Ireland: The Gaeltacht
[excerpted from, Latin America & Anglo: Stories across Cultures ?2023]
Bíonn siúlach scéalach. Travelers have tales to tell. [Irish proverb]
A month in Galway. What’s not to love? I’ve been to the Emerald Isle, properly known as éire, on several occasions, my first visit in December 2006 demonstrating to me just how it got its green reputation: perpetual mist.
I spent the month of August 2016 in Galway, on the heels of a month in Reykjavik just to its north – a blissful summer indeed. That also meant … for a month in Iceland, I couldn't sleep, as I reveled in the Land of the Midnight Sun. This month, while sleeping deeply in dark nights ... I didn’t so often see the sun during daytime.
My own heritage is Celtic – Welsh, and Cornish, with a few distant Irish ancestors in the mix. I’ve a decades-long interest in Celtic culture, while my first visit to Ireland had introduced me to Dublin, Cork, West Bantry, and Galway … and pub life, music, poetry, storytelling, and Guinness. Among other cultural niceties.
In this extended stay, I was in search of the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking regions of the country, keepers of tradition (some of which are also in the southwest). What’s more: it was the centennial of the 1916 rebellion for independence, and my final week would be in Dublin – for Heritage Week and a host of events.
A social media post on day 1: First ‘dinner’ a picnic – of buttermilk soda bread and a mature Irish cheddar, while sitting alongside the River Corrib ... a man nearby singing a folk song for his 2 mates ... surrounded by old stone buildings and small boats, a large flock of swans and even a swimming seal, all under a dramatic sky. Yes – must be Galway.
Evidence, all along River Corrib and its canals, of Galway’s mill town past. My ‘hometown paper’, The New York Times, had recently called Galway "Ireland's most charming city."
The swell foams where they float and crawl, / A catherine-wheel of arm and hand; / Each head bobs curtly as a football. / The yelps are faint here on the strand. / No milk-limbed Venus ever rose / Miraculous on this western shore. / A pirate queen in battle clothes / Is our sterner myth. The breakers pour / Themselves into themselves, the years / Shuttle through space invisibly. / Where crests unfurl like creamy beer / the queen's clothes melt into the sea / And generations sighing in / The salt suds where the wave has crashed / Labour in fear of flesh and sin / For the time has been accomplished / As through the shallows in swimsuits, / Bare-legged, smooth-shouldered and long-backed, / they wade ashore with skips and shouts. / So Venus comes, matter-of-fact. [Seamus Heaney, Girls Bathing, Galway, 1965; from Door into the Dark, published in 1969.]
While Galway City itself is simply delicious, to truly touch the Gaeltacht one goes to the Aran Islands, and up into Connemara.
The most delightful coincidence: I was there at the time of the annual Connemara Pony Show. (And in a quirky collision of my worlds: representatives from South Korea were there, my longtime former home, in a bid to buy Connemara pony stock in order to interbreed them with Korea’s own indigenous equine.)
Connemara Pony Show & Festival, in its 93rd year, in Clifden. Glorious. Competitions at the Pony Show included best-dressed woman and man, best dancers (traditional Irish), best baked goods, best homegrown vegetables, all with charm galore. A street fair in the middle of town complemented the Pony Show. Two mares were shown with their colts alongside, presumably to keep both calm – the colts were not being shown – or maybe to prepare the colts for showing next year?
Heard at the Pony Show: [4-year old boy to his 12-year old sister, gleam in his eye] “When I get my donkey, I’m going to name him ‘Bad’.” [One boy to another, upon hearing a rapid-fire sound] “Hey, fireworks!” “Nah,” replied his mate, “that’s just the Irish dancin’.”
I made several visits to various tiny towns throughout the peninsula – Oughterard, An Spiedal, Roundstone Village. Low stone walls, small cottages, sheep dotting the hills, tiny town centers with their little privately owned shops, always a centralized café wherein one catches up on the local gossip, all charming and reminiscent of an earlier era. Irish stone walls appear even in Galway suburbs, such as Renmore, on seaside farms and modern homes alike.
And then: off to Inis Mor (Inishmor), largest of the 3 Aran Islands, with numerous heritage sites and a living tradition. Naturally, once landed I set off walking, as one does, eyes and ears and senses wide open. Though ‘stepping back in time’ may seem cliché, it fits nowhere more aptly than these islands; despite their touristic element (especially Inis Mor), they are far removed from life as we know it. Small cottages, stone fences, lots of wind-swept land, few amenities, donkeys and goats and sheep – all as one might expect, and Irish language first.
In a new scheme published in just June of this year (2023), the Irish government offers cash to Galway residents willing to relocate to these islands (and another 17 nearby for a total of 20), off the country’s western coast and far-flung into the Atlantic. Apparently, the population is waning, the islands too challenging for year-round living. A local judge travels to Inis Mor just 3 times a year to hear cases of all 3 islands, which gives one a sense of how far into the mists of the Otherworld they are.
Over to another island, not one of the Aran: Inis Bo Finne (Inishbofin), off the Connemara coast. Quite similar to Inis Mor (though far smaller), its heritage museum in a tiny stone house the lifelong collection of one individual, a true labor of love. Sweet, so sweet. (Yet, year-round living would perhaps be mind-numbingly dull today.)
Near the mainland ferry dock in Cleggan was Letterfrak, site of the infamous St Joseph’s Industrial School (closed in 1974) ... where 147 children died and countless suffered severe physical and sexual abuse and gross neglect, recently revealed. In one case, 4 brothers died in 2-year increments. The surrounding hills are dotted with the graves of these children. Not all cultural stories are pretty. But all are important – in some cases, to ensure that history is not allowed to repeat itself.
With my BPW sisters, dinner for 20 … and later in the month, brunch with 3 members – following a 12k early Sunday morning trek. Many good advancements for women of late; Ireland now ranks 7th in the EU for the status of its women, 11th in the world (per 2023 Global Gender Gap Report of WEF, down from 9th in 2022). At Galway City Museum, to my delight, I found a special exhibit commemorating remarkable women of Ireland.
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Galway Cathedral is found in the center of town. My BPW colleagues informed me, however, that Catholicism in Ireland is recently and now swiftly on the decline. ‘Equality Emerging ~ The People’, sculpture of a woman emerging from a flat stone surface, is installed across from the cathedral – an apt if unintentional metaphor, I thought.
Galway Pride occurred during my stay, with rainbow flags everywhere. An Irish-born female member of a breakaway Catholic group, which welcomes female and lesbian priests, was to preside over a religious service in Dublin. Brave woman. Declining Catholicism.
A seaside children’s park stands as a memorial to local child Celia Griffin and all children who died in Ireland’s Great Famine of the 19th century. The country’s population declined from 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.6 million just a decade later, and in 1891 only 4.7 million remained. While many died, many more emigrated; between 1820 and 1930, 4.5 million Irish arrived in the US, my homeland. (In New York, second only to Boston, we are well familiar with Irish culture as a result.)
In a post to social media: Beautifully sunny day in Galway, a rarity. You see, autumn begins in Ireland on 01 August, at Lughnasa. [Photo of a large tree, leaves already half-changed.] Second sunny day in a row – what the Irish call “summer” – and a veritable heat wave at 25c. Rain tomorrow, back to 18c. Summer over.
Inebriated man with his mates on the street, to me: “Hey, love, when ya goin’ ta marry me?” I sang out: “Tomorrow!” [which never comes, of course.] “When shall I pick you up?” he inquired, my reply only a chuckle. “Cheeky!” he laughed.
What’s not to love, in a culture that places a high value on storytelling, music, literature, poetry? – my long-term love affair with Ireland (though it could be said, I do have several other such loves...).
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My final week in Dublin as mentioned - 3rd time in the capital, though it had been a few years, yet very quickly I remembered just how much I love the city. What’s more: it was Heritage Week all across Ireland, and I would be going to events every day.
My accommodation was a room in a Gregorian (18th century) mansion, very British – as Dublin was, then (central point of ‘the Pale’ and all that), undergoing loving restoration by the young – French – couple now its owners. Worlds collide. Prior to their ownership, it had been converted into a school, its below-ground kitchen the cafeteria. Fabulous.
This being Heritage Week, my first stop was naturally the National Library for a photo exhibit of the 1916 Uprising. Ireland gained its independence by 1921; there are many memorials to those who fought in the 1916 resistance that is often cited as the true beginning of the independence movement. The National History and Decorative Arts Museum, in a former military barracks, held a wonderfully comprehensive exhibition on the Easter Sunday revolt.
This was followed by a talk at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on how, in 1916, 3 prominent women, the Cooney sisters Anne, Lily, and Eileen, were influential in the independence movement. Inghínidhe na héireann (Daughters of Ireland) had been founded in 1900 and was both feminist and nationalist; 7 years later, the Sinn Féin political party began admitting women (even though women’s right to vote hadn’t yet been achieved), while in another 4 years, the Irish Women’s Workers Union was founded, as existing trade unions still excluded women. By 1914 Cumann na mBan, an Irish republican women's paramilitary organization, had replaced Inghínidhe na héireann, and by the time of the Uprising, there were plenty of women revolutionaries alongside the men.
I like to think I’d have joined them.
Irish Museum of Modern Art. Sculptures on the bank of the Liffey in remembrance of victims to the Great Famine. Dublin City Gallery, in the beautiful and historic Charlemont House. Dublin Writers Museum. National Museum. National Gallery. Trinity College. All included exhibitions and events related to Heritage Week and those all-important 1916 events, and I immersed myself.
Most significantly, however, was a visit to the city’s main post office, where that 1916 Easter Week Rising began. Bullet holes can still be seen in its columns. One stands in the shadow of history there. And, in all things weird and wonderful, a Lego replica of the 1916 Rising was on display.
Daytrip to beyond-charming Howth, small seaside village on Dublin’s outskirts, to meet up with BPW members there for hiking, seafood, boats, and seals.
In a grand finale, I spent my last day touring several restored Georgian homes in Merrion Square and viewing relevant exhibitions at the Irish Traditional Music Archive, Royal Society of Antiquaries, and Irish Architectural Archive. Then I took in the annual People’s Photography Exhibit at St Stephen’s Green, and finally, an organ recital at St Patrick’s (one of the world’s finest organs) – complete with projection on a large screen of the organ and organist in action. Not all related to the Uprising, but surely to Dublin heritage, and Irish culture.
And in all these exhibitions and events, what did I learn? I already knew well the facts of the Easter Uprising of 1916, but I learned beyond any doubt what high value the Irish place on this event. Bloody as it was, resulting in nearly 500 deaths, countless wounds, imprisonments, executions, and the unconditional surrender of the revolutionaries, it nevertheless began a movement for freedom that could not be stopped.
éirinn go Brách. Ireland forever.