by Frank Gannon
Out in the West of Ireland things look pretty much the way it looks in that picture that forms in your mind when someone says “Ireland.” There also seems to be a quality that is floating in the general atmosphere: “Irishness.”
“Irishness” is discussed as if it were an actual palpable thing. You hear people in little pubs in Galway saying things like, “We’re losing our Irishness,” or, “He lost his Irishness.” “Irishness,” when lost, is always an occasion for sorrow. People express fear of losing their Irishness. If you’re lucky enough to have it, you want to hang on to it.
Having observed people talking about Irishness, I draw certain conclusions:
Irishness, when put into words, sounds poetic. It often involves sheep, heather, rainbows, stone walls, and thatch-roofed cottages.
Irishness can be faked. Americans can’t tell fake Irishness from real Irishness, but all Irish people can. The fake Irishness is so obvious to them they often laugh derisively when they see it.
“Irishness” is an endangered species.
The southwest of Ireland is a place you could stay forever. It was there that I first felt that little hand on the shoulder telling me that even though you’ve never been here, this is the place for you. Paulette, who is 1 percent Irish, felt the same thing. There are many startling things there.
On a cliff edge in a place called Liscannor there is a pretty spectacular tower. It’s what is left of a castle built in the fifteenth century. It was originally built as a place to spot the enemy, who were, at that time, the Spanish. The Spanish never showed up, but the amazing tower is still there. The rest of the castle is, as the kids say, history.
The view from the tower is beautiful. It looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. This is appropriate because, I was told, the man who invented the submarine was from the little village of Liscannor. There is a plaque that commemorates the man. He thought that his invention would help the United States in their fight against…guess who? (England. Shocked?)
Not far from there we saw a monastery at Dysert O’Dea. There is a wall that is decorated at the top with little carved faces. They’ve let this one deteriorate. This isn’t surprising when you consider just how many ancient ruins there are in Ireland.
The monastery is almost thirteen hundred years old, but the Ozymandias-like faces are still up there: an arc of ancient faces staring at you. Almost all of them are frowning. One face looks as if he’s about to laugh. Whenever there are ten Irish faces together there is always one wise ass.
Paulette had to make me leave. There was something in the faces that riveted me. Did the sculptor make that guy smile? Or was it just erosion? I like to think that erosion produced the smile, like God correcting the artist’s work.
Near the Cliffs of Moher there is a little place called Lisdoonvarna. This is the place, I think, that evoked the Janeane Garofalo movie, The Matchmaker. In Lisdoonvarna, the ancient elaborate mate-finding ritual is still “followed” (at least it is an excuse for a festival). The movie left a lot to be desired, but there is a beautiful tower that looks just like the sort of tower they use in Errol Flynn movies. Like so many other Irish towers, it looks out over the ocean. I don’t know what invader they had in mind. It should have been used to prevent the producers of The Matchmaker from ever getting a foothold.
The Cliffs of Moher
The ride to the Cliffs of Moher is really beautiful. If I had had a convertible I would have put the top down. (We would have gotten wet, but we were beginning to accept “wet” as the usual Irish condition. You get wet, you sit in front of a turf fire, you get dry, you go outside, you get wet. Rinse. Repeat.)
We enjoyed that beautiful ride so much that we forgot, for a second, that we were driving along on a two-lane road that was twelve feet wide. We cruised around Liscannor Bay and, as we went along, we saw more and more signs for the Cliffs of Moher.
The Cliffs of Moher are a great natural phenomenon and, like all great American natural phenomena, it has a parking lot. We parked at a visitors’ center and got out of the Punta, glad to get the chance to straighten our legs. I looked back at the Punta. It looked like the kind of car twelve clowns get out of.
The cliffs are quite amazing. They go seven hundred feet straight out of the ocean, and, at every level, they are covered with tourists. When we got there, there were at least three hundred people there. There are railings so tourists don’t fall into the Atlantic Ocean. I asked a guy at the snack shop and he told me that, as far as he knows, only one tourist had ever taken the big plunge, and he believed it was intentional, although he wasn’t sure.
Paulette doesn’t like heights, but she accompanied me to the highest points of the Cliffs of Moher. There is a very impressive tower up there, built by MP Sir Cornelius O’Brian in the nineteenth century. They let you go up into the tower and the view from up there is quite spectacular. Paulette let me know, in a subtle way, when it was time to leave the tower and its spectacular view. She let me know by hitting me in the ribs in a Jake LaMotta manner.
When we got to the bottom we noticed several parked vans selling CDs and T-shirts. Paulette went off to the bathroom. When she was gone I struck up a conversation with a guy in a CD van. He was about six-six with tight curly black hair. His T-shirt said “Manhattan, The Greatest City in the World.”
I asked him all about the cliffs and his life. He was from Bunraty. He played rhythm guitar in a band. They played in bars. I asked him a lot of questions. He answered them politely. Then he asked me a question.
“Why are you asking me all these questions?”
“I’m writing a book,” I said. “I just need the facts, sir.” I tried to sound like Jack Webb in Dragnet as a friendly, bantering thing. He didn’t get it.
“Do you know Dragnet here?”
“Sure.” A pause. “Oh, you were doing a Jack Webb thing. That’s funny.”
I saw Paulette returning from the bathroom. The wind was lifting her hair. It was now just starting to rain.
“I gotta get out of here,” I said. I shook his hand.
“There aren’t any facts in Ireland,” he said. He waved goodbye.
But there are some facts. William Faulkner said that the past wasn’t really past. There is no place on earth where Faulkner’s statement is truer than in Ireland. But first, let’s just look at the physical place.
Ireland is an island, “John Bull’s other island.” It’s set out there apart from the rest of Europe next to that other island, England. But Ireland is its own little, intensely green place.
The oldest definition we have for the word “Eriu,” the source of the word “Ireland,” is often translated as something like “the most beautiful woman in the world,” which is pretty appropriate because Ireland is really good looking. If we personify countries, and the United States is Uncle Sam, and Russia is either a bear or a rotund “Mother Russia,” Ireland is “the most beautiful woman in the world.”
If Ireland were a woman, she would be a very good one to date. She is a knockout. The most beautiful woman in the world. She walks down the street and breaks hearts.
Ireland is known by many names, but none of them, except “Eriu,” is a woman’s name, although sometimes, in songs, they refer to Ireland as “she.” The country is sometimes called “The Emerald Isle,” “The Old Country,” “The Old Sod,” or “Erin.” My dad, who referred to England only as “jolly old England,” called Ireland all of those names and a few other less pleasant ones. But my dad never referred to it as a warm, inviting place. He often referred to it like a place he escaped from, an old woman whose clutches he evaded.
Whatever you call it, magical land or penal colony, when you approach the island in an airplane, or look at it from a boat far offshore, it seems like an enclosed, very separate entity, a different world, a theme park made by God. “Mist Land.” “Planet Green.” “The Land of Saints and Scholars.” “Island of the Religious Drinkers.” Too bad “Greenland” is taken.
Ireland’s coastline is 2,000
miles, pretty remarkable when you consider how little the country is. From the tip of Ulster to the shore of Kerry, it’s only about 350 miles. From northwest to southwest, it’s about 200 miles. A little place, really. A little bigger than New Jersey, smaller than Georgia.
Planet Green is a theme park with a lot of water. Eight hundred lakes. The River Shannon, its main river, is really a huge interlocking network of rivers and lakes. So, if you add in the fact that it rains almost every day, you can safely say that if you are in Ireland, you are close to water no matter where you are. In fact, if you are in Ireland, you are probably wet. When people speak of the “Shannon dampness,” they are describing the place very well, and they are very close to the heart of Ireland. The average yearly rainfall in Ireland is over thirty inches a year, and the idea of dampness comes up in countless Irish sayings.
Irish people are wet a lot, although they, as a rule, don’t do much swimming. Ireland, for all that water, isn’t big on water sports. Oddly, Irish people aren’t that fond of fish. I met an Irish surfer, two words that don’t seem to belong together. I asked him how he did that, and he said, “Drunk.”
There is not a spot in Ireland more than a hundred miles to the sea, and you would have to look very hard to find a place in Ireland ten miles from a river or a lake or a pond or a stream. Unless you stay inside all the time, it’s hard to stay completely dry in Ireland. I took a lot of pictures when I was in Ireland, a lot of pictures of wet people.
It almost never snows there. If it does, it’s gone in an hour or two. No skiing. But lots and lots of mist. Wake up early in Ireland; look out the window at the green mist. It does seem like another planet.
Because of all that water, Ireland looks really, really, well, green. But there are many shades of green in Ireland. How many shades? The standard answer is “forty.” I was told “seventy-one” by a man in glasses in a pub in Longford. I believe him. The preciseness of “seventy-one” convinced me.
Whatever the number, the sheer greenness is overwhelming, and if you stare at green for a long time it begins to affect your vision.
In Ireland, there are always gray skies and gray rocks that seem to set off the green, so the landscape almost glows when you look at a long horizon. I have lived for a long time in the rural South of America, and I have seen lots of pastures and farms. But Ireland doesn’t look like the American South. I told a man in Ireland that Ireland looks a lot like Scotland and he looked at me as if I was insane or just really, really stupid. Ireland or Scotland? Apples and oranges. If you can’t tell them apart you are a sad case.
The Old Sod has a very distinctive look. The green is broken up on the ground by—always—some rocks, some gray rocks. There are gray stones everywhere. And where there aren’t gray stones, there are gray ruins, of ancient buildings. And on the sides of the ancient crumbling gray walls there are green ivy vines. And where there aren’t rock or ruins there are little winding gray roads. And there always seems to be the ocean, or a stream, or a lake, or a pond, somewhere in the background to add some hazy, vaguely mysterious blue.
I am not a poet, but when I looked at Ireland I started to have what I called “poetic thoughts.” (I kept these, largely, to myself.)
Anyway, trust me. Ireland doesn’t look like anyplace else.
Ireland has what geography people call a temperate climate. Parts of the southwest actually have some tropical flora stuff that wouldn’t look out of place in Florida.
The average temperature, for the whole year, in Ireland is fifty degrees Fahrenheit, but, as I was told, “Every day in Ireland is all four seasons.” It will be freezing in the morning, but you will sweat before the day is through. After a few days in Ireland I went with the “layers” strategy: a T-shirt, a regular shirt, a thin sweater, a thick sweater, a coat. You get the idea. It worked pretty well. You are always putting things on and taking them off in Ireland. You sweat and shiver three hours apart.
“Ireland is a natural simulacrum of a detox center.” I was told this by a man in a bar near Athlone. He had a huge, bulbous nose, and it looked as if he knew what he was talking about.
Ireland was an island before Britain became an island. Because of this, there are certain plants in Ireland that do not appear in Britain. This also accounts for certain differences in the animals found on the two islands. And, Yes! There are no snakes in Ireland! I wasn’t able to establish whether there had ever been any there. I was told, of course, that the island was crawling with snakes until Saint Patrick got rid of them. Scientists believe that there never were any there to start with, but I wouldn’t necessarily buy that.
Irish people have an odd relationship with the weather. Most Americans think that a rainy day is bad, but the Irish people I talked to actually seemed to like the rain. The best day to Irish people is a day where the rain is misting, a “grand soft day.” You see happy faces when it’s raining in Ireland, something you would never see in, say, Philadelphia. You don’t know what dark thoughts the Irish may be thinking, but the Irish people do smile a lot.
Almost all of the houses in the Irish countryside seem to be white. This also serves to set off the amazing glowing greenness that surrounds everything. If you are a fat slob in Ireland, dark green is a good fashion choice (avoid white or gray at all costs).
In fiction and movies, Ireland seems to be a hilly place. It is, but not many of the hills get very big. I was surprised to find out that only three of Ireland’s mountains exceed three thousand feet. They aren’t big hills, but there are a lot of them; you are never far from a hill or a mound or a small mountain, and there always seems to be one looming in the background. It’s hard to take a picture of the Irish countryside that doesn’t have some little mountain or hill behind whatever you’re taking a picture of.
So it’s gray and white and green. Everything else is just several different shades of green with dots of gray and white. After a whole day of rambling around the Irish countryside, you get very used to long uninterrupted green. When you close your eyes, it’s still green. Then you drink some Guinness. Walk outside. Close your eyes. Open them. The green doesn’t go away.
Whatever else it is, Ireland is great to look at, one of the great places in the world to go for a long bike ride. Throughout history, God’s deal with the Irish seems to have been, “You get a really pretty country, but that’s it. You get no optional equipment.”
The Irish people have always worked extremely hard for very little. The land is tough farming because it’s so damn rocky and hilly. Most of the land requires a whole lot of preparation before you could even think about farming.
Irish people consider a field without any rocks to be a wonderful thing. A man can be proud of his field because it took him countless hours to get all those rocks out of it. There is no farmland in Ireland like the great wide-open plains of the Midwest in America. Farming Ireland has always been absolutely brutal work.
Unlike Wales and Britain and Scotland, Ireland has almost no coal or iron ore. The Industrial Revolution in Ireland was a very quiet affair. The country does have more peat (sod that is burned for heat and not for electricity), than anyplace else in Europe. You can always see huge fields of peat being cut in vast thin rows. The smell of burning peat instantly evokes home for anybody who grew up in Ireland. If there is an “Irish smell,” it’s peat burning.
At one time Ireland had as much as 311,000 hectares of bogland, land you could cut up for fuel. Today these boglands are disappearing fast. In twenty years, people told me, the bogs and the peat will be gone.
Peat fires are a big part of the “romantic” picture of Ireland’s past that movies have helped to produce, but I’m sure that Irish people would rather have had the unromantic coal, or, better yet, oil.
But if the peat will be gone soon, no one in Ireland seems overly concerned. If you mention “the peat crisis,” you are met with no alarm. You are told that Ireland has continually run out of things throughout history. The things it didn’t run out of, it didn’t have. S
o don’t sweat it.
A woman in Cashel told me, “We’ve never had enough of anything, ever. We don’t even know what it’s like to have enough of anything. So big deal with no peat.”
There never seems to be a “Plan B” in Ireland. The dominant attitude of the Irish people is definitely more grasshopper than ant.
The West of Ireland is still basically a land of country people. The houses tend to be pretty far apart because most of the people used to, or still do, have farms of one sort or another. The archetypal west Irish person’s neighbors live maybe a half-mile away.
I think some Irish people tend to like it that way. That may have something to do with the “Cold Irish” thing. My uncle John told me, when I was a kid, “If an Irishman is all warm and huggy, he’s drunk.”
Maybe. Other people told me that the houses are far apart so that the women won’t talk to each other all day. Both of these theories need work.
Ireland’s geography is not complex. There are four provinces in Ireland: Leinster in the east, Munster in the southwest, Connaught in the west, and Ulster (home of the “troubles”) in the north. “The north” as the home of the “troubles” isn’t quite accurate. People are quick to tell you that the northernmost point in Ireland is actually part of the republic. Long ago, in the Middle Ages, they wrote about a fifth province in the middle, Meath or Midland, but that distinction is long gone. “There are four provinces in Ireland” is a truism.
In ancient times, the northern half of Ireland was known as Leth Cuinn (“Conn’s side”: Conn was a mythological hero). The southern half of Ireland was known as Leth Moga (named after another mythical personage, Mug Nuadat).
(“Mug Nuadat,” by the way, sounds like a character in a James Cagney gangster movie. While I was writing this book, I stopped and looked through cast lists of old movies to see if some Irish-American screenwriter decided to be a wise guy, but I never found a “Mug Nuadat” in any of those Dead End Kids/Gangster movies.)