Irish I Was Still in Ireland

Ireland, the home of my people.  Well, some of my people, since we only have a little Irish heritage based on what we could find.  Some of my Scottish ancestors moved to Ireland, but I’m not sure if we actually have any Irish blood.  But who cares!

This past weekend, I travelled to Dublin with a friend to escape Italy for the weekend.  We had a mild mishap with our Air BNB, mostly because we arrived later than expected and didn’t have a way to contact her to tell her.  However, once we finally arrived, she was the nicest person you could meet.  She greeted us outside, showed us how to jimmy the key in the lock to get it to open, and then showed us into our room where she had a bowl of popcorn waiting for us! How awesome is that?! 

The following morning, we got up and headed towards the Dublin city center.  After wandering around for a bit, we walked into an amazing Irish gift show called Carrolls.  Everything was green and covered with sheep and shamrocks!  We spent a bit of time walking around and I probably bought more than I should have, but it was definitely worth it.  Afterwards, we headed across the river to a tourist office that we had spotted to see what there was to do in and around Dublin.  We ended up buying tickets for a hop-on hop-off bus tour of the city, which was more than worth the money. We also bought tickets to go see the Giants Causeway the following day. We drove around the city with the driver providing a commentary as we drove past interesting sights.  Our first stop was a nice, quiet little park.  I have no idea what the name of it was, but it was very beautiful. 

We hopped back on the next bus and rode until we got to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  In case you didn’t know, it is actually a sort of memorial cathedral for people who died in wars throughout the churches history.  I certainly didn’t know it so it was really interesting to walk around and see the various tombs and dedications to colonels, generals, and what not.  They even had this cool little tree that you could write a leaf for someone you had lost and put it on the ground beneath the metal tree.  

We continued our trek through the city, seeing Phoenix Park where the US Embassy house sits across the roundabout from the President’s mansion, which I thought was interesting.  There are actually over 1000 deer within the park that people were even going up to pet.  How cool is that?! By the time we got back into the city center.  Thankfully, that bus tour gave us a coupon for a two-for-one meal at a restaurant in Temple Bar that we definitely took advantage of.  It was a great little restaurant and it had really good food!  The waiter recommended the lamb shank, which came with scalloped potatoes and steamed vegetables and it was amazing! Top it off with a Bulmer’s Cider and I was one full and happy person!  We decided to go to bed early since we had to be up early for our tour the following morning.

At the crack of dawn the following day, we were up and walking towards the city center as the sun was just peaking over the water of the river.  It was a farther walk than we thought, so we had to book it to make it to our bus on time, although it was late anyway.  We were headed out of the city by 730 though, and on our way toward Belfast.  Other than a brief stop for breakfast and to pick up some snacks (we bought sandwiches for lunch), it was a beautiful and quiet ride north to Belfast.  We were given the option of either doing a Black Taxi tour of the city or to go see the Titanic museum.  Since I’ve never actually seen Titanic, I chose the taxi tour and I was very glad I did.

Belfast is very intriguing city.  I learned a lot about the city during our taxi tour, most of which I had never heard about:  I knew that the IRA was still active, but I never really knew anything about them.  In Belfast, they have a rather rich and interesting history.  Back in 1969, the government began building what they called “peace walls” to separate the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods.   The Catholics were definitely on the losing side of these walls, as they were placed into tiny little ghettoes that packed in over 1000 people per square mile.  At some point during the years that these walls went up, Protestants began bombing and attacking the Catholics of one particular ghetto.  At the time, there were fewer than 30 IRA members in the city and they had no weapons whatsoever, so they could do nothing about the conflict.  It got to the point that the British army was sent to protect ghetto.  Since they could no longer attack this ghetto, they turned their sights on the other.  Less than three days later, they were prepared to attack other ghettoes but the IRA had been busy.  Within those three days, over 1000 IRA members were in Belfast and armed to the teeth to prevent further conflict.  How amazing is that?

Today, there are murals throughout the city.  They depict support for refugees, remembrances for those killed in political conflicts, and memorials for innocents killed, including for those killed in the conflict mentioned above.  These murals are not allowed to have anything racist, sexist, homophobic, or secularist.  They also are only up for three years before they are repainted, with only two exceptions: an imitation of Picasso’s Guernica painted by a Protestant and a Catholic artist working together and a mural that was painted in remembrance of the Jews killed in WWII. Both of these painting were up for 5 years.  We also learned about Bobby Sands, an IRA leader who was imprisoned and lead hunger strikes to protest their political imprisonment as well as later “blanket” protests.  He was even elected as a Member of Parliament while still in jail, although he died of starvation in prison before he could take his seat.

The last stop of our tour was at Cupar Way, the longest peace wall of the city.  This wall was painted by several artists with the graffiti that had been on the Berlin wall before its demolition.  They hope that eventually the peace walls of the city will receive the same treatment, which is supposedly on its way.  The wall is covered with signatures of people advocating for its demolition, which actually began under Bill Clinton’s presidency.  He facilitated a peace process between the Irish and British governments and the IRA and decided to sign the wall.  It has also been signed by various political leaders and celebrities, including the Dali Lama, Beyonce, and Barack Obama, and now me!

Finally, we made it to the Giants Causeway, which was absolutely gorgeous.  I have come to the realization, however, that Hollywood and the internet ruins everything.  I thought the stones would be bigger.  Don’t get me wrong, it was absolutely gorgeous and I had a blast climbing around the stones and up the nearby hill to get a better view, but still…  All of the rocks are shaped like hexagons, the side effect of an ancient volcanic eruption apparently. Clearly that geology class I took didn’t cover hexagonal volcanic eruptions.  It is such an odd and unique view, all those geometric rocks being crashed against by the waves.  Some are covered with lichen, some with seaweed or moss, and others are just black from the constant abuse by the water.  It was absolutely gorgeous.  The water was a gorgeous turquoise and I really just didn’t want to leave.  It helped that it was a gorgeous sunny day, I’m sure.  Wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun if it had been pouring down rain.  We had about two hours to wander around and eat lunch while looking at the rolling green Irish hills before we headed off again. 

Our final stop of the day was the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge.  Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.  It’s a rope bridge that links the mainland to a tiny, rather useless little island, although some fisherman in the 1700s thought it was worth building a bridge to.  There’s even a little boat on the island that has absolutely no access to the water below, so I’m not sure what the point is.  However, it was really fun to cross the rope bridge in the gusting Irish breeze alongside a bunch of shrieking people (no that isn’t sarcasm).  It was really fun and it had a great view of the water and the cliffs of the mainland.  We spent a few minutes enjoying the view before we took the harrowing walk across the bridge again.  Good thing I’m not afraid of heights! After that, it was just a long bus ride back to Dublin with a quick little bus tour of the Belfast city center, which we did not see on our taxi tour. 

Along the drive, the bus driver threw out some random little facts every once and a while.  One of them, which he almost had some of the passengers around us believing, regarded the paint marks on the sheep throughout Ireland.  He claimed that the Scottish would come over during the night and graffiti the sheep out of spite.  The people around us were almost convinced.  By the time we got back to Dublin, we were rather hungry and tried to find a new place to eat.  Unfortunately, most places were too packed even for standing room so we ended up back at the restaurant from the previous night.  We had some absolutely amazing fish and chips before having a quick walk through Temple Bar (I mean when in Ireland do as the Irish do right?) although we were still back at our B&B before 11. 

We just kind of wandered around the last day, including going to see Trinity College. It's an absolutely beautiful campus, right in the heart of the bustling city.  You can't even hear the world outside, which was amazing.  Overall, it was a really great trip.  I’d love to go back one day and see the area where our family lived, but it was too difficult to get to with the little bit of time that we had.  Ireland reminded me a lot of Scotland, although Scotland definitely had better scenery in my opinion!  Sorry for the little bit of a history lesson, I was just really amazed!