I had the great blessing of starting my year abroad with a pilgrimage to Le Mans, France for the beatification of Fr. Basil Moreau, founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross which founded Notre Dame. I believe there could be no better way for a Notre Dame student to begin a year abroad. It gave me a chance to reflect on what it means to be a Notre Dame student and to reaffirm my choice to leave my much-beloved Notre Dame for a whole year. It also filled me with a deep gratitude to Fr. Moreau and to all the Holy Cross priests who have served God so fearlessly and faithfully.
Campus Ministry graciously paid for around 40 Notre Dame students studying abroad to participate in the beatification and organized masses, lectures, and visits to important sites in Blessed Fr. Moreau’s life to help us understand the significance of the beatification. However, in a way, I felt as if we didn’t really learn anything new about Holy Cross, but rather we were given a way to articulate the experience we have lived at Notre Dame.
The most important aspect of Holy Cross’ mission which we discussed was Blessed Fr. Moreau’s strong belief in the education of both the mind and the heart. This education can occur only in the context of a community in which we rely upon one another and freely serve one another. By ‘the heart’, Blessed Fr. Moreau meant human affection and will, the special gift of God to man to passionately embrace God’s desire for humanity. Human freedom is that ability for passion and for positively choosing God. Therefore, by educating both the heart and the mind, Blessed Fr. Moreau was trying to free his students. Freedom is more than liberty from physical bondage: freedom requires having both the knowledge to understand the choice before you and the ability and desire to positively embrace God’s will. The entire History of Salvation is the story of God trying to educate Man’s mind and heart, not forcing us to serve Him, but revealing Himself to us and living in solidarity with us, so that persuaded by his love and freed by His sacrifice, we would have the ability to return to Him again. Blessed Fr. Moreau’s own mission is therefore a reflection of salvation history.
My experience at Notre Dame has been an education of the mind and the heart. I have studied under dynamic professors who could explain complex concepts and put those ideas into the practical context of how we should live our lives. I have studied across disciplines, never being allowed to confine myself to a single subject or a single approach. Words and images and the ideas they attempt to convey have filled me with wonder and put me in awe of God through His creation.
Just as importantly, I have encountered people from very different backgrounds and perspectives from myself and yet have found them all to be essentially the same- beings with the same essential human need for love, passion for life, and the desire for a better life. I have lived in the close community of a dormitory, prayed and participated in dorm masses with people who became my closest friends, and broken bread with friends and strangers alike. I have listened to my friends’ experiences and insights and they have challenged my own and changed the way I live. I have been selflessly served and I have been called to selflessly serve. Most importantly, Notre Dame has constantly reminded me that the source of this all is God.
I realized that although I am studying at TCD this year, I am still a Notre Dame student, with a particular understanding of the purpose of education and of how we are to live in community with those around us. Blessed Fr. Moreau and the Congregation of Holy Cross provided us with this understanding and they continue sustain that vision. He knew that the purpose of our education is to lead students to God, the source of our joy and our very life, and to free us to embrace His desire for us. He also knew above all that the cross is our only hope, that we can never learn enough or give enough of ourselves to transform the world or make ourselves content. That faith makes his efforts more than a work- they are an action of God. Fr. Moreau was filled with zeal to make God known, loved, and served, and that zeal animated and sustained the mission of Holy Cross which has so profoundly shaped my life.
Many things motivated my decision to study abroad, such as my love for Ireland, my desire to see more of the world and to experience a different educational system. But the conviction which impelled me to choose to be away for a year is that there are many important ways in which I can grow and change only by being away from home and in a foreign culture for a year. I need both the shock of an alien environment and the space to move forward and not be bound to expectations that I think those who know and love me have of me.
Just as Fr. Moreau sent his missionaries out all over the globe, from Bangladesh to South Bend, Indiana, at the end of the pilgrimage we were sent out to Dublin, London, Angers, Paris, Athens, Rome, and Leuven to communicate that which we have encountered at Notre Dame and the ways in which Holy Cross has formed us, and to seek the cross where ever we go.
This weekend we went on a Notre Dame programme field trip to the West of Ireland. I am already convinced it is one of the most beautiful parts of Ireland. However, our programme director, Kevin Whelan, was determined to give us a deeper grasp on Connacht’s beauty than we could possibly get from the inside of our bus. He wanted us to really get the feel of the country and the people and ‘imbibe it through the soles of our boots’. The experience left a deep impression on me of the intensity of life of the natural landscape and of the ongoing struggles of the Irish people with their land, their history, and their identity.
We drove from Dublin to the Burren, which are 600-foot limestone mountains on the coast of County Clare, reaching down into the Atlantic Ocean. At first, I thought the Burren was a bit of a disappointment after driving for hours through the lush green fields, since the limestone of the mountains is even greyer than the bleak Irish sky. The name ‘Burren’ comes from the Irish word for Rocks, and the people who named it so initially considered the terrain quite barren. But the monks who chose to live on top of Blackhead Mountain in the Burren knew better. As we climbed Blackhead Mountain, a local scholar explained to us that the Burren is among the most fertile land in Ireland. The limestone was formed by dead sea creatures and plants being crushed and compacted over time to make a rock rich with calcium and therefore excellent for growing all sorts of plants. Shifting glaciers added further nutrients to the soil. Therefore, though the soil is too shallow for growing food for humans, it does produce plants for the cows, bulls, and sheep to graze.
But the natural fertility of the land requires the intervention of humans to fulfill its full potential. In most farmland, farmers herd their animals out to the pastures during the summertime and shelter them during the cold winter months. However, the hardy Irish farmers of the Burren do the opposite. The reason is that during the summer, animals on the Burren would become dehydrated because limestone is quite porous, and the abundant rain of Ireland seeps through the rock into the caves below the Burren. However, in the winter, there is even more rain and the water is captured in the natural indentations in the rocks for the animals to drink. Also, the limestone retains the heat of the summer, which keeps the animals relatively warm.
But the cattle give back to the land as much as they receive, because by grazing for those winter months, they clear out all the debris of the grasses and hawthorns, allowing the spring sunshine to reach the multitudinous plant seeds. Over 75% of Ireland’s indigenous flora can be found growing on the Burren, making is one of the most fertile and diverse environments on the island. The entire ecosystem depends on a delicate balance between the natural landscape and the human stewards.
The land shapes her people as much as the farmers shape the land. Just to use the land of this part of the country, the farmers were required to painstakingly clear the fields of their endless stones, which they used to build dry stone walls without mortar. It is slow, cold, back-breaking work. In County Clare we visited Corcomroe Abbey, founded by the Cistercians, who fulfilled their charge of ‘ora et labora’ by spending their days patiently clearing the stones from the slopes above their abbey. The land is harsh on the farmers, forcing one out of two Irishmen to emigrate during the 19th century, up until the Celtic Tiger. Nearly as many of those emigrants were women as were men, because only the eldest daughters of the large farming families could get a husband in Ireland.
The mythology of Ireland grows out of the country, so that the great tales are not set in dark conifer forests like in Germany, nor are they populated by wolves and reindeer, but rather the endless fields are the stage for the run of the cattle and the wandering herdsmen and warriors. The lore of the land has a very different feel from any other, and the feel of the lore goes with the feel of the land. The natural color of Ireland is green and the natural sound of Ireland is the lowing of the cow and the roaring of the bull.
I want to avoid painting an overly simple, pastoral landscape though, because Ireland is a thoroughly modern and even post-modern country, with all the complexities of identity that that entails. The Celtic Tiger economy is turning the center of life towards the major cities such as Dublin and Galway, and taking it out of the constellation of villages and small towns which used to be the real Ireland. This dual identity of a rural, depressive past but an urban, prosperous present does not simply describe the abstract country but is embodied in thousands of Irish individuals who grew up in, or whose immediate family grew up in, provincial, tightly-knit and interdependent villages and farms, but who are now drawn into the bustling, individualistic, impersonal cities. The traditional ways of living from the past are not yet dead but the modern developments cannot be denied either, and the tension to integrate both aspects into one country and within one individual require the imagination and artistry of a new Joyce or Yeats.
The solution proposed by our programme director, Kevin Whelan, is a personal one discerned in centuries of Irish history: the integrity of the nation’s identity and the way to preserve the most wholesome aspects of Ireland is through the community and through the family (clann). We visited Lemeneagh Castle and heard the story of Connor O’Brien, the great Irish king who stood up against the bully Oliver Cromwell, and then we learned that O’Briens still live on that land in a more modern house next to the ruin of the castle. We attended a Mass crowded with elderly people, families, and bachelors on Sunday morning in Ballyvaughan in a 19th century church which was paid for by Irish immigrants to Australia who sent the money that they earned in Australia back to their old parish. We learned about the younger sisters in large families leaving alone for America where they slaved away in American households to send money back to their starving families in Ireland while trying to find husbands and set up households for themselves. The O’Briens still live on their lands, the crowded church still stands, and many of us students are alive today and able to attend Notre Dame because of the self-sacrifice and intense family loyalty of the Irish people in our own past.
We ended our foray into western Ireland with a visit to Lady Gregory’s estate of Coole Park in Galway and to William Butler Yeats’ tower home to read his words aloud and to tread the lands he had wandered and held so dear. Much of his poetry is a bleak reflection on the emptiness of the modern lower-middleclass Irishman, who in his consideration was the weak-willed, easily-contented Last Man of Nietzsche’s philosophy. He turned to the traditional, hearty, plain Irish farmer as the remedy for his diagnosis of the disease of Modernity. Yet Ireland can never go back to what it was, nor should it. The limestone of the Burren emerged out of the ocean to bear life, and then the cows came to purge the overgrowth, enabling a much greater complexity and delicacy of life to grow there, and now great steel windmills stand on the edge of Galway Bay to catch the winds as they gust in from their 3000 mile trip over the Atlantic to be converted into energy to run the city, energy sent east over the waters on the wind from America, the land of the Irish émigrés like money was sent east over the waters on the boats to feed the émigrés’ families left behind. The Irish identity must be an integration of all of this, not a denial of any part of her history, just as the abundant life of the Burren is the result of the whole process, not privileging nature or human intervention, but taking it all in all and integrating it.
I spent the weekend soaking up Dublin. Between visits on Saturday to the Guinness Storehouse and Jameson’s Distillery, I took in a much more sobering Dublin site, the Kilmainham Gaol, a British prison from 1796 to 1924. The building was left to fall apart after it was vacated, but in the 1960s former prisoners raised money to restore it as an historic site, so that the Republic of Ireland will not forget her past- the bravery of her heroes and the misery of her common citizens. Kilmainham Gaol was put to many uses: it housed criminals guilty of serious crimes, political prisoners who ran afoul of England, and victims of the Great Famine who viewed the shelter and two free meals per day of the prison as a paradise.
The Gaol was constructed with surprisingly humanitarian concerns for the time. It stands on the top of a hill to prevent dampness and flooding, and it was designed to let in as much light as possible for a prison. The thought behind this was that prisoners would associate light with freedom and with God, and it would aid in their moral reformation. In the later, Victorian addition to the prison, there is a window in every cell and a long skylight over the atrium around which the cells are organized. The older sections of Kilmainham Gaol are low, narrow passageways of cells with no way to communicate with the upper or lower levels, but the open Victorian design enabled the guards to be fully aware of disturbances on any floor. The architects of the Victorian atrium also located the laundry and kitchens in the basement with hatches in the floor which released the hot steam into the atrium, in an effort to heat the cells.
The Gaol was at its fullest during the Great Famine. Cells which were intended to hold only a single prisoner had to hold 8 during the day, and at night the guards tossed straw on the floors of the passageways on which the women and children could sleep. The potato, which was very well adapted for Irish weather and soil conditions, had enabled the Irish population to grow drastically at the end of the 18th century and for the first decades of the 19th because when combined with milk, it provides all the necessary nutrients to sustain life. Three million poor Catholic farm workers subsisted solely on a potato diet, eating a stone of potato per day (about 14 pounds).When the Blight came in 1845, and the potato failed for 4 successive years, the population was decimated. Out of 8 million Irish people on the eve of the Great Famine, one million died of starvation or disease, and two million emigrated. The British government saw the crisis as an opportunity for peaceful social change in Ireland, where the Potato was associated with Poverty and Popery. The Famine did allow for a silent, uncontested shift in the balance of power in Ireland, giving London the upper hand. But the silence was the silence of men, women, and children starving to death on the sides of the roads; and the bitterness born of watching whole communities of people starve to death, many after being mercilessly evicted by their Protestant landlords, destroyed any chance of peace in Ireland for a century and a half.
After being evicted from their shacks in the country, the Irish came streaming into the cities, including Dublin, which had an equally scant food supply. Parents who stole food in an attempt to feed their hungry families were thrown into Kilmainham Gaol, which often saved their lives. The starving Irishmen and women quickly realized that the Gaol provided a roof and two meals a day. Soon the poor were desperate to commit any petty crime which would get them imprisoned in that paradise. The British reacted by decreasing the food allowance to milk, some oats, and a pound of bread per person per day, which was considered to be the level of bare sustenance. However, it still surpassed anything available in the outside world. The British government also passed a Vagrancy Act which outlawed begging, further swelling the already crowded population of the Gaol.
As poignant as the Famine stories, though, is the tale of the Easter Rising. Sinn Fein declared the political independence of the Republic of Ireland from Great Britain on Easter Sunday, 1916. The Irish rebels were headquartered in the old Post Office on O’Connell Street, which the British demolished by bombing the Post Office from their boats on the River Liffey. British troops overwhelmed the Republicans, and the leaders, both men and women, were taken to Kilmainham Gaol. After a short delay, 13 of the 14 main leaders were shot like soldiers in an interior courtyard of the prison. Not a single window of the prison looks in on that courtyard, and when the other prisoners asked in the morning what the firing had been, they were told that it was just guards shooting at snipers on the street outside. The fourteenth was shot a few days later because gangrene had developed in his wounds from the fighting, and he was being treated in a hospital. Too weak to use crutches, the British transported him on a stretcher from the hospital to the jail, where he had to be set on a chair to be shot, not standing or genuflecting like the other 13, since he could not support himself upright. That cruelty saved the lives of about 80 other Republicans, as King George himself was embarrassed at this treatment of the rebel Republican at British hands, and the sentences of the remaining 80 were commuted to life imprisonment. Most did not ultimately end up serving out a life sentence, however, because of a general repeal of sentences for British political prisoners about eight years later.
These men were soldiers for Ireland, but they were not military men by training. They were barristers, they were teachers, they were poets, they were artists, they were dreamers. Dublin initially disdained the rebels, viewing their act as reckless and desperate, but after learning of the prisoners’ maltreatment, held them to be heroes.
One of the leaders, Joseph Plunkett, was permitted to marry his sweetheart, Grace Gifford, in Kilmainham Gaol Chapel the night before his execution. She was led into the prison chapel, where she was permitted to exchange the vows of matrimony with Joseph before a Catholic priest, and then she was sent out and not permitted to speak to her new husband. After being sent home, she was awoken in the middle of the night and told to go back to the Gaol because she was to be allowed ten minutes’ conversation with Joseph, which she enjoyed in front of several British soldiers counting down the minutes aloud in front of them. Grace herself was later imprisoned in the Gaol for political transgressions.
Eamon de Valera was spared execution because he was born in Brooklyn, New York and held an American passport. In the middle of the Great War, the British thought it unwise to execute an American national while attempting to persuade America to join them in the War. Ironically, while British soldiers were being slaughtered across Europe for the sake of the desire for freedom of ethnic groups in Eastern Europe who thought that they deserved their nationhood and their sovereignty, British soldiers slaughtered the ethnic group in their own backyard who had been hungering for freedom, nationhood, and sovereignty for decades. The flag of the Republic of Ireland now flies in that interior courtyard where the Republican freedom fighters were shot, the tricolour of Irish nationalism and British unionism joined by the white band of peace.
