Murphy’s, or Beamish, the three traditional choices across the country, none of which are actually produced, sadly enough, by an Irish-owned company.
Our initiation into pub protocols began as we watched the ritual of “the pour,” which is enticing yet very deceiving. The barmaid’s first pull fills a pint glass rapidly and you’re licking your lips, waiting to plunge into that semisolid cream-foam head. But then her pull ceases when the glass is two-thirds full and it’s set down “to rest” while she’s off serving someone else. Eventually, two long minutes later, she’s back and slowly easing the remaining third of the stout into the glass…almost to the top. But it’s that “almost” that’ll drive you mad with pent-up desire because you have to wait again—sometimes for up to another full minute—until a final ridiculous little flick of the pull-lever injects that last ounce or so of black liquor to provide a perfect cream topping, which she may or may not skim with a knife, in a final finessing flourish before handing you your reward for almost unbearable patience. And so I celebrate the daily patience of all those other “punters” who wait at each of Ireland’s 25,000 Guinness “taps” for their glasses of “black.” And each pub seems to have its own little pouring idiosyncrasies and customs. Some in Dublin insist that the best places are Neary’s, Long Hall, and Stag’s Head; others, particularly the writers and journalists, insist it’s Doheny and Nesbitt’s, but in terms of an overall favorite, it’s invariably the mighty Mulligan’s, founded in 1782 and still said to offer “the best pint in the whole city—and maybe the whole of Ireland!”
Is it worth the wait? Indeed it is, although to reduce further waiting time, it’s best to order the second pint immediately upon receipt of the first.
We had been dreaming of this moment for months, but first, permit me a pet peeve.
As any regular bar-frequenter knows, there are thousands of erzatz versions of Irish pubs around the world complete with elaborate etched glass; brightly burnished quaint shamrock-adorned signs for O’Shaunahay’s, O’Flanagan’s, or O’Doherty’s; antiqued Guinness signs; pseudo bar pulls; red-haired (dyed) non-Irish colleens; lots of diddle-di, diddle-da music; and inane signs inviting customers to KISS ME I’M IRISH. They’re everywhere. Some even have genuine Irish pub doors ripped off some poor bankrupt place in a godforsaken Irish bog-village no one’s ever heard of. Others boast fiberglass yellowed oak beams (to suggests eons of tobacco-pub-fug), a dartboard or two, and maybe even a few clay spittoons scattered about, although no one ever seems sure what to do with those.
And it really doesn’t matter. Because it’s all a load of “feckin eejit junk” that bears no more relationship to a real Irish pub than a tame house cat does to a wild savannah leopard. And having got all that off my chest, let me introduce you to the truly authentic Dublin watering hole of Kehoe’s, just a short stroll off Grafton Street.
We couldn’t have found a more Irish city pub than this one, described in one revered guidebook to Ireland’s taverns as “possibly the best pub in the world.” (Similar accolades celebrate the eight-hundred-year-old heritage of the nearby Brazen Head, long regarded as the hotbed nexus of nefarious plots to rid Ireland of the hated British.) And according to a sign outside on the side wall, even the great “Ulysses man” himself, James Augustine Joyce, wrote that “in the particular is contained the universal. Kehoe’s with all its charms and beauties will surely live for generations.” And indeed it has, with its aged yellowed ambience, old wood paneling, etched glass, ancient worn floorboards, and a clientele that knows this is one of the best places in town to enjoy the best of times. Even to the point of offering impromptu hugs, which I received from one charmingly exuberant youngish lady who said she loved my white beard and “lovely tummy” and had always wanted to say a special thank-you to dear old Santa Claus for all his kindnesses. So—as we were leaving—she did just that, which halted our departure for a while longer as we chatted with her coterie of female friends (three more hugs here—I tell you, this Santa beard is a keeper for life! Not too sure about the tummy, though…) and managed to squeeze in another pint or two before we finally eased ourselves painlessly out the door as they all wished Anne and me a very good night—oíche mhaith duit!
Despite the abrupt deluges, which were interspersed in schizoid Irish fashion by brilliant periods of bright, hot sun and blue skies, the exuberance and vitality of the crowds on Grafton Street washed us northward into the tiny squares and courts of the Dickensian Temple Bar Quarter and eventually to the River Liffey itself.
Writers often make this stream seem as imposing as London’s Thames or Manhattan’s East River, but in actuality it is an enticingly modest stream crossed by stubby bridges that provide easy intercourse between the twin urbanities on either side.
We strolled on past the great Dublin landmarks—Christ Church Cathedral, the stately composition of Dublin Castle, the National Gallery, and the architectural extravaganza of Trinity College, meeting and melding place of Ireland’s greatest artists, writers, and statesmen. Finally we circled around to the great O’Connell Bridge. Here we crossed into O’Connell Street, that gloriously broad avenue that is featured so prominently in Dublin’s turbulent history, a history that was now being flaunted from banners and poster and placards declaring the celebration of the ninetieth anniversary of the great Easter Rising of April 24, 1916—one of the most spectacular, if ill-organized, of Ireland’s attempts to throw off the scourge of British imperialism.
And guess what day it was? It was April 12, 2006, and the Easter Rising celebrations had already begun and were an incessant generator of discussions, documentaries, and political diatribes for another three weeks!
And if that wasn’t enough, it was also the centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett, that maverick poet, playwright, and novelist, once described by Nancy Cunard as having “the look of an Aztec eagle and a feeling of the spareness of the desert about him.” His Waiting for Godot and a score of other minimalist productions still confuse the uninitiated, delight his disciples, and create infinitely more pompous pontification and pseudo-intellectual blather than all his own strange pieces combined.
Beckett left the city—“this nothing of a noplace”—without ever adequately explaining any of his work, except to hint that maybe his whole genre and oeuvre was a send-up of the very idea of genre and oeuvre—and pretty much of life and living in general.
And it was ironical that he and fellow Dubliner James Joyce became companions and strong coworkers in Paris during the late 1920s. There was Joyce, renowned with his Ulysses and his impenetrable Finnegans Wake for putting everything into his works (at almost seven hundred pages, Ulysses covers only a single day in Dublin), whereas Beckett took just about everything out. A review of Waiting for Godot, which was running at a city theater during our visit, read: “Each fresh viewing sheds new light—on nothing.”
And yet despite the differences in their works, they were very similar in other odd respects. As one biographer suggests, they were both: “agnostic, polyglot, metaphysical, apolitical, numerologists, superstitious, and humorous.”
So we had arrived in the midst of this zany carnival-like celebration of a key historic and political event, on that fateful day in April 1916, that was in truth an utter confusion in terms of organization, public interest, and comprehension. Then this was coupled with a second event that honored a writer who, according to one critic, epitomized “organized disorganization” and certainly generated enough public incomprehension about “nothing and nothingness” to guarantee his celebrity for a second centennial.
Swimming about for a couple of days in such dichotomous tides of “un-history” and nonsensical rhetorical contradictiveness, we felt we were touching something of the true wacky and audacious spirit of this compact and cohesive city (cohesion that, alas, collapses into utter confusion, of course, when you get behind the wheel of a car).
Joyce, who wrote the ultimate “Dublin novel” in his Ulysses, despite the fact that he lived most of his life out of the country, captures the rambunctious stream of glorious consciousness here. In fact, so richly descriptive of Dublin is the book, that Joyce claimed, if the city were ever destroyed, it could be re-created through the pages of his Ulysses.
So—here are a few fragments of his homage to Dublin:
The gray warm evening descended upon the city…The streets swarmed with a gaily-colored crowd. Like illuminated pearls the lamps shone from the summits of the tall poles upon the living texture below, changing shape and hue unceasingly.
In a second vibrant vignette:
The air without is impregnated with rainbow moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under star-shiny coelum. God’s air, the All Father’s air, scintillant circumambiant cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee.
And from another of his beloved books, Dubliners:
It was noon when we reached the quays and we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping by the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce—the barges signal from afar away by their curls of wooly smoke. The brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay…Looking at the high masts I imagine the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance before my eyes…Then we walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of laborers, the shrill litanies of shop boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street singers, who sang a come-all-you, about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me.
There’s something utterly enticing about Joyce’s rich ramblings that resonates here in the city. They are perfectly suited to one another—the prose and the zany realities. You want to go about reciting aloud his observations and celebrations, sharing them with the smiley-faced people on Grafton Street, watching their eyes light up when they see how his bouncing words and rhythms pick up and toss like bright baubles all the sensations, sounds, and sights that surround us. You want to shout out “D’ya see it?” “D’ya feel it?” “D’ya understand what he’s painting in words?”
But instead of shouting we shuffled off instead to a church where, it being the Easter season, one of many services was in progress. Easter is one time in the year when even the most recalcitrant churchgoers finally bow to guilty consciences and bend a humble knee. And we were no exception on this particular occasion. It is also the one time, on Good Friday, when all the eight thousand or so pubs in Ireland are closed and there’s a national panic over booze—or the lack of it.
We entered the church and, despite the excellence of the choir and the rapidity of the Communion that in an Anglican Church with five hundred congregants could have taken a good hour or more to get through, the long service inevitably developed a droney, droopy pace and mood. And I caught myself remembering the flash and flourish of Joyce’s religious revivalist rhetoric in the turbulent middle section of Ulysses, and wondered how this would go down if read aloud here in the church instead of yet another dirgy psalm:
Hush! Sinned against the light and even now that day is at hand when He shall come to judge the world by fire. Pflaap! Elijah is coming! Washed by the blood of the Lamb. Come on, you wine-fizzling, gin-sizzling, booze-guzzling existences. Come on, you dog-gone, bull-necked, beetle-browed, hog-jowled, peanut-brained, weasely-eyed flower flushes, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extracts of infamy. The Deity ain’t no nickel dime bum show. I put it to you that He’s on the square and a corking fine proposition. He’s the grandest thing yet and don’t you forget it. Shout salvation and King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaap!
It didn’t happen, of course. Instead the congregation began one more murmured recitation of the Our Father, and I felt the yawns easing like sleepy cloudscapes over me. A little Joyce would certainly have juiced up and jollied the process along, but as this period is the most sacred of the Catholic calendar, maybe it was best to stick to the tried-and-true. After all, I convinced myself, we were going to need all the blessings we could engender during this new adventure of ours in a new country—and by the sound of it, most particularly on the racetrack roads where we’d been told many drivers were unlicensed, uninsured, and far too often, unsober.
And so back to Beckett, who, like Joyce, spent most of his life out of Ireland and was typically obscure when defining the settings for his works. This fragment possibly captures something of the spirit of Dublin that we sensed during our own brief introduction:
Apologies. As another editor emphasized to me eons ago, authors should not play games with their readers. But—this tease of blank space could be interpreted literally. I honestly couldn’t find, in all of Beckett’s works, a single reference that seemed to have any relevance to our reflections upon Dublin. Or any other recognizable place on our earth, for that matter. On the other hand, this space could be interpreted artistically as a recognition of the minimalist blankness, the emptiness, the near vacuum, the void that permeates almost all of his plays: Acts-Without-Words, Roughs-for-Theatres, Roughs-for-Radios, and even his forty-second contribution to Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta!, “written” in 1969 and titled simply Breath. This work consists of a curtain raised up with a faint light falling on “miscellaneous rubbish” scattered across the stage followed by “a faint brief cry,” an expiration of breath, and then silence, before the curtain drops again. Some claim it’s actually been performed in just over twenty seconds as opposed to the forty seconds estimated by Beckett. Undoubtedly a relief to many in the audience.
What a bizarre nonworld the Nobel-Prized Beckett offered to a confused public—minimalistic tableaux of suspended heads with frantically chattering mouths; people in overgrown plant pots; characters immersed in sand; two Chaplinesque tramps waiting by a solitary tree for someone or something that never comes; a man feverishly winding and rewinding a recorded tape searching for…the truth, the meaning, or perhaps just the meaninglessness of man’s existence. I find his work irritating, absurd, pretentious, arrogantly elusive (and illusive), ambiguous to the point of total nonsense—and utterly, gloriously enticing. Even if I can’t call up the necessary rigorous attention his plays need, I still sense fundamental truths, humor, and deep eternal perceptions floating by, tantalizingly just out of reach. Or certainly my reach, and certainty, or the lack of it, seems to be the elusive essence of many of his works. As one of the Waiting for Godot characters exclaims: “To have lived is not enough for them…They have to talk about it…To be dead is not enough for them.”
With all the frenzied forelock-tugging of the metropolitan literatae and Habling-bling bloated reverential piety about Beckett mushing around the city, it was refreshing to read one critic who wrote that “the centenary celebrations are almost enough to put most off literature for life.” Nevertheless, a Beckettian spirit was definitely flowing through downtown Dublin that Easter week (you could hardly escape posters and banners of his tumultuously wrinkled and time-worn face), characterized by sequences of bizarre non sequiturs.
First came flurries of little girls frolicking by in neon pink, meticulously embroidered costumes and heavily made up, carrying skirt-shaped bags for all their inordinately expensive outfits. They were here for some important Irish step dancing contest (now thanks to Riverdance and clones, an international passion) and accompanied by proud and occasionally stressed-out parents who seemed far more nervous than their tiny, decked-up offspring.
And then came one of Ireland’s oddest ball games. I’d seen Irish football before and rather liked its odd, rugby-soccer-basketball maneuvers and speedy flow. So different from the lumbering, tough guys’ scrums and touchline tumbles of the traditional rugby games I used to be involved in. But I’d never seen a hurling match before and sat fixated by the TV in our room, which showed one of the fastest, most bizarre, and seemingly most dangerous games I’ve ever experienced. Harry Potter would love it. Fifteen men a side hurtled by and into one another in seemingly total Hogwartian disarray, flailing long cáman paddle-sticks on which they carried—yes, carried—a small white leather ball (sliotar)—although in the truly wild days when the game first emerged I heard it was often a human skull. And then, while running pell-mell, they tossed the ball off the tip of the stick and whacked it with all the force of a top-flight tennis player to another team player fifty yards or more down the field or, if they could, over the posts at the far end of the field to score points.
In minutes I was hooked. The constant frantic pace and ability of the players to avoid regular decapitation by swirling sticks and supersonic-speed sliotars amazed me and left me utterly exhausted by the end of the first half. As a result of watching the game, I fully understood the remark of an elderly gentleman in another of Dublin’s fine Irish pubs, Ryan’s, on Park Gate Street, when he chortled: “Ah well, this game and our other ancient village game of ‘road bowling’ explains it all, d’y’see. You English play cricket, which is a waspocracy gentleman’s game of patience and fair play, and we do the hurling, which is an ancient bogman’s game of pure unrestrained, skull-crushing passion. No wonder we didn’t get along with you lot for centuries!”
“Well—thanks for explaining that…”
“Tá fáilte romhat—you’re very welcome, good sir!”
FINALLY, WE DROVE SOUTH out of Dublin, leaving behind the tortuously tangled one-way traffic systems; the glorious pure-Irish pubs, and the earthy redolence of fresh-poured pints of thick black stout; the pedestrianized people-powered streets full of music and mirth; the sudden passing vehemence of a tanked-up local calling the whole world “ya feckin’ eejits”; the cultivated calm of the St. Steven’s Green gardens; and all the big burly-pillared and porticoed neoclassical public buildings and the dainty, decorous streets of Georgian refinement.
And we were sad, despite the fact that we’d barely touched the place in our brief stay. As had so many others, our hearts had warmed immediately to the heart of Dublin. We could have done, however, without the endless outer eddies of suburban “semis” financed by the surging economic tsunamis of Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” affluence, with their pristine privet hedges and eye-blurring stamp of bland sameness and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mundanity. And we also tried hard to ignore the bizarre, carnival-colored bungalow mania that seemed to characterize the outer-outer neighborhoods. The riotous riches of downtown Dublin remained with us as we curled on through the high Wicklow Mountains with the radio playing either endless recountings of the Easter Rising or “let’s pretend we understand” discussions and diatribes about Beckett’s intentionally ambiguous and obscure works that were apparently not meant to be “understood” but rather “un-understood” by the hoi polloi.
“We’ll be back,” said Anne when we finally switched off the natter-chatter.
“I’m still there,” I said. And I meant it.
AND I INDEED FELT we were “still there” a little later that day when we paused on the quay in the pleasant riverside town of Wexford to while away an hour or so over lunch before continuing our drive to County Cork and the Beara Peninsula (a seven-hour drive we managed to stretch into a leisurely three-day backroading odyssey).
Hardly had we ordered a platter of “toasties” (those ubiquitous toasted ham and cheese sandwiches that are a staple of pubs everywhere here) than we became aware of a real Irish brouhaha at a nearby table. The subject (of course) was the Easter Rising again, and the pro-and-con arguments were so complex in the Beckettian sense that I was convinced we were back in one of those gloriously intimate and intense little pubs just outside Trinity College where feisty debates and furious beer-imbibing are the order of the day. Every day.
It quickly became apparent that the distinct lack of concerted conviction on the part of the public in support of the Rising still lingers on today. I tried to keep notes on the group’s arguments, but they spoke far too fast (a frustrating national problem over here) and the dialect was far too thick (another problem). But I did find, the following day, parts of a Sunday Times editorial that seemed to strike a reasoned balance in all the blather and blarney:
Twenty-first Century Ireland is an independent, proud and prosperous republic, and the world’s tenth wealthiest nation. Its economy is thriving, its culture is vibrant. Other societies now look to Ireland as an economic role model and covet its confidence and accomplishments. Irish people no longer need the dubious myths and shibboleths of the past to bolster their identity. [By the sound and fury of the adjoining debate, one could seriously question such an optimistic statement.] People who see the world today through a republican lens complain that it has taken far too long for the modern Irish state to acknowledge formally the undeniable courage and idealism of the men who led the insurrection on that fateful April morning in 1916. [The debate at the nearby table continued: “It had officially been canceled, for God’s sake! They couldn’t get enough support,” claimed one of the men at the table. “It was only the crazies who kept going, and if the stupid Brits hadn’t executed them in the stonebreaker’s yard at Kilmainhan Jail and made martyrs of them, they’d all be long forgotten today!”] Those who believe this bloody and divisive rebellion had a malign effect on modern Irish history meanwhile argue that the celebrations glorify political violence and send out dangerous signals to unrepentant advocates of the physical force tradition. [At the table again: “We got the freedom we wanted, though!” shouted one of the group. “Only after massive slaughter and a bloody civil war that split the country down the middle for years,” said another. “As the great John Lennon said,” quipped a third man, “‘Time wounds all heels’—and the British heels certainly got their comeuppance!”] Immigration is changing the complexion of our country and with so many diverse cultures now, the ancient quarrel between nationalists and unionists seems increasingly irrelevant, if not absurd. However, the 1916 Proclamation of Independence remains an impressive document and the citizens of 2006 are the first in Irish history fortunate enough to be free to appreciate all that was liberating and outward-looking about the Easter Rising, while rejecting all that was destructive and narrow-minded.
We hoped the editorial writer was correct. We had no desire to spend valuable pub time over the next year or so of our stay in the country listening to incessant replays of domestic Irish history, but only time would tell, and, indeed, the later release of Ken Loach’s film The Wind That Shakes the Barley was indeed one more dramatic and bloody replay of that terrible divisive era. Only time would tell if this would be a major theme of our journey here or whether we could focus happily on the many other intriguing and true aspects of Irish life as it’s lived today here in this utterly captivating little country.