IRELAND IN TWO WEEKS: Part 1 from Dublin to the Aran Island of Inishmore (May 2023)

Prelude

My mother’s maiden name was Moran and I grew up surrounded by Moran cousins. My mother’s father John Moran lived with us. I was the product of a “mixed” marriage, i.e., my father was not Catholic, but my brother Richard and I were raised Catholic. I never really figured out the real story behind my grandfather John Moran who was also not a practicing Catholic, neither was his older son my uncle Jack Moran. My great-aunt Molly Moran seemed to be the matriarch of the family even though she was only a Moran by marriage. She may have been born a McNamara. The Moran side of my family was very prolific with lots of children.

My father’s side of the family, the Hunt side, was Protestant and not child-prolific at all. I think my grandmother Mabel Young Hunt was the only religious one on that side of our family. Strangely enough, I know a lot about my father’s family, but not much about my mother’s. His family had deep Anglo roots in Maine, but my mother’s roots were unclear, except they were Irish. 

The current population in Ireland is roughly 6 million, but by some estimates 50 to 80 million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry, making the Irish diaspora one of the largest of any nation in the world, all from one island the size of Indiana in the north Atlantic. Emigration from Ireland has been the result of war, famine and poverty. The United States has the largest number of people in the world claiming Irish roots. Personally, I like being an American, even though I may not like a lot of our politics, but this is where my roots are.

Our visit to Ireland had some cultural sentimentality on my part, but in the end, it was not significantly different than our other journeys to Argentina, Haiti, Japan, Ethiopia, etc. They are all explorations of human cultural adaption to different geographic situations.

Noel and I arrived in Dublin two days before our tour began to avoid any last-minute flight snafus that are unfortunately all too common these days. We flew on Aer Lingus and found it to be a very good airline, but it doesn’t participate in the “Trusted Traveler” program, so we had to go through a certain amount of TSA malarky at O’Hare. It was a small price to pay for roundtrip fares several thousand dollars less than on United or American Airlines. As we age, we prefer river cruises on small ships where we can unpack once and opt what land tours we want to take, but that’s not possible in Ireland

Our hotel was the Shelbourne Dublin, located in the heart of the city and within walking distance to several major cultural and shopping attractions. The best part about the hotel is the bar, No. 27 Bar & Lounge, that offers superior beverages and an excellent but limited food menu. I noticed that most of the patrons were from the many businesses in the area, not just hotel guests. We became friends with one of the bartenders, an Egyptian, who had only been on the job for five days, but who clearly had had a lot of experience. I really loved the art in the bar, all original by a self-taught Irish artist named Victor Richardson.

On our second day in Dublin I felt a bit jet-lagged but pretty good. I was trying to avoid taking sleeping pills, so I didn’t really sleep the night before. At the recommendation of our cab driver from the airport, we stopped in at the Little Museum of Dublin located just down the street from the Shelbourne in an impressive Georgian style mansion. The museum purports to tell the story of Dublin, but the story is basically confined to the 20th century with some leakage into the 19th century. We did have a “guide,” a young man who clearly wanted a career in the theater. He was a very good actor. The names Yeats, Joyce and Bono came up, but I’m not sure how much we learned that we didn’t already know.

After a walk around the pond in St. Stephen’s Green across from our hotel, we retreated to the hotel dining room for an early dinner of trout and a crab sauté, then back to the bar for nightcaps and an early bedtime with sleeping pills. Our travel companions were scheduled to arrive the next day.

Our Fellow Travelers Arrive

We did a bit of exploring near our hotel the next afternoon. At the suggestion of a passerby, we checked out a high-end used bookstore in the neighborhood. I found a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but at 350€ I passed.

Late in the afternoon we all assembled at a meeting room in the hotel where we met our tour director Jeremiah Daly and the Smithsonian expert Carol Ann Lloyd. We all introduced ourselves and then trundled off to dinner at a private club off-site. I have to admit that at first, with the exception of a young engaged couple, I was a bit shocked at the ages of our fellow travelers. Then I saw my own reflection in a window and thought this is definitely my group. 

We did some superficial touring of Dublin’s high spots after breakfast the next day – St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Guinness Brewery, the River Liffey (a tidal river), and the Book of Kells exhibit at Trinity University. The sites were very crowded. I was particularly disappointed by our visit to the Book of Kells exhibit. There were just too many people to really study the display of this remarkable work of Biblical art by Celtic monks on the island of Iona around 800 CE. This kind of touring cries out for more time in fewer places.

We had a bit more time and smaller crowds in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, an Anglican church, where one of my literary heroes, Jonathan Swift, is buried next to his best friend and the love of his life, Esther Johnson, aka Stella. 

Tour director Jeremiah gave a brief but interesting presentation on the Door of Reconciliation on display in the cathedral. Apparently, in 1492 two Irish families, the Butlers and the Fitzgeralds, were at war with each other over who would hold the position of Lord Deputy of Dublin. The Butler family took refuge in the cathedral chapter house but the Fitzgeralds followed them inside and asked the Butlers to come outside to make peace. The Butlers refused because they figured the Fitzgeralds would then kill them. However, Gerald Fitzgerald asked that a hole be made in the door and he stuck his arm through the hole and offered his hand in peace. The Butlers shook his hand as a peace gesture, emerged from the building, and the families made peace. We would hear more about the Butlers later in the tour.

One fact that became clear to me during our tour of Dublin is that the city was basically a British city in an Irish country until independence came in 1922. Independence did not include Northern Ireland. One cultural battle conquerors of a country always wage is suppression of the native language. The Brits almost succeeded in Ireland, but the Irish government is valiantly fighting back. Ghaeilge, pronounced Gwelga, or Irish, is used first in all the street signs with English underneath. Ghaeilge is also mandatory in all the public schools, but many of the citizens we spoke to told us that it is a very difficult language to learn and is not generally spoken at home. However, I heard sounds of hope at Trinity University and in St. Patrick’s Cathedral with several groups of young people speaking the language to each other.

We Go West to Galway

On Wednesday, the next day, we boarded our bus for Galway. The highlight of our bus ride to Galway was our visit to Clonmacnoise, the ruins of a monastery founded in the 6th century and located on the banks of the River Shannon. The monastery became an important center of Christianity, scholarship, art and craftsmanship and eventually trade. Scholars from all over continental Europe visited Clonmacnoise. 

However, it had its trials and tribulations. In the 7th century a plague killed a large number of its scholars. The monastery was reportedly attacked 7 times by the Vikings, 6 times by the Normans and 27 times by the Irish themselves. Perhaps as a result of all these attacks, the original wooden buildings were replaced by stone structures in the 9th century. Surrounding the monastery was a large secular community of artisans and farmers who supported the monastic population. These metalworkers and stone masons created some of the most beautiful and highly regarded metal and stone artwork in Ireland. 

Clonmacnoise started to decline in the 12th century because of competition from Athlone, a sizable town north of it, and because of the growth of competing religious orders in continental Europe. Finally, in 1552 the English garrison at Athlone destroyed and looted the monastery for what treasures remained, leaving it the ruins we see today. The site includes a cathedral, seven ruined churches, a castle, two round towers and many grave slabs and carved stone crosses. It is still very impressive.

We finally arrived in Galway, a university town and the fastest growing city in Ireland. I should mention that all day from our bus we saw lots of new houses (most seemed designed by the same architect using the same contractor) with late model cars parked in the yards. From these superficial signs the economy in Ireland appears to be very good. The statistics I’ve seen bear that out. Between 1985 and 2002 the Irish economy shifted from an agricultural one to a knowledge economy, i.e., from one based on physical labor and natural resources to one based on human capital that comes from knowledge, skills and education. The unemployment rate in May 2023 was 3.8% per the Central Statistics Office Ireland. The average weekly earnings rose 4.3% in the first quarter of 2023 to 923.48€ per Trading Economics.

Our hotel, the Twelve Hotel, is located in the seaside village of Bearna in the Connemara region which is supposed to be Irish speaking. The hotel is comfortable but doesn’t have anything like the amenities we enjoyed at the Shelbourne in Dublin. Dinner that night at the hotel was not good, cold food. 

The next day it rained. Noel and I had expected it to rain most of the time while we were in Ireland and came fully equipped with raingear, but this was the only time we needed it and this rain was more of a drizzle. The bus ride through the Connemara countryside was truly beautiful with mountains, glacial lakes and peat bogs on one side of the highway and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. There was stunning flowering yellow gorse everywhere on the roadside along with the largest bushes of rhododendron that I had ever seen. It turns out that rhododendron thrives in Ireland because it has no native predator to keep it in check. It was imported by landscapers and is extremely invasive, taking over native plants, even trees. Apparently, there is a concerted effort to eliminate it in the wild, but its roots run deep. 

Our principle stop of the day was at Kylemore Abbey, a neo-Gothic estate built in 1861 by a British doctor named Mitchell Henry for his wife Margaret who died at a rather young age. He later sold the estate to the Duke and Duchess of Manchester in 1903 who later sold it to Benedictine nuns to pay off gambling debts. The nuns turned the estate into a girls’ boarding school for a while and still own it. Kylemore Abbey is beautiful in an anachronistic way but the drive through the Connemara countryside was much more interesting.

We finished our day back at the village of Bearna in a local pub with live Celtic music and great bar food.

We had an early start the next day as we boarded a ferry for a day trip to Inishmore, one of the three Aran Islands and the largest. It has a declining population of roughly 800 most of whom speak Irish (Ghaeilge) as their first language. In the past the folks living on Inishmore were farmers and fishermen, but now the major industry is tourism. There are ancient sites with stone walls everywhere. The Aran Islands are famous for the Irish Aran sweater that was worn by farmers and fishermen working outside in the harsh weather along the Atlantic coastline. You can buy a machine-knit sweater or a hand-knit one. The superb texture of the hand-knit sweaters is immediately apparent. I didn’t find the price of the hand-knit ones particularly high. Mine was quite reasonably priced at 300€. The island and its sights are quite stunning. They remind me of the rocky coastline of my native state of Maine.