A Week in Ireland

My late father was German, but my mother is a full-throated Irishwoman, born Mathilda Gertrude Edwina O’Donnell. You don’t get much more Irish than that without potatoes coming out of your ears, a shillelagh whipping the kids’ backsides and “Danny Boy” playing through the speakers of your mind at full blast. (That's Tillie on the left, Fred on the right, with me and my wife between, 

Now, a caveat. I was named for my mother’s grandma O’Donnell, who was born Anna Korzeniowski, in New Bedford, Mass., in 1867. Anna’s dad was Polish, her mother English. Dana is a Polish name, and sounds as much like Anna as my sister Michael’s name sounds like Mathilda. It took me six decades to figure all this out – the Polish origins of Dana are why I’m the only Dana Blankenhorn you’ll ever see or hear from (a great present from my mother to the Internet age). But my grandmother was born a Cooney, and they’re even more Irish than the O’Donnells.

What this means was that I just had to make a pilgrimage to Ireland. I had to go to Ireland, in the worst way.

Maybe our trip was the worst way. I had it booked on Expedia before I could sign into it, a special deal that included a hotel and rental car. We took it under the wife’s e-mail, classed as a guest, and won’t get credit on their frequent buyer program.

We spent the first two days without money or phone. My bank hadn’t acted on my phone call about the trip and refused to let me use my plastic money until I called them from Ireland. My phone company refused to let me get a SIM card until I paid for the phone. Thank God for Linuxcon, just starting in Dublin as we landed. An assistant to President Jim Zemlin let my wife borrow his phone to yell at the bank, and once her dumb phone started working we got the smartphone straightened out, for $400 to buy out the sales contract and take possession.

We spent the middle part of the trip on the commode, thanks to either a full Irish breakfast, the water that came with the whiskey at the Whiskey Museum, or perhaps Dublin’s best fish-and-chips. Anthony Bourdain writes that Imodium is a must-pack for any overseas trip and I can now endorse that 100%, the hard way. We really didn’t feel like anything until Friday night, when we were due to leave for home on Monday morning.

But it was a great, great trip, and I learned some things that are important and worth talking about, as opposed to what you read up until now.

First, today’s Ireland is prosperous. Really. Thank the European Union, which gave the country lots of tax breaks when it joined. Thank the Irish government, which has extended those tax breaks so that many American companies, especially drug companies, now use Ireland as a base for tax purposes. (This is outside the Castletown House, next to the Dublin suburb or Celbridge.)

Whatever. There’s money everywhere. It’s amazing how much nicer a country is when people have decent jobs and there’s opportunity about. The roads are skinny but they work, thanks to a network of cameras that catch the crazy drivers and prevent most bad, bad accidents. It’s safe because they had no Antonin Scalia to twist the meaning of a militia amendment so every looney with a grudge was armed like a Provisional IRA leader during the Troubles.

Dublin especially. Dublin is a lot like London was a few decades ago, before Cameron’s Tories got hold of it and started building huge skyscrapers and gated communities everywhere. Central Dublin today is absolutely packed with young people, not just Irish young people but black folks and Middle Eastern folks and even Chinese folks, all trying to put on Irish accents and doing all they can to make enough to bring the rest of their families in, or provide for said families, or start families. It’s very exciting. It makes for incredibly crowded streets, commutes of six miles that can take an hour in a car, pedestrian malls that feel like midtown New York sidewalks.

The best part was the Jeannie Johnston, replica of a ship that took thousands of people like John O’Donnell, my great, great grandfather, Anna’s father in law, from Ireland to America and Canada during the famine, without loss of life. The docent there tells the story beautifully. When he was finishing he asked, “Imagine the strength and character it took to go through such suffering. How did they do it?” Same way they do it coming from Syria today, I replied under my breath, ashamed of the modern world’s indifference to such things. (Near the Jeannie is this collection of statues, meant to honor the Irish famine victims, but reminding me more of today's Syrian refugees.) 

The suburbs of Dublin, meanwhile, are filled with American families, and other European families, as well as some Japanese and Chinese and even Irish families. The suburbs start about where the street cars end, and it’s a completely different lifestyle, car-centric, disconnected entirely from the city. It’s just like living in an American suburban city, only cleaner, with fewer stores, less diversity in the restaurants, less fear of crime, but quiet and green grass all around. Lovely.

Outside the Dublin area, on the other hand, young Irish people are as scarce as hens’ teeth. Those who stay are treasured by their elders, they and their grandchildren are made much of, and those elders who are without try to get along as best they can. In Cork, or Waterford, or Limerick, these young families aren’t the best Ireland has to offer – those folks still leave — but they’re nice enough. And their lives are rich beyond wealth.

Still, there’s an enormous generation gap coming as the young people of Dublin start flexing their economic and political muscle in the countryside. The land use policy of Ireland today is a bit like that of Portland. Once you get out of town, you’re in the countryside – none of that 30 miles of suburb and 40 more miles of exurb you get in a place like Atlanta. That’s good, but the pressure of all those people and all that money is going to extend Dublin out at least 20 miles in every direction by the end of this decade. Maybe further, if they get hold of the government and start building the kind of American suburban lifestyles they are going to want 10 years from now.

The Irish road system is a bicycle wheel, spokes of freeways extending toward every major center to the northwest, west, southwest and south, toward Donegal and Letterkenney, Sligo and Galway, Limerick, Cork and Waterford, all centered on a single ring road around the city called the M50. This means that just about anything is just a few hours’ drive away. Great for tourists. If you get a room near the M50, a toll road that does what I-285 does in Atlanta or the 610 Loop does in Houston, you can do anything in a day trip.

But don’t. The best night we spent was in Northern Ireland. It was pure serendipity, for which Expedia gets the credit (I just asked for a hotel in Donegal and this came up), a lovely B&B called the Ardgolt House, in a tiny town called Castlederg, County Tyrone. It’s far beyond the reach of Irish phone service, and far beyond any economic hustle-and-bustle. The whole area smells distinctly of manure, but in a good way. It’s magic.

While the border winds its way over hills and dales across the countryside, and the contrast between the two sides could not be greater. On one side there Euros and fat roundabouts, pharma jobs and money everywhere, and signs done in both Gaelic and English. On the other side there are Pounds, horses, cows and sheep, the land lying as it was before the Irish Republic was founded, small white road signs in English only. The landlord at Ardgolt is a former contractor, fixing it up to make a life for his son. The son is enthusiastic, friendly, and wonderfully welcoming. The food superb, the prices low.

Ireland today is a very secular country, and this could be an opportunity for reunification, especially if Britain decides to exit the EU, but this secularity is a very recent development. On the plane ride back home I had a good cry over a movie called “Jimmy’s Hall,”  a true story set in 1933, in County Leitrim, telling of how even after the Republic was founded the Catholic Church and the gentry conspired against anything like learning and secular thought in the countryside. A sad tale, if you hadn’t just spent a week in today’s Ireland, where men like Jimmy Gralton are acclaimed as heroes and the poets he loved, like W.B. Yeats, have had their grave sites turned into tourist attractions. But it’s all within the living memory for those pensioners I met in Cork and Limerick and Donegal.

The bottom line here is you should really go to Ireland. Now, before it’s transformed yet again. That transformation could be “good” for the Irish, if rather ugly in an American suburban sense. Or it could be bad, if Americans get sick of losing businesses to Ireland and the Europeans get tired of letting the country retain its special place in the tax laws as well. That could transform today’s Dublin go-getters into the urban poor, set off a violence crossing age and religious lines across the island, burn through that pot of gold and set off another diaspora.

So go, now. While you have time. There are 75 million people in this country with Irish descent, like me, and even if you have none pretend. You’ll be glad you did.