This weekend the Dublin programme students took a field trip to Belfast, to try to understand the situation of Northern Ireland following the cessation of the violence of The Troubles.
It took only about an hour to drive from Dublin to Northern Ireland, bringing home how close Northern Ireland is to the capitol of the Republic which is currently thriving under the Celtic Tiger economy. However, Belfast is completely different from Dublin. An inattentive person could drive through some areas of Belfast and never realize the violence and anguish which has torn Northern Ireland apart for more than three decades. The city is at peace now; we saw kids playing on the sidewalks and adults walking home with groceries and a man with balloons for his daughter’s 16th birthday party. However, if you drive around Belfast for twenty minutes the scars become inescapable.
We drove around Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods to view the murals which continue to be painted on house gables. In an effort to control the violence of The Troubles, walls were put up to separate Catholics from living near Protestants, creating a ghetto culture for both factions in which children of one denomination do not grow up with children of the other, and neither community sees the sufferings or joys of the other. The gates close at night, and some of the gates have barracks for British soldiers. The murals are a way to express the values and the history of each culture, and to ensure that they never forget what they have lost and sacrificed and suffered. Many of the murals were memorials to those who died in the fighting, paramilitaries and non-combatants, both of which were often teenagers. However, not all of the murals were military in nature; others commemorated the Catholic “hedge schools” when Catholic education had to be carried out in secret in the countryside, and “Mass rocks” when Catholic Masses had to be celebrated in secret in the countryside. The murals, especially those commemorating the Republican prisoners who died on hunger strike in the 1980s in protest of Margaret Thatcher, who insisted on treating them as common criminals, were very moving.
As we walked through the neighborhoods on Saturday afternoon and saw the children playing field hockey in the Catholic neighborhoods and soccer in the Protestant neighborhoods, I was grateful that none of them had any personal memories of the violence which occurred daily on the streets on which they now played. I still vividly remember the all-too-frequent newspaper and radio reports when I was a child of the seemingly interminable violence in Ireland. It was chilling to realize as I looked at the dates on some of the murals that the deaths depicted by them occurred when my own parents were children or high school students, and that the children now in front of me were the first generation to escape the constant bloodshed.
But as we continued to move through the streets of Belfast, that thought became less reassuring, seeing that the children must grow up in the aftermath of the violence. It is easy to identify which sections of Belfast are Protestant and which are Catholic; the Protestant sections fly the Union Jack and their shops bear English names; the Catholic sections fly the tricolour of the Republic and use the Irish language for their notices. Whole blocks of Belfast are still bombed-out ruins, and even our bus driver became nervous as we drove up a street to discover black smoke erupting from the end of it. It was no bomb, but simply children in a very poor and still heavily damaged neighborhood burning trash for fun in the wreckage of old shop fronts. We were told that this was one of the many lower class Protestant neighborhoods in which hardly anyone can find a job, and almost none of the children will enter high school.
The physical violence of The Troubles may have come to an end, but the emotional and psychological trauma will last for generations. The suicide rate in Northern Ireland is devastating, especially among those who were directly involved in perpetrating the violence on both sides of the conflict. We passed several suicide prevention centers in both sections of the town. The Belfast walls remain standing, dividing the sections of the town, and just this summer Britain announced that it would finally decrease its troop levels stationed in Northern Ireland to pre-Troubles levels.
While some would like to forget the past and move on in amnesia, too many people must live with the reality of the violence and its consequences. In the infancy of a peaceful, power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, the challenge is to make sense of how we can integrate the violent history with the current peace and to find ways to convert that peace from a mere lack of violent conflict within the country to a prosperous community in which people can flourish in their lives together. One of the difficulties is the peace itself: ringleaders within the paramilitary factions, both Catholic and Protestant, who bombed each other two decades ago, now sit together in a power sharing parliament. As grateful as people are for the peace, it is also shocking to them that those who hated each other most are now governing together, suggesting that the entire conflict was meaningless and the sacrifices unnecessary. Yet they need to view their suffering and sacrifices as worthwhile or the value of their friends’ lives will be cheapened.
We got the opportunity to visit Stormont, the Legislative Assembly of Northern Ireland. It was an exciting time for us to visit Stormont because the power sharing government is in its infancy, having only been assembled since May 8 (and in recess for most of the summer). We were given the opportunity to question a member of the Legislative Assembly, a Sinn Fein representative named Jennifer McCann. She joined the women’s branch of the IRA at the age of 14 and at 20 was imprisoned for ten and a half years for her IRA operations. She was a close friend of Bobby Sands, one of the main hunger strikers who died in prison in the 1980s. She is grateful for the peace now, but she is totally unapologetic for the violent campaign of the IRA. It is still her conviction that a violent campaign was the only way to regain civil rights for Catholics. She also believes that the whole island of Ireland will be one, free, united, self-governing country within her lifetime. She does, however, acknowledge the reality of the current political situation, and she wants to work for healing within that context. She believes that the best way to build peace and understanding is to have Northern Irish children educated in schools together (currently very few Northern Irish children attend a non-sectarian school), though notably she is unwilling to send her own children to a non-Catholic school.
Our Belfast Protestant bus driver, on the other hand, thoroughly feels like a British citizen, but he also feels like Britain wishes it could be rid of Ireland. He hopes that having a functioning parliament in Stormont will address practical needs which were simply never a priority in London. He was an impressive character: he is a member of the Orange Order, but he put great effort into finding someone to teach his daughter traditional Irish dancing because the Catholic teachers refused to have a Protestant in their classes. He deeply believes that both cultures have a lot to learn from each other.
One hardly knows where to start when the very language is a barrier in maintaining a unifying identity: the Sinn Fein MLA refused to refer to her country by its official name, “Northern Ireland,” insisting on calling it “the North of Ireland.” When division runs so deeply that the two factions cannot call their home by the same name, it makes one wonder whether there is any hope for real integration and reconciliation of the past with the present and of citizen with citizen.
However, the rapid and completely unexpected improvement in Northern Ireland in the last ten years since the Good Friday agreement give reason to hope that the situation will continue to improve beyond what we can envision with our own limited imaginations. Whether the island of Ireland should be unified as one country, considering how radically different the history and culture have developed in the Republic versus the North, is a debatable issue. But I believe that healing and wholeness can be restored on a personal level and within the community of Belfast. It was appalling to hear the stories of The Troubles and to know that one in three adults whom we passed on the streets personally had a family member or close friend die violently in The Troubles; but it was equally astounding that we did not see a British soldier or an IRA paramilitary man while crossing the border or walking through Catholic neighborhoods. Perhaps Northern Ireland can find a way to bolster its ties with the Republic to take advantage of the desperately needed prosperity of the Celtic Tiger, while still living under the stability which Britain supplies. More importantly, as Bobby Sands said, “our revenge shall be the laughter of our children”: we heard the laughter of children ringing out on the streets of Belfast. It is not so much their revenge as God’s mercy.
This was a weekend of high adventure. My good friend Andrew Haynes and I wanted to do something a little off the beaten path, and we were very successful on more fronts than one.
Right before leaving for Ireland, I got an email from Joe Lindsley, founder of Notre Dame’s independent Catholic newspaper, The Irish Rover, for which I have served as an editor and writer, along with Andrew. Joe said we should visit his family in Ireland, so this weekend we took the opportunity to do so. Joe’s great-uncle, Dan O’Shea the Durd, still lives in his 500-year old family cottage, alone on the O’Shea farm. I have never met a character like the Durd. He is the real Ireland.
Andrew and I took a train from Dublin to Killarney, in the southwest of Ireland. Then, since the Kenmare bus doesn’t run on weekends, we rented bicycles and cycled 26 miles up a mountain to get down to Kenmare, a town of 4000 on the Beara Peninsula on Kenmare Bay. This was an irrational decision on several counts: I grew up in Northern Indiana with no topography to speak of and therefore have never had to change gears on a bike in my life, never mind cycle up a mountain; the speed limit in County Kerry is 100 km/hr on hairpin turns; and I have exercise-induced asthma and didn’t bring an inhaler to Ireland. But, a life lived in conformity with perfect rationality is inhuman. Despite these obstacles, we took on the challenge, and I must say it was one of the most incredible afternoons in my life. I have become convinced that cycling is the only way to see Ireland, and I am very grateful for this one opportunity. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road when I had a sloping forest with the sunlight streaming through the branches of the trees on my left, and a long drop down to a sparkling blue lake on my right. As we approached Kenmare, great vistas of steep grazing land swept out in front of us as we took the sharp turns. The smell of farms was always in our noses, with not a house to be seen, and sheep cut across the road in front of us. The world has rarely looked more beautiful.
I was thinking as we cycled along that the metaphors of ‘pilgrimage’, ‘journey’, ‘quest’ and ‘climbing a mountain’ have become horribly spiritualized to the point of hollowness today. What good is a metaphor if the image is just an image and not a human experience intensely lived? Those metaphors mean a lot more to me now after cycling up the N-71 to Kenmare, with the real possibility of not completing our quest, the diligent endeavor to achieve it, and the intense beauty that surrounded it.
Joe’s instructions upon reaching Kenmare were to drop into a few particular pubs and inquire as to the whereabouts of the Durd. It sounds funny, but sure enough, every person we asked knew the octogenarian and his habits, and suggested another favorite spot. We finally located him in a bookies betting on horses. He was thrilled to meet us and straightaway took us next door to the pub for a pint and Black Bush whiskey for himself (always Black Bush whiskey). He took us to two more pubs on the way out to his farm, 10 miles outside of town, introducing the two of us to everyone we met as his ‘fine young American friends that write for his grandnephew’s paper, The Irish Rover, at Notre Dame, the great Irish Catholic university in America.’ I was glad we’d left the bikes with a friend of his in town, because there was no way I was going to cycle another 10 miles with two and a half pints of Guinness in me.
We finally made it to the Durd’s cottage around 9 o’clock that night, and he proudly showed us every 500 year old nook and cranny of the sweet little house, his mother’s faded oleograph of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Pierced Heart of Mary still hanging on the wall, though now with an electric red lamp burning under it instead of a candle.
I set the table and peeled some potatoes and we feasted on a wonderful lamb stew with the creamiest potatoes you’ve ever tasted, then we did the washing up and watched the lottery on TV with the Durd, followed by the BBC news. He’s a great one for news; he reads 4 newspapers everyday cover to cover. He is very opinionated, so we benefited from his detailed analysis of the day’s events from the viewpoint of 80 years of lived Irish history.
The Durd also insisted that we call our parents to tell them that we were safe and sound and staying with the Durd, and he himself spoke to our fathers to tell mine what a “grand young dortie” I am and to tell Andrew’s what a “fine young lad” he is. Throughout the night, the Durd received numerous phone calls from his family across the United States, several of them reporting the ever-depressing ND-BC football score.
We did ask Dan why he is called “the Durd” but he said nobody knows; but it’s been carved on the tombstones of all the O’Sheas for centuries. It’s his hereditary title.
The Durd is like an ancient Irish monk (he liked it when I said that): he sleeps only 3 hours per night and he doesn’t nap. He also still oversees the farm and cooks his own food. Andrew and I, however, were exhausted from the day’s exercise and retired upstairs at about 11 o’clock. We got up around 7 and each had a cup of tea, because Dan said it was too early for breakfast, and we just listened to Dan tell stories for hours- about growing up the youngest of 13 children, about family rosary with his mother, about being the first house in Kenmare to own a television set and all the local children filling up the living room and sitting on the staircase to watch it, about leaving to find work in England because there wasn’t any in Ireland, about returning to care for his ailing mother since he’d never married, about how good America has been to those of his brothers and sisters who emigrated. We could have sat there and listened for days.
At 10 o’clock Dan cooked us a huge traditional Irish breakfast with rashers, sausages, white pudding, and eggs. It was the best meal I’ve had in a month. We ate slowly and listened some more. Just as we started washing up, though, Dan noticed the time and told us to run down the road a quarter of a mile to catch the second half of Mass and say a prayer for the Durd. Unfortunately, Mass had been an hour earlier, but we knelt at the crucifix anyway to ask God’s blessing for Dan the Durd. We picked up his newspapers at the post office on the way back.
When we returned Dan asked us to help herd his cows down the road to the other pasture. I’ve never herded cows before; this was a treat. There were about 8 cows and a bull, and Andrew and I trotted after them with a stick for about a quarter of a mile, yelling at them to get on with it. For that and my help cooking, he paid me quite a compliment- he told me I’d make a great farmer’s wife. When we finished, we got to visit the house where all the O’Sheas were born and raised until they were old enough to move out to the cottage to work the land.
“Aren’t I a grand life?” he asked us over and over, and we always replied, yes, you lead the best of lives. As Dan the Durd says, “Americans live to work. But the Irish work to live”. It was hard to leave Dan the Durd. I have never had such an hospitable host, nor have I met many people as genuinely good as he.
Sunday afternoon we retrieved our bikes and set out on our 26 mile ride back to villainy, thankfully downhill all the way, we thought. This is where our irrationality caught up with us, as well as another aspect of the human condition: vulnerability. I was cycling behind Andrew downhill and not pedaling because gravity was doing an efficient job. We came up on a right-hand turn and I was going downhill too fast and I wiped out. There was a lot of blood and bruises and a broken left wrist. This is a point of acute frustration for me because I am left-handed, and my classes just started, too. Andrew was incredible, though, and took really good care of me. It could have been so much worse than it actually was, and the pain wasn’t too bad, so all I could be was grateful that things turned out the way they did. I’m just glad it happened to me and not to him, because I never would have been able to forgive myself if something had happened to him on my escapade to visit Dan the Durd.
They don’t have proper medical facilities in Kenmare, but we did manage to find a taxi to villainy where we caught our train back to Dublin. we had called ahead to the Keough Centre staff to let them know what happened, that I was alright, but that I’d need to go to the emergency room when the train finally got in. They were fantastic- they met us at the station, and Kevin Whelan, our director, stayed with me at the emergency room until 3 in the morning as they patched me up. I’m in a cast that goes up past my elbow, I don’t know for how long, but all of the Notre Dame students and staff here are taking really good care of me; I guess it’s in bad situations that you really see the strength and the love of the Notre Dame family.
This weekend the Dublin program had an opportunity to go on retreat in Glendalough, an ancient Irish monastic site. It’s a valley located in the Wicklow Mountains about 45 minutes away from Dublin.
On Friday, we arrived in time to explore the old cemetery with an ancient round tower still standing in the middle of it, before watching the sun set between the mountains. The oldest tombstones I could read dated from the eighteenth century, but there were much older ones which were completely illegible. St. Kevin came to Glendalough in the 7th century and Christians have come to Glendalough to pray ever since. It was very strange to walk among the headstones, some of them no longer recognizable as such, having rejoined the natural landscape, and think of the struggle involved in each life marked by the stones – struggle both with the challenges of daily life and with the longing for God. These tombstones were much simpler than many in the US; there were no elaborate descriptions of what the individuals did during life or moving quotations about hope in the Resurrection. The stones simply stated the names of the deceased and their relations, the date of their death and their age, and most bore a crucifix, showing clearly their conviction that their struggles and death were united with Christ’s. As these stones were gathered together in the graveyard, they themselves will be gathered together at the eschatological banquet, and us with them.
On Saturday a priest took us to the various monastic sites scattered throughout the valley, telling us many stories about St. Kevin, and then we were given time to pray and reflect on our own. In one story, St. Kevin was standing near the upper lake with his hands lifted to heaven, praying for something great, when a bird landed in his palm and proceeded to lay an egg. St. Kevin didn’t move from his prayer until the baby bird hatched. the point of the story was St. Kevin’s openness to the whole experience of life, not rejecting a small or inconvenient experience because he was looking for something great.
I have been the beneficiary of many small, beautiful experiences over the course of the past week on account of the inconvenience of having a broken arm. Suddenly, I am incapable of performing the most basic actions for myself, like washing my hair or peeling a banana. However, my friends have risen to the occasion and put themselves to inconvenience to care for me. I am deeply grateful to them. Nevertheless, it is frustrating. I had just started cooking really good dinners for myself and my friends; there is always something sacramental to me about sharing a meal. It’s hard for me to be unable to do anything for my friends – at house parties both here and back at Notre Dame I always ended up washing the dishes in the kitchen before the end of the night, and now it’s my friends rushing to take my dirty dishes out of my hand. But it’s good for me to have to constantly ask for the help of others; it helps me realize how dependent on others I really am all the time for so much else, and it is good to recognize my own limitations and to have to graciously accept help. They are not obstacles to life but opportunities for grace.
It has also helped to remind me that I am still deeply a part of a community, because I don’t have that sense at all at Trinity. The emphasis on individual research makes it easy to forget that education is a corporate undertaking, and I find my Irish professors and fellow students to be very cold and distant. Only my theology professor acknowledged my broken arm; the other professors and students ignore it and leave the classroom as quickly as possible after the lectures, never keen to chat.
Studying abroad can feel like a very self-indulgent experience. I have to spend much more time here than when I was at Notre Dame taking care of my basic daily needs like shopping for and preparing food. And since Trinity doesn’t constantly evaluate students’ academic progress and expects them to study what they’re interested in, it’s easy to feel like I’m not learning anything or forget why I’m studying what I’m studying. There was always so much going on at Notre Dame in terms of volunteering, late night discussions in the dorms about what my friends and I were studying, reading my friends’ papers for them, baking cookies for people when they were stressed out or sick, 10 p.m. mass in Keogh every night, that it was easy to feel like I was building up the life of the community just by being there. But here I have to work much harder to feel like I’m positively contributing to the life of a community, especially since the Trinity student body doesn’t have a strong sense of community.
I miss having peers and professors with whom I could reflect upon why I study what I study and why philosophy and theology matter. My professors at Notre Dame constantly made the case for studying philosophy and theology, and here I haven’t heard any students or professors question why they bother with it. For example, what good does analytic philosophy do? I have no idea; I just felt like it was a serious gap in my philosophical education, so I signed up for the class this term. I’d like to think that I am spending my time now in a worthwhile way, and that what I do with my life ultimately will be worthwhile. It’s hard to see it that way here at Trinity right now. As we walked through the monastic ruins of Glendalough it occurred to me that the monks must have had a grand vision for the way in which that valley was to contribute to the glory of God, but at the same time they must have had incredible patience to build their buildings slowly stone by stone, and peace that the small things they did from day to day would be worthwhile. I wish I had that gift of the monks.
