At the Edge of Ireland Page 5

  “And then came the glorious Easter Rising of April 24, 1916, in Dublin, which was actually a bloody fiasco, except that the stupid British executed sixteen ringleaders and made them into instant martyrs. So this was followed by the start of the ‘Troubles.’ First, a two-year war of independence led by Michael Collins—y’ remember him? Very famous. Very popular. Then a peace treaty with Lloyd George, the British prime minister in 1920. But that wasn’t much use. Ulster was still left as a British colony, y’ might say, but a lot of southerners wanted a united Ireland. So what happens? We have another damned war—the Civil War—us fightin’ ourselves, can y’believe, until Eamon de Valera—our taoiseach (prime minister)—says, the heck with it, accept the bloody treaty, we’ll become the Irish Free State and we’ll deal with Ulster later on. And well, y’know that story. Decades of Catholic-versus-Protestant slaughter and bombings up there around Belfast and Derry until today, when we’re a republic and—God willing—the power-sharing peace treaty in Ulster might actually work now. But you’ll notice—I’ve got m’fingers crossed. And that last bit—from Civil War ’til t’day, especially that time they call ‘The Troubles’—has filled a thousand books describin’ the unbelievably tangled shenanigans of politicians and freedom groups and just plain terrorists. I couldn’t even start to give it to you straight. And anyway, you asked fer a fast version an’ that’s what I’ve given you.”

  “So that was the fast version then?”

  “Fast as I could do it.”

  “Well—thank you, and thank God I didn’t ask for the slow one.”

  “Aye, well—y’d’ve been here fer another few hours, tha’s fer sure…”

  “You must be very thirsty by now.”

  “Well—b’jeez at last! I thought I’d never ever hear the offer of liquid sustenance, which I am more than ready to accept, kind sir!”

  I FOLLOWED UP ON this brief introduction to Irish history from my diminutive friend in Waterford with far more extensive readings and now wholeheartedly agree with his description of his poor country’s fortunes as “our terrible convoluted turmoil.” One of my favorite must-reads, of course, is the long—very long (in dealing with Ireland how could it be anything else?)—epic Trinity, by Leon Uris. His book generated the full spectrum of reactions from horror to hurrahs when it was first published, but as I came to realize that every resident here has his or her own take on the nation’s history, such discordant reactions were obviously to be expected.

  A slightly less contentious nonfiction book by Uris is Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, completed with photographs by his wife, Jill Uris, in 1975, and I use his words to summarize the traumatic fate of this tiny nation:

  Over eight hundred years of occupation and four hundred years of intense colonization, Ireland has been cruelly and stupidly administered and her people shamefully persecuted, with every sort of indignity brought to bear. The most wanton penal laws legislated by a civilized western nation (Britain) denied the Irish Catholics every human and material right. In the mid-Nineteenth Century the Great Famine was little more than a subtle, or not so subtle, exercise at “gentlemen’s genocide.” The land had been stripped naked through court intrigues and run red to the sound of clanging armor and bellowing cannon in an epic of boundless bloody greed…This stricken land, a ponderous religion, and a tortured foreign occupation have made it impossible for decades of Irish to exist in their own country…Yet it has become a depository of the folkways of a dozen cultures, the haven of the last great peasantry of the west. All this, mixed in with their own Celtic bizarreness and the deeply practiced mystical aspects of Catholicism, has given them the universal image of “leprechaun people”…They are as warm and lovely as any on earth. Their wit is incomparable. Their use of words and language has enriched life wherever they may have touched it…Through it all a magnificent people have survived with their own identity intact!

  I couldn’t say it better myself.

  So I didn’t…except to add a celebratory postscript on Ireland’s recent economic and social good fortune after joining the EU in 1972 (previously the EEC—European Economic Community). Once the penurious basket case of Europe, the “Celtic Tiger” has led the whole community for years in booming economic expansion, international business investment, reverse emigration (Irish workers returning home), and “best place to live” appeal. As the popular saying has it—“There are only two kinds of people on this earth—the Irish and those who wish they were”!

  The only problem is that when tiny, dilapidated row houses in Dublin sell for well over a million dollars, both groups are finding it harder and harder to afford even the most modest accommodations in the major cities. Nevertheless the momentum of ambition, accretion, and affluence moves this proud nation forward, and you can almost hear the little green leprechauns giggling with delight as they watch all the gold rolling in and the coffers filling and swap tales of the Irish buying up fancy apartments in Manhattan and second homes all along the Mediterranean coast.

  Even back in the peasant-poor Middle Ages, poets like Edmund Spenser celebrated Ireland’s enduring charms: “Ah to be sure it is yet a most bewtifull and sweete country as any is under Heaven.”

  And today—in celebrating the “Celtic Tiger”—it’s a hearty Sláinte! again, a booming Céad Míle Faílte (“A Hundred Thousand Welcomes”), and this popular blessing too:

  Health and long life to you

  Land without rent to you

  A child every year to you

  And if you can’t get to Heaven

  May you at least die in Ireland

  4

  The Ring of Beara

  Our First “Loop” Adventure

  THE PERCEPTIONS OF “BLOW-INS”

  DESPITE ALL THE “CELTIC TIGER” TALES of progress and prosperity and Ireland’s pulsating aura of newfound confidence (some even claim it’s becoming cloyingly complacent at times—others claim “the bubble has to burst soon!”)—in places like Beara you still sense a timeless quality in those great elemental aspects of shattered mountain ranges, sea-gouged cliffs, black water lakes, vast moors, and miasmas of peat bogs. These have always been the true touchstones of this strong and ancient land—this haven of great poets, artists, and writers, whose works resonate with primal energies and the ancient pagan rhythms of long-forgotten languages and legends and the horrors of their decimated, diaspora-plagued heritage.

  No matter how capsulized you make these Irish histories, how euphemistically you paraphrase the sequences of ethnic “displacements,” cultural annihilations, endless centuries of occupations and Troubles, heart-shattering poverty, the terrible famines, the mass emigrations, the constant battles against the state and the Catholic church for freedom and liberation—the emergence of the “peaceful and prosperous” nation of today is a nonfictional gothic melodrama far more complex and convoluted than any novel could ever be.

  The recent transformations here have been miraculous and yet tinged with ironies. In a land now flush with new affluence and with more Mercedeses per capita than any other country on earth, including Germany, you can still see the Angelus bells being rung on TV twice a day and people pausing to pray in the street to the Blessed Virgin. And out in the wilder parts of Connemara, Donegal—and Beara—visitors still seek out scenes and experiences of the “old ways”—the ashling—of simple sustenance lives lived close to the earth and the ocean and within their own remote, close-knit communities.

  It’s always fascinating to see how our tastes in and reactions to landscape and travel in general have changed over the centuries. Today’s first-time “touchstone-seeking” explorers of Beara are invariably enchanted by its bold, burly mountains, its wild heather and gorse-strewn moors, and that magical sense of discovering secret Brigadoon valleys glowing with that iridescent sheen of green that is pure Emerald Isle.

  But it was not always so. Even a superficial search of reactions from celebrities and historical figures over the last couple of centuries reveals far less rosy-hued a
ccounts and opinions. While today, for example, most of us are bemused by the little, narrow, winding, and vegetation-crammed boreen lanes here, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau portrayed his journeys around Beara in 1828 as “indescribably difficult.” And William Wordsworth, whose purpled poems often exceeded the normal bounds of adjectival and emotional restraint, limited his comments on Beara roads to a single word: “Vile!” Sir Walter Scott, however, was far more enthusiastic, describing the scenery of Beara and County Kerry as “the grandest sight I have ever seen.”

  And then, of course, there’s the weather. The plans of poor old Theobald Wolfe Tone, who attempted to harness a French armada here to drive the English from Ireland in 1796, were decimated by Beara’s notoriously fickle climate. “Dreadfully wild and stormy and easterly winds which have been blowing furiously and without intermission since we made Bantry Bay, have ruined us,” he wrote before being captured and executed in 1798.

  Similar outrage also pours from countless early “travel memoirs,” although one of the less voracious commentaries by the novelist Marie-Anne de Bouvet (1889), attempts a more balanced summation: “The climate of Ireland is vexatious rather than absolutely bad, and it has consolations the more delightful because they come unexpectedly.” A splendid example of damning with faint praise.

  And then came such social commentary as this 1818 description by Georgiana Chatterton of the local Beara people in her best-selling travel book, Rambles in the South of Ireland: “They were the wildest-looking people I ever beheld…and the appearance of the dwellings of the peasantry was more truly wretched than I have ever seen…Some of the younger children were completely naked.”

  Rose Trollope, however, wife of the famous novelist Anthony, obviously had a tolerance for Beara, as they both enjoyed several family holidays in Glengarriff. Anthony quickly absorbed the nuances and subtleties of Irish life in his official position with the post office in Banagher, which he portrays vividly in his novel The Kellys and the O’Kellys. However, in 1849, Anthony’s mother, Fanny (herself a distinguished author), did not share their enthusiasm and found: “the food detestable, the bedrooms pokey, turf fires disagreeable, and so on, and so on.”

  Virginia Woolf, like so many other celebrities of the time, also enjoyed a vacation in Glengarriff in 1934, and although she and her husband, Leonard, toyed with the idea of buying property here, she also saw the “underbelly” of life in the country, which she described in her typically terse and acerbic manner: “How ram-shackle and half-squalid the Irish life is, how empty & poverty-stricken.” (Interesting how she makes “half-squalid” sound far worse than just simply ‘squalid.’)

  As the twentieth century progressed and conditions improved along the peninsula in terms of roads, housing, and employment, especially in fishing and the British naval yards at Castletownbere, the mood and reactions of visitors began to improve. One particular commentary by Sean O’Faolain in his book An Irish Journey (1941) combines the direness of the past with a new romantic effervescence celebrating the power and majesty of this remarkable corner of the country: “If there is in Ireland a harder world than the Bere Peninsula, a tougher life, a sterner fight against all that this loveliness of nature means in terms of poverty and struggle and near-destitution I have yet to find it.” But then he switches tone and lets his eloquence flow:

  Few more lovely seascapes exist in Ireland than that which unfolds itself on the walk to Glengarriff and beyond…The sweeping grandeur…the vast elemental infinities…the Glen, as we call it in County Cork, has three things peculiar to itself. It has tiny refuges of inlet nooks and coves where the mind can dream itself into a drowsy peace for days on end, hidden low-tide or high-tide lagoons, lovely at any season, little islands where one can bathe and bask, silent but for the cry of a curlew or gull, or the chattering of herons or the suck-suck of the seaweed caressing the rocks. It has foliage of a tropical variety in abundance. It has a climate so mild that the place flowers with rare flora, and on the more moist summer days, the bay lies heavy as molten metal, and the very rocks seem to melt, and everything swoons in a land-locked sleep.

  Ironically, while the Beara has remained relatively aloof and unexplored, it is seen today by many to capture the very essence of the Irish people and the enormous power and beauty of the land itself. “Beara,” I was told by one proud resident, “is just quite simply the best place in the whole of Ireland.” And by the time Anne and I left at the end of our seasons here, we were of course in total agreement with such sentiments.

  SCURRYING FROM KILLARNEY AND THE RING OF KERRY

  AND WE ARE BOTH in total agreement about Killarney and the Ring of Kerry too that runs around the Iveragh Peninsula. Out of season, if the weather holds, this is indeed an enchanted realm of soaring mountain ranges with such entrancing names as Macgillycuddy’s Reeks reflected in broad forest-edge lakes and a tumultuous chiseled coastline pounded by the Atlantic Ocean. A dramatic dreamworld indeed that conjures up all the boisterous charms of the Ireland of popular inspiration.

  But come during the peak late spring to early autumn season and you’ll need to brace yourself for a traumatic transformation when the charmingly upmarket and architecturally flamboyant Victorian town of Killarney itself, with its plethora of palace-like hotels and resorts, suddenly becomes Ireland’s most popular tourist nexus after Dublin. The relatively narrow roads that encircle the Ring of Kerry attract dawn-to-dusk processions of bumper-to-bumper coach traffic, all visiting the same “top spots” (the National Park, Muckross House and Abbey, the Ladies’ View panorama, Ross Castle et al.).

  For those whose images of Ireland conjure up shamrock-garnished horse and carriage rides, leprechaun-filled souvenir shops, pseudo-céilí concerts in “traditional pubs,” KISS ME QUICK I’M IRISH souvenirs in every imaginable guise, and an exuberance of blarney that even make Japanese tourists wary of overkill hype—then this will be seen as some kind of paddywackery paradise.

  For those, however, who are willing to work a little harder to discover a more authentic Ireland—may we gently continue to entice you to travel a score or so miles from the crush of Killarney and venture south to the next peninsula, which offers a far more authentic experience altogether.

  Here on Beara the scenery is as rugged as a rhino’s carapace and formed largely of sandstone, with slate and igneous intrusions, all bent, buckled, and fissured by the Armorican tumult of over three hundred million years ago. The land is creased, incised, and gashed by constant conflicts with the oh-so-Irish elements of rain, frost, and that miasma of “mizzle” (mist and drizzle) that cocoons the high ancient places.

  But we don’t mind at all. We’re out of the Killarney chaos and into the wild country now, switchbacking up the steep narrow road to Moll’s Gap and a quick pause for a gourmet snack (one of the thickest, creamiest, and richest quiches ever) at the famous Avoca Café perched on the scoured treeless peak here.

  And then it’s all downhill, looping and laughing together as we see signs for Kenmare and the Ring of Beara. Anne reads a short outspoken commentary from one of our guidebooks:

  The Beara peninsula is as beautiful as the Dingle, far to the north, but it is perhaps the least known of the western peninsulas. It is more rugged and till now lonelier than the others. Its fate is being argued. One faction, led and supported by conservationists, tourists, and many German, Dutch and English “blow-in” settlers, is for keeping things much as they are. The other, including a number of influential locals, want the god Development: roads, houses, hotels and industry to match Ireland’s economic surge of the 1980s and 1990s. Having fouled up your own countries, these Irish seem to be saying, you want to stop us fouling up ours, and that is for us to decide.

  “I assume this ‘fouling’ business doesn’t refer to our peninsula,” I said.

  “Oh—so it’s ‘our peninsula’ now, is it? Getting a little possessive aren’t we, especially as you haven’t even see the place yet!” Anne said, laughing.

  “Well—it says �
�least known,’ so I guess we’ve picked the right one…and I’ve heard nothing about any ‘fouling.’”

  And Kenmare certainly appears foul free. In fact, after all the hype and hullabaloo of Killarney this is a model town of decorum and grace. Hidden back behind the cozy little cluster of downtown stores are two of Europe’s most prestigious hotel-resorts. First is “High Victorian” Park Kenmare tucked away at the top end of main street, laden with antiques and tingling with olde world country house charm. Then comes Sheen Falls Lodge, definitely one of those “if you have to ask the price here you can’t afford it” places set on a three-hundred-acre estate with tree-shaded walks down to the long, ocean-lapped bay known somewhat misleadingly as the Kenmare River.

  From even a superficial glance at this coy little town you sense a distinctly non-Irish heritage here. And so it was. In fact the notorious diarist Macaulay, ever prone to vast exaggerations in his writings, described predevelopment conditions here in the seventeenth century when Sir William Petty arrived to “make profitable sense of the country. For having been awarded a large grant of land for services to the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, he had to face half-naked savages, who could not speak a word of English and who made themselves burrows in the mud and lived on roots and sour milk…scarcely any place…was more completely out of the pale of civilizations as Nedeen” [Kenmare’s original name].

  So—as happened all across Ireland when the “let’s get things organized here” Britishers moved in—Sir William set about creating ironworks, lead mines, fisheries, and other industries and, in 1670, founded a very English-like village in a tree-laced hollow. He even tried to entice scores of “doughty maidens” from England to come and “civilize our local natives” and set up a flourishing Protestant society. Things didn’t quite work out in so utopian a manner, but the place began to truly flourish under the Marquis of Lansdowne, who created a new town plan in 1775. Almost a century later, in response to the dire unemployment and starvation conditions of the Great Famine, Kenmare became renowned for the superlative quality of its local handmade lace sponsored by the Sisters of the Poor Clare Convent. It’s still being sold today in the town’s Dickensian-flavored stores and exhibited in Kenmare’s Heritage Center and occasionally in the town’s remarkably eclectic array of fine restaurants.