The Invisible People

August 12, 2019

Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland

Tonight in this colorfully painted little coastal town there’s a ghost walking tour. It’s reputed to be more about comedy than ghosts, so I think I’ll skip it. I’m more interested in real ghosts.

Ireland is a haunted country. I’m not necessarily talking about Halloween-style ghosts, misty white-robed apparitions floating about and spooking humans, though this island may have its share of those beings for all I know.

Rather, I’m referring to a nation haunted by its memory and its imagination. A nation that bears the scars of history, the scars of An Gorta Mor (The Great Famine) of the 1840’s, the scars of political violence inflicted upon it by a foreign occupation and its aftermath. And a culture that for centuries has imagined supernatural forces at work in its landscape.

In the last couple weeks I’ve been moved by two outdoor sculptures by renowned Irish artist Rowan Gillespie. “Famine” is a group of several bronze figures next to the River Liffey in Dublin. The emaciated, anguished, and despairing figures dressed in rags commemorate a 100 mile walk by 1,490 starving people in 1847 from County Roscommon to Dublin to get aboard ships bound for Canada. “Proclamation” is located opposite the infamous Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. Its 14 blindfolded, bullet-ridden bronze figures stand in a circle around a metal table inscribed with the words of the 1916 proclamation of Irish independence. The sculpture honors the 14 rebel leaders of the Easter Rising who were shot to death by British soldiers in the jail across the road. The circle of figures is also reminiscent of ancient stone circles found in various parts of Ireland, circles thought by some to have special power.

The ghosts of the famine victims, the executed rebel leaders, and other heroes (Daniel O’Connell, Michael Collins, Charles Stewart Parnell, Roger Casement, et al) occupy a prominent place in the collective Irish psyche. In Dublin’s beautiful Glasnevin Cemetery, where several of the political chiefs are buried, the number of dead interred there is about 1.5 million, approximately triple the population of living Dubliners. Many graves there are marked by Celtic crosses, which are crosses with pagan circles representing the sun and the moon superimposed upon them. Ireland may be a Christian country, but pagan beliefs in nature, magic, and fairies lie not far beneath the surface of the conscious national mind.

The Tuatha de Danaan (people of the goddess Danu) are said to be an immortal race of supernatural beings, beautiful to look upon: tall, with red or golden hair, blue or green eyes, and pale skin. They are the guardians of Tir na Nog, the Land of Eternal Youth, where time stands still. It is sometimes said that these beings later became the Good People, also known as the Gentry, better known to us as the Fairy People.

When I was last in Ireland in 1986, Irish currency (before the Euro) featured Maeve, Queen of the Fairies, on the one pound note. Can you imagine the American dollar bill having a fairy on it? Neither can I. But it was no problem for the Irish.

W.B. Yeats, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, believed in magic and the occult, and wrote about Irish myths and fairies in his poetry. One famous poem, “The Stolen Child,” includes this refrain: “Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild, with a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

Tomorrow my tour group is headed to the west coast, but we’re stopping along the way in Kenmare, County Kerry, to visit a prehistoric stone circle and the sacred hawthorn tree next to it that, like all hawthorn trees in Ireland, is said to be a meeting place for fairies. Even the Irish government has been forced by public opinion to reroute roads in order to avoid cutting down fairy trees. Our tour guide has given each of us a card upon which to write a wish, a card that we will then tie to the hawthorn tree. I haven’t yet decided what to wish for. But I’m inclined to summon all the ghosts of the Emerald Isle, both real and imagined, and to call upon those invisible people to help heal this magical green island in the deep blue sea.