2017 Ireland People

Sunday, October 1, 2017   Anaham

     This second of blog entry from my September, 2017 trip to Ireland revels in the fascinating people I met on the way there, in Ireland, and on the way back to Canada.
     My Vancouver-Toronto Westjet flight seat was beside a Canadian couple over 60 who were going to Newfoundland for the first time, while I was going to Ireland for the second time.  During my May, 1989 month rail pass, I went by ferry from North Sidney, Nova Scotia to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland.  A day's bus ride brought me to St. John's, where I stayed two nights.  Getting off the bus and walking dockward to find a cheap place to stay, I got an enthusiastic welcome from quite friendly women outside the tattoo parlor beside the Seaport Inn, where I spent two nights, alone, saving money and virtue.   I slept well, alone, despite the bar music below my second floor room.  
     Returning west, I rented a car in Deer Lake and drove to Bonne Bay, midway up the Northern Peninsula.   A man born years after Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, whom I met at the desk of a Woody Point inn, told me he did not see himself as part of Canada, a distant mystery.  I barely understood the speech of old timers I met in the Bonne Bay Legion.  Newfoundland, part of Canada?  You and Shanneyganock decide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7ybrr_g4Ck

    Two springs later, in May, 1991, I got closer to but still not to the tip of the Northern Peninsula, when I practice taught in Blanc Sablon, Quebec, on the Labrador border across the Strait of Belle Isle from St. Barbe, Newfoundland.  Icebergs as big as buildings clogged the strait until two days before I left at the end of May, so the ferry did not operate.  One noisy, ice-grinding night sent almost all the ice southwest into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  I only saw the Northern Peninsula across about 15 km of the Strait of Belle Isle.
     I did not regale my seat mates with my Newfoundland tales, but a couple weeks later, a woman working in a Dublin thrift shop assured me that Newfoundland books I read during my trip and gave to her would find an interested reader she knew.  Instead, I listened to the older couple explain how happy they were finally to go to Newfoundland.  Newfoundland is closer to Dublin than to Vancouver, geographically and culturally.  The Dublin accent sounds close Newfoundland to me.
     My Toronto-Dublin flight sat me in the last row of the first section, aisle seat, beside a woman of about 30 who had just graduated from theology training in Kentucky.  I would meet two Kentucky women during my trip.  I have ancestors on my mom's mom's side who lived in Kentucky in the 1700s.  Attach Neil Diamond to which character you please:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-YpI-eJgDc

     Sister Kentucky was going to her new job as a chaplain at Queen's University in Belfast.  Her minister fiancee, a Northern Irish Presbyterian minister too inclusive for the older and more reactionary members of his rural flock south of Belfast, later met her at Dublin airport.
     The second Kentucky woman I met, about ten days later, was going to her tour bus in the Tara historic site parking lot.  Earthen mounds that predate Christianity in Ireland speckle this place for crowning ancient Druid kings.  She told me that a DNA test showed her 98% Irish but without any Cherokee, despite her belief she was part Cherokee.   Could one or both of us be part Druid?  I think I'm 98% storyteller, but you can decide as you read.  Stay awake.  There might be whisky.

     On my return flight from Dublin to Toronto, I sat beside a Drogheda woman joining her Irish-born husband in their Ontario home.  He helped bring ice hockey to Ireland, don't ya know.  She, like every Irish person I met, were happy that Ireland was at peace, unlike the decades before a 1998 peace agreement ended most hostilities in Northern Ireland, between those who want to remain part of Britain and those who want the North to join the rest of Ireland.
     The other Drogheda person I met was a man walking his dog at the nearby Battle of the Boyne historic site.  He, like the Dublin couple I met earlier there, liked Ireland staying in Europe, unlike the British, who by a slim majority recently voted to leave Europe.  Check the map, John Bull.  The woman of that couple was arch-Republican.  The man's father wrote books about Oliver Cromwell, whose troops did not skewer babies, contrary to propaganda against the English Commonwealth leader and scourge of Ireland.  Two deer ran across our path as we talked.  "That's unusual," the  woman said.
     It was not Cromwell but his successor Edmund Ludlow who said that Ireland had not enough water to drown a man, nor trees enough to hang him, nor dirt enough to bury him.  Still, Oliver, later hanged, buried, dug up, and burned, strengthened English rule in Ireland.  In 2015 in the Enniskillen library, I found a passage about a Welsh cop named Wynne who came to Ireland with Cromwells army in the 1640s.  "Perhaps you don't want to know your ancestors," my dad Joe Wynne more than once replied to my questions about them.   May my ancestors be closer to Ned Hill than to Oliver Cromwell in philosophy. Have The Pogues on that contrast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-y2ox2HPnc

     The Boyne battle of 1690 is long over but only in the past generation has Ireland begun reconciling with the consequences of this biggest-ever one-day battle on British soil.  The Boyne River Valley was part of Colonial Ireland when King James II of Scotland, the last Catholic on the English throne, backed by King Louis XIV of France, deposed by King William III of Orange, Netherlands, Protestant, in this battle fought on  Irish soil.   The Orange order sprang from this July victory, and annual marches celebrate it, sometimes provocatively in Catholic neighborhoods.
     A large photo in the interpretive centre features former arch-Orangeman Ian Paisley shaking hands with Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern when they signed the 1998 agreement to end "The Troubles."
Invading to occupy Northern Ireland for decades starting in the late-1960s, the British Army worsened the extant colonialism into "The Troubles."  Words near the Paisley-Ahern photo explain that Ireland is trying to reconcile with those who oppressed Northern Irish people, mostly Catholics, for working for equal rights and a united island.  Paul McCartney and Wings offer a musical view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaO4XeHhwo8

     The "Blanket Men" in the above video remind me of Paul McGlinchey, whom my sister and I fortuitously met in Duleek's Greyhound Pub.  In the lobby of the pub, where we stopped to pee during our drive around the Boyne River Valley area, we saw a poster advertising Paul's book signing that night.  That day, there had been a commemorative march to honor Thomas Ashe, whom prison guards killed on September 25, 1917 while he was on a hunger strike.
     Paul, arrested in his suburban Derry home at 17 in 1976 for being in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and having weapons, served more than 12 years during two terms in Belfast's Long Kesh Prison, later renamed the H-Block, and later The Maze.  The occupying British called him a criminal and wanted to clothe him as one.  He called himself a political prisoner and wanted civilian clothes.  To get political prisoner status, Paul and several comrades wore nothing but blankets, hence "Blanket Men."  Beaten, starved, abandoned by church hierarchy, called grandstanding masochists rather than politicals by Amnesty International, whose headquarters are in London, the Blanket Men eventually got to wear civilian clothes.
     Truth Will Out is McGlinchey's memoir of growing up, living in prison conditions worse than international law accepts, and writing this book before the serious cancer he suffers kills him.  Poet Philomena Gallagher wrote to McGlinchey during his mid-1990s imprisonment, helped him write the book, and ended her introduction in that pub that night by saying, "One island, one Ireland."  Philomena is from Newry, just across the border in Northern Ireland, and a place of much tension during "The Troubles."  Have a review of the book.

http://www.organizedrage.com/2017/08/book-revue-truth-will-out-by-paul.html

     As I drank a Guinness and my sister and Irish host and guide Maryanne drank pop, I photographed the quiet Paul from across the room, and recorded some of the band's playing after the book signing.  Old men around the pub, perhaps IRA, might have mused at my motives, but years earlier they might have manhandled my camera from my hands, asked me my business, and roughed me up some.  That night they probably saw a foreigner more ignorant than dangerous.  Ignorance can be bliss, but sometimes also safe.
     One song the band sang to honor Paul McGlinchey from Derry was"I Wish I Was Back Home In Derry."  Have a version by Christy Moore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCch_W2Ro38

     We stood by that "Free Derry" sign a few days before the book event.  We were on a Bogside Tour by a local guide, who was 9 in 1969 when police and army bullets flew past his nearby front door  during a peaceful march for better working and living conditions for the Derry poor, mostly Catholic.  He grew up pretty quick, away from his house and backyard outhouse, and went to university, while others joined the IRA to resist the police and army and paramilitaries and others who supported the unjust situation, which colonialism always is.
     Not all, perhaps not even a majority of the Northern Irish support colonialism.  Keith, a Derry-born Catholic whose spouse Angela is Catholic from closer to the Portrush house which Maryanne watched for its vacationing owners, said that there would be Irish unity, but not in his lifetime.  Coleraine is near Portrush.  Blanket Man Paul was held at the Coleraine interrogation centre decades before Keith, Angela, two of their friends, Maryanne, and I formed a team and came second in the weekly Quiz Night in a Portrush pub.  We faced more peaceful questioning than Paul faced.
     Rita, at 70 or so, a few years older than Keith and Angela, met us a week later in Connolly's Bookstore in Dublin on my birthday.  Born in Yorkshire, fluent in Irish, Rita supports the socialism that James Connolly promoted until the British executed him for his part in the 1916 Easter Uprising to end British rule over Ireland.  By 1921, British rule ended in 26 of 32 counties on the island. Have an Irish language song I have long known to hear but cannot sing (yet?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n730FWycrTY

     By 2021, who knows?  By my next blog entry, whose theme I have not decided on yet, be as fun to write as this one was, and as fun to read as I hope this one was.