Month: October 2022

When searching for Irish roots, Irish luck helps.

We left Ireland on October 14, having spent 3½ week there, including 4 days in Belfast, Northern Ireland (part of the U.K.). For much of that time, I traveled as a sideman as my wife and her brother pursued family roots. All 4 of their grandparents were born in Ireland and emigrated, ending up in the U.S. But Kathleen and her brother Kevin wanted to dig further along the family tree, and their genealogical search bore tremendous fruits. They met an Irishman who is a third cousin and whom, until only a few months earlier, they knew nothing about. With the enthusiastic support of newly acquainted relative Maurice Daly, a retired school principal who lives outside of Dublin, we visited a farm in the vicinity of the parish of Aghadoe in Country Kerry where Kevin’s and Kathleen’s great-grandfather and Maurice’s great-grandfather, the brothers Cronin, had lived and worked. We walked the grounds of an old cemetery and, with Maurice’s guidance, found the Cronins’ graves.

Our travels through Western Ireland — County Kerry and County Sligo, in particular — were genealogical searches. Kathleen and her brother Kevin, who joined Kathleen and me for most of our Ireland journey, were making contact for the first time in their lives with distant relatives on both their mother’s and father’s sides. This farm in Aghadoe/Nunstown is where their grandfather, John Cronin, grew up. They could not learn who was living there now. No one but a dog and a flock of sheep seemed to be at home when we stopped in.
Kathleen and Maurice Daly, who is her cousin (3rd cousin, to be exact) and whom she had never met until a few days before this photo was taken (and knew nothing about until a few months before that) reflect on the splendor of a view across Lough Leane, to the McGillicuddy Reeks, Ireland’s highest mountains.

Near the parish of Glenbeigh, on the Iveragh Peninsula farther west in Kerry, something remarkable happened. Kathleen and Kevin knew that their maternal grandmother, Delia Sullivan, had left Glenbeigh at age 15, traveling alone to make a new life in America, where she would eventually meet and marry John Cronin. Delia moved out a few years after her father, John Sullivan, had died and after her mother had remarried and moved the family to a second home. Mossy, as Maurice is known, drove Kevin and Kathleen to Glenbeigh hoping to locate some remnant of their grandmother’s life. They stopped at a coffee shop and, on a whim, Maurice engaged a young woman working the check-out: Do you know any old-timers in town who could remember some of the families who lived here back when?

“My grandfather,” the woman said right off. Mossy wrote down the phone number, stepped outside the shop, and called him. The conversation yielded little, so Mossy and his charges drove off for the local cemetery to see what it could tell them. On the way they went down a wrong street and Mossy executed a U-turn using an adjacent driveway. Just as he began to back away, a man drove up who happened to live in that house. A conversation began. The man turned out to be the son-in-law of the cashier’s grandfather. He insisted now that Mossy call his father-in-law again, so Mossy did. The grandfather was hiking way up in the hills and he invited everyone to come up. No, that’s not going to happen, said Mossy, who nevertheless pressed on, asking the man if he knew of any other old-timer in the community. Yes, the grandfather said: Talk to John Barton.

Maurice “Mossy” Daly, Kevin McCoy (unseen, w/ phone/camera) and John Barton, an old-timer from the area whom they had only just met, are shown near Glenbeigh on property to where Kevin’s grandmother, Delia Cronin, and her family moved after her mother remarried and not long before Delia emigrated alone to America. (Kathleen McCoy photo)

Armed with an address, Mossy and the others were soon sitting in the living room of John Barton and his wife, giving him the names and other information they had. Barton’s interest spiked. He told of a man named Sullivan who was known in these parts as “The Babe.” Now Kevin McCoy lit up: A distant relative had recently told him that his and Kathleen’s great-grandfather, John Sullivan, was known as The Babe. With this confirmation, Barton told them he knew exactly where John Sullivan and his family lived.

On a hillside commanding a view across a broad valley, they were soon gazing at the ruins of the Sullivan family home and, no more than 100 yards away along the same road, at the gender-segregated two-room schoolhouse Delia had attended, also in ruins. Dense vegetation had overtaken the fallen stone and concrete walls and grown through the empty doors and windows, and daylight poured through dilapidated roofs. Though it was all so far gone, what was left of the two buildings brought their meaning home for Kathleen and her brother, who had never expected to get so close to their own beginnings.

This building is what’s left of Delia Cronin’s schoolhouse near Glenbeigh. Her family’s first home is in no better condition, given over to the ever-encroaching vegetation.

The story continued a week later, but on the other side of the family, that of Owen McCoy, Kathleen’s and Kevin’s father. Through his studies and with the help of Mossy’s research skills, Kevin had located and began communication with distant relatives of his grandfather, Owen’s father, in the village of Gurteen in County Sligo. By the time we arrived, the resident McCoys were waiting for Kevin to show up. As we drove down a hill approaching the house, the eldest, Gerry McCoy, was standing in the road waiting for us. After initial introductions, Gerry and several others — who began to arrive in ones and twos and seemingly did not stop coming — were sitting around a table enjoying tea, small sandwiches, homemade soup, cookies and Irish affability. Kevin produced his folder of family records and other documents and — his hands shaking with the emotion of the moment — told everybody what the papers showed: A few people long ago had picked up their lives in the old country and got themselves to Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They lived through times bad and good. Their descendants are still going strong way up in Alaska. And the people sitting around the table were connected to all of them.

Kevin McCoy explains to his newly encountered family members from the community of Gurteen, County Sligo, in northwest Ireland, the family relationships he has uncovered while doing genealogical research into his father’s Irish roots. Gerry McCoy, a distant cousin, sits opposite him.

Irish Stew

On September 24, towards the end of our first week in Ireland, we celebrated Kathleen’s 70th birthday with a fabulous dinner at the Panorama restaurant in the Hotel Europe outside the city of Killarney, County Kerry. Kathleen and I both had the Dingle Goat Cheese Ravioli, which was one of the most delicious restaurant dishes we’ve ever tasted. It came in a cheese “foam” with roast butternut squash, candied walnuts, pickled shallot, and crisp kale. Altogether four of us marked her birthday, including Kathleen’s brother, Kevin, and their Irish cousin Maurice, whom they met for the first time only 2 days earlier. At dinner we all 4 shared a bowl of buttered new potatoes (which were a creamy nirvana) and a bowl of mixed vegetables. The experience was off the charts. Out beyond the window is Lough (“Lake”) Leane.

The plot was thick. A German ship, the Aud, carrying weapons intended for Irish revolutionaries, was headed for the west coast of Ireland on the night of Good Friday, 1916, awaiting a signal. Four members of the Irish Volunteers were driving through Killorglin in County Kerry that night on their way to Cahirciveen to seize the wireless station at Valentia Island. According to the Irish Times, they intended to transmit “a series of false signals which would fool the [British] Royal Navy into believing that a German attack on Scottish naval bases was imminent. It was hoped that such a move would allow the Aud … to proceed unmolested through Irish waters.” ¶ But the car’s driver took a wrong turn and drove down a road that ended at this pier at the River Laune. Under pains of poor visibility because the car lacked a headlamp, driver Tommy McInerney saw too late that the vehicle was headed for the water. In it plunged. McInerney survived, but the others drowned, the first casualties of the Easter 1916 Rising. The Aud’s skipper scuttled the ship and its weaponry went down with it. The Irish Revolution was stillborn that Spring, and the Irish were forced to wait several more years before winning independence. ¶ At Ballykissane Pier is a monument to the martyrs. When we were there, I felt that the real monument was this very pier, a concrete and stone structure that I doubt has changed much in 106 years.

In late September I sat beside a statue of Irish poet Pádraic Ó Conaire in John F. Kennedy Memorial Park, Eyre Square, Galway. So much history and sadness seemed to come together in this image, in this park. JFK made a memorable journey through Ireland in June 1963, just 5 months before he was murdered. He gave a speech at this park attended by thousands (the Irish people loved it that one of their own had become the U.S. president). This statue of Pádraic Ó Conaire is a replica. The original is in the Galway City Museum where it was moved after vandals decapitated it in 1999. As I see it, this image of Ó Conaire, also known as Patrick O’Connor (he was a leader of the Irish language revival and wrote stories in Irish), shows him in a serious contemplation of sorrow, inspired by the book he’s reading. Not necessarily a sorrow regarding himself, but about the people he knew and wrote about it. Maybe that’s why the vandals attacked him: His inwardness, his ability to probe the sorrowful deep, to live with uncertainty, was too scary for the fools. Ó Conaire died in 1928 at about the age of 46.

I can’t look at this photo without seeing a vista from somewhere out west in America. But it’s Ireland, near the town of Glenbeigh on the Iveragh peninsula, County Kerry. What I saw from inside our rented car and at those times when we stepped out into the towns or villages of west Ireland seemed no more developed than the American Southwest as I first saw it 43 years ago.

Stone walls, ruins of ancient stone buildings and cows (also sheep, horses & hedgerows) are everywhere in the countryside of west Ireland where we toured in September. We saw similar pastures during our drive from Sligo to Belfast, but it was in County Kerry, County Clare, County Galway, and County Sligo where we did most of our driving. ¶ The ruins in this photo are of the Kilmacduagh monastery in County Galway. According to on-site displays, the monastery was founded by St. Colman Mac Dutch early in the 7th century. The abbey is said to be one of the finest collections of monastic buildings in the country (there are more ruins than seen here). The churches were plundered in the 13th century but the site remained the Bishopric until the 16th century. The modern diocese still bears the name of the early monastery. ¶ The Round Tower seen in the background dates from around the 12th century. It functioned as a place of refuge for the monks in case of attack. ¶ The tower is actually a leaning tower: it tilts 2 feet from the perpendicular. For comparison, the taller Leaning Tower of Pisa leans 12 feet 10 inches from the vertical.

Which visitors to west Ireland do not visit the Cliffs of Moher? We were no different. The Cliffs may be Ireland’s most popular attraction. Their formation and strata make them a distant cousin to Arizona’s Grand Canyon, though they’re not nearly as high. Ancient river flow dropped sediments that, at the bottom of the cliffs, are more than 300 million years old. ¶ Visible out in the North Atlantic Ocean in this video are the Aran Islands, another tourist draw (which drew us one day), and beyond them a hint of the shores of Galway Bay. Note the cows, which (along w/ sheep) are impossible to avoid in Ireland.

Innisfree: Isle of Peace

Lough Gill, not far from Sligo in County Sligo, Ireland, and the island Innisfree, written about in a famous poem by William Butler Yeats, who knew this country well.

Lough Gill is a freshwater lake near Sligo in west Ireland. The 5-mile-long lake, where people walk the nature trails through the surrounding woodlands, watch birds, and kayak on the water, is associated with a famous poem by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The lake is not the focus of the poem. Instead, the poet draws our attention to a little island, the one you see here, whose name is Innisfree. Yeats wrote meditatively and symbolically about that island in a famous poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

Yeats (1865-1939), who is buried in Drumcliff, 5 miles north of the town of Sligo, would spend summers in this region when he was a child and youth. If you travel through this country, as we did early this month, you’ll see a number of tributes to him, like the Yeats Country Hotel at Rosses Point, a little bit of land jutting into the sea where he and his family would vacation; a visually arresting statue of him (erected in 1989) in Sligo, a B&B named after him, and so on.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” was written in 1888 and first published in 1890.

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THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

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Yeats spoke about his inspiration for the poem in a moving and, for anyone interested in the creative process, fascinating way. The passage is almost as famous as the poem: “I had still the ambition,” he wrote, “formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of [Henry David] Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street [in London] very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem ‘Innisfree,’ my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.”

I first read Yeats’s poem in a course on modern poetry that I took in my final semester as an undergraduate a long time ago in The Bronx. The course was one of my most important learning experiences. I still have and still occasionally read my copy of the course text, Modern American and Modern British Poetry, an exhaustive anthology compiled by Louis Untermeyer and originally published in 1922 with later editions, including a revised, shorter edition published in 1955, which was the text we read. Until we began that course in mid-January 1969, I had never read anything by Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, and other poets.

My photo is of a photograph displayed in the Yeats Country Hotel at Rosses Point, outside the town of Sligo, County Sligo, Ireland. (Names of children and date and place of photo unavailable.)

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” was the first poem we read. After reading the poem aloud, our instructor, a classy Southerner with a tremendous passion for poetry and Shakespeare, opened the talk by placing Yeats’s poem into a broad cultural and political moment, the fin de siècle (“end of the century”). The term is often applied to the end of the 19th century and is taken to mean that Western culture (especially in France) was going through a period of lassitude, decadence, and decline. The professor pointed to the mood of the poem and in particular the first line: The speaker has been sitting or lying down and perhaps doing nothing more than thinking or dreaming, but nothing seriously worth mentioning. The poem doesn’t really start, doesn’t demand our attention, until he decides to get up and build his little Thoreauvian cabin, a refuge from the world, a place for solitude and contemplation but not for action in the social sense. He’ll be alone with the bees and the softly lapping water. He won’t engage with human institutions or his fellows.

How many people today feel exactly the same way as the poem’s speaker, who decides that the “bee-loud glade” and the song of the crickets and the “dropping slow” peace are all preferable to the ceaseless activity and madness of the cities and suburbs that we’re all trapped in? Many Alaskans, I’m sure, know exactly what I’m talking about.

By the way, I urge readers to listen to Yeats recite his own poem. I was much surprised when I first heard it. I never expected that Yeats’s “music” was so incantatory, although actually seeing his little island and knowing he was thinking about that place while walking around London makes me understand his poem more than I ever did.

Spirits of Galway

I love older well-designed, romantic pubs and restaurants, places with a human scale that above all are comfortable to the body and mind and pleasing to the eye. We stumbled on such a place one afternoon in the Latin Quarter of Galway. I managed to take this (jumpy) video of its interior — make that interiors, because this is a decorative warren of rooms and sub-rooms and little alcoves, an adult playset. And despite my penchant for the old, it’s been this way only since 1997 (but it looks old style). It consists of Malone’s Whiskey Bar, The Front Door, and a back gin bar (name forgotten) — all in all, 6 bars (not all shown) and assorted other hideaways on several floors. The whole of it was developed out of the lower floors of 3 separate houses. I was told that when they began, they didn’t have a final vision of what it would look like, just built one room first and then poked a hole in a wall and started making another, and so on. This is the end result.

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This street is Bowling Green in Galway. On the other side of St. Nicholas’s Church in the distance is The Latin Quarter. In the house on the right (with the oval plaque) there once lived one of the most famous muses in all literature: Nora Barnacle, who became the lover, mother of his two children and eventually wife of the Irish author James Joyce. Nora would move out of Galway to become a chambermaid in Dublin, which is where Joyce met her. To judge by the letters they wrote each other when they were apart for some time, Jim and Nora enjoyed as steamily erotic a relationship as any man & woman may enjoy. (I really do dare you to read those letters.) This house, which remained in Nora’s family for many years after she left, is exceptionally modest, perhaps even humble. ¶ Galway’s Latin Quarter is an exciting district of pubs, Irish music, restaurants, shops, etc. When we were there a few weeks ago (Sept. 27 to Oct. 1), I was struck by how the Irish girls and young women dressed to show a lot of skin, even though evening temperatures were in the 40s. And then I thought … How did Nora Barnacle (b. 1884) dress as a teenager and young adult in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Ireland then was more repressive than it is today, so she was probably modest, well covered up. But maybe that’s why she moved to Dublin, the big Irish city. ¶ Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was a bit of a wit (a trait he passed on to his son). When he learned that Jim’s girl was named Barnacle, he quipped, “Well, she’ll never leave him.”

Tower of Literary Power

The James Joyce Museum (left) is an addition to the 1804 Martello Tower at Sandycove, located above the strand about 14km (8.6 miles) southeast of the Dublin city center.

Among my personal ambitions for this journey was to learn more about the Irish author James Joyce and to visit Dublin locations associated with him. It wouldn’t be my first time doing that. Kathleen and I came to Dublin for a few days in early January 1987 so she could research her Irish ancestry in order to obtain an Irish passport. I don’t exactly understand the arrangement whereby Ireland and the U.S. allow for dual citizenship between them, but Kathleen succeeded and eventually obtained Irish citizenship and the passport (her two brothers and our daughter likewise now enjoy that benefit). While visiting the repository of Irish vital statistics with her, I did a bit of research myself and came away with a photocopy of the small strip of paper that was the birth certificate of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Feb . 2, 1882).

During that visit 35 years ago, a Dublin cousin of Kathleen’s drove us to two sites linked to Joyce: one of the many places his family lived (their finances, which started out strong, grew weaker over time and they moved often), as well as the Martello Tower in Sandycove, south of the city along the shore of Dublin Bay. The tower is one of the best-known Joycean attractions — a large round stone fortification built in 1804 as one in a string of more than two dozen such towers that formed a defensive line stretching along the bay and to its north and south (the British were concerned that Napoleon might set up a base in eastern Ireland from which to attack them across the Irish Sea). The Martello Tower at Sandycove, No. 11, was also the place where Joyce not only lived for a brief spell, but where he sets the opening scenes of his best-known work, the novel “Ulysses.” Seeing the tower in the dark that evening 35 years ago, I didn’t know its full history or what to make of it. I don’t remember being impressed.

Recently, however, in preparation for this longer visit to Dublin, I learned that a museum of Joyce artifacts, letters, and the like is attached to the tower (has been since the 1960s), and it welcomes visitors, asking only for donations. So on the second day of our visit to Ireland, September 21, we took the DART train south to a Dublin suburb, walked less than a mile along a beautiful seashore and this time got to see the tower from the inside.

In the 1804 design of the Martello towers, a large cannon supported by a bulky wooden scaffold could rotate 360 degrees on the inner & outer rails visible here. Its range was about a mile. The coast of Dublin Bay was dotted with a couple dozen of the Martello Towers and effectively threatened any vessel coming within a mile of the shore. We were told that no Dublin Martello cannon was ever fired against an enemy. ¶ Here’s one of the reasons I think this structure is worth knowing about: The opening you see in the wall is the stairhead referred to in the first sentence of Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” which reads: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Another reason for wanting to learn more about this tower is what occurred inside it 100 years after it was erected. (See below.)

The museum, for those who want to know about Joyce, is excellent if small. It owns many priceless items, including a guitar he once played, his steamer trunk, a tie he gifted to the playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, letters written by and to him, drawings of him, and many other artifacts, including Joyce’s death mask (photo below). The tower is fascinating, particularly the round interior room where Joyce’s friend, Oliver St. John Gogarty, invited him to live in late summer 1904. The attached photos tell more of the Joyce relationship with the tower, including what is alleged to have happened there one night not long after Joyce moved in.

The place beneath the striped robe, where the brown valise lies, is where Joyce spent the first of his six nights in the tower in September 1904, at the invitation of a friend and fellow writer, Oliver St. John Gogarty, who had secured a lease and turned this room into an apartment. When a third man, Samuel Chenevix Trench, joined them, Joyce gave up his spot to Trench and slept where the bed in the photo is presently situated. In the caption for the next photo I recount what allegedly happened a few nights later. (Incidentally, none of the furnishings & objects in the “living quarters” of the tower are original but rather period pieces suggestive of past usage.
As a writer of fiction, Joyce was noted for his hyper-realism and for writing real people and real locations into his narratives. In “Ulysses,” his friend Gogarty becomes Buck Mulligan, Trench is Haines, and Joyce himself is Stephen Daedalus. The incident that’s alleged to have happened on the sixth night of Joyce’s stay at the No. 11 Martello tower (it is not fully told in the book) is that Trench awoke from a nightmare in which he was menaced by a black panther. He reached for his handgun and started firing. Gogarty grabbed the gun and fired at “all the tinware of the tower,” as Gogarty, in a later memoir, would call the pots & pans on the shelf above Joyce’s bed. Joyce was startled, left the tower, and several weeks later left Ireland with his paramour, Nora Barnacle. Joyce and Nora would never return intending to live together in Ireland and instead would take up residence first in Trieste, then in other cities, Zurich and Paris primarily, where he wrote his stories and novels.
A tie that Joyce owned and later gave as a gift to Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright and novelist who was a admirer of Joyce, to the point that he became the elder writer’s secretary. Beckett gave the tie to the Joyce Museum at Sandycove.
ONE OF TWO PLASTER CASTS TAKEN FROM THE FACE OF THE BODY OF JAMES JOYCE, SHORTLY AFTER HIS DEATH IN ZÜRICH ON THE 13TH OF JANUARY 1941 … (Caption by James Joyce Tower & Museum, Sandycove.) I took all the photos in this post at the museum.

Launch on Landing

This is a new blog. I’m starting it to keep my friends & family up to date on three months of travels through Ireland, the U.K., France and Czechia (the Czech Republic). I say “up to date,” but I’m posting this on October 12, already more than three weeks into our journey. So, sort of like space-time, my timeline curves, due to the pull of gravitational laziness.

And technological under-performance. Regarding this software, the WordPress system of creating & maintaining blogs or websites or both, I’m a full-on newbie. Therefore I also face an enormous learning curve, which bends toward irregularity as I grope along trying to catch up. My initial hope for these posts, for example, imagined they would appear as we carried on and things occurred, more or less chronological with the events they recorded. That’s not going to happen. The fact that I actually managed a first posting is providential. As of this writing we are less than 40 hours from leaving Dublin for Liverpool, where I expect our experiences to spike in excitement. It would be nice if I was conversant with the rudiments of WordPress by then. Which means that events of the past three weeks, if worthy of a narrative, will appear when they appear.

All right, let’s get started.

We left Anchorage on September 18. After 26 hours of travel, door to door, we settled into our downtown Dublin hotel room, exhausted and worried over how long it would take before we could feel we had something to look forward to instead of dragging our asses for a week or more. But the next morning (Sept. 20), after a night of inadequate sleep, we went down to the hotel dining room and were jolted deliriously awake by a magnificent buffet breakfast. The abundance and range of food choices and its quality amounted to a fanfare announcing that we were on vacation and off to a good start. (For those who are curious, we were staying at Jurys Inn Dublin Parnell Street, part of a chain and a good and not too expensive hotel very well located.)

Soon we were walking south through sunny Dublin streets. We crossed the Liffey River, wound our way past a corner of the Trinity College campus, past the statue of Molly Malone and her disappearing neckline, and ended up at a pub and entertainment venue called the International Bar. At every street crossing we explicitly reminded ourselves to look right for oncoming left-side-of-the-road traffic. It’s one thing to sit inside a car moving around a comparatively quiescent town like Anchorage and another when, only two days later, unsteady because of a 9-timezone lag, you’re walking through crowds and crossing busy streets in a heavily motorized city like Dublin. We would later return to Dublin after exploring other parts of Ireland and Belfast, yet still we lack any real confidence on these streets. The other day I thought it was clear to cross a sharply curving single-lane roadway at an expansive intersection, but halfway across I had to scamper like a terrorized animal because of a huge onrushing bus whose driver apparently wanted to kill me.

Jack, a Dublin theatre artist and amateur historian, leads a version of the “1916 Rebellion” historical tour on September 20, 2022. Dublin Castle behind him was the scene of some of the violence of the 1916 Easter Rising.

The International Bar is a comedy club. Kathleen and I and some 15 others were there to meet an actor and amateur historian who calls himself Jack. He would lead our group to major sites associated with the 1916 Rebellion, as the tour is named. The locations — Dublin Castle, the General Post Office, and others — are places where Irish revolutionaries instigated a violent uprising against their United Kingdom overlords (they chose Easter Week to set off their bombs and engage street battles with British soldiers and Irish constabularies due to the Easter “rising” of Jesus in the Christian iconography). No need here to recount the history of the next half-dozen years of violence and civil war that gave rise to a new nation, the Republic of Ireland (which notoriously did not include six counties of Ulster province — Northern Ireland). That history is available in many places online. However, this saga of the Irish independence movement dogged our travels throughout the island, including our visit to Belfast in Northern Island. It’s inescapable. Only a few hours ago, for instance, we toured Kilmainham Gaol (Jail) a few miles to the southwest of the city center, which is a site bitterly linked with the rebellion. So I hope to bring forward still more bits about our experience related to the events that a century ago gave Ireland its independence after 700 years of British rule.

Historical and other walking tours like The 1916 Rebellion have become a habit of Kathleen’s and mine. They’re an easy way to acquire a reasonably full picture of how specific locations fit into the larger narrative of important events. We’ve taken tours of sites linked to the birth of the Nazi Party in Munich, the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, World War 2 events in Prague and Paris, the Battle of Gettysburg, and key Spanish Civil War sites in Barcelona and Madrid. The tour leaders are generally knowledgeable authors, students or, like Jack in Dublin, artists with a passion for history.

So on that first day we quickly stepped into the role of inquisitive tourists getting our lick of Irish history, which was delivered exceptionally well. Jack is a slight, middle-aged Irishman, serious and talented. Occasionally he sang an Irish folk ballad to enhance the lesson. It became obvious he doesn’t think well of the English. When the recent death of the queen came up, he shrugged without sympathy.

Jack outside the G.P.O. on O’Connell Street, near the end of the tour. (We never got his surname.)