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When I think about Ireland...
When I think about Ireland...
...a sense of Home creeps over me, a sense of belonging that’s not quite like anywhere in the world, even though I hail from far away. My blood is Irish and the Old Country draws me, calls me to immerse myself again in its rain-kissed days.
This feeling, this uniqueness of the Emerald Isle, it is made up of many things. One, I think, is the vestige of British rule now replaced by a proud republic. Endless cups of strong black tea – always with milk. Narrow terraced houses joined wall to wall, all with the same layout but vastly different in their interior and exterior decoration. Urban and suburban lifestyles, overfilled public transport, shopping as a semi-glamourous pastime in fancy malls where cheap department stores line up next to designer fashion outlets and international food courts.
Then there is the weather and the outdoors – that sense of damp always in the air, those multi-layered clouds painting a different picture every moment of the day. The smell of the soil, somehow richer than I know from elsewhere, and the sated green of the soft, fine grass. The wild ocean, mostly frigid, always evocative, calling a song by the crashing of its waves on pebbly beaches and soaring cliffs alike. The breezes ruffling tiny flowers that grow in the clefts of coastal rock.
Its history, too, contributes to Ireland’s ambience. Here, it stretches back almost to the dawn of time as we know it, and beyond. The mystic Celts, the monks that followed in their footsteps, saints and warriors of old and the heros of myth and legend. Evidence of it is everywhere: ruined castles of various ages line the coasts and hills, ancient burial mounds and crypts are found all over, and swirling Celtic patterns adorn many shops and fashions.
The city of Dublin fights to maintain a coherent identity, as its different regions are entirely different in character. Bustling thoroughfares and pedestrian malls on the one hand, staid and elegant university edifices on the other, the Temple Bar quarter with its restaurants and musical nightlife, the brand new financial district on reclaimed ground, the docklands and coastal suburbs and inland hills and sprawling parks – and in between, community after community and row after row of houses and apartments.
Out in the country, where narrow roads are overhung by trees that meet together overhead, there is often no map to tell you where to go. A bewildering sequence of twists and turns and apparent backtracking is necessary to get you to the friend’s house who invited you; even getting from town to town or finding a particular village comes with its own unique challenges. But that’s the spirit that overtakes me as I travel the country lanes: to enjoy the journey for what it is, even if it is not what I had planned it to be.
Oh, Ireland, many’s the songs sung to you, and ’tis true they are. I am honoured to have walked on your soil for nigh on half a year, but it’s getting to be too long ago...
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