The Feast of one of Ireland’s great patronesses, St. Brigid, was Friday (traditionally considered to mark the beginning of Spring in Ireland), so my week was fittingly saturated with Irish. I’m currently taking conversational Irish, my fifth semester of Irish language, although I feel pretty rusty since I hadn’t done any Irish in seven months. I have seen an advantage in the lapse, however, since up to now my Irish classes have been fairly academic, the most recent one being an intermediate translation class, and I was never comfortable speaking in Irish unless I had analyzed every word in the sentence to make sure that what I was about to say was grammatically correct. I no longer remember a lot of the technical grammar points, though, so I just have to let whatever comes out of my mouth come out, and feel my way through it rather than think my way through it. I think it’s the beginning of getting a more instinctual grasp of the language, which I’ve always wanted because none of my Latin, German, or Irish classes ever put much emphasis on promoting fluency.
I am greatly anticipating my trip to the Aran Islands in March, where the four of us who are taking the course are required to live for a week as part of this Irish course. The Aran Islands are a Gaeltacht (primarily Irish-speaking region, which is easier to maintain on remote islands than on the mainland). It’s going to be sink or swim. Initially I was afraid that I might starve, but then I remembered that one of my favourite Irish phrases, and one which I say often, is “Tá stiúgtha orm” (“I am starving”). Regardless, it promises to be an unforgettable experience.
Besides two hours of conversation class per week (held around a genuine antique Wake table, I might add. Could the Dublin Programme be any better?), we have an extra hour of cultural immersion classes. This week’s installment attracted a large crowd of our non-Irish studying friends for a Sean-nós singing workshop given by our teacher, who is a competitive and award-winning Sean-nós singer from Connemara. “Sean-nós” is the “old-style” Irish singing, exquisitely beautiful and impossible to notate because of its characteristic quavering between many pitches within a single syllable for unregulated durations of time. Since it is impossible to notate, it has been passed down orally for generations. Our teacher taught us to sing two challenging songs in Irish during the course of the hour. Besides being beautiful and enjoyable, it made those of us who are taking the course realize how much we’ve learned, since our friends who came because they love music, though have never studied Irish, were completely confounded by the pronunciation system. They had never been asked to moved their mouths like that, and we chuckled when they protested that an ‘mh’ couldn’t possibly sound like a ‘w’, nor a ‘bh’ like a ‘v’, nor should ‘duit’ come out as if you had started with a ‘g’. We often feel as if we’ve hardly improved at all in the last two years, but for once we felt as if we knew something.
But we were back to being out of our league when we went to a Mass said in Irish in Trinity College’s Chapel (the only chapel in Ireland which regularly hosts both Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland services) on St. Brigid’s Day. It was the largest congregation for a daily Mass in Ireland I’ve ever seen: the Irish language society at Trinity had specially requested that Fr. Paddy say it in Irish, and about 20 of them turned up, to match the score of Notre Dame students who came (only about half of whom have studied Irish), led by Andrew Hoyt, our Campus Minister for Europe. I sat with Joe, one of the boys in my Irish class, and we were perpetually frustrated in our attempt to follow along. We had the order of Mass printed in Irish in front of us, but the Irish rush through the responses even more than usual when using their teanga dhúchais (native tongue), and we would say half of a line only to realize that we were the only ones in the congregation left still speaking. We were prepared for the Ár nAthair (Our Father), however, as we regularly say it in Irish at our Tuesday night milkshake Masses at the Notre Dame Center in Daniel O’Connell’s house (a native speaker himself, from County Kerry, where I broke my arm in October). We also got to sing Ag Críost an Síol, a beautiful and familiar Irish hymn. I wish more Irish liturgical music sounded that Irish. A friend of mine recently suggested that having to celebrate Mass on the Mass rocks out in the wilderness, hiding from the English, probably went a long way in discouraging the organic growth of a local folk liturgical music style. I would be curious to learn if this really is the main cause for the unfortunate poverty of liturgical music in Ireland. I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Notre Dame Folk Choir in May, on their Ireland tour, so I can bring my friends from the little Trinity chapel Mass choir I sing in on campus, to hear what I’ve grown up hearing. I had to marvel at the idea of a Catholic Mass being celebrated in Irish in the Trinity College Chapel in 2008, though; few things would be as abhorrent to the school’s founders.
Saturday evening brought an excellent Irish traditional music session in the basement of the Stag’s Head, an old pub just off of Dame Street. All of my Notre Dame friends ditched me for a pub crawl, which I wasn’t really up for since I had spent yet another evening in Bewley’s Cafe on Grafton Street, which is the most conducive environment I’ve found for learning Irish vocabulary. So I wound up sitting with a bunch of young, friendly German architects who explained that they’d moved to Dublin because there weren’t any architectural jobs for them in Germany, and that Irish traditional music is very popular among German youth. Who knew?
To add one further twist, tonight I headed up to St. Francis Xavier Church, north of the Liffey, with my friend Matt from Trinity’s chapel choir, to check out the Gospel Choir which sings at that Jesuit church’s Sunday night Masses. Yes, that’s right: a 30-person, highly spirited Gospel choir of young Irish men and women, energetically conducted by a 5’1” rhythmically intelligent young woman with black and raspberry red striped hair. They completely lose their accents when they sing. The Mass and the choir were excellent; it was the first display of any sort of passion I’ve seen in an Irish church (apart from Fr. Ciaran’s heartfelt thanks to his congregations for showing up on Sundays at Trinity). I think double Sunday Masses are going to have to become a habit.
I took a day trip to Cashel in County Laois this Saturday with my friends Joe, Brian, and Lauren to see the Rock of Cashel, an important political and religious site in Ireland as long as memory serves. Beginning in the pre-Christian era, whichever king controlled the Rock of Cashel, a limestone hill jutting up in the midst of miles of the gently rolling fields of the Plain of Tipperary, was the High King with authority over the others in the south of Ireland. As a consequence, Cashel was continually a site of turmoil. In 1101, King Murtagh O’Brien donated the Rock to the Church, taking it out of play in political skirmishes and winning favour for himself and his clan with the Church. That important political event intersects with the equally important shift occurring in the Catholic Church in Ireland at the time, as religious authority was passing from the abbots in the numerous monasteries, a local and organic arrangement, to bishops in the bishoprics newly organized in Ireland, a rigid and hierarchical development. The spirituality and piety of Ireland’s monasteries gave Ireland a unique Catholic culture which the continent lacked until Irish monks moved east, and the later shift in power incorporated Ireland’s Catholic culture into a more homogenous and Roman Catholic culture. Cashel became one of the first archbishoprics in Ireland, and a suitable cathedral was built on top of the Rock after the King vacated the premises.
The Rock of Cashel also provides the soil for the deepest root of Irish Catholicism, St. Patrick. He baptized King Aengus of Munster on the Rock in the fifth century. There is a famous carved stone cross on the Rock called “St. Patrick’s Cross,” but it was actually made about 700 years after St. Patrick walked on the Rock, in commemoration of King Murtagh’s donation of the Rock to the Church.
The Rock of Cashel is a stunning architectural site and offers one of the most impressive collections of characteristic Irish religious masonry still standing on the island. It features a round tower, a building typical of Irish ecclesiastical sites (over one hundred were built on the island) but extremely rare outside of Ireland. Scholars are not entirely certain of the intended function of these tall, slender, cylindrical stone towers. Some have hypothesized that they were defensive in nature, offering a last-ditch shelter for monks, and others suppose that they were intended as storehouses for valuable items, especially gold. Then the archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians took heed of the linguists who quietly pointed out that the Irish term for the round towers is cloigtheach which literally means “bell house,” so perhaps their primary purpose was to serve as belfries. Adjacent to the round tower stands a thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, its walls well-preserved but its roof long gone, and its lancet-pointed arches and windows standing in contrast to the barrel vaulting of the neighboring twelfth-century Romanesque chapel. Each church building contains its own delights: the limestone Gothic cathedral has numerous, well-preserved sculptures decorating its transepts and side chapels, featuring Celtic animals and human faces which look like they walked out of the Book of Kells, and the sandstone Romanesque chapel contains the fragments of a mural of the nativity painted on the ceiling and walls of its chancel. There is also a fortified tower which was added onto the back end of the Gothic cathedral, and a comfy hall of the vicars choral, the only of its kind to be built in Ireland, which housed the eight choir members who served the cathedral.
But of all typical Irish stonework, even including round towers, my favorite must be the high crosses. These tall, ornately carved gravestones dot the Rock of Cashel, surrounding the churches on three sides. They are distinctive because of their Celtic designs and the circle which holds the perpendicular arms of the cross in place. I love them for their style, but I love them even more for the statement they make: that the men and women below are united to Christ in their suffering and death, and that although we have forgotten them as individuals, their lives of faith and their deaths in hope still stand as witnesses for us to the power and love of Christ and their, and our, ongoing life in the Communion of saints.
We descended the Rock of Cashel in a blaze of spring sunlight and blue skies, amidst darting sheep and a light breeze, to come to the plain below. We followed a path along a stone wall (well, as a matter of strict honesty, we climbed up the stone wall and walked on top of it) until we crossed a road to reach a boggy field where we had spotted the ruins of a Cistercian monastery from the top of the Rock. Cashel was once home to three monasteries: Cistercian, Dominican, and Franciscan, and along with the archbishopric, I can’t imagine how all of those clergy coexisted peacefully in such close quarters. Even today Cashel is quite a small town. Hore Abbey was not nearly as well-preserved as the ecclesiastical buildings on top of the Rock, but what remained of its structure appeared more complex than any of those buildings, and offered Joe in particular an irresistible temptation to climb, which he did to a worrisome height.
While contemplating the graveyard and reflecting that ruined monasteries on grey days make you sad about the broken state of Church in Ireland, but such golden days with green grass poking up through the stones make the prayer and devotion of the past ages almost tangible, I suddenly found that I was the only one of us four who did not have her index finger on her nose. That made me the Seeker in a spontaneous game of hide-and-go-seek played within the ruins of the abbey. “Count to fifty!” I was instructed, as they scampered off. “No! Guys! 1, 2, 3, 4, Guys this is ridiculous! 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, I’m playing! 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, hide-and-go-seek! 16, 17, 18, at the age of twenty!, 19, 20, 21, 22, in an old! 23, 24, 25, Cistercian! 26, 27, 28, 29 abbey! 30, 31, 32, 33 in IRELAND!! 34, 35, 36 with a bunch of Notre Dame students! 37, 38, 39, 40, on a blazing spring day! 41, 42, 43 where ST. PATRICK walked!! 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 GOD IS AWESOME, READY OR NOT HERE I COME!!!” Brian climbed up a wall and hid in the doorway spanning two expanses of clear air, standing on the remains of steps and shifting from one side of the wall to the other every time I walked under him, so it took a while to get him, but I did find Lauren with relatively efficient dispatch. We ended up having to text Joe on his cell phone to say we’d given up, since I had assumed he had climbed another wall and I couldn’t find him anywhere, but as it turned out, he had just darted behind the wall where I was counting.
We walked back into town, taking the long way around the Rock to view it from all sides, and then caught our bus back to Dublin, thoroughly content with the day.
We took another programme fieldtrip to Northern Ireland this weekend for the benefit of the spring semester students, who have been in Ireland for about a month already. It was substantially the same as our fall fieldtrip there but nevertheless a rich experience to return to the north.
On the drive up we took a detour to hike in the Cooley Peninsula, which sits immediately south of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was a fine, dry day, so we hiked up to the tallest peak of the Cooley Mountains, just south of the Mountains of Morne, to look down on Warrenpoint, a significant site in the history of the Troubles. Layers of history fell away as we climbed. We first learned about the Narrow Water ambush, a 1979 attack in which a Provo detonated a bomb using a cell phone from where we stood on the peak of the mountain. The mountain exploded in the valley below, killing 18 British soldiers. It was chilling to imagine the IRA man doing exactly the same hike we had just done, and looking down to see his bomb exploding. The Newry River which runs through the valley is the border between the North and the South, and it reinforced that the Troubles were not a phenomenon of urban warfare but rather a comprehensive guerrilla campaign.
From the same point, we could also look down upon the scars of the lazy beds, furrows left in the earth from when potatoes were grown there until the famine. Lazy beds had supported millions of Irish until the blight killed all of the potatoes and the people starved or emigrated. In some cases, whole communities were wiped out, and you can still drive through the countryside and see where settlements had been but were never restored after the nineteenth century.
Finally, as the wind picked up and our ears and fingers started to numb, Kevin Whelan gave us a lengthy recounting of the Táin Bó Cuailnge, or the Cattle Raid of Cooley, Ireland’s equivalent of the Iliad. The story concerns Queen Maebh’s attempt to steal Cúchulainn’s prize cow so that her possessions will outstrip King Connor’s. Cúchulainn is Ulster’s great hero, and his statue stands in the General Post Office in Dublin. His cow was pastured at Narrow Water, and the battle came to a head just southwest of us. It’s incredible the way so many dimensions of history converge upon every rock in Ireland. The Provo, the famine victim, and Cúchulainn were all Irishmen caught in mortal struggles upon the same land and for the same identity. They have all passed away, but the rock still stands and we still repeat their stories.
Kevin talked about similar themes during our visit to Giant’s Causeway, an unbelievable natural formation of pentagonal rocks on the coast of the North Channel between Ireland and Scotland. He said that we marvel at the land, the sea, and the sky not simply for their beauty, but because they are such a mystery to us, and have been to all the men who preceded us. We look upon the same stones and the same sea and wonder, century after century, for the ten millennia Ireland has been populated, how it came to be and what it means. Ancient Irish poetry, the Táin and the other myths, sean-nós singing, the Book of Kells, W.B. Yeats’ poetry and James Joyce’s novels all seek to describe the mystery we encounter as humans, and how we stand in relation to it and each other. Ireland is particularly endowed with this sense of mystery, wildness, and yearning for the infinite, since for centuries men believed that Ireland was the end of the world, as far west as you could go without slipping over the rim of the earth into eternity. The beauty of Irish poetry and art, and, I think, the language itself, comes from the desolation not just of the raging seas, hard rocks, and relentless rain, but of standing on the edge of the world, beyond the complacency of western civilization.
That night was Courtney Wahle's birthday, our academic coordinator and a great friend, so we all walked down to the Ballintoy coast where we were staying to sing her "Notre Dame, Our Mother" on the beach in the dark, with the waves splashing as they rolled in and out, and the smell of horses and sheep, but hardly anything discernible in the deserted countryside.
We turned south again to visit Stormont, the Northern Ireland parliament, and to tour Belfast’s murals before returning safely to Dublin. A man named Peter Maguire who grew up in West Belfast accompanied us to explain the murals and tell us stories of his own experiences as a Catholic in Belfast. We also spoke to Mervin Story, a Member of the Legislative Assembly from the Democratic Unionist Party (Dr. Ian Paisley’s party). It really brought the situation to life not just to hear their stories, but to see their attitudes and the attitudes and identities they attempt to instill in their children. It was particularly striking to hear Mervin Story repeat over and over again that he is British and blames the IRA (which he unequivocally characterizes as a Catholic terrorist organization) for the suffering of the Troubles, while Peter thinks of himself as thoroughly Irish, inhabiting an artificially constructed political state which tries to deny the realities of its culture.
Peter says he didn’t suffer at all in the Troubles, compared to the way some of his friends suffered, and still his grandfather was murdered for being one of a handful of Catholics working in the Belfast shipyards, his uncle was tortured and killed randomly by Protestant paramilitaries so that his casket had to be closed for his wake, and Peter himself was beaten up several times, suffering a fractured skull and lying unconscious in hospital for four days on one such occasion. Many of Peter’s friends joined the IRA in high school, and while he resisted the peer pressure, holding a driver’s license with a Catholic surname and a Falls Road address made him a constant target for police brutality. The police would regularly stop cars at random to search them and abuse the occupants, and driving his girlfriend home from a date one night, they dragged him from the car and beat him to a pulp, resulting in the fractured skull (his girlfriend, also a Falls Road native, responded by jumping on the back of the offending officer and attacking him). Yet Peter speaks without bitterness and has great hope for Northern Ireland’s future. He told us that when his children were small and they would ask why the policemen were always stopping them to search the car, he would say that the officers just wanted to make sure it was safe, and that the car was in good running order, and the children were wearing seatbelts. I was overwhelmingly impressed with the lengths he went to in order to raise his children without bitterness and to live sanely in the midst of the terror.
But Belfast has a long way to go. We got off the bus in Lower Shankill, the Protestant ghetto equivalent to the Catholic Falls Road ghetto and stood under the Oliver Cromwell mural to ask Peter how he viewed Belfast’s future. Things have improved even from the last time I was in Belfast: many of the scarier murals have been repainted, the swathed paramilitaries armed to the teeth are gone and replaced by less militant depictions, slogans, and crests. No Notre Dame group has every disembarked at Lower Shankhill because that neighbourhood is still so rough, and in past years the coach has been stoned. Kevin warned us as we got off the bus that we were walking into the neighbourhood of Loyalist Johnny Adair, who has been exiled to Scotland for boasting of personally slitting the throats of 16 Catholics. But on that bright, warm spring afternoon I stood on a corner in Lower Shankhill wearing my Notre Dame hoodie and talking to a survivor of the Troubles about how much he values his Catholic education and sees Catholic education as the reason the Catholic communities in Belfast have begun to thrive in peacetime, since his children have recently graduated from their schools with the skills and confidence to lead a successful and meaningful life. He regrets that the Protestant Belfast community lacks a similar tradition, having always been able to depend upon their monopoly of the job market prior to the ceasefire and the Good Friday agreement. He went on to comment that while people always accused the IRA of leeching off of their communities, they at least kept drugs and drug violence out of the Catholic communities, while since the ceasefire the Protestant paramilitary organizations have turned to drug crime and depend upon keeping their neighbourhoods (particularly Lower Shankhill) addicted. Belfast needs a lot of help. They need to rebuild the streets still covered in rubble; they need to dismantle the “peace walls” and untangle the barbed wire, and they need to purge themselves of drugs and build up their education system. Most of all they need to find a way to be as forgiving as Peter and raise their children without bitterness or bigotry.
As much as I disliked Mervin Story’s rhetoric at Stormont, and while I have no patience whatsoever for Ian Paisley, I am impressed by their willingness to participate in the Legislative Assembly. It was clearly very hard for Mervin Story to bring himself to sit around a table with Sinn Fein members, whom he considers to be terrorists and butchers, and to serve as an MLA alongside them because he believes it is in the best interest of Northern Ireland’s peace and prosperity. He has had to forgive and to sacrifice his personal inclinations to make the devolved government work. I think as long as Northern Ireland has citizens like Peter Maguire and politicians like Mervin Story, it has a future. Belfast isn’t easy on the eyes, but visiting her always fills me with hope.
I was being kind of flighty this weekend. I was terribly peevish on Friday, and I can’t quite articulate the reasons for that. I have about a million things on my to-do list, and I managed to accomplish about five of them, exclusively academic. Then I frittered away a perfectly good Friday night feeling disagreeable. So on Saturday morning I threw my Irish books and flashcards into a bag, grabbed my camera, and hopped on the DART (Dublin’s heavy commuter rail service, distinct from the LUAS, or the light commuter rail service) for Brey. Dublin is a perfectly situated city since it nearly sits on the eastern coast of Ireland and runs up against the mountains on the south and west edges of the city. Both mountains and beaches are within a pleasant half-hour’s ride.
The ride to Brey was quite pretty. I got a seat on the east side of the carriage and got lovely views of the sea, cliffs, and beaches all the way to Brey. When I stepped off the train forty minutes later, I was in a sweet little town with a steady sea breeze and gorgeous grey clouds. I wandered down a street and almost immediately discovered an Irish-language book store. The day was clearly off to a good start. It must have had every Irish title printed in the last decade. There was everything from illustrated children’s books (I sat down and read “The Three Little Pigs” in Irish, since that falls within my limited vocabulary), to folksy books for tourists, to contemporary Irish poetry, and Irish biographies and novels. I spent a good half-hour browsing through the titles and skimming the back covers, usually able to get the jist of the book and the reviewers’ extravagant praise (I’m good at Irish superlatives) but not much more. I noticed that the lady minding the register answered the phone and chatted away in Irish whenever it rang. Given Brey’s proximity to Dublin, I was shocked to have found such a place. I also felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb in there, because I hate to appear as a tourist when I really feel myself to live in Dublin. But as I left and threw a “Slán go foill; go raibh maith agat,” (Goodbye; thank you) at the lady at the register, I realized that she probably couldn’t tell I was American; I was wearing my Allied Irish Bank drawstring bag and hadn’t spoken any English in her shop. That was a good feeling.
I walked south along the coast and ran into a big hill, atop of which was planted a large cross, clearly visible from the center of the town. I was intrigued and decided to try to get up to it, to see if it was some sort of memorial or shrine. I found a steep path going up the hill, hugging the coast, and that seemed promising. But after about half a mile I realized that it was never going to turn west, so I continued walking south along the cliffs for a few more miles. It was a really gorgeous walk; the path was narrow, but not uncomfortably so, and the DART tracks ran along just to the left and beneath it, and below them, the sea. It was so nice to hear the waves and the gulls and feel the breeze, with the sun peeking out now and then to dapple the sea and turn it from its usually snotty Irish green to a grey-blue.
After about an hour, the cliffs turned into freshly ploughed fields, and the rocks turned into beaches, and in another half-hour I found myself in Greystones, the village immediately to the south of Brey. Greystones was smaller and cuter than Brey, and didn’t take long to explore. I visited the Catholic church, then found some lunch, and then wandered into the public library, still within view of the beach, and settled comfortably into three hours of conjugating Irish verbs and plugging away at prepositions. It was nice; there were little kids laughing at picture books, and their mothers shushing them, and old men reading the newspaper. When the library closed at five I went for a walk along the beach and watched the sunset, then hopped back on the train to Dublin, this time speeding past my cliff walk in about fifteen minutes. I made it back to Dublin in time to hit the pubs with some friends, and it was good craic- some serious conversations, and some good music, and a lot of laughter.
Altogether it was a first-rate day, both relaxing and productive, but it also made me think about how much I’ve changed in the last six months. I can’t imagine jumping on a train without knowing anything more about my destination than its name and general location, and without a map or a plan, before I moved to Dublin. Until now, I certainly wouldn’t have viewed finding myself wandering onto a cliff walk without really knowing where it was leading as relaxing. And it was so refreshing to be studying by the sea and not shut up in the grey dungeon of Trinity College. I think several more study-trips to Brey this spring are in order in the run up to June exams.
