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Since the Belfast Peace Agreement in 1998 and the mostly steady though sometimes faltering progress towards peace in Northern Ireland, outsiders have begun to discover the extraordinary beauty of the northern coast of the island. The so-called “Causeway Coast” stretches from Lough Foyle all the way to the town of Ballycastle, where it joins an equally stunning stretch called the Antrim Coast or the “Glens of Antrim” that reaches around to Belfast. With the wild North Atlantic all around, Scotland visible in the distance behind a veil of mist, and magnificent cliffs, glens, beaches, and rocky promontories galore, the views along this coastline will take your breath away in any season.

During our two-day sojourn in the North, we will spend a long afternoon and early evening–remember, the sun doesn’t set until 10 p.m.–exploring the Causeway Coast and its two most notable features, one natural and the other man made.

The Giant’s Causeway was formed 50 to 60 million years ago by volcanic eruption and consists of about 40,000 upright basalt columns, most of them hexagonal. These columns are of varying heights and are clustered along beaches and cliffs in extraordinary formations.  When the surf is roaring in and the sunlight reflects off the sea turning the columns red and orange, it’s a magical place. No wonder it figures in myth and legend. The Giant’s Causeway  was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1986 and is considered the “fourth natural wonder” of the United Kingdom.

Nearby Dunluce Castle perches dramatically on a cliff above the North Atlantic. A castle has been on this strategic site since the 1200s, and the current edifice includes remnants from past centuries. The castle was a center of power and intrigue for several important clans who vied for control of the area. Cair Paravel in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia was probably inspired by Dunluce (Lewis was a Belfast man). Recent excavations are adding to the history of Dunluce and its importance in Irish history.

I’ve just learned how to do slideshows on this site, and I couldn’t think of a better story to tell in photos than that of the Causeway Coast. Enjoy these photographs of the Giant’s Causeway, Dunluce Castle, and other sights along this route in many moods and weathers.

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While history and literature are endlessly fascinating, when I’m traveling I always find myself to be keenly interested in the details of daily life and other miscellaneous trivia. How are grocery stores arranged in other cultures? What are the rituals of the morning meal? How do common idioms do the work of everyday communication? How does geography, or weather,  or a relationship with neighboring places influence culture? As we approach our departure date, I have been thinking about a few small items of interest or amusement that I wanted to convey to you, so this post is a collection of bibs and bobs.

Land of the Midnight (or 11 p.m.) Sun
While we are in Ireland, as Midsummer approaches the sunset each day will occur at around 10 p.m., and it will be light outside until nearly 11 p.m. We will be situated, after all, at the same latitude as Hudson Bay. The sun will rise around 5 a.m. during our stay, so no relief at that end. The very long days are great for sightseeing and photography but not that great for sleeping if you are sensitive to light and dark. When I’m in Ireland, I find I always have to acclimate myself to this new definition of “nighttime” and work on my sleep habits.

“Are you all right?”
Although Irish English is closer to American English than is British English in both diction and pronunciation, you’ll hear many wonderful Irish/British phrases and words that are usually easy to understand from the context. But here’s one that sometimes gives Americans pause. In restaurants and bars, the server is likely to greet you at your table with the phrase “Are you (ye) all right?” or “All right, are ye?” or some variation of it. This is not an inquiry about your health: it means, “Can I help you?”

Pint v. Glass and Guinness Etiquette
If you are a beer drinker, there are several things you need to know when ordering at a bar or restaurant. Beers in Ireland come in two sizes: pint and glass. A pint is 570 ml., which is about 19 oz. or 1.2 US pints. A glass is a little more than half a pint and is served in a thinner, shorter glass. Pints seem to be ordered more often, but glasses are also popular, especially among the ladies. If you say “a pint of Guinness, please” or “a glass of Murphy’s, please” the bar tender will know exactly what you want. Guinness is poured into glasses of both sizes following a time-honored “pour” method that requires patience on the part of the drinker. When ordering a Guinness, never grab the glass to drink until the “pour” is complete and the white head and the dark brown stout have completely separated–separation takes about five minutes. If beer is not your thing, another nice, Irish-made drink to order at bars is Bulmers (called “Magners” outside the Republic of Ireland) Cider, a hard cider that comes in both apple and pear flavors,

“Full Irish”
While most of our hotels will have breakfast buffets, some will also offer an ordered “hot breakfast,” meaning some combination of eggs and meat or even pancakes. I recommend that you go for the “full Irish.” A “full Irish” breakfast is a joy to behold. It usually includes one or two fried eggs (but you can ask for scrambled or poached), Irish bacon (more like what we would call “Canadian bacon”), a couple of Irish sausages, slices of “black and white pudding” (another kind of sausage), a grilled tomato, and toast. Sometimes you will get baked beans or sautéed mushrooms with your “full Irish.” If a “full” is too daunting, you may always ask for any combination of these elements, such as egg, sausage, and grilled mushrooms—or whatever you please. In Northern Ireland a “full Irish” is called an “Ulster fry” or a “heart attack on a plate” and will also include potato or soda “farls”—delicious triangular bread-like things. North and South will sometimes add a potato cake of some sort. Unless you are a vegetarian, you should really try a “full Irish” once at least. Hey, you’re on vacation—go for it more than once!

Country Codes
When telephoning, the country code for the Republic of Ireland is 353 and the code for Northern Ireland (and all of the UK) is 44. While in Ireland if you want to call someone in the US on your cell phone, use the plus sign (European long distance) and the country code; like this: +1-404-555-5555. The +1 followed by the ten-digit number is also used if you want to call someone from the group with an American phone while we are in Ireland.

Cash v. Credit Cards
You will need cash (Euros in the Republic, Sterling in NI), as some smaller businesses don’t take credit cards. I use my ATM card all the time in Ireland on both sides of the border. You will probably need to alert your bank that you are traveling. American Express cards are accepted less widely there than here, so having a Visa or MasterCard is a must.

Tipping
The Irish have a different attitude about tipping than we do; they see it only as gratitude for excellent or extra service. In the US, tipping provides a substantial part of  a worker’s wage, while in Ireland and the UK, servers, bartenders, and other workers make better hourly wages. In Ireland it is not customary to tip when ordering drinks only at bar. When ordering food at a bar or restaurant, you can tip up to ten percent or round up a few Euro. Usually the server will bring a handheld credit card machine to your table, but the process does not always involve a line on the bill for a tip, so cash tipping is generally favored. In a taxi, the tip usually consists of rounding up or adding some loose change.

Bathroom Talk
Knowing what to ask for when you need to use the facilities is an important topic in any country. It is quite common in Ireland to say “toilets,” so “Where are the toilets?” is the most common way of asking. Other common terms are “Ladies” and Gents.” Everyone will understand what you want when you say “bathroom.” In the Irish language, the terms are “Mná” (mn-AWE) for the women’s bathroom and “Fir” (FEAR) for the men’s.

Adaptor
The only adaptor that works in Ireland is “Type G,” the one that also works in the UK and Hong Kong. It is pictured below. You can purchase these at travel stores, Target, and online. I get mine from amazon.com

More travel tips…A more complete list of travel tips is available in the Trip Basics section of this site.

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At last we have an itinerary! I’ve posted it on the “Trip Documents” page. A few things still need to be tweaked or corrected, but the basics of each day are laid out with accompanying details. I know you will have questions. Please ask away by commenting here or sending me an email. If your question is of general interest, I’ll discuss it in another itinerary-related post.

One note about hotels. We were supposed to stay two nights in Galway City, but the hotel we had chosen experienced significant flooding during the winter and is now closed. Because it’s such a busy time of year for tourism in Ireland, Celtic Tours had some trouble finding a place for our group of 46 to stay for two nights, contacting over 35 hotels in the process. I am grateful for their efforts. Given the touring we had planned for those days, the best decision turned out to be to spend one night in Galway City, not far from where we had originally intended to stay, and the second night in the town of Ballinasloe. It’s nicer to have two nights in one place, but we couldn’t make it work.

Please note the instructions on the itinerary for the morning of Sunday, June 5, as we gather the group together for breakfast at the Man O’War pub. Some of you will already be at the hotel and can board the bus with me at 8:00-8:15 a.m. for the drive to the airport and the pub.  For those arriving at the airport that morning, we’ll be waiting for you outside baggage claim at 9:00 a.m. I’ll provide phone numbers closer to the day, but I check email on my phone pretty often, so you can always reach me that way.

For anyone arriving before the June 5th start date, I will be at the Davenport from June 1 and will be happy to consult on sightseeing plans, restaurants, or anything else you want to discuss.

Once we leave Dublin on the bus, we beg your indulgence and permission to make small changes to the itinerary every now and then. Depending on the weather and other things, we might want to change the order of certain stops, or take a brief detour to see something special. “Comfort stops”–a very nice Irish way of saying “bathroom stops”–will be frequent, but you may always request one.

As noted in “Travel Tips for Ireland,” we ask you (and your traveling companion, if you choose to sit together) to sit in a new place on the bus every day. That way, everyone will get a turn at the better seats, and you will have a chance to talk to different people. The bus is very well designed and will have state-of-the-art stabilizers. Irish roads can be windy, but in all my trips, I’ve not had anyone experience motion sickness. If this is a worry for you, please bring whatever medicine you take to be comfortable. We’ll keep a supply of cookies and crackers on the bus for those hungry moments as we roll, but you may want to bring a water bottle or thermos and your own snacks for the longer drives.

Our trip is less than four weeks away.  I hope you are as excited as I am!

On our trip around Ireland, we will be visiting several  “stately homes,” what the Irish call “Big Houses.” This term refers to the divided nature of life in previous centuries when the Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocracy owned the land and the mansions and castles on it, and the “mere Irish” (a common derogatory term used by the Anglo-Norman invaders) lived as small tenant farmers on land that had been confiscated from their ancestors at various stages of England’s colonization of the island.

As you might imagine, a contentious history surrounds many of these houses, not to mention the ones that were burned down by rebel forces during the independence movement and subsequent civil war in the first quarter of the twentieth century. As a result, there’s no money, no tradition of preservation, no National Trust as in the UK to tend to the rich history and traditions of these magnificent edifices. Where private money and the few government grants are not enough, the houses have fallen into decay. It’s a shame, because a great deal of history and a great many important works of art and culture adhere to these places.

That contentious history has resulted in “the Big House” becoming a focal point of many novels that tell complex stories of life and love and offer critiques of the landlord system centered on an estate with a large, unmanageable house at its center, a site of inevitable individual, class, and cultural conflict. The tradition had its start in 1800, when Irish writer Maria Edgeworth broke new ground with her satirical Castle Rackrent, a novella critiquing the absentee landlord system that contributed to so many Irish manor houses going to ruin. Criticizing her own class, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, for its exploitation and neglect of its Irish estates, Edgeworth innovatively adopted the persona of a faithful servant to tell her story; Thady’s loyalty to the castle-owning family blinds him to the way they bring this ruin on themselves but sheds satiric light on the problem for the reader to appreciate. Considered the first regional novel, Castle Rackrent was praised by none other than Sir Walter Scott, a famed poet who was about to become a regional novelist himself.

The Real Charlotte (1894), written by cousins and writing duo Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (aka Violet Martin), looks at these same problems and the fate of intelligent, aristocratic women trapped by social expectations in a story set in a mansion with a contested inheritance in southwestern County Kerry. My favorite Big House novel is Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929). Set during the War of Independence, also called the Anglo-Irish War, in 1920, this lyrical novel examines Ireland’s uncertain future—and that of the heroine Lois—as the colonial system begins to unravel. Bowen grew up in a Big House, Bowen Court (called Danielstown in the novel), and actually inherited it, but she eventually had to sell out, and the house was allowed to fall into ruin.

Of the four “big houses” on our itinerary—Muckross House, Westport House, Lissadell House, and Strokestown Park House—only Muckross seems to have a secure future. Set in a gorgeous landscape on a lake at the foot of McGillycuddy’s Reeks, Ireland’s highest mountains, Muckross House, where Queen Victoria once stayed, is now part of Killarney National Park and is maintained by the government. Westport House in the town of Westport, once the home of the famous “pirate queen” Grace O’Malley, has been in the hands of the same family for hundreds of years and was a model of how to operate a house and estate as a family business, until it was abruptly put up for sale last year. Lissadell House, the childhood home of the revolutionary Constance Gore-Booth Markiewicz and frequented by the young W. B. Yeats, is currently owned by a wealthy family, the Cassidy-Walshes, and has been lovingly restored, but as a private home faces future risks.

Strokestown Park House, with its connections to the Great Potato Famine of 1845-52, is owned by a somewhat eccentric local person whose idea of preserving the house is to leave it just as it was, decay, cobwebs, and all. We will also be visiting Coole Park, home of writer and literary patron Lady Augusta Gregory, but only to see the beautiful gardens and lake, as the house fell into ruin long ago: it was simply too expensive for anyone in post-independence Ireland to afford. These varying—and in the case of the last three—precarious circumstances are a good representation of the attitude towards such monuments following independence, though a greater sense of the houses’ significance is increasingly evident in Ireland today.

I think you’ll enjoy all four houses and their grounds and the grounds of Coole Park. I have my favorite spots in each of them. The views of the lawn, lake, and mountains from the Muckross House drawing room are spectacular, though I’m afraid the Victorians made much use of the heavy curtains they favored. As a hunting lodge, the house is decorated with taxidermied animals and antlers from the surrounding area.

Westport House is filled with art, furniture, and artifacts of historical importance, including a knitted cap left there by Alfred, Lord Tennyson when he visited the Browne family. There’s a portrait of a lady with wild curly hair that I am pretty sure was one of my ancestors. At Lissadell, you can see where its most famous denizen, the Easter Rising heroine Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz, etched her name on a window pane and gaze out the “great windows open to the south” overlooking Sligo Bay and the mountain where Queen Maeve is said to be buried, Knocknarea. In his poem “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,” Yeats wrote these lines about Constance and her sister Eva, whom he had a crush on.

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Strokestown Park House is a marvel of Georgian Palladian architecture. It has a fabulous kitchen with a gallery around the top from which the lady of the house could drop the menu down to the cook, so she didn’t have to dirty her gown or mingle with the servants. My husband, Ron Calabrese, is a neurobiologist who studies leeches, so we love this leech jar in the Strokestown kitchen. Leeches were once used for medicinal bloodletting and, interestingly, are still used today to increase circulation after microsurgery.  On our trip in mid-June, we should be in time to see the beginning of the vegetable and flower gardens that stretch out behind this beautiful house.

Whenever I visit one of Ireland’s few Big Houses, I’m grateful that it is still open to the public, still offering a window on the life of the rich and the poor, still echoing with the hopes and dreams of ages past.

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Ireland is a land of writers and other creative people. It is an inspiring place, and our group trip will be an inspiring experience, so we want you to have an outlet for your creativity as we travel.

Each day, travelers will be invited to the bus’s microphone to read their trip-related limericks, six word essays, or haikus. All are welcome (no one is required) to participate in this fun way to comment on what we are seeing, doing, and experiencing as we roll around the island. Your poems and six word essays should be about the trip; humor and insight are always welcome. At the end of the trip, we’ll award prizes for the best works.

Most group bus tours of Ireland encourage Limerick writing; it’s a longstanding tradition, and something about being there makes you want to write poetry.  We are unique–we are Agnes Scott, after all!–in enlarging the activity to include the six word essay and the haiku. I like to encourage these writings because I think it connects us to the language and literature we are focusing on in our travels.  And, sharing these works over the microphone each day  makes for good laughs, good insights, esprit de corps, and camaraderie.

Under “Trip Documents” you will find a handout entitled “Limerick, Six Word Essay, Haiku” that gives guidelines and examples for each form.  This guide will be included in the “trip booklet” I’ll give each of you upon arrival in Ireland.

About halfway through our trip, we will have a wonderful evening out to see a program of Irish music, dance, and song called “Trad on the Prom.” “Trad” (rhymes with “bad”) stands for “traditional” and is the short name given to the rebirth of Irish traditional music that occurred in second half of twentieth century, a movement that continues to today.

Along with a push to modernize Ireland, first Big Bands, then Rock and Roll, and other music movements rose in popularity at mid-century, threatening to supplant the traditional folk music that had developed to such a high degree throughout the island and that had influenced folk music in every corner of the Irish diaspora (Bluegrass music is a direct descendant of the Irish tradition). Seeing this threat, young performers—many of them from musical families or towns—started to revive the traditional forms, learning from the aging experts and taking their art in new directions, as well. They taught others, and the Trad movement is now in its third or fourth generation. In Dublin and elsewhere, you’ll be able to find “sessions” of “Trad” at many pubs, sometimes with local musicians coming together for an evening, and sometimes with groups that travel the country. I love spending an evening this way, especially since Ireland banned smoking in bars, restaurants, and other public buildings in 2004, becoming the first country in the world to do so.

When we are in Galway, we have an evening booked at the Trad on the Prom dinner and show, held at the Galway Bay Hotel in Salthill, on “The Promenade”—a broad sidewalk following the shore of Galway Bay. Trad on the Prom is a very special show—I’ve seen it twice and plan to see it again any time I’m in the Galway area from May to September. Each summer the director of the show and lead guitarist, Chris Kelly, brings together Ireland’s finest trad performers, many of them legends in their field—like Gerard Fahy, renowned uilleann pipe player and composer of “Lords of the Dance”—and many fresh of them from winning vocal and dance competitions around the world. For over two incredible hours, you’ll see their talents displayed. Watch this video of step-dancing, and you’ll see what I mean, or hear Marc Roberts singing “Galway Girl.” One of my favorite Trad on the Prom performers is Emma O’Sullivan, who does an even older form of traditional step dance called “seán nós” (SHĂN-noss) or “old style.” Seán nós dancing is less stylized and more casual than what is often called “Irish step dancing,” but has a charm of its own. The video shows her at another venue doing the “brush dance,” a broom dance that might have been performed in the cottages on the Great Blasket Island in Tomás O’Crohan’s day. It is said that Irish “step” dancing emphasizes complex movement of the feet instead of leaps or wide arm movements because of the narrow spaces available in cottages and barns where the dances originated.

Above I mentioned the “uilleann pipes” (ILL-en), Ireland’s own bagpipes . “Uilleann” means “elbow,” and this instrument is played using a set of bellows operated with movements of the elbow that push air through the pipes. The resulting sound is not unlike the more familiar Scottish bagpipes but is somewhat softer and more mournful. The Scottish bagpipes are generally considered to be “outdoor” instruments, while the uilleann pipes are said to be “indoor” instruments. In Ireland a traditional band usually includes, guitar, fiddle, accordion or concertina, uilleann pipes, flute and Irish whistle, and a “bodhrán” (bow-RAWN), a round wood-framed drum with a goatskin head (today many heads are synthetic).

I think you will find Trad on the Prom to be one of the highlights of the trip. You can find lots of other great Trad on the Prom recordings on YouTube, and the musicians and singers all have CDs, available for purchase at the venue.

I’ve just received a draft of our itinerary. Once a few more things have been finalized, I will post it on this site, but I know some of you are wondering about free time in Dublin and hoping to make some plans, so I thought I would write about that a bit today.

Our trip is something of a whirlwind, so there is not a lot of give in the schedule, but on our first official day, Sunday, June 5, you will have most of the day free between our early morning breakfast at the Man O’War pub and a welcome dinner at our hotel. The Man O’War, by the way, was founded before 1595 and still retains many of its historic features; you won’t want to miss this chance to eat a traditional Irish breakfast in the company of your fellow group members in this storied building. The name of the pub has nothing to do with a type of ship, by the way! For those arriving in Dublin on June 4^th or earlier (like me), we’ll provide a departure time for the airport stop and this breakfast. Most of the rest of you will be picked up at the airport before we head to the pub. Details to follow.

Sunday is a great day to visit Dublin’s museums, several of which are situated very close to our hotel, the Davenport. All of them have nice cafes and gift shops. The National Gallery of Ireland (art) is across the street and down a short block. The NGI has been undergoing extensive renovations for several years now, but they’ve gathered their “greatest hits” into a few rooms, and these are well worth seeing. For those of you who read James Stephens’s The Insurrection in Dublin (see Trip Documents), there’s a fascinating exhibit about his life and times. Stephens was working for the museum during the Easter Rising. I saw this exhibit in March and loved it, but they only recently extended it to June 5, so you will be able to see it if interested and if you go on that Sunday. The Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw had a special relationship with the NGI; I wrote about it in my blog, The View from Here.

A little further afield but still very walkable (about two blocks) is the National Museum of Ireland–Archeology, which houses a stunning collection of artifacts found all over the island and representing various stages of history. My favorites include finely crafted items from Ireland’s Golden Age, such as the 8^th century CE Ardagh Chalice, Tara Brooch, and Bell of St. Patrick. There’s also a collection of even older finely crafted gold items found in the peat bogs that cover the island and, because of their chemical properties, preserve artifacts in stunning condition. They’ve even found butter and wine in the bogs that are hundreds of years old but still viable! Don’t miss the “bog bodies” in the “Kingship and Sacrifice” exhibit at the National Museum—human remains mummified in the bogs and representing a practice of ritual murder that goes back thousands of years.

Next door to the National Museum is the National Library where W. B. Yeats and James Joyce were patrons. The library itself is closed on Sundays, but the stunning exhibit on Yeats is open and must for Yeatsians. Along with a collection of his personal times and an array of excellent short films, you’ll see the actual manuscripts of many of the most famous poems with his notes and crossouts.

Trinity College is also just a short walk from the hotel. In addition to strolling the campus and taking in the sights of a busy university and possibly a cricket match, you can visit the Book of Kells and the famous Long Room in the Old library. This famous illuminated manuscript is very popular, so be prepared to wait in line, but the wait is well worth it. Because the manuscript is in book form, only two pages are on display at a time, but there are other manuscripts to see and a very good exhibit on how such works of art are created.

There’s so much of historic interest to see in this area, as well as shops, cafes, beautiful parks and gardens,  restaurants,  pubs, and more. Dave and I can help you plan your Sunday afternoon if you want us to. Do let me know if you have questions or want to plan ahead.

History Ireland is a very interesting  and high quality magazine that publishes articles by scholars and researchers written for the general public and illustrated with photographs, maps, and charts. In addition to publishing books and special issues, the magazine sponsors lectures and panels on a range of topics at locations throughout Ireland and Northern Ireland. (If you are interested in subscribing to either the print or online editions, click here for a link to their home page.)

In preparation for the Easter Rising centenary, they have brought out a special issue called “1916 Dream & Death,” and because of its relevance to our trip, the Alumnae Office has purchased copies for each of you. We will be giving them out to those who attend either the April 25th or May 9th meetings in Atlanta and mailing them to the rest of you when we send you your travel documents.

I hope you find the articles and illustrations illuminating and relevant to your study of the historical and literary context of the Easter Rising.

When I teach Irish literature in the survey course at Agnes Scott, I always begin with a collection of poetry called “I Am Ireland,” or in the Irish language, “Mise Éire” (pronounced MEE-shuh AIR-uh). In different ways, poems on this theme declare and define an identity for the land of Ireland, often in the persona of a woman, sometimes called “Mother Ireland” or the “Poor Old Woman” (see Yeats’s and Gregory’s play Cathleen In Houlihan in Trip Documents). Poems on this theme span the centuries, and all have to do with defining or declaring Irish identity, though the phrase “Mise Éire” didn’t come into common use until a hundred years ago, when it began to take on a distinctly political and eventually sectarian tone.

For centuries, the people of the island of Ireland or Éire have been concerned with their identity, with distinguishing themselves in some way from their neighbors–especially those on the bigger island to the east. Such a body of work is not necessarily found in other literatures or regions, and there is much speculation as to why Ireland fostered this perspective or this need to claim identity. Of course, island status could in itself be a cause. An island, especially if it is relatively small, has distinct borders and might be expected to develop a bounded identity. Instead, as the site for millennia of a succession of arrivals or invasions of foreign peoples, Ireland developed a splintered population of clans or kingdoms and, until the middle ages, had no towns or unified rule. There has never been an all-Ireland, Irish-born royal family, or anything close to it. The map on the right shows what clan rule on the island looked like around the year 1100. Ironically, it would take the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the twelfth century and the subsequent nearly 800 years of British rule to create anything like a unified “Ireland”–which is even today, of course, split into two nations, albeit  with a uniquely fluid border in all senses of the word.  This history of this island-ized identity before, during, and after colonial rule is what makes the “Mise Éire” poems so interesting and helps explain why this phrase was chosen as the title of the documentary made in the Republic in 1959 to celebrate the Easter Rising and the subsequent independence movement (some of you will be viewing this film at the college on April 25).

Patrick Pearse’s poem on this theme, written a couple of weeks before the Easter Rising, is reproduced below, and if you’re interested in pursuing the Mise Éire theme and the imagery associated with it in literature and politics, I’ve put the “I Am Ireland” poems in Trip Documents. In Pearse’s poem, the “woman of Beara” refers to the ninth century “Hag of Beara” (BEAR-uh) poem included in the handout. He also mentions Cuchulainn (coo-CULL-en), an ancient and iconic Irish hero-god. You can read about him here. We will be coming back to the Cuchulainn story as we study the Easter Rising and its iconography.  Of special note is Eavan Boland’s feminist response to Pearse’s poem in her “Mise Éire” poem on p. 8 of  the handout, in which she denounces the idealization of Irish identity and critiques its exclusion or stereotyping of women. Finally, you can listen to the famous theme music from the 1959 film (composed by Seán O’ Ríada)–played quite often during the Easter Rising centenary ceremonies in Dublin–by clicking on this link, Mise Éire.

I Am Ireland

By Patrick Pearse

I am Ireland:
I am older than the old woman of Beare.

Great my glory:
I who bore Cuchulainn, the brave.

Great my shame:
My own children who sold their mother.

Great my pain:
My irreconcilable enemy who harasses me continually…

Great my sorrow
That crowd, in whom I placed my trust, died.

I am Ireland:
I am lonelier than the old woman of Beare.

When giving advice on traveling to Ireland, I always recommend renting a car and driving southwest from Dublin to the Dingle Peninsula, one of the most beautiful and interesting places in the country. On our trip, we’ll be spending a day there, gasping at the gorgeous scenery, gazing across the water at the Great Blasket Island where famous writers such as Tomás O’Crohan lived and wrote, inspecting the ruins of ancient Christian communities like Gallarus Oratory, and of course, enjoying the atmosphere, shopping, and wonderful food in Dingle Town. Dingle Town is the capitol of this area, a designated Gaelic speaking region or “Gaeltacht,” so an added bonus is getting to hear this beautiful language spoken in the streets and shops and restaurants. There’s even a Gaelic bookshop and café, An Café Liteartha, where the scones and the book browsing are top notch.

For more on the Blasket Islands and the writers who came from there, check out the new handout I’ve posted under “Trip Documents.” We’ll be visiting the Blasket Centre, with its exhibits that celebrate the life and accomplishments of the community. You’ll see their handmade boats, baskets, fishing gear, and other items along with the manuscript of The Islandman and the pen O’Crohan used to write it. If it’s a clear day, we’ll be able to see Skellig Michael and the Little Skellig, two steep, rocky islands sticking jaggedly out of the sea beyond the Blaskets. Uninhabited now, these islands were once home to a thriving monastic community in the days when sea travel was the main way to get around Ireland and Europe. Today they’re famous for being the location of the last scene from the recent Star Wars film, The Force Awakens. The photo to the right shows the treacherous path up to the top of Skellig Michael—not on our itinerary this time!

The scenery is spectacular all around the peninsula, especially at the western tip with its many promontories and islands. If you’re interested, you might take a look at the David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970), which was filmed in Dingle and has extensive scenes of the gorgeous beaches and vistas. Though the film crew was only in residence for a few months, Dingle natives claim that their presence and interest in Dingle life created the confidence to develop the area as a tourist destination, which along with fishing, is a mainstay of the local economy today.

Dingle Town amounts to just a couple of streets reaching up a hill above the bustling harbor, where Fungie the bottlenose dolphin has hung out to amuse visitors with his antics for over thirty years. This area is favorite with craftspeople and foodies, so we’ll have a great few hours wandering around town. When I travel I like to buy thingfor friends or myself that represent the place they’re from. At Lisbeth Mulcahy’s The Weaver’s Shop on Green Street in Dingle, you can find handwoven scarves, shawls, placemats, and knitted sweaters in colors and patterns that echo the landscape around you.

Next door, Seán Daly’s Dingle Crystal brings the skills and vision of a Waterford trained glass-cutter to the local scene. I love the way Seán’s designs reflect the features of the surrounding area in patterns like Dingle, Skellig, and Blasket. We’ll get to visit him in his workshop and watch him create these wonderful items.

I think you can understand why on almost every trip I make to Ireland, I manage to find a few days for the Dingle Peninsula.