I arrived at Dublin’s Glasnevin neighborhood by bus from the airport after spending a month in Dubai and Istanbul in 2022. It was March 16th. (Dublin, by the way, has a great system of double-decked buses that go everywhere. The number 41 serves Drumcorda and downtown from the airport). A smile appeared at the first sound of an Irish lilt at the airport and it only widened daily while in Dublin. (Although I did hear a remarkable number of people speaking Spanish).
Walking the precincts of Glasnevin and Drumcondra, with their Georgian-style buildings and Gothic churches, somehow returned me to the multi-family homes and row houses of my childhood in Woodside, New York. Perhaps it was their plainness or the color of the brick. But it was familiar. I felt like I was on a trip back home to Queens and also back in time as well. It was not long before I was convinced that everyone I passed had a face that I had grown up around. It was my first time in Ireland, but I felt as if I was home.
I found myself smiling at these familiar strangers, at row houses that appeared to be transported from New York, at the names of pubs, and streets, and from distant memories. I smiled at reddish brick two-story homes guarded by black wrought iron fences. Their silver-painted finials seemed to express pride in the home, even if the yard may have looked a little weedy. This was the neighborhood that housed me for my first week in Ireland. Being there was deeply and unexpectedly personal, so much so that it has taken me a year to write about it.
I spent the first week at Egan’s House with a wide smile on my face. (Certainly, enjoying the delicious breakfast buffet there helped). My smile would brighten when someone spoke to me. I loved to listen to the poetry of the Irish lit. It was this that delighted me most in those first days. The friendliness and the familiarity of Dubliners made it easy to start a conversation and I had many. I first occurred before leaving the airport with a security guard at the airport. I asked her to confirm the directions I had on how to take a city bus from the airport. I’m sure that she had heard that question before but she answered as if she was delivering the best news of my day. There was that accent, the brogue. I was captured by it. So I decided that I had to tell her that I was Irish-American. I thought it was important to add that this was my first time in Ireland. I then started to share with this total stranger details about my family history. I could not stop talking. Fortunately, this did not stop her from taking it. I listened and smiled. I had not expected to have my heart stirred by the first person I spoke with even before leaving the Dublin airport. She was the first, but not the only or last to make me feel at home. I knew instantly that I was going to like Ireland.
Dublin
I love museums and Dublin has too great ones. EPIC, the Irish Emigration Experience is new, interactive, and generally not how I like my museums. However, it takes the intelligence of its visitors for granted and gives them in turn a lively educational experience, full of facts. The Museum also offers assistance with genealogical research. It is worth anyone’s time.
My favorite museum in Dublin was its oldest, the National Gallery. Its 16,000-piece collection is housed in a huge beautiful Neoclassical building constructed in 1864 in central Dublin. Among its most famous works is “Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid” by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. Created around 1670-1671, the painting depicts a young woman dressed in a yellow jacket, seated at a desk, and writing a letter. Her maid stands behind her and looks on. Nothing is really happening but the feeling of viewing it is electric.
Moving on, I came across 24 portraits, part of the Museum’s 2021 Zurich Portrait competition. My favorite was Note to Self by Tom McLean. It is a self-portrait. McLean is young, hip, and good-looking, like the crowds in central Dublin. He is alone, surrounded by post-it notes. As with Vermeer’s work, the viewer cannot read any of the words. They remain a mystery.
If the Irish are anything, they are lovers of words. Ireland is over-represented on the list of great novelists and essayists. Irish literature is renowned. There is even a center for the study of Irish literature in Beijing! Being Irish means being a lover of words in some sense. And not the written word alone Just before viewing “Note to Self” and the other 24 short-listed portraits, I listened to a National Gallery podcast. It was an interview of the poet Paula Meehan. She read, “ The Island, A Prospect,” commissioned for an exhibition on Irish landscapes. She began recalling that as school girl she learned Ireland’s climate is temperate. “The child I was found that word disappointing, no earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, volcanoes, floods.” The word temperate, she said, was a “A dreary wet city Sunday sound.”
I’d experience some dreary wet city Sundays in and around Galway, Limerick, and the Wild Atlantic Way. But before doing so, I made a trip north to Belfast and the nearby geological wonder of Giant’s Causeway. Located on the coast of the North Channel separating Ireland from Scotland, it is composed of some 40,000 interlockings, mostly buried basalt columns. They are the results of a 60 million year old volcanic eruption, which cooled rapidly to give them their distinctive hexagonal shape. They look manufactured instead of natural. Legend says that the Giant Finn built the causeway either to get into a fight with another giant or to get to Scotland for some giant business or another.
In Belfast I learned about another legend, Bobbie Sands. On May 5, 1981, after 66 days on a hunger strike, Sands died in a British prison at the age of 27. Protests and violence throughout Northern Ireland and beyond followed. This Belfast native and IRA member became a symbol of the Irish struggle for independence throughout the world. He is remembered today along with “The Liberator: Daniel O’Connell], and the 20th-century revolutionary[Micheal Collins]. Both of these men are buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, which is close to It Egan’s House. The museum there is alone worth a visit and the grounds are beautiful. It holds the remains of 1.5 million souls, making it one of the largest cemeteries in the world.
It is adjacent to another’s favorite Dublin place, the lovely National Botanic Gardens. At 50 acres, it is composed of an arboretum, rockery, and a walled garden, and made for a beautiful day. It is also free. Placing over a million dead next to a formal garden would, by the end of my time there, feel like a very Irish thing to do.
On the way to Belfast, our tour guide sang, “The Town I loved So Well.” I thought that was weird of him but I listened. And I was moved. The guide had a beautiful voice and later that day I was at The Celt, a pub in downtown Dublin, that he recommended for its nightly music. He asked if I was going to Galway, which he called the capital of Irish music. After spending a night at The Celt — where I again heard “The Town I Loved So Well”, I made plans to head West, to the cultural heart of Ireland.
Going home in the rain, running up the dark lane
Past the jail and down behind the fountain
Those were happy days, in so many, many ways
In the town I loved so well
I thought of the towns I have loved so well, as resident or visitor. I had never heard this song before but it is one of those pieces of music that sounds familiar on first hearing. It triggered feelings of remembrance even though it was set in Derry, a city in Northern Island where I have never been. That was the thing about being in Ireland. It was all new and familiar at once. It made me euphoric and melancholic at the same time. It invoked a garden and a graveyard.
Now the music’s gone, but they carry on
For their spirit’s been bruised, never broken
They will not forget, but their hearts are set
On tomorrow and peace once again
For what’s done is done, and what’s won is won
And what’s lost is lost, and gone forever
I can only pray for a bright, brand new day
In the town I loved so well.
The Grays
While my Dad’s side of the family was proudly and loudly Irish-American, they never spoke of the Emerald Island. They had never been, of course. They identified as Irish but I don’t think they knew anything about Ireland. Certainly, my father’s family didn’t make any effort to encourage an understanding of the place. I did grow up aware of “The Troubles” and there was always someone “right off the boat” in my Woodside, Queens, NY neighborhood who was instantly identifiable by his Irish brogue. Irishness was around me all the time but never in me.
The Grays are Irish Americans, but I had always identified more with my maternal German ancestry. For days, my thoughts centered around my father, my uncles, all of my cousins who had always seemed more Irish and Irish-liking than I ever was. My blabbering did not stop in the coming day and very soon everyone in Glasnevin and Drumcondra, had a face that I knew I had grown up with. It was my first time in Ireland, but it felt like time-travel to back to Queens, NY. I was home.
I shared much of my feelings upon arrival with Murieann, my host in Dingle, in the West, a few weeks later. She is an Irish speaker, has two sons who play Celtic sports, and a home they share with very lucky AirBnB guests. I choked up a bit when I told her that I had not expected my visit to be so personal. She smiled as she stirred oatmeal and I spread jam on her soda bread. In coming to Ireland, I became Irish.