Ireland

Good fences make good neighbors

August 22, 2019

Belfast, Northern Ireland

Your neighbor is your other self dwelling behind a wall. Khalil Gibran

Sometimes people just can’t get along. Sometimes divorce is unavoidable. Sometimes it’s necessary to build fences and walls to keep human beings from killing or harming each other. And sometimes the time is right to remove such barriers and allow folks to come together when they are ready to do so.

The always interesting question of appropriate boundaries between individuals and between groups of people occurred to me yesterday as I walked along the “peace walls” of Belfast. These fences and walls, some of which date back to 1969, were built during the violence of the “Troubles” of 1968 – 1998 to separate warring Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, Derry, and other Northern Irish towns and cities. But since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 officially ended the Troubles (thanks in large part to President Bill Clinton and Senator George Mitchell), the violence between Protestants and Catholics has greatly subsided, and some of these walls built to keep peace through separation have been dismantled.

The local government of Northern Ireland has vowed to remove the last of these walls by 2023. But according to our tour guide Lynn, the majority of both Catholics and Protestants in these adjacent working class neighborhoods want to keep the walls in place, because they don’t trust each other to refrain from violence. They feel safe and secure in their homes and neighborhoods because they feel protected from each other.

Northern Ireland has been transformed by the 1998 peace agreement. The last time I was in this British province, in 1986, Belfast and Derry were patrolled by armed British soldiers, and the tension and fear in the air were palpable. But now the soldiers, their Land Rovers, the barbed wire, and the checkpoints are long gone, and tourism is booming. Cruise ships now regularly dock in Belfast, and people come to see the Titanic museum, various film locations of the Game of Thrones TV series, and the murals and graffiti that decorate or deface the peace walls. Northern Ireland, like the rest of Ireland, is thriving.

Brexit could do serious short term damage to the economy of Ireland, both in the British-ruled north and in the independent Irish Republic in the south. But beyond the immediate social, political, and economic trends, something positive is happening on this island. The people here seem to be evolving toward a more tolerant, more internationalist, more conscious world view. So even though tribalism is alive and well in Northern Ireland (nationalist Catholics vs unionist Protestants), the peace and prosperity that the Northern Irish have enjoyed for the last 21 years have convinced most people here that the violent extremists on both sides must not be allowed to turn back the clock and bring back the bad old days.

In 1968, when I was 16 years old, I wrote a 10 page paper about Ireland for my Modern European History class. Entitled “On the Possibility of the Reunification of Ireland,” that paper concluded that Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would one day be reunited because of demographic change. That is, although Protestants outnumbered Catholics by a two to one ratio in 1968, Catholics had (and still have) a higher birth rate than Protestants, so eventually Catholics would outnumber Protestants in the north as they already did in the south. And that high school prediction of mine is about to come true, as Catholics are now approximately 50% of the population of Northern Ireland. Part of the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 stipulates that if and when a majority of the people of Northern Ireland vote to leave the United Kingdom and unite with the Republic of Ireland in the south, the UK will not stand in the way of the will of the Irish people.

The Irish here in the north are not quite ready to tear down all the walls that divide them. But they are making good progress in that direction. For now I think it best to leave the peace walls in place until such time as the folks in those neighborhoods feel safe and secure enough to voluntarily remove them.

Boundaries, borders, fences, and walls between people are necessary – until they are obsolete. And I hope that I live long enough to see the Northern Irish transcend their limited loyalties in favor of more inclusive identities. One of these days I might even try to do the same thing myself.

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.

A terrible beauty is born

August 7, 2019

Dublin, Ireland

When is it worth dying for Ireland, or the United States, or any country?

I’ve been pondering that question here in Bailé Atha Cliath (Irish: The City on the River), also known as Dublin. Everywhere in the Irish capital there are reminders of the sacrifices made by patriots as they resisted invasions by Vikings, Anglo Normans, and ultimately, British colonialists. Street names, statues, songs, exhibits, and museums celebrate the heroes of the Easter 1916 Rising that eventually led to a modicum of independence in 1922, and greater autonomy in 1949 with the establishment of the Irish Republic.

While a quarter of a million Irish soldiers were fighting for the British army against Germany in World War I, a small group of Irish poets and philosophers led a band of 1600 rebels in Dublin in attempting to overthrow 700 years of British colonial rule. Hundreds of people were killed, half of them civilians, as British cannons and machine guns slaughtered Dubliners and crushed the rebellion. At first, many locals blamed the rebels for the death and destruction, and even nationalist poet W.B. Yeats questioned the futility of the attempted revolution, asking in his poem Easter 1916: “Was it needless death after all?” Speaking of the movement’s leaders, he went on to say in the same poem, “We know their dream; enough to know they dreamed and are dead.”

But when the British government made the mistake of executing 14 rebel leaders by firing squad, Irish public opinion changed, and Yeats honored four of the leaders by naming them in his poem: “MacDonough and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse, now and in time to be, wherever green is worn, are changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.”

The death and destruction were the “terrible” price that the rebels and civilians had to pay, but the “beauty” was in the ultimate result of political freedom from oppression of the Irish nation. In the words of songwriter Tommy Makem in his song Freedom’s Sons, “A poet’s dream had sparked a flame. A raging fire it soon became. And from that fire of destiny, there rose a nation proud and free.”

Ireland consistently ranks among the most patriotic of nations, according to the International Social Survey Program, probably because they had to earn their freedom through centuries of battles and uprisings against overwhelming odds. The United States also ranks highly for patriotism in that same survey, probably for the same reason: a bloody revolution by underdog colonies against a mighty empire.

But was it necessary for the Irish and the Americans to use violence to achieve their ends? George Washington certainly felt so, as did the colonists who stood up to the British at Lexington, Concord, Boston, and elsewhere. And the martyrs who died violently in Dublin hoped, correctly as it turned out, that their deaths would inspire their people to rise up and “trade their chains for guns,” as Tommy Makem sang in Freedom’s Sons.

Yet nonviolence might have accomplished the same goals. Britain eventually allowed Canada, India, and other colonies to achieve their independence peacefully. In Ireland’s case, Winston Churchill was an early supporter of Irish independence, and the British government was planning to allow some form of Home Rule for Ireland until they were distracted y the outbreak of World War I. But American and Irish independence were achieved sooner by bloodshed than they would have been if those colonies had waited for England to see the light. And sometimes you just have to stand up to bullies, as we and the rest of the world found out in World War II when appeasement failed to deter Hitler and violent self defense became necessary.

As a hot-headed young man in 1776 or 1916, I might have picked up a gun and joined the revolts. Would I be willing to die for my country now? I doubt it. I’d have to be convinced that there was no alternative, and that the cause was just and righteous. Even then, as I near the end of my life, I don’t feel that I’d be willing to kill anybody for the cause of nationalism or for any other cause. I do appreciate the sacrifices made by those who died for Irish and American freedom. But as Yeats said in Easter 1916, “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” I’m not willing to turn my heart into stone.

I’m pleased to report that Ireland is prospering both culturally and economically. Clearly they are benefiting from the fruits of their long struggle for freedom. But I hope they never again have to give birth to a terrible beauty.

Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood

July 31, 2019

Dublin, Ireland

I’m not entirely sure what the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats meant by the above line when he wrote it in his 1931 poem Coole Park and Ballylee. But here and now in the Irish capital, it feels like a great metaphor for this nation in contemporary times.

Dublin has changed dramatically since last I was here in 1986. At that time, the city was a charming European backwater, the provincial capital of a country mired in economic doldrums with a high unemployment rate. It was also the whitest big city that I’ve ever seen. Almost everyone was white, and almost everyone was either a local or a tourist. There were no immigrants because there were no jobs to be had; in fact, Irish people had been emigrating to the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere for generations in order to find work. The vast majority of the buildings were brick or stone structures leftover from British colonial rule.

When I arrived here three days ago, I was immediately struck by the cosmopolitan appearance of the city. Instead of the one black man that I saw in 1986, I observed scores of Africans, numerous Asian faces, and a number of women wearing the Muslim hijab. I heard a wide variety of languages, including Spanish, Polish, French, Arabic, and Asian and African tongues. Modern buildings abound, with construction cranes everywhere, adding economic vitality to the old Georgian and Victorian architecture.

What happened?

The short answer is that Ireland opened to the world. It opened to change.

For centuries Ireland had been dominated by London and Rome. Its British colonial masters had kept the island isolated from the rest of the world, and the Roman Catholic Church had kept the people captive to religious dogma and control. Even after independence from Britain was achieved in 1922, it took time for the Irish psyche to break free from the bonds of dependence upon their former overlords. But joining the European Union broadened Irish horizons both economically and psychologically, as did the decision, circa 1990, to invite foreign investment on a large scale with significant tax breaks.

The result? An economic boom, known as the Celtic Tiger, that lasted from about 1990 to 2008, until the global recession burst the local real estate bubble and temporarily wrecked the economy. Now the economy is growing rapidly again, and is once more attracting temporary workers and permanent immigrants from all over the world. Meanwhile, major scandals involving pedophile priests and abusive nuns have rocked the Catholic Church and badly damaged its standing in this former bastion of Catholicism, leading to increasing secularization, gay rights, and abortion rights.

But the impending departure of Britain from the European Union, known as Brexit, could deal a serious blow to the Irish economy. Britain is still a major Irish trading partner, and if the British economy suffers as expected from leaving the European common market, that would have significant repercussions for Irish exports to Britain.

Great change, both economic and social, has come to this country in the last 33 years. For now, the Emerald Isle is thriving. Prosperity, materialism, and demographic diversity have enriched the island and its culture. But beneath the graceful Irish swan is a darkening flood of economic uncertainty, climate change, tribalism, and world turmoil.

The time may come when the swan will have to find another river.