Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, its subtitle from the W.B. Yeats poem "Easter, 1916," which I read in my first year English course at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1979, is a 1978 edition of a 1975 book by Leon and Jill Uris. They wrote and published during the British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, and they like neither the army nor the province.
The Hill of Tara, ancient burial mounds, pre-Celtic migrants from Scandinavia and Scotland, perhaps via a land bridge 6000 years ago, Vikings, Normans, the Reformation, the government-induced famine of the 1840s, while cattle were exported, the 1916 events, Partition, Ulster "fascism" in the authors' words, and 1970s despair that peace will never come are in this book from this fall's used book sale in the mall in Williams Lake. Today, when I volunteer again at the sale, I'll return the book, so someone else can have it.
Here I'll write about the book, for my blog readers, especially my sister Maryanne, my 2015 and 2017 Ireland travel partner.
From "Ulster," the title of the last third of the book, here is the authors' view of one section of the police set up in Northern Ireland when Britain granted it province status around 1920:
"Of the auxiliaries, the B-specials, a civil militia of mostly Orangemen, were to gain a
well-deserved infamy for their brutal tactics."
"From the beginning, no protest ever failed to bring on a reaction of overkill. It was a
blunt instrument of totalitarianism. To back up those massive forces, a Special Powers
Act was legislated at the very start to enable this one-party government to arrest anyone
without warrant or reason and to hold him behind bars indefinitely without charges or
rights. It is small wonder this act would become a model law for later fascist regimes
in Europe." (176)
Later, describing Bloody Sunday, the January 30, 1972 British Army murder of 13 peaceful demonstrators among an unarmed crowd in Derry, and its aftermath British inquiry that condemned the army's behavior, the authors write, "if the British had given justice to Ulster's Catholics and had not invoked fascism through Internment, no protest would have been required." (220)
Here is the authors' third and last mention of fascism in Northern Ireland:
"[The British] know that the Ulster love of the Crown had the biggest Catch 22 of them all:
the proposition that Britain was going to be used to allow their quasi-fascist regime to
exist." (277)
Strong words.
Martin McGuinness is young in the book, whose authors would probably not "piss on his grave," unlike an old English man Maryanne met decades later said he would, upon hearing of McGuinness' peaceful death. "After the Battle of Bogside [1969], the I.R.A. Provos came under command of Martin McGuinness, a twenty-two-year-old butcher's apprentice." (215)
On the other side of the barricades, have one of several Orange chants the book quotes:
"A rope, a rope,
Tae hang the Pope!
A pennyworth o' cheese
Tae choke him!
A pint o' lamp oil
Tae wrench it down!
And a big hot give
Tae roast him!
When I was sick,
And very very sick,
And very near a-dying,
The only thing that raised me up
Was to see
The old whore frying!" (180-181)
A few paragraphs later, there's this amusing announcement from a pilot about to land at Belfast airport: "We are about the land in Ulster. Set your watches back 300 years." (181)
Page 214 is about John Hume, "A Voice in the Wilderness." Hume is "the best political brain on the island"and his Social Democratic Labor Party "the most illuminating lights in Ulster politics." The page ends, "it will fall to the John Humes to bring sanity" to Ulster. This later happened. I wonder if he's related to David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher from the 1700s.
A week before Bloody Sunday, in "COs Want Paras Restrained," Simon Hoggart writes in the January 25, 1972 Guardian of British Army units asking that the Parachute Regiment not enter Derry. One unit captain, unnamed, whose commander did not oppose the Paras in Derry, said the paras "seem to think they can get away with whatever they like." (221)
After Bloody Sunday, "the British Embassy was burned down by a Dublin mob." (278)
Father Edward Daly, whose statue we saw in 2017 in Derry, and I wonder if he's related to Sister Daly who taught me Catechism during my First Communion year, when I was 7, is in this book. On Bloody Sunday, he dodged British Army bullets to rescue shot teenagers. He told the authors, "it doesn't matter whether you have a Roman collar or a dog collar." Daly regularly evacuated old people before demonstrations and consequent army attacks. Daly's story, pages 222-24, ends by noting that a year after Bloody Sunday, the paratrooper commander was knighted.
Bloody Sunday gets much attention from the authors, writing only a couple years after it. The event still weighs on Ireland. We saw a demonstration about it outside Belfast City Hall in 2015.
Here are a couple pithy quotes:
"The British Army has performed with total consistency in Ireland since the
Reformation as an anti-Catholic force of conquest, occupation, and suppression."
(232)
"[Belfast] is the mongoloid child of British imperialism." (247)
Innocent Protestants in Ulster suffered, too. Stephan Parker, 14, whose Belfast liberal pastor father "sought Christian answers to the crushing events," died when a July, 1972 I.R.A. bomb blasted the grocery store where he worked. "There is something Godlike about Joe Parker and his wife [Dorothy] that keeps them from being consumed with bitterness." (262-263)
Belfast Protestant Malcolm Orr, 19, engaged to a Belfast Catholic woman, was shot dead for it. At his wake, "She was there with her family and many other Catholic families. Protestants were there and many many strangers and they prayed together." Malcolm's mother told the authors, "Revenge is empty." (265)
The authors conclude the book by saying that the I.R.A. can't win by force and lacks the support to win by votes, but "will never be able to leave its people to the 'tender mercy' of the jackals." (277)
The timeline in the Appendix says that Henry VIII's Catholic daughter Queen Mary, whose heritage centre we saw in 2015 in Ireland, started the first plantation, in 1556, "confiscating Counties Leix and Offaly." (281)
The Catholic-Protestant division is therefore newer, politically grafted onto the earlier English-Irish, colonial-independent conflicts. Perhaps unity won't come, Northern Ireland's colonial history conjoined to Scottish Presbyterianism being too different from the history of the rest of the island. Still, Ulster was the strongest anti-English part of Ireland before the Reformation and Plantations.
The authors note that the Republic of Ireland, which I have called Southern Ireland since Paul McGlinchey so named it in his I.R.A. memoir Truth Will Out, whose signing we attended in the Greyhound Pub in Duleek on September 23, does not want to welcome a million Protestants from Northern Ireland into a unified Ireland and island. "One island. One Ireland," McGlinchey's co-author Philomena Gallagher ended her McGlinchey introduction in the pub that night.
A personal ancestry note occurred to me as I read about the consequences of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, whose site we saw in 2017, in which Williams of Orange's Protestant army defeated James II's Catholic army and ensured that only Protestants would sit on the English throne. After the battle, Anglican English oppression of other religions in Ireland was hardest on Catholics, but also hurt Presbyterians.
Our mom's mom's mom was a Mahurin. Several generations earlier, Hugh Mahurin left Scotland or Ireland around 1690, the Hugh Mahurin website says. I put this lineage, which includes links to a Mayflower passenger, on my blog:
http://michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/2017/07/ancestry-of-wynnes-going-back-to.html
If you can't open that link, then search the blog using the keywords "Mayflower" or "Mahurin." The link mentions the Mahurin ancestry after the Mayflower ancestry.
Was Hugh Mahurin a Scottish Presbyterian oppressed by English colonial laws against Presbyterians, Catholics, and other non-Anglicans? Does it matter now? One could crack up obsessing about history. I just wanted to write about this interesting book because I was recently in Ireland, North and South.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
2017 Ireland Ancient
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
I wrote the first five blog entries about my September, 2017 Ireland trip in five successive days, but this sixth entry I write several days later. The topic is 2017 Ireland Ancient, which got only a few days more ancient during my dawdling.
It's about the land. It has always been about the land, as the Irish, and other people, colonized or not, always knew. The fifth blog entry, 2017 Ireland Modern, started with mention of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, the start of Modern Ireland, I argued. Protestants defeated Catholics. Catholics continue to outnumber Protestants in Ireland, but the incipient capitalism that Protestantism strengthened eventually supplanted the feudalism that had buttressed Catholic rule for centuries. Feudalism ties peasants and lords to one another and to the land. I choose to start with ancient geography we found in Ireland, then describe pre-Christian and Medieval religious sites, and finally note evidence we found of vain Protestant attempts to erase Catholicism from Ireland.
Land is old, but rock is older. On the Antrim Coast on the northeast part of the island, we found The Giant's Causeway:
http://www.giantscausewayofficialguide.com/
Undersea volcanic eruptions eons ago made these hundreds of tall, skinny, hexagonal rocks, "but the people don't believe that," I've heard or read more than once. Finn MacCool, or Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish, was a mythical giant warrior who accepted a challenge from Benandonner, a giant who lived in what would become Scotland, across the sea from what would become Ireland. Finn built The Giant's Causeway to bridge the gap, but learning that Benandonner was bigger, Finn returned to Ireland. Benandonner pursued Finn, whom Finn's wife Oonagh dressed as a baby and put in a large cradle. When she told Benandonner not to wake the baby, lest the father be mad, Benandonner feared that the father was too big a match for him. Benandonner therefore fled back across the sea and destroyed most the the causeway behind him.
I wonder what the Scots think of this myth. Have they a myth to battle the Irish myth? Could a mythical causeway exist?
Moving ahead in time and south in direction, we found the Hill of Tara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of_Tara
The ancient people crowned kings here, and the rolling hills and round pits show where dwellings were. I have seen similar "pit house" features west of my home city of Williams Lake, in the land of the Tsilhqot'in, one of the area's Indigenous peoples. Pit houses are in many places:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit-house
Tara is one of many places Saint Patrick came much later, in the 400s, preaching Christianity to the people. Tara has a statue of Saint Patrick. Here and elsewhere, he explained the Trinity by using the shamrock, an iconic plant. As in the New World a millenia later, Christianity found receptive spiritual soil in Ireland. Pit houses abounded in the world. So did beliefs in supernatural explanations for natural objects and processes whose origins people did not understand. Where people once venerated Druidic kings, they would venerate Catholic bishops. Kings and bishops erected explanations of worlds seen and unseen, and gave the people their places in both.
Christian Ireland erected buildings as well as statues, and we saw plenty of both, sometimes by chance.
For example, we drove past a sign that said "Bective Abbey," and a couple kilometres away we found the ruins of an abbey dating from the 1500s, the original stonework from the 1100s gone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bective_Abbey
This was one film site for Braveheart., the film about William Wallace, who led Scots against English in the late-1100s. By then, the Anglo-Normans had built the first abbey here, centuries after Saint Patrick lived and died. Christianity therefore came to Ireland at least twice: once from England with Saint Patrick, and once from France via England after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. I remember thinking how soon this abbey went up after the Anglo-Normans came. I also liked how many arches, rooms, and levels were in this abbey. A centuries-old stone house was preserved nearby. What did dwellers in stone houses think of the incoming Anglo-Normans?
Another film site for Braveheart was Trim Castle, near where we had a picnic that included the last of the birthday cake my sister Maryanne made for me that week. Again, the Anglo-Normans built this impressive structure in the 1200-1300s, I recall from the nearby tourist centre. Indeed, the tourist centre had a copy of the coffin of Edward Longshanks, Edward II I think, and a stone casting of his body on top, in a back room. Edward was the English king who ringed Wales with forts, and similarly built structures to watch and control the Irish. The king gave a local lord taxing power, and the taxes built Trim Castle.
One might object that peasant labor and blood and the theft of peasant land built this and other monuments, to church and state. True. "But they are beautiful," the mid-1600s Republican English poet John Milton answered a Puritan who so objected. Is any Trump tower so beautiful, or lasting? When I asked the tourism centre man how the locals saw this castle project, he said, "They probably were happy to get the work." I suppose the man knows the Monty Python sketch against feudalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng
Today on CBC Radio One I heard an English author muse that King Arthur might have been a Briton rebelling against the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England. There were feudal battles for England before the winners ventured to bring English feudalism to Ireland, only to see industrialism replace it in each land.
Still, feudalism hung on longer in Ireland than in Britain, whose Industrial Revolution touched Belfast and other urban areas long before gathering the starving remnants of Irish peasantry into wage work by the late-1800s. This process had been nigh finished for a century in Britain by then. The Irish faced the Enclosure Movement via starvation and exile, not expropriation, unlike earlier in England, Scotland, and Wales.
A notable word about the building of the walled city of (London)Derry was that the city, like many British incursions into Ireland, was to be a "defensible" one. Circling oneself by a wall, like circling the wagons in the Old West of America, proves that one is in hostile territory, in a place where one is unwanted. Going to a place with an eye to defending oneself there proves that one suspects the locals are hostile to one's presence.
In 1613, King James I granted a charter to build Derry into a city archly loyal to the crown of England. This King James did more than authorize a new Bible, but even that book was an attempted improvement over the Catholic Bible, as Londonderry was an attempt to show the local Catholics an improved, Anglo-Protestant, way of life. There was other mention of this king in a Coleraine historic building which displayed the history of the Plantations, that is, land taken from Irish peasants and Catholic lords by gentry, mostly English, all Protestant. Oliver Cromwell deposed and decapitated James' son Charles I, but Cromwell continued with military force this plantation movement. In an Enniskillen public library book in 2015, I found mention of a police constable named Wynne who came from Wales to Ireland in 1642 with Cromwell's army.
Wynnes I know are more pro-Irish than pro-English, which fits a historical trend of incoming people adopting local ways. Thus the Anglo-Normans of the 1200s spawned generations who, by Cromwell's time in the 1600s, were pro-Irish, not pro-English, and therefore Cromwell battled them. Cromwell, was Republican, but he was pro-English, not pro-Irish. By 1798, the Protestant-begun Plantation System had spawned Protestants who were pro-Irish, not pro-English, such as the lawyer Wolf Tone, who that year helped in a rebellion against English rule of Ireland. Even Jonathan Swift of the early-1700s was an Irish person jaded by English rule. Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw openly opposed English rule of their Ireland. Swift, Wilde, and Shaw were Protestant. The struggle started Irish-English, not Catholic-Protestant, the latter hitched on much later. The Catholic Emancipation of 1829 conferred legal but not economic equality on Catholics,leading to generations of sectarian feuding that only calmed down since the late-1990s. "All You Need is Love:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyHN3LoRJ4
Dad, a Wynne, said that his mother, an Irish-born Irvine, the Protestant name of a family probably assimilated generations earlier to Catholicism, would not have liked The Troubles that began in the 1960s, had she lived past 1960 to see them. He also said he liked the British sense of justice and fair play. They then, like I now, no doubt saw Ireland through the filter of acquired experiences, views, and knowledge of this or that scrap of history.
Granny (Irvine) Wynne came to Canada in 1916, generations after Granny (Bender) Nasby's Mahurin ancestors left Scotland and soon after that Ireland, around 1690, the Battle of the Boyne year. Dad said that Granny Wynne had a brother who was a cop, in what would have been Colonial Ireland. Granny Nasby might have had an ancestor who was a Plantation whipman. All these ancestors, and my two grannies, were economic migrants first, moving to make a living. We who condemn their choices of employment have the luxuries of time, geography, material security, and most of all ignorance.
Traveling in Ireland in 2015 and 2017 made me less ignorant, and therefore less arrogant.
I wrote the first five blog entries about my September, 2017 Ireland trip in five successive days, but this sixth entry I write several days later. The topic is 2017 Ireland Ancient, which got only a few days more ancient during my dawdling.
It's about the land. It has always been about the land, as the Irish, and other people, colonized or not, always knew. The fifth blog entry, 2017 Ireland Modern, started with mention of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, the start of Modern Ireland, I argued. Protestants defeated Catholics. Catholics continue to outnumber Protestants in Ireland, but the incipient capitalism that Protestantism strengthened eventually supplanted the feudalism that had buttressed Catholic rule for centuries. Feudalism ties peasants and lords to one another and to the land. I choose to start with ancient geography we found in Ireland, then describe pre-Christian and Medieval religious sites, and finally note evidence we found of vain Protestant attempts to erase Catholicism from Ireland.
Land is old, but rock is older. On the Antrim Coast on the northeast part of the island, we found The Giant's Causeway:
http://www.giantscausewayofficialguide.com/
Undersea volcanic eruptions eons ago made these hundreds of tall, skinny, hexagonal rocks, "but the people don't believe that," I've heard or read more than once. Finn MacCool, or Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish, was a mythical giant warrior who accepted a challenge from Benandonner, a giant who lived in what would become Scotland, across the sea from what would become Ireland. Finn built The Giant's Causeway to bridge the gap, but learning that Benandonner was bigger, Finn returned to Ireland. Benandonner pursued Finn, whom Finn's wife Oonagh dressed as a baby and put in a large cradle. When she told Benandonner not to wake the baby, lest the father be mad, Benandonner feared that the father was too big a match for him. Benandonner therefore fled back across the sea and destroyed most the the causeway behind him.
I wonder what the Scots think of this myth. Have they a myth to battle the Irish myth? Could a mythical causeway exist?
Moving ahead in time and south in direction, we found the Hill of Tara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of_Tara
The ancient people crowned kings here, and the rolling hills and round pits show where dwellings were. I have seen similar "pit house" features west of my home city of Williams Lake, in the land of the Tsilhqot'in, one of the area's Indigenous peoples. Pit houses are in many places:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit-house
Tara is one of many places Saint Patrick came much later, in the 400s, preaching Christianity to the people. Tara has a statue of Saint Patrick. Here and elsewhere, he explained the Trinity by using the shamrock, an iconic plant. As in the New World a millenia later, Christianity found receptive spiritual soil in Ireland. Pit houses abounded in the world. So did beliefs in supernatural explanations for natural objects and processes whose origins people did not understand. Where people once venerated Druidic kings, they would venerate Catholic bishops. Kings and bishops erected explanations of worlds seen and unseen, and gave the people their places in both.
Christian Ireland erected buildings as well as statues, and we saw plenty of both, sometimes by chance.
For example, we drove past a sign that said "Bective Abbey," and a couple kilometres away we found the ruins of an abbey dating from the 1500s, the original stonework from the 1100s gone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bective_Abbey
This was one film site for Braveheart., the film about William Wallace, who led Scots against English in the late-1100s. By then, the Anglo-Normans had built the first abbey here, centuries after Saint Patrick lived and died. Christianity therefore came to Ireland at least twice: once from England with Saint Patrick, and once from France via England after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. I remember thinking how soon this abbey went up after the Anglo-Normans came. I also liked how many arches, rooms, and levels were in this abbey. A centuries-old stone house was preserved nearby. What did dwellers in stone houses think of the incoming Anglo-Normans?
Another film site for Braveheart was Trim Castle, near where we had a picnic that included the last of the birthday cake my sister Maryanne made for me that week. Again, the Anglo-Normans built this impressive structure in the 1200-1300s, I recall from the nearby tourist centre. Indeed, the tourist centre had a copy of the coffin of Edward Longshanks, Edward II I think, and a stone casting of his body on top, in a back room. Edward was the English king who ringed Wales with forts, and similarly built structures to watch and control the Irish. The king gave a local lord taxing power, and the taxes built Trim Castle.
One might object that peasant labor and blood and the theft of peasant land built this and other monuments, to church and state. True. "But they are beautiful," the mid-1600s Republican English poet John Milton answered a Puritan who so objected. Is any Trump tower so beautiful, or lasting? When I asked the tourism centre man how the locals saw this castle project, he said, "They probably were happy to get the work." I suppose the man knows the Monty Python sketch against feudalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng
Today on CBC Radio One I heard an English author muse that King Arthur might have been a Briton rebelling against the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England. There were feudal battles for England before the winners ventured to bring English feudalism to Ireland, only to see industrialism replace it in each land.
Still, feudalism hung on longer in Ireland than in Britain, whose Industrial Revolution touched Belfast and other urban areas long before gathering the starving remnants of Irish peasantry into wage work by the late-1800s. This process had been nigh finished for a century in Britain by then. The Irish faced the Enclosure Movement via starvation and exile, not expropriation, unlike earlier in England, Scotland, and Wales.
A notable word about the building of the walled city of (London)Derry was that the city, like many British incursions into Ireland, was to be a "defensible" one. Circling oneself by a wall, like circling the wagons in the Old West of America, proves that one is in hostile territory, in a place where one is unwanted. Going to a place with an eye to defending oneself there proves that one suspects the locals are hostile to one's presence.
In 1613, King James I granted a charter to build Derry into a city archly loyal to the crown of England. This King James did more than authorize a new Bible, but even that book was an attempted improvement over the Catholic Bible, as Londonderry was an attempt to show the local Catholics an improved, Anglo-Protestant, way of life. There was other mention of this king in a Coleraine historic building which displayed the history of the Plantations, that is, land taken from Irish peasants and Catholic lords by gentry, mostly English, all Protestant. Oliver Cromwell deposed and decapitated James' son Charles I, but Cromwell continued with military force this plantation movement. In an Enniskillen public library book in 2015, I found mention of a police constable named Wynne who came from Wales to Ireland in 1642 with Cromwell's army.
Wynnes I know are more pro-Irish than pro-English, which fits a historical trend of incoming people adopting local ways. Thus the Anglo-Normans of the 1200s spawned generations who, by Cromwell's time in the 1600s, were pro-Irish, not pro-English, and therefore Cromwell battled them. Cromwell, was Republican, but he was pro-English, not pro-Irish. By 1798, the Protestant-begun Plantation System had spawned Protestants who were pro-Irish, not pro-English, such as the lawyer Wolf Tone, who that year helped in a rebellion against English rule of Ireland. Even Jonathan Swift of the early-1700s was an Irish person jaded by English rule. Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw openly opposed English rule of their Ireland. Swift, Wilde, and Shaw were Protestant. The struggle started Irish-English, not Catholic-Protestant, the latter hitched on much later. The Catholic Emancipation of 1829 conferred legal but not economic equality on Catholics,leading to generations of sectarian feuding that only calmed down since the late-1990s. "All You Need is Love:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyHN3LoRJ4
Dad, a Wynne, said that his mother, an Irish-born Irvine, the Protestant name of a family probably assimilated generations earlier to Catholicism, would not have liked The Troubles that began in the 1960s, had she lived past 1960 to see them. He also said he liked the British sense of justice and fair play. They then, like I now, no doubt saw Ireland through the filter of acquired experiences, views, and knowledge of this or that scrap of history.
Granny (Irvine) Wynne came to Canada in 1916, generations after Granny (Bender) Nasby's Mahurin ancestors left Scotland and soon after that Ireland, around 1690, the Battle of the Boyne year. Dad said that Granny Wynne had a brother who was a cop, in what would have been Colonial Ireland. Granny Nasby might have had an ancestor who was a Plantation whipman. All these ancestors, and my two grannies, were economic migrants first, moving to make a living. We who condemn their choices of employment have the luxuries of time, geography, material security, and most of all ignorance.
Traveling in Ireland in 2015 and 2017 made me less ignorant, and therefore less arrogant.
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
2017 Ireland Modern
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
This fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland describes modern history there, contrary to the traditional expectation that a person writes first of ancient history. Later, I will write of ancient history elements I saw in Ireland. I agree with the view that the present is largely a product of the past, but describing the modern first might entice readers to infer the ancient. When I describe the ancient, they can see if they inferred correctly. Indeed, some ancient aspects of Ireland had little or no modern consequences.
How about 1690 as the start of modern Irish history? That year, The Battle of the Boyne strengthened Protestant ascendancy for generations to come. The Protestant Reformation in England, more than 150 years old, finally ensured that only Protestants would be monarchs. The 1688 forcing off the throne of King James II, the last reigning Catholic, his failure to recapture the throne via the Battle of the Boyne, and the strengthening of the Plantation system begun centuries earlier and enforced bloodily by Oliver Cromwell's armies in the 1650s, set in motion modern Ireland, in war and peace, in colonialism and liberation.
I walked around the remaining stone buildings of the Village of Oldbridge, the site of an important engagement of the Battle of the Boyne. Landscapers and gardeners trimmed and coiffed the foliage that now stands on the couple square kilometres of ground whose 1690 battle shaped modern Irish history.
The manor house, now the interpretive centre, built a half-century after 1690 the Coddington family, was in that family's possession until the descendants emigrated to Canada in the mid-1900s, one guide said.
The site is in Southern Ireland, the Republic, and one display says that the government only recently gives due attention to the Battle of the Boyne. I don't recall the exact words, but the sense seemed to be that the Battle was not all negative. Beside the words was a large 2006 photo of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern shaking hands with Ian Paisley, who spent decades undermining Irish unity and finally reconciled with Ireland late in life.
Between 1690 and 2006, Ireland thrived, starved, found peace and war, and in only the last couple decades began to reconcile with its past and many factions.
Many Catholic churches went up after the 1829 British revocation of laws oppressing Catholics, Baptists, and other non-Anglicans. Still, echoes of earlier days exist in many modern churches. St. Peter's Church in Drogheda, for example, built in 1884, contains the head of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic Archbishop executed in 1681 "for promoting the Roman faith."
Wikipedia goes on to say that Plunkett's head went to a Benedictine monastery in Germany in 1683, and by 1921 the head was in Rome. Then it returned to Ireland, and it has been in St. Peter's Church in Drogheda ever since.
The 1916 Easter Uprising centenary was in 2016. I wonder if there will be a Plunkett head centenary in 2021.
The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic surely graces other places besides the General Post Office in Dublin, whose shrine to the failed Easter uprising I saw in 2015. The British execution of 15 leaders outraged the Irish enough to overturn British rule in 26 of 32 counties by 1922. The Proclamation was in a store window in Slane, for example. A shelf of biographies of the 15 executed leaders is at eye level near the entrance to Connolly's Bookshop in Dublin. James Connolly was one of the executed leaders. Their bodies went to a mass, unmarked grave, increasing Irish outrage. Would the General Post Office display Connolly's head if it had it? Here is "Irish Rebel," about Connolly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEmy8nif7J8
I noticed little 1916 commemoration in Northern Ireland, a predictable lack, given its continuing colony status. One thing I read in the Portrush public library, in a book of Catholic Irish history, or a book of Royal Irish Constabulary history, was a strong phrase in a passage describing negotiations for peace leading to the 1922 partition of Ireland. Britain had already created Northern Ireland in 1920, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George "put his gun on the table" during negotiations about the rest of the island. The British seemed ready and able to fight to retain the rest of the island, but thought better of it.
I saw little 1916 history in "Ireland's Ancient East," that is, the Boyne River Valley and Irish Sea coast north of Dublin.
Plunkett's well-traveled head rolled around Europe for a few centuries. I found movements arguably lasting millenia, such as the devotions tree at the Hill of Tara site. Tara is a site of many mounds, where the Irish crowned kings before Christianity came in the 400s. A spreading, leafy tree at the site sported hundreds of pieces of paper with written prayers and pleas, memory articles, and other items to gain supernatural help for those in need, alive or dead. The ancient people of Ireland, before there was such a name, were not like the middle-aged Catholic woman who assured me that the tree we beheld was powerful, or were they? Granny said that Catholicism was a hard faith to live by, but an easy faith to die by. Granny is in one piece in a graveyard in Edmonton, Canada; I think.
In Dublin, I read on an O'Connell Street plinth a clever quotation from Sean O'Casey, about people and dignity and freedom. There was a Famine Museum and a Leprechaun Museum we did not visit, but one of the first photo opportunities was me standing beside a statue of James Joyce. I suppose someone has counted the number of public sites that mention this early-1900s writer.
Somewhere I saw mention that Daniel O'Connell, the mid-1800s Catholic lawyer activist for Irish home, spoke to audiences of more than 300 000 in the fields outside Dublin in the early-1840s.
Then the late-1840s Hunger intervened, made worse by a British change of government to one opposing the distribution of food and encouraging emigration. I'd read this in an Irish history book since my 2015 trip there. Sinead O'Connor's "Famine" explains the contemporary consequences of this 1840s disaster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo
The British parliament had a home rule law ready in 1912, before World War One intervened, and Northern Irish Protestants demanded their own "statelet," in the words of their critics. The 1920 creation of Northern Ireland, like the 1947 creation of India and Pakistan, ensured decades of discord and violence. "Where you see two birds fighting, look for an Englishman, who probably started the fight," a Balkan friend once quoted a quip from his region. Angry birds indeed.
Somewhere else I read about revolutionary sentiments spreading to Ireland after the 1789 French Revolution. I saw mention of the 1798 uprising under Protestant lawyer Wolf Tone, and I knew about that; but the 1800 British Act of Union welding Ireland to Britain was news to me. I knew that a similar 1707 law joined Scotland to Britain.
The modern sentiment I noticed the most was that Irish people are Europeans, despite having had to vote two times to join the European Union. "People didn't understand what they were voting for the first time," an arch-Republican woman told me while she, her husband, and I walked the Boyne battle grounds. "The second time, they understood, and voted to join Europe." Everyone I asked saw the recent British vote to leave Europe as a mistake that will reduce diversity and therefore the quality of life. The U.S. group Chicago advises against breakup, in "If You Leave Me Now:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJNVc6CZGBQ
I found in modern Ireland a sense of the long as well as of the short term. People know much about the past, but they live in the present. It is always the present, for everyone; but the past helps make us who we are. "The Who" asks "Who Are You," as I conclude this fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 Ireland trip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5modnIBpqTQ
This fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland describes modern history there, contrary to the traditional expectation that a person writes first of ancient history. Later, I will write of ancient history elements I saw in Ireland. I agree with the view that the present is largely a product of the past, but describing the modern first might entice readers to infer the ancient. When I describe the ancient, they can see if they inferred correctly. Indeed, some ancient aspects of Ireland had little or no modern consequences.
How about 1690 as the start of modern Irish history? That year, The Battle of the Boyne strengthened Protestant ascendancy for generations to come. The Protestant Reformation in England, more than 150 years old, finally ensured that only Protestants would be monarchs. The 1688 forcing off the throne of King James II, the last reigning Catholic, his failure to recapture the throne via the Battle of the Boyne, and the strengthening of the Plantation system begun centuries earlier and enforced bloodily by Oliver Cromwell's armies in the 1650s, set in motion modern Ireland, in war and peace, in colonialism and liberation.
I walked around the remaining stone buildings of the Village of Oldbridge, the site of an important engagement of the Battle of the Boyne. Landscapers and gardeners trimmed and coiffed the foliage that now stands on the couple square kilometres of ground whose 1690 battle shaped modern Irish history.
The manor house, now the interpretive centre, built a half-century after 1690 the Coddington family, was in that family's possession until the descendants emigrated to Canada in the mid-1900s, one guide said.
The site is in Southern Ireland, the Republic, and one display says that the government only recently gives due attention to the Battle of the Boyne. I don't recall the exact words, but the sense seemed to be that the Battle was not all negative. Beside the words was a large 2006 photo of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern shaking hands with Ian Paisley, who spent decades undermining Irish unity and finally reconciled with Ireland late in life.
Between 1690 and 2006, Ireland thrived, starved, found peace and war, and in only the last couple decades began to reconcile with its past and many factions.
Many Catholic churches went up after the 1829 British revocation of laws oppressing Catholics, Baptists, and other non-Anglicans. Still, echoes of earlier days exist in many modern churches. St. Peter's Church in Drogheda, for example, built in 1884, contains the head of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic Archbishop executed in 1681 "for promoting the Roman faith."
Wikipedia goes on to say that Plunkett's head went to a Benedictine monastery in Germany in 1683, and by 1921 the head was in Rome. Then it returned to Ireland, and it has been in St. Peter's Church in Drogheda ever since.
The 1916 Easter Uprising centenary was in 2016. I wonder if there will be a Plunkett head centenary in 2021.
The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic surely graces other places besides the General Post Office in Dublin, whose shrine to the failed Easter uprising I saw in 2015. The British execution of 15 leaders outraged the Irish enough to overturn British rule in 26 of 32 counties by 1922. The Proclamation was in a store window in Slane, for example. A shelf of biographies of the 15 executed leaders is at eye level near the entrance to Connolly's Bookshop in Dublin. James Connolly was one of the executed leaders. Their bodies went to a mass, unmarked grave, increasing Irish outrage. Would the General Post Office display Connolly's head if it had it? Here is "Irish Rebel," about Connolly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEmy8nif7J8
I noticed little 1916 commemoration in Northern Ireland, a predictable lack, given its continuing colony status. One thing I read in the Portrush public library, in a book of Catholic Irish history, or a book of Royal Irish Constabulary history, was a strong phrase in a passage describing negotiations for peace leading to the 1922 partition of Ireland. Britain had already created Northern Ireland in 1920, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George "put his gun on the table" during negotiations about the rest of the island. The British seemed ready and able to fight to retain the rest of the island, but thought better of it.
I saw little 1916 history in "Ireland's Ancient East," that is, the Boyne River Valley and Irish Sea coast north of Dublin.
Plunkett's well-traveled head rolled around Europe for a few centuries. I found movements arguably lasting millenia, such as the devotions tree at the Hill of Tara site. Tara is a site of many mounds, where the Irish crowned kings before Christianity came in the 400s. A spreading, leafy tree at the site sported hundreds of pieces of paper with written prayers and pleas, memory articles, and other items to gain supernatural help for those in need, alive or dead. The ancient people of Ireland, before there was such a name, were not like the middle-aged Catholic woman who assured me that the tree we beheld was powerful, or were they? Granny said that Catholicism was a hard faith to live by, but an easy faith to die by. Granny is in one piece in a graveyard in Edmonton, Canada; I think.
In Dublin, I read on an O'Connell Street plinth a clever quotation from Sean O'Casey, about people and dignity and freedom. There was a Famine Museum and a Leprechaun Museum we did not visit, but one of the first photo opportunities was me standing beside a statue of James Joyce. I suppose someone has counted the number of public sites that mention this early-1900s writer.
Somewhere I saw mention that Daniel O'Connell, the mid-1800s Catholic lawyer activist for Irish home, spoke to audiences of more than 300 000 in the fields outside Dublin in the early-1840s.
Then the late-1840s Hunger intervened, made worse by a British change of government to one opposing the distribution of food and encouraging emigration. I'd read this in an Irish history book since my 2015 trip there. Sinead O'Connor's "Famine" explains the contemporary consequences of this 1840s disaster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo
The British parliament had a home rule law ready in 1912, before World War One intervened, and Northern Irish Protestants demanded their own "statelet," in the words of their critics. The 1920 creation of Northern Ireland, like the 1947 creation of India and Pakistan, ensured decades of discord and violence. "Where you see two birds fighting, look for an Englishman, who probably started the fight," a Balkan friend once quoted a quip from his region. Angry birds indeed.
Somewhere else I read about revolutionary sentiments spreading to Ireland after the 1789 French Revolution. I saw mention of the 1798 uprising under Protestant lawyer Wolf Tone, and I knew about that; but the 1800 British Act of Union welding Ireland to Britain was news to me. I knew that a similar 1707 law joined Scotland to Britain.
The modern sentiment I noticed the most was that Irish people are Europeans, despite having had to vote two times to join the European Union. "People didn't understand what they were voting for the first time," an arch-Republican woman told me while she, her husband, and I walked the Boyne battle grounds. "The second time, they understood, and voted to join Europe." Everyone I asked saw the recent British vote to leave Europe as a mistake that will reduce diversity and therefore the quality of life. The U.S. group Chicago advises against breakup, in "If You Leave Me Now:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJNVc6CZGBQ
I found in modern Ireland a sense of the long as well as of the short term. People know much about the past, but they live in the present. It is always the present, for everyone; but the past helps make us who we are. "The Who" asks "Who Are You," as I conclude this fifth blog entry about my September, 2017 Ireland trip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5modnIBpqTQ
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
2017 Ireland Travel
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
This fourth blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland is about travel to, from, and on that island off the British coast. British Columbia, the Canadian province where I live, passed a law in 1922 ordering everyone to drive on the right side of the road. I think this province was among the last North American places to so decree. A couple decades ago, a playful political party called the Rhinoceros Party mused in public about strengthening Canada's British link by moving vehicles back to the left side of the road. Rather than shock everyone with an abrupt change, the party suggested only buses and trucks drive on the left side of the road for the first year.
Back in Britain and Ireland, people continue to drive on the left side of the road. Europeans drive on the right side of the road. This forces traffic to switch sides upon entering, or exiting, I don't know which, the tunnel that links Britain to the rest of Europe. Britain's recent vote to leave the European Union might complicate driving as it complicates farming, trade, education, and many other areas. A British Rhinoceros Party might suggest a gradual exit: potatoes, cheese, and philosophy professors during the first year, carrots, crackers, and physics professors the second year, and so on. Have the Mo;nty Python crew, good Brits all, singing "The Philosopher Song, which Europe and the world hope to retain:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPFClJGqjBQ
Most of Ireland severed the British link in 1922, the year British Columbia stopped British driving, but all Ireland continued to drive on the left side of the road during my visit. Should I feel outraged as a tourist whose habits they ignored? Given that I have a hard enough time driving on the right side of some Canadian roads, especially in winter, I think the Irish should be grateful that I neither complained about driving nor drove while in Ireland. I left that to my vehicularly-ambidextrous sister.
Clutch under her left foot and therefore closer to the clutch plate in the transmission, Maryanne smoothly shifted all five forward and one reverse gear as she drove a rented car 851 kilometres in one week. After she drove a couple thousand in two weeks during a 2016 visit from our brother Harold, wowed by her driving, and perhaps as happy as I was not to be behind the wheel, I thought the Irish car rental agencies might combine to blacklist her from future rentals; but they again rented her a car.
"Hey, that Canadian-Irish dual citizen is renting a car here," the 2017 agency might have said to a central registry. The registry could then take bets on how far she would drive this time; the Irish love betting. The winner could get a week's holiday in Canada, and see people drive on the wrong side of the road. What side of the road is correct is relative, and I'm glad a relative found the relatively-correct side of the road during our travels. See on this Irish road trip instructional video a road sign for Slane. We wuz there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbvWT1PXrSM
Soon after my plane from Toronto landed at the Dublin airport, I found a bus for Belfast. It was a double-decker with about seven people on it and I sat on the top deck, behind the people who took the front seats, over the driver. The bus rolled into the breaking day and reached Belfast in a couple hours. Unlike other buses, this one had no stairs down to a bathroom midway along the bus on the right side, at least not on the top deck. Irish people older than 65 ride buses for free. Is Weird Al Yankovic over 65? Could the Irish adopt him? Sing along to "Another One Rides the Bus:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SFEgu3KsGk
The bus stopped at Great Victoria Station in Belfast, where I boarded a train for Coleraine, a couple hours west along the north coast. The train made a couple stops within Belfast and a few more outside it, on its way to Derry. I got off at Coleraine, where Maryanne met me after she rode a few kilometres on a train from Portrush. We rode a train back to Portrush and after a brief walk around town, I stayed awake until 8:30 PM and slept off most of my jet lag that night.
I'm still amazed that I flew through eight time zone changes in one day. The planes fly about 800 kilometres per hour, higher than 10 000 metres. The Aer Lingus middle row was four seats wide and each side row was two seats wide. When I saw the mass of baggage cascading down the carousel, I was even more amazed that all that weight of people and bags got into the air.
A New Zealand man we met on the ferry across the Foyle River from County Derry to County Donegal foresaw a long trip back, by air: Dublin to London to Dubai to Auckland. That's 12 time zones, he told me, halfway around the Earth.
Have "Learning to Fly," by Tom Petty, who died on October 3, 2017 of heart failure at age 66:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbvWT1PXrSM
Trains were my favorite form of transportation to, in, and from Ireland: smooth, quiet, not crowded. People can get up and walk around. During our Derry-Belfast train ride, we sat in facing double seats with a table between us. What a nice way to travel, and picnic. The Derry train station retains serious ironwork fortifications from the 30 years of British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, where Derry is, due to a jag in the border which follows the Foyle River then turns south around the city to swallow it before resuming its run along the river.
Perhaps I liked trains because the tracks are as wide and far apart as Canadian tracks. For the Irish roads are narrower than Canadian roadds. Big trucks, buses, and our little red rented Ford Fiesta pass one another by mere centimetres. Maryanne was an excellent, organized, reassuring driver and I was not a nervous passenger. This helped make a happier holiday.
Back in Canada now, I end this fourth blog entry about my 2017 trip to Ireland thinking of "Traveling Man," which I remember from Tommy Hunter's 1970s musical variety show on Canadian television:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtXvznfMWAw
This fourth blog entry about my September, 2017 trip to Ireland is about travel to, from, and on that island off the British coast. British Columbia, the Canadian province where I live, passed a law in 1922 ordering everyone to drive on the right side of the road. I think this province was among the last North American places to so decree. A couple decades ago, a playful political party called the Rhinoceros Party mused in public about strengthening Canada's British link by moving vehicles back to the left side of the road. Rather than shock everyone with an abrupt change, the party suggested only buses and trucks drive on the left side of the road for the first year.
Back in Britain and Ireland, people continue to drive on the left side of the road. Europeans drive on the right side of the road. This forces traffic to switch sides upon entering, or exiting, I don't know which, the tunnel that links Britain to the rest of Europe. Britain's recent vote to leave the European Union might complicate driving as it complicates farming, trade, education, and many other areas. A British Rhinoceros Party might suggest a gradual exit: potatoes, cheese, and philosophy professors during the first year, carrots, crackers, and physics professors the second year, and so on. Have the Mo;nty Python crew, good Brits all, singing "The Philosopher Song, which Europe and the world hope to retain:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPFClJGqjBQ
Most of Ireland severed the British link in 1922, the year British Columbia stopped British driving, but all Ireland continued to drive on the left side of the road during my visit. Should I feel outraged as a tourist whose habits they ignored? Given that I have a hard enough time driving on the right side of some Canadian roads, especially in winter, I think the Irish should be grateful that I neither complained about driving nor drove while in Ireland. I left that to my vehicularly-ambidextrous sister.
Clutch under her left foot and therefore closer to the clutch plate in the transmission, Maryanne smoothly shifted all five forward and one reverse gear as she drove a rented car 851 kilometres in one week. After she drove a couple thousand in two weeks during a 2016 visit from our brother Harold, wowed by her driving, and perhaps as happy as I was not to be behind the wheel, I thought the Irish car rental agencies might combine to blacklist her from future rentals; but they again rented her a car.
"Hey, that Canadian-Irish dual citizen is renting a car here," the 2017 agency might have said to a central registry. The registry could then take bets on how far she would drive this time; the Irish love betting. The winner could get a week's holiday in Canada, and see people drive on the wrong side of the road. What side of the road is correct is relative, and I'm glad a relative found the relatively-correct side of the road during our travels. See on this Irish road trip instructional video a road sign for Slane. We wuz there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbvWT1PXrSM
Soon after my plane from Toronto landed at the Dublin airport, I found a bus for Belfast. It was a double-decker with about seven people on it and I sat on the top deck, behind the people who took the front seats, over the driver. The bus rolled into the breaking day and reached Belfast in a couple hours. Unlike other buses, this one had no stairs down to a bathroom midway along the bus on the right side, at least not on the top deck. Irish people older than 65 ride buses for free. Is Weird Al Yankovic over 65? Could the Irish adopt him? Sing along to "Another One Rides the Bus:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SFEgu3KsGk
The bus stopped at Great Victoria Station in Belfast, where I boarded a train for Coleraine, a couple hours west along the north coast. The train made a couple stops within Belfast and a few more outside it, on its way to Derry. I got off at Coleraine, where Maryanne met me after she rode a few kilometres on a train from Portrush. We rode a train back to Portrush and after a brief walk around town, I stayed awake until 8:30 PM and slept off most of my jet lag that night.
I'm still amazed that I flew through eight time zone changes in one day. The planes fly about 800 kilometres per hour, higher than 10 000 metres. The Aer Lingus middle row was four seats wide and each side row was two seats wide. When I saw the mass of baggage cascading down the carousel, I was even more amazed that all that weight of people and bags got into the air.
A New Zealand man we met on the ferry across the Foyle River from County Derry to County Donegal foresaw a long trip back, by air: Dublin to London to Dubai to Auckland. That's 12 time zones, he told me, halfway around the Earth.
Have "Learning to Fly," by Tom Petty, who died on October 3, 2017 of heart failure at age 66:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbvWT1PXrSM
Trains were my favorite form of transportation to, in, and from Ireland: smooth, quiet, not crowded. People can get up and walk around. During our Derry-Belfast train ride, we sat in facing double seats with a table between us. What a nice way to travel, and picnic. The Derry train station retains serious ironwork fortifications from the 30 years of British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, where Derry is, due to a jag in the border which follows the Foyle River then turns south around the city to swallow it before resuming its run along the river.
Perhaps I liked trains because the tracks are as wide and far apart as Canadian tracks. For the Irish roads are narrower than Canadian roadds. Big trucks, buses, and our little red rented Ford Fiesta pass one another by mere centimetres. Maryanne was an excellent, organized, reassuring driver and I was not a nervous passenger. This helped make a happier holiday.
Back in Canada now, I end this fourth blog entry about my 2017 trip to Ireland thinking of "Traveling Man," which I remember from Tommy Hunter's 1970s musical variety show on Canadian television:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtXvznfMWAw
Monday, October 2, 2017
2017 Ireland Staff
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.
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.
Sunday, October 1, 2017
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.
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.
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