Midlife Irish

by Frank Gannon

  Blarney Castle itself would be pretty amazing in say, Anaheim. But in Ireland, where castles are as common as lawyers in Jersey, it’s not that striking. It’s a nice enough castle, I guess. The most interesting thing about it is a bit of folklore/legend.

  Supposedly a great many Irish soldiers escaped through a secret tunnel during the Cromwell siege of the seventeenth century. I would be very happy if that actually happened, and I can’t say that it didn’t. But it seems that whenever things get truly awful in human history, humans like to invent ways out. Someone escaped. Somebody got away.

  Still, it’s a pretty nice castle. It’s a tower, actually. The towers always seemed to outlive the castles, much like all the antebellum chimneys in the American South that are all that is left of the old mansions. The chimneys stand out there alone in the middle of vast fields. There are a lot of solitary towers in Ireland. It’s as if God wanted people to remember what was once there, and he left the tower to show you how big it was.

  That explanation was given to me by an old man in Donegal. The more I think about it, the better it sounds.

  One day I took a long walk in Ireland.

  I got up from our B&B bed in Clifden. Paulette was asleep, so I took a shower and headed out. Taking a shower in your average Irish B&B is like standing naked, with soap, in the rain. It gets the job done, though. It just takes longer than you are used to.

  I put on some khakis, some white socks, sneakers, a white T-shirt, a golf shirt, a sweater, and a tweedy-looking coat. I looked at myself. An Irishman out for a stretch of the leg. As I walked along I wondered whether anybody could tell I was a “Yank.” I resolved to try out my pseudo-Irish accent on the first person I met.

  I decided to wander along in a random fashion, always careful to keep the Atlantic Ocean on my right. I calculated that this must be south. I did this because of my complete absence of a sense of direction. I walked out of the little town and went happily on my way. I’m an Irish guy, I thought.

  It was a cloudy day. There were a lot of birds. I walked for about ten minutes and did not meet a single Irishman or Irishwoman on my way. I didn’t even meet any Yanks. It was a slow day for stretching the leg. I tried to think of Irish songs. I tried to think of that song that my dad used to play. My brain did not cooperate. I ran through a lot of Smokey Robinson, a lot of Stones. Nothing Irish was stored up there.

  I then saw someone approaching. An Irish guy. A wandering Irishman. As he got closer I could make him out. Tweed coat. Jeans. Big brown shoes with thick soles. He had a beard and a hat. A baseball hat. We got closer and closer. I could finally make out the hat. Boston Red Sox.

  We walked up to each other and stopped. He spoke.

  “Hey, how you doing?”

  He sounded foreign. His accent was not like my accent. I spoke.

  “Doin’ good,” I said.

  “Where you from?”

  “New Jersey,” I said. It just slipped out. Damn. “How ’bout you?”

  “Boston,” he said. Now I knew the origin of this foreigner.

  His name was Lynch. He was an internist. His people were from near Wicklow. He had been in Ireland for three weeks. He was staying the whole summer. His wife was Italian. He met her in North Carolina. He went to medical school at Duke. He said he had just come from Wicklow.

  “Guess the name of the town we stayed at last night,” he said. He had a big grin.

  “Istanbul,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “not even close. Hollywood.” He started laughing. He had one of those laughs that makes you start laughing. I started laughing too.

  We talked for a while. Our subject was Ireland in general. We agreed on many things. You can’t get a good sandwich here, but breakfast, that’s something. If we ate like this for long we would die. He then asked me if I had felt “the Irish thing.” I said I think so. He said “the Irish thing” had several identifiable symptoms. It makes you talk in a slower, more roundabout way. It makes you feel as if you belong here even though you’ve never been here. Finally, it makes you feel that life is very wonderful but very temporary.

  Yes, I assured him, I had felt the Irish thing. We said our goodbyes.

  I walked until I saw a sign telling me it was eight miles to Screeb. I turned around. By the time I got back to Clifden, Paulette was waking up. While she got dressed I told her of the Irish internist I had met on the road to Screeb.

  In Ireland, there are almost as many castles as there are big rocks. The first one I saw astounded me, but there are so many of them in Ireland that you start to get used to them. After spending several days at Disney World, you get sick of the “Magic Kingdom.”

  I read somewhere that Ireland has more castles and golf courses, per acre, than anywhere else in the world. I have reservations about the golf course claim (Myrtle Beach?), but the castle thing is undoubtedly true. They are all over the place and they usually have English-sounding names. So every time you look around in Ireland there’s a giant house silently screaming, “England screwed us.”

  Some of these places are now tourist hotels. A few are private residences again. Dot-com guys and other rich people own them. Writers (very successful ones—J. P. Donleavy owns one; that Lord of the Dance guy probably does) own a few, and more than a few castles are still owned by the ancestors of the British people who had them built. These people are called the Anglo-Irish. They’ve been in Ireland so long they are more Irish than English.

  A lot of the castles have tours, and we went on a couple of them. Most of the castles were built in the time between the Norman invasion and Oliver Cromwell’s friendly tour. Most of the older castles are impossible to date because the records were destroyed in one uprising or another. Historians dated a lot of the Irish castles by finding similar structures in England. There’s a lot of guesswork.

  Norman-era castle life wasn’t really all that lavish. “Living in a castle” was pretty tough. The castles were difficult to heat, windowless, and the bathrooms were built right into the walls. There was no plumbing, so it must have smelled terrible all the time.

  By the time of Cromwell, things had improved a bit, but it still wasn’t what you usually think when someone says “castle.” A lot of the castles have a very tangled history with many owners, Irish and English, depending on who was running the general Irish show. But, if you go on a tour of one of these castles, it’s difficult not to get the creepy feeling that the whole massive structure is just a giant reminder of English oppression.

  The tour guide usually avoids certain awkward facts. Here is an all-purpose castle tour history:

  Muck Castle

  Lord Muck was visiting some of his money and one day he just happened to be passing through Gaelic Lough when he “fell in love” with the place. He ordered his driver to stop and said, “I will build a house right over there next to that cow.”

  He built this house as a charming understated place to go in the early to late spring. He had a large family and they needed a large house. That’s what they got because there are twelve thousand tons of marble involved in the structure. Ten laborers died while building the house, and there is an old legend that their spirits inhabit the house, which is convenient because their bodies are embedded in the plaster-work and floor of the west verandah. On a cold fall night, they are said to wander the halls. Tourists sleeping at the castle have been known to complain about them!

  Lord Muck married a girl named Madeline Blight-Ashen and she apparently loved gardening, or rather she enjoyed looking at gardening. In the major garden, there are several rare flowers that only bloom once, for ten minutes, every year. Madame bought enough of them so at least one in the crowd is blooming at all times!

  I can’t recommend these tours, but it might be “just the thing” if you are visiting Ireland, have some spare time, and want to look at a big, big house and feel appalled and revolted after lunch one lazy afternoon.

  Later, back in a bed and breakfast, I thought about what Robbie Walsh had told me ab
out Americans wanting to buy any little piece of Ireland, about them paying stupid money for stupid stuff. I thought about it, and it didn’t sound so grotesque, so pathetic. It didn’t seem like the gross stupidity it had seemed in the pub that night. Now, in the semi-glare of sunlight, it seemed almost touching. Irish people in America, most of them second- or third- or eighth-generation, know that they are Irish because people have always told them that they sound Irish. That’s all they have of their Irishness. There isn’t one tangible thing from the Old Country. They have no “Irish traits.” They wouldn’t be able to identify them if they had. Under the circumstances, paying twenty bucks for a pile of twigs from Ireland really doesn’t sound bad. The long-lost son cherishing some fragment from his long-gone past.

  I lay in my bed and looked out the window and thought, It’s good to be a tourist.

  Now, of course, we were tourists. Like it or not, that’s what we were, two Yanks on holiday. I consoled myself with this thought: Sure, I’m a tourist, but my mom and dad were born here, so I am, after all is said and done, 100 percent Irish. I just had the misfortune of being born in America. In reality, the blood of Ossian flows through my veins!

  I abandoned that thought. To paraphrase a good Englishman: He thinks too much. Such men are a pain in the ass.

  We said our goodbyes to the real Irish people and the tourists and walked outside. The sky was as clear as it ever gets in Ireland. We were ready to go rambling. We knew that later, when we were going to track down my mom and dad, we would have a definite purpose and a definite destination. But for now we could go anywhere. We walked around talking about where we might go. We were within driving distances of many, many intriguing places: Bunratty Castle, the ring of mountains they call the Twelve Bens, the beach of Old Head. We had read and been told about these places that we could go. The Punta was filled with petrol and, after the breakfast, we had enough carbohydrates to drive to Africa.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked Paulette. She was looking up at some sea birds flying overhead. In Ireland you look up a lot.

  “I am feeling great,” she said. “How about you?”

  I said I was up for anything.

  We consulted a little guidebook that we had brought. It had a lot of maps in it. The wind turned the pages so we had to duck inside the B&B. Paulette looked at the book. She had assumed the role of navigator. I looked out over the ocean. You could hear the waves. I started to think that the time was right to do something epic.

  “Let’s find God,” I said.

  I said it as a joke. But, after a minute, it seemed like a good idea. We knew that this was one of his favorite places. He was hanging around here someplace.

  We decided to go to a place where he had been seen—if not God, at least his mother. That is a place in County Mayo called Knock.

  Supernatural phenomena don’t seem that weird in Ireland, for some reason. You don’t hear two farmers talking in a pub about spirits appearing and statues moving every day, but the general atmosphere is a lot different than in America. In America, unexplained phenomena like that turn up in the pages of Weekly World News. America is filled with people who have had coffee with the postdeath Elvis when they weren’t having sex with aliens, but you just don’t walk around telling your neighbors about the statue who stole your dog. You don’t want to be one of those people; you just know that they’re around somewhere. In Ireland, these stories are taken differently.

  “We listen to things with a carefully withheld incredulity,” was what a distinguished older gent in Athlone told me. That seems to be precisely the Irish attitude toward weird stories. I’m listening, the attitude says, but you don’t believe I’m buying this, do you? Nevertheless, I’ll play along.

  If you drive up the coast from Clifden toward Louisburgh, then head inland, you can get to Knock in a couple of hours. If Knock isn’t the holiest place in Ireland, it’s close. The little town of Knock is in County Mayo. Mayo is a rustic area and Knock is in the most rustic part of the country. Only one extraordinary thing has ever happened in Knock, but it was very remarkable indeed. On the evening of August 21, 1879, at the peak of the famine, a little girl looked at the southern gable of her parish church, the Church of Saint John the Baptist, and saw what she thought were statues of a woman and two men. She thought they had been newly placed because she hadn’t seen them before, and she was a devout Catholic who went to church often.

  What she saw weren’t newly placed statues. The woman “statue” was a vision of Mary, the mother of Jesus. On either side of Mary stood Saint Joseph, her husband, and Saint John, the author of the last Gospel. To their right was a plain altar on which stood a lamb. Behind the lamb there was a large cross. Angels hovered around the lamb.

  Fourteen other people reported seeing the same thing. Two ecclesiastical commissions investigated. After considerable examination of the witnesses and the site, the commission found that “the testimony of the witnesses, taken as a whole, was trustworthy and satisfactory.”

  Their conclusions permitted the establishment of Knock, like Lourdes, as an official holy place and a site for “Marian” pilgrimages. The Knock Shrine Committee was set up in 1935, and a folk museum was built at Knock in 1973.

  Today there is a huge church where the little girl saw the apparition of Mary. Near it, there is a vast basilica. Near that there is the museum, which tells the story of the miracle of Knock, along with a sort of capsule view of rural Irish life through the past few centuries.

  Although Lourdes is the more celebrated miracle, Knock is a vital part of the worldwide growth in devotion to the Virgin Mary in the twentieth century. In Ireland it was a big part of what was called “the devotional revolution,” a sort of re-establishment of a direct emotional response between Ireland’s Catholics and their faith.

  I knew about Knock when I was a little boy because my mother told me about it many times. My mom, who grew up near Knock, had a little white book of prayers that she read silently, at the kitchen table in our house, every night of her life. When she went on vacation she brought the book with her. I looked at the book closely when I was a kid. There was a “Prayer for People in Purgatory,” a “Prayer for People Who Don’t Believe in God,” a “Prayer for the Dying,” a “Prayer for Sinners,” a “Prayer for People Who Mock Religious Faith.” A prayer for everybody.

  My mom, unlike my dad, who was a voracious reader, never, as far as I know, read anything other than that book. You would see her looking at a newspaper or a magazine every once in a while, but you never see her reading another book. One time I asked her why.

  She looked at me as if I had asked a question that had a very obvious answer. Then she said something I always remember.

  Me: Why is that the only book you read?

  Mom: What else is there?

  When they are saying mass at the church at Knock, the priest’s words are amplified and sent to the huge speakers they have mounted around the church and basilica. So no matter where you are in the town, you can hear the mass. I watched a guy pumping gas while around him I heard:

  Lamb of God

  Who takes away the sins of the world

  Have mercy on us.

  Later, I saw a man outside drinking a Guinness and eating some dry roasted peanuts while this was in the air.

  May the peace of the Lord be with you always

  Let us now share a sign of that peace.

  I looked over at a fat guy having some sausages at the table next to me. We nodded at each other. I wished the fat guy peace and he did the same, I guess, to me.

  Knock has had a long-standing, Lourdeslike reputation for cures, and the sick and the crippled visit the shrine every day. When you walk around in Knock you are likely to come across a man or woman walking with a cane or a metal walker, head down, whispering the words of the Our Father or the Hail Mary or some private prayer of their own composition. It is impossible to spend any time in Knock and not feel the presence of…something.

  Ireland has always h
ad a particular love of Mary, the mother of Jesus. My sister is named Mary, and in an Irish phone book the first name “Mary” in front of a last name like Kennedy or O’Brian will take up a page or two. To use the phone book to call Mary Kelly of Dublin is a life’s work.

  A few years ago Mary appeared in Ireland again, in 1985. In a little village in Cork named Ballinspittle there is a little shrine with a statue of Mary. The shrine itself is not unusual. Irish people often have a shrine to Mary in the backyard or nearby. If you drive randomly through the Irish countryside the odds are good that you will encounter a shrine to Mary on the side of the road. We passed several of these driving around in the west when we weren’t looking for them. When we saw a particularly striking one, we got out of the Punta to investigate. Some of the shrines are amazing things with painstakingly erected steps and kneelers and carefully planted flowers of all sorts.

  But in 1985 a particular statue of Mary started to move. This movement was witnessed by at least ten people. When news of this appeared in the papers, some Irish wise asses drove around putting little signs on Mary statues with messages like INSERT COIN HERE and OUT OF ORDER.

  But other people took the moving statue very seriously. Many interpreted the animated Mary as a sign of Mary’s displeasure at something topical. Mary’s appearance was attributed to whatever axe was being ground. Some op-ed pieces said Mary was appearing now because of abortions in America. Others said it was a sign of Mary’s pleasure at something the pope said or the recent peace efforts in Northern Ireland. More than a few said Mary’s appearance was an authentic miracle, but it was Mary herself attempting to help tourism. These observers seem to embody the sacred and profane in a particularly Irish way.