Monday, October 2, 2017
This third blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland focuses on the staff I met in various places we were. This entry, which I hope is shorter but no less entertaining than the first two entries, about expert guide Maryanne and various Irish people we met, says something about the places as well as the people. I learn lots about a place by listening to people who are familiar with it.
Take Slane, for example.
"There's nothing we can tell you. You've seen everything," one of two women in the village's travel information centre said, the day before I flew back to Canada.
"I had a good guide," I replied, pointing to Maryanne.
The two women proceeded to offer Maryanne various tourism pamphlets, including one of Francis Ledwidge, a local poet killed in World War One in 1917. A 10-metre portrait of him graces the side of a local building. We saw his poetry posted on store windows, including the laundromat. Perhaps this publicity was due to the centenary of his death. Or perhaps Irish people like poets and poetry in public places. Should I ask to post poetry at my local laundromat in Williams Lake?
"His poetry is light, not heavy," one tourism woman explained. Light or heavy, there are only two kinds of poetry: good poetry and bad poetry. United States composer and jazz band leader and pianist Duke Ellington said the same about music. "It Don't Mean a Thing if You Ain't Got that Swing:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDQpZT3GhDg
Music, like poetry, need not "mean" anything, and it certainly can mean something different to the audience than to the author, however much the audience should seek and respect the author's meaning; but this story is about Irish people on the job, not an tract on aesthetics.
The town of Trim and its castle mean much to the volunteer running a local travel information centre like no other I ever saw. His centre had pamphlets about this Medieval castle, and about area history and culture, as well as souvenirs including compact discs of Irish music. I bought one.
This tall, boney, blue-eyed, dark-haired Irishman also had a replica of a Medieval English king's sarcophagus, King Edward II, "Edward Longshanks" I believe, and Medieval armor in a room off the main room. This 1200s king gave a local feudal lord rule over the area, and the lord taxed the people enough to build and defend the castle. This area of Ireland saw much war for centuries, before and after the 1690 Battle of the Boyne nearby. See the 2017 Ireland People blog post about that decisive event.
I decided that this enthusiastic history buff loved his volunteer work, and he agreed. As well as the cd, I bought two copies of a children's version of Irish history, subtitled "A Long Story in a Short Book." That's a subtitle for our busy times, but Medieval Ireland was busy, by the reckoning of many people then and since.
At the nearby Battle of the Boyne interpretive centre a day or two after the Trim tour, tourism centre man, and castle grounds picnic that included the last of my birthday cake, two men at the front desk told me much about the battle, and Ireland, and history in general.
One man pointed out the window to the hill down which the army of King James II rode to engage King William III. I could almost see the clods of earth flying from the horses' hooves, by his telling. He explained kings from Scotland and the Netherlands driven by king from France to fight in Ireland for the crown of England. Can you say "entangling alliances?" The Netherlands king won, outlawed Catholics on the English throne, and strengthened the plantation system in Ireland. English plantations in Ireland fed on peasant labor. English plantations in North America fed on slave labor.
The Protestant army led by a Dutch king and peopled by soldiers from Netherlands, Prussia, Poland, Scandinavia, and the British Isles won that battle, but little Protestant power or heritage remains in that part of Ireland, the other tourism centre man said. The 1795 start of the Orange Order finds no marching resonance around there, unlike in Belfast and other Protestant strongholds losing marching and general cultural strength by the year. Have some Orange history:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXNf91unZgo
Farther north, at the northern tip of Ireland, Malin Head, a woman in a mobile trailer on a windy hilltop in County Donegal had been glad for the sunny day of our encounter, after rainy days.
"There was nobody selling souvenirs up here, only in the village below, so my brother set up this trailer. I'm running it for him today," she explained. "Many things we sell are made around here," she continued. She gestured to knitting, ceramics, woodwork and other items that stuffed her trailer, behind whose open side she stood, inside, out of the rain, and today the sun.
"Try this," she said, squirting a transparent liquid on my hand. "It's from local seaweed. It's a great moisturizer." I rubbed it in and said it had a nice feel and smell. I wouldn't wash my hand the rest of the day, I said, before I bought, not her bottle, but a fridge magnet.
She said that some days very few people bought things . I asked if she and her brother made enough to get by.
"We do all right. People around here do all kinds of things to get by," she said, before we wished each other well and parted.
Back across the Foyle River by ferry, we had found a County Antrim beach with an English family sitting by their camper van under sunny skies a day or two earlier. The historic sign behind their van interested me more than they did, but I stopped to introduce myself and explain the importance of the plaque to Canadians such as I.
We were at Torr Head, the closest Ireland comes to Scotland, a mere 12 miles away. We were in Northern Ireland, measured and valued in miles and Pounds, not kilometres and Euros as in Southern Ireland. I started calling the Republic of Ireland "Southern Ireland" after I read Paul McGlinchey's memoir calling it that. See 2017 Ireland People for more on the brave Paul.
The sign above the sandy and rocky beach was about, who was in the Young Ireland movement when he fled from that beach, pursued by agents of the British occupation of Ireland, in 1848. In 1848, many in Ireland starved to death or emigrated, and many in France, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Prussia rose against tyranny.
McGee went to the United States a Fenian, that is, a person who wanted Irish, not British rule in Ireland. He left the U.S. and the Fenians a few years later for Canada, where he helped bring home rule, that is, Canadian Confederation, in 1867. Reducing British influence in Canada was not Fenian enough for Patrick Whelan, the Fenian who shot McGee dead outside his Ottawa house in 1869. I told the camped English family this.
U.S.-based Fenians raided Canada in the 1860s. I suppose that the U.S. retains more sympathy for Fenians than Canada does, especially after a Fenian killed a Father of Confederation. The internet tells me that "Danny Boy" is a Fenian song. Have the U.S. singer Deanna Durbin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j32Fnb_8Bv4
The traditional Canadian belief is that McGee's is Canada's only assassination of a Canadian political leader. An Armenian shot dead the Turkish ambassador to Canada in the 1980s. Another tradition gives Louis Riel status at least equal to that of McGee. The Metis leader Riel's 1869-70 efforts to secure Indigenous and French and Catholic rights in land ruled by the Hudson's Bay Company, including land that would by 1870 become the province of Manitoba, whose first leader he was, qualifies Riel as a political leader, arguably a Father of Confederation, and even a provincial premier. McGee was not a premier.
McGee and Riel were both elected to the Canadian parliament. McGee was shot dead and Riel fled to the U.S. in 1870 when the Canadian government militarily opposed his work for Indigenous, French, and Catholic rights in Western Canada. In 1885, after he led armed resistance to the imposition of rule that undervalued Indigenous, French, and Catholic rights in a region to the northwest of Manitoba, Riel was convicted of treason by a Regina court and hanged.
Prime Minister John A. Macdonald vowed to "hang Riel though all the dogs in Quebec bark." Riel's strongest support was in that French Catholic part of Canada. Some argue that Quebec is an internal colony. Some argue that the Indian Act rules and land reserves for Indigenous people are internal colonies. The Indian Act is not subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Indian Act was a model for the racist apartheid system that ruled South Africa for decades, until the 1990s.
"My people will sleep for a hundred years, then awake," Riel said. The Canadian government pardoned Riel more than a hundred years after its court hanged him. Indigenous people in "this land called Canada" are awakening lately, which is good for them, and for all who live here.
Colonialism that convinces the colonized that it is the best possible system for them is very hard to undo, but the Irish largely undid it. May Canada one day do likewise. Have Sinead O'Connor and the Chieftains' "Foggy Dew" and Willie Dunn's "Louis Riel:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaS3vaNUYgs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwPjB8TfmLI
Dunn's song is from the album Akwesasne Notes. Akwesasne was a place of armed resistance to colonialism in 1990, when I was a student at McGill University in nearby Montreal.
Near Derry, the city whose Bogside Tour I noted in 2017 Ireland People, the tour guide perhaps belonging in this entry about people on the job, not that entry on people not on the job, we rented a car for a week. An England-born man worked in the agency. An Irish-born woman worked there. The woman who rented the car to us was from Orlando, Florida.
"This job came up and the company said I could apply for it," she told us. What a brave young woman, to move across an ocean to a job. You only live once, so go where you can and experience what you can, my Indigenous spouse's late father used to say.
I hope you liked this word trip to Ireland. I wonder if my next, fourth blog entry should be about transportation there, and feature the expert driving of my host and sister Maryanne. She also sings. A carload of women, with Maryanne at the wheel, on the right side, as in this SketchSHE video, can be noisy harmonic fun on wheels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMpQUsQcJFg
Noisily harmonic, I sign off.
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