Dublin

September 18, 2023

O’Connell Street in central Dublin is the place to be. We found it a few blocks north of Parnell Square, lined with shops and restaurants and crowded, recalling the flaring streets of James Joyce’s Dublin. O’Connell crosses the sullen gray River Liffey and passes Trinity University campus, site of the library that houses the ancient Book of Kells.

That first morning the rain and chill drove us to an Insomnia coffee shop. In mid-September the Irish sky was gray and dark, cars and buses drove with headlights, pedestrians and cyclists were wrapped in parkas with hoods. We shivered in our summer jackets. By noon the rain slackened, the streets were packed with local people and tourists dodging the hop-on/hop-off buses, taxis, and trolleys.

The Ireland visit has always been waiting in the background for us, as it is for many with Irish connections. The original Walshes, I’ve heard, are of County Cork. Most of the family have made the trip, my parents finally in their later years. Daughter Marie spent a student year at University College Dublin.

Putting it off has to do with what we know. Ireland is famous for tranquil, rural countryside of lush, deep-green meadows, pretty towns and farms, spectacular seaside vistas below the rugged Cliffs of Moher, along with the magical folk yarns and mythology. All that is set off by the history, centuries of tragedy, privation, sectarian conflict, oppression, violence.

The tension between the Irish and their oppressors has ancient origins. Oxford scholar Paul Johnson, in his history of Ireland reveals that, centuries before the Protestant Reformation incited by Martin Luther in 1517, Pope Adrian IV in 1154 gave Henry II of England a papal bull to assert control over Ireland and its bishops, who tended to run their churches their own way. Henry hired Norman mercenaries who in 1167 entered Ireland. Henry then was “acknowledged as sovereign by all concerned, Norman and Irish, lay and ecclesiastical.”

In 1172 Pope Alexander III endorsed Henry’s actions, writing that, “how great are the enormities of vice with which the people of Ireland have been infected, and how they have departed from the fear of God and the established practice of the Christian faith …”

Johnson writes that the Reformation largely bypassed Ireland. Irish Catholic hatred of the English set into the deepest threads of the country’s history and culture. It simmered along with resentment of the indifference and greed of absentee Protestant English landlords towards the grotesquely poor Catholic tenants, who were bled white by taxes or thrown off their land, their homes burned if they couldn’t pay.

The primitive Irish economy exploded with the Great Famine of 1847, when blight devastated the potato crop. Starvation ravaged the country, causing the emigration of millions to Canada and the U.S. The Irish agony of the 1840s and early 1850s finally was answered by emergency relief by British churches and charities worldwide, from Europe to Russia and Latin America to the U.S. I was surprised to learn that private groups in South Carolina, along with some in Pennsylvania, were the largest American contributors.

Most of us, Irish-heritage or not, know something of the more recent nightmares centered on the conflict between Catholic republicans and Protestant unionists: the Irish Republican Army and Ulster Defense Association terrorism; the thousands of victims, men, women, children; the clumsy, brutal British interventions; the endless talks and broken truces; the Irish Civil War of 1922-1923. Then the “Troubles” of roughly the late 1960s through 1990s, and the still-fragile Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Still, we went. The flight, helped by a 100-mile/hour tailwind, arrived early, at around 4 AM. We sat on the tarmac because the customs people didn’t start work until 5 AM. A friendly cab driver dropped us at a hotel north of O’Connell, but last night’s guests still were sleeping. We wandered up Dorset Street in wet dawn darkness and found Insomnia. A sweet Irish lady treated us to her musical brogue and made us sandwiches and poured coffee.

By noon the rest of the city had ventured out, shopping, visiting, drinking strong coffee, listening to music. Students demonstrated along O’Connell Street against Iranian government oppression. The crowd’s mood was mostly upbeat. A smiling Irish girl served us coffee and delicious “breads and spreads” at Bewley’s Cafe on fashionable Grafton Street. 

On Sunday morning the rain poured, we stepped out anyway and got to Mass at St. Theresa’s Church near Grafton. Afterward we walked through St. Stephen’s Green, the city’s largest park, a lovely place of ponds, birds, flowers, and trees, which hung heavy with rain. The air was soft and gentle. The Green offers dozens of memorials to well-known locals, including Constance Markievicz (1868-1927), daughter of Irish Arctic explorer Henry Gore Booth.

Gore Booth, fifth baronet of Sligo, provided assistance to starvation victims during the famine of 1878-1880, following the example of his father, Sir Robert Gore Booth. Markievicz helped found Na Fianna Eireann (Soldiers of Ireland) and the Irish Citizen Army. She fought in the Easter Rising of 1916, when the republicans tried to throw out the British, and St. Stephen’s became a battleground. She was sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison.  In 1918 she was elected to Parliament while in prison and appointed Minister of Labor.

We got more coffee and sat for a while in a warm shop. To escape the dampness we browsed at Aran’s Sweater Market, piled high with heavy wool sweaters, caps, and jackets. A video showed the processing of wool from sheep to shelf. The place was packed with tourists demanding authentic Irish wool, lines at the register stretched the length of the store. Sandy bought a sweater, I got in line.

The air warmed a bit, but the rain kept coming, the tourists pulled up their hoods and tightened their scarves. We circled the block near the college and the Bank of Ireland, built without windows to avoid Britain’s “window tax,” and looked for a ride. So we missed the Little Museum of Dublin and the Museum of Literature. We missed most of the places on our list. But we felt a bit more Irish. We’ll be back.