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Books
Ireland
By PATTY McCARTY
Come back to Erin, mavourneen,
mavourneen.”
That’s the first line of an old song my grandmother,
Margaret, used to sing when I was a little girl. She often spoke about going
back to Ireland “when my ship comes in.” I knew that meant when she
got her inheritance from her Auntie Mary.
Auntie Mary’s husband, John, had left her many acres of rich
farmland in southern Minnesota.
Years later, after the ship had brought much less than hoped for
-- Mary left most of her money to a convent in Ireland -- I realized that my
grandmother not only would never go back, she had never been there. The child
of immigrant parents, she had been orphaned at 8. Taken in by a kindly couple,
she grew up in an Irish community where people talked and sang a lot about the
land they left behind.
It gave me much pleasure some years ago to send both of my
grandmothers to Dublin by Federal Express for $50. I wrote a play about Grandma
Margaret as I knew her during World War II when she was struggling with her
soldier son’s alcoholism. My other grandmother, Bridget Ann, appeared in
the play as a ghost. I entered the script in a contest for an Irish-American
play sponsored by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. I didn’t win. In fact,
nobody won.
The contest committee wrote that none of the many entries met
their standards. The plays had too many stock Irish characters, too much
alcoholism, too many ghosts and sorrowful mothers. My play could have been the
poster child for the plays they hated most. And, they said, there was little
satire, political or religious. When I told my mother, she said, “They
don’t know the half of it.”
I think the committee didn’t want to dwell on how much
sadness the Irish found in their new lives in America. I think they wanted
success and things to laugh at -- the John F. Kennedy story as told by Woody
Allen.
I went to Ireland several years ago, Grandma would be pleased to
know, to attend a week-long summer school on the life and work of playwright
John Millington Synge (pronounced Sing), who wrote in the early 1900s and whose
best-known works are “Playboy of the Western World,” a comedy, and
“Riders to the Sea,” a tragedy. The Irish have many summer schools to
sing the praises of their writers and musicians and their lovely land.
The school was held in a little village called Rathdrum, 50 miles
south of Dublin. After mornings of speakers and midmorning breaks for tea, the
staff would take us to explore the wonders of County Wicklow. We saw lakes and
ruins of castles and abbeys, weavers, young girls step dancing, grand old
houses and charming smaller houses with lace curtains and pots of geraniums in
the windows and bright painted doors. We went to a horse race high in the
mountains.
After summer school ended, my friend Carol and I and a couple from
Australia that we met at the school rented a car and spent a week traveling in
a big circle to the West, the South and back to Dublin. The couple had traveled
in Europe, and the man knew how to drive on the left side of the road. You can
drive from Dublin on the East Coast to Galway on the West in a day with a stop
at a pub in a village called Horse Leap for a lunch of fresh-caught salmon, and
we did.
We took a ferry to the Aran Islands, the westernmost point of
Europe. They say the next parish is in Brooklyn. The three islands are bleak,
almost barren rocks where fisher folk long ago made small plots for raising
potatoes by gathering bits of soil and seaweed. The largest of the islands,
Inishmore, has a few houses, a ruined church, a hostel where we spent the
night, and Dún Aengus, the ancient semicircular stone fort on a cliff
edge high above the ocean.
We walked in a rose garden in Tralee, where Grandma
Margaret’s mother came from, visited a small stone oratory on the Dingle
Peninsula, saw workers thatching a roof with reeds from the Shannon River and a
farmer in a tweed jacket digging peat.
I was reminded of the trip when I saw the color and
black-and-white photos in The Encyclopedia of Ireland, which describes itself
as “an A-Z guide to Ireland’s people, places, history and
culture.” Published by Oxford University Press ($39.95), its 390 pages
contain 19 essays on a variety of topics in addition to hundreds of short
entries.
I especially like the quotations scattered throughout the book.
For example, this by flautist James Galway: “It is next to impossible
… to toss a brick in the air anywhere in County Galway without it landing
on the head of some musician.” Or this by playwright Brendhan Behan:
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity except your own
obituary.” And this, from Titanic Town by Mary Costello, included
in the section on Belfast: “It’s starting to rain. The boys will go
in now. Let the Brits lie out in it and get saturated. A man’s army.
It’s spoiled the garden, all this running in and out through it with guns
and army-issue boots.”
Essay topics cover almost anything you might want to know: the
Viking and Norman invasions, agriculture, tracing Irish ancestors, the early
film industry, cinema in the ’90s, step dancing and
“Riverdance,” folklore, the Celtic tiger (the transformed economy),
Northern Ireland’s complex history, the Great Famine, the Irish diaspora,
great moments in Irish sport, and social change as the republic grows more
outward-looking. There are maps and there are chronologies for Belfast and
Dublin and for the island itself. Ireland’s chronology begins with the
hunter-gatherers of the Middle Stone Age appearing in Ulster about 7000 B.C.
and ends with the Northern Ireland Assembly being suspended in February of 2000
and reconvening that May following stalemate on the IRA’s decommissioning
of weapons. In addition to all this, there’s a list of 124 Web sites
beginning with Abbey Theatre and ending with Yeats, W.B.
On our road trip, I carried a little book of poems by Yeats, W.B.,
purchased in a Dublin bookstore. I read a poem to my companions whenever I got
the chance. We ended our road trip where we started, at Mrs. Potter’s bed
and breakfast in Black Rock, a Dublin suburb. Next day, I stood in Mrs.
Potter’s shower and sang “Come Back to Erin” to myself and cried
about all the things that deserved crying about and then I came home.
Patty McCarty is NCR copyeditor. Her e-mail address is
pmccarty@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, March 16,
2001
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