Ireland

When I was a boy, I remember my father sitting, lost in thought and memory, in view of a painting in our American living room. That painting was of Torc Mountain rising above the Lakes of Killarney in County Kerry, Ireland, which was for my father, home. He always seemed unreachable in this state, but whether or not he was, it was clear to me that he was filled with a longing that I at least in part understood. I loved him then as he loved Ireland—hopelessly, with every fiber of my body.

So for me, my father was Ireland itself, just as he was the Catholic Church, the essence of which he labored mightily to instill in me and my six brothers and sisters. (And of course in Ireland, the two are, as the saying goes, joined at the hip.) What then did my father, as Ireland, represent in these twin roles?

He embodied a love of learning, a love of scholarship, a love of exact speech, of moral laws, of hard work, of looking for and expecting goodness in others but not being surprised if it wasn’t forthcoming, of storytelling and reading and music, of sly and lunatic humor. He had a wild streak of sacrifice and charity, a combination of St. Francislike gentleness and ayatollahlike fierceness. He lanced personal boils with self-denial, revered tradition and rules because they are the stone framework of civilization when the wolves of cruelty and hunger are at the door, as they have been for so much of Irish history, a framework that lasts long after the roof has burned and the residents hanged. My father made me want to be, well, a saint—because it was so transparently the goal and practice in his own life—and it seemed then as it seems now, that nothing else could be as important. What does being a saint mean? Being as close to your Maker as you possibly can, at all times, warts and nose hairs and terrible bleeding mistakes all. That was the gift of my father, and for me was and remains the gift of Ireland.

What does this have to do with modern Ireland? Ireland has changed so dramatically in recent years, you’d hardly recognize the place if you haven’t been in a while, or if all you know of Ireland is what Uncle Paddy told you of his childhood. So intellectuals in Dublin may scoff at my characterization of Ireland, cynics in Belfast hoot with derision, geeks in Cork dismiss the bandwidth of my thinking, Eurotrash in Galway snort at my naïvete. They’ve seen the real Ireland and it doesn’t look at all like the romanticized version sloshing over the gunwales of the vast Irish diaspora. The Catholic faith has eroded, the Church is in decline, the famine ships are ancient history, the rural culture is on its last legs, and everything Irish is nothing but a tourist gimmick. But sometimes those who have left, those who are filled with unspeakable longing, as my father was, have something correct to say.

Ireland has in it, in its soil and air and water and sun, something that for want of a better word is alchemical, that no other place on earth seems to have. This is not to say that other peoples don’t love their native land as much or as well, or that ancient portals of feeling and wisdom don’t exist the world over, not at all. It is just that whatever there is in Ireland is unique.

Perhaps this is a genetic thing—my bias is suspect with a name like O’Reilly—but I don’t think so. I think the genetic predisposition may be only to love Ireland a bit more fervently, but it is not responsible for the place Ireland holds open on the spectrum of human possibilities. Ireland, it seems to me, is an earth-bound zone between birth and death that has not been de-coupled from either human event, not by Celts, nor Catholics, nor Computers. In Ireland you can sense more clearly the form of your own life, the shape of the little corporal boat that carries you down the river to home and the Eternal. In other words, in Ireland, you can get pretty close to Heaven.

When my father died, we took him back to Kerry. He was borne on the shoulders of his grade school classmates to rest above Killarney in Aghadoe, in a sixth-century cemetery with a breathtaking view of his beloved Lakes and, of course, Torc Mountain. My brothers and I filled in his grave, taking care with the skulls and bones of other relatives buried there.

When I visit now, especially when I visit my father’s grave, and look out over the Kerry Mountains, I am still filled with longing for all the things humans long for. But the heart’s home really is elsewhere…only in Ireland, you are closer to it than anywhere else.

—James O’Reilly

Introduction

Map

PART ONE: ESSENCE OF IRELAND

An Unexpected Reception — Brian Wilson

A Mayo Dog — Paul McGreal

A Blackbird Follows the Heat of the Sun — Thom Elkjer

Mr. Looney’s Archeological Adventures — David W. Mcfadden

Irish Roads — David Blaker

Long Ago in Ireland — Rex Grizell

The True Face — Rosemary Mahoney

A Pub Fairy Tale — Pamela Ramsey

Holy Communion — Frank McCourt

Mediterraneans of the North — Susan Hughes

The Miracle of St. Bridget — J. P. Donleavy

Thoughts on Irish Rain — Heinrich Bõll

A Begrudger’s View — John Boland

Walking the Kerry Way — Tim O’Reilly

The Root of the Troubles — Cecil Woodham-Smith

PART TWO: SOME THINGS TO DO

A Windy Tale on Cape Clear — Robert McGarvey

An Appointment with Doctor Caldwell — Larry T. Jordan

In Killarney — Nuala O’Faolain

Dean Swift’s Dublin — Rebecca Solnit

Climbing Croagh Patrick — Colm Tóibín

The Reel Thing — Michael Sean Cain

Renting a Piece of the Old Sod — Jo Broyles Yohay

The Fox Hunt — Maryalicia Post

Wisdom in the Feet — Niall Williams and Christine Breen

To the Great Blasket — Carol McCabe

A Fish Story — Alan Cowell

PART THREE: GOING YOUR OWN WAY

Mollie and Eddie — Gretchen Fletcher

Under the Light of Vega — Chet Raymo

Skellig Dreams — Katharine Scherman

Captain River Yank — Kent E. St. John

Land of High Spirits — John McLaughlin

The Sheela-na-gigs — Judy Wells

My Own — Jonathan Harrington

Tea with Mr. Curtain — Janine Jones

The Long Memories of Mayo — Thomas Flanagan

Cycling to Dún Aengus — Tom Mullen

Going Home — Brian Moore

PART FOUR: IN THE SHADOWS

Making a Killing — Scott Anderson

The Chill of Autumn Charity — Maeve Binchy

Annie and the Bishop — Fintan O’Toole

The Unsettled People — Nan Joyce

The Last Confession — Martin Dillon

Escape to England — Edna O’brien

PART FIVE: THE LAST WORD

Tara — H. V. Morton

The Next Step
What You Need To Know
The Basics
Getting There
When to go/weather
Visas/permits
Customs and arrival
Health
Time
Money
Police
Electricity
Media: local newspaper, and radio
Touching base: phone, fax, E-mail
Cultural Considerations
Local customs
Events & holidays
Important Contacts
Tourist offices
Important telephone numbers
Activities
Off the beaten track
Fun things to do
Additional Resources
Ireland Online

Sample Chapter: Walking the Kerry Way

by Tim O’Reilly

A candle in a dark church illumines family history,

I hadn’t spent much time with my brother Frank since he was about twelve years old, back in 1973. That was the year I’d gotten engaged to a non-Catholic, and my parents wouldn’t let me bring her home because “it would scandalize the children.” I was nineteen and equally sure of myself, so I refused to come home without her.

I finally gave in seven years later, when my father’s health was failing, and went home for a visit alone. After that, my parents also relented, and met my wife and three-year-old daughter for the first time. Our mutual stubbornness had cost us precious time together as a family, a loss made especially poignant by my father’s death six months later.

My relationships with my younger brother and sisters took years to recover. By the time I came home after my long exile, Frank was away at college, and thereafter we’d met mainly at family holidays and reunions. Still, we’d found many common interests and a mutual admiration. Both of us were entrepreneurs—I in publishing, he in construction—and both of us had struggled with how to build a business with a heart, a business that served its employees as well as its customers. In many ways, our lives were mirror images, seven years apart.

But there was one big crack in the mirror, one gulf between us that we skirted politely (most of the time): while I had long ago left the church, Frank remained a committed Catholic. He had also retained an abiding love for Ireland, to which he had returned again and again with my father, mother and sisters in the years when I was persona non grata. He and my father had gone for many a tramp around Killarney, the town where my father was born, and where my aunt still lives. Mangerton, Torc and the McGillicuddy Reeks were more than names to Frank; hikes on the slopes of these mountains were the source of the richest memories of his childhood and young adulthood.

I envied Frank the time had spent in Ireland with my father, and I’d always wanted to spend more time there myself. When my mother suggested that Frank and I might want to walk part of the Kerry Way together (a higher altitude walking version of the Ring of Kerry), we both jumped at the chance. I had a week between a talk I was due to give in Rome and another in London. It was March—not the best time to visit Ireland—but Frank could get free, and with his eighth child on the way, it was now or never.

We set out from Killarney on a blustery day. Though neither of us had done much recent hiking, we had an ambitious itinerary, about eighteen miles a day for the next five days. We were planning on staying each night at bed & breakfasts along the way, but we still carried packs with plenty of extra clothes.

The first day took us through Killarney National Park, up around the back of Torc, then down across the road to Moll’s Gap and into the Black Valley. The hike took more out of us than we expected, and we tottered the last few miles, grateful that our guest house was at the near end of a “town” (a sprinkling of houses spread over the better part of a mile).

After a hearty dinner of local lamb chops, though, things began to look up, so when Frank confessed that it was his wife’s birthday, and that we wanted to go a mile up the road to the valley’s only public phone, outside the youth hostel and the church, to call her, I agreed to go along. It was pitch dark by then and raining to boot. We managed to stick to the road, though, and eventually came to the phone. Unfortunately, Angelique was not at home. How about going in to say a rosary for her, he asked?

Now, I hadn’t said the rosary for over twenty years, and wasn’t sure I even remembered how the “Hail Mary” went, but I agreed.

The church was open, of course, its outer door swinging in the wind. In Ireland, at least in the back country, the church is never closed. There was no electricity, and only a single candle burning by the altar. The wind howled outside, the door banged open and shut.

We began to pray. Frank helped me to recall the words; the memories I’d never lost. When we were small, the rosary, even more than dinner (where my mother never sat down till everyone else had eaten), was the time the family was all together. As we droned aloud through the decades, the joyful, the glorious, and the sorrowful mysteries, I remembered my father’s passing.

He had had a heart attack. He knew himself to be a dead man, he said. He was met by Mary, St. Joseph, and surprisingly, the devil. He begged for more time to make his peace with his family, and his wish was granted. The doctors brought him back, and as he lay in the hospital, intubated and unable to speak, he was desperate to communicate with each of us, scrawling on a small white slate. He wanted to reply to my letter, he said.

I had written him a few weeks before, telling him that even though I had left the church, I had absorbed so much of him, his belief, his moral values, his desire to be good, and to do good. I didn’t want him to think he had failed. His short, so poignant reply, written on a slate and soon erased, but burnt forever in my memory: “God forgive me, a sinner.” His apology for the long years we had not spent together: “I only wanted you to be with us in paradise.” The desire for togetherness in a world to come had become a wedge between us.

As he recovered over the next few days, he was a different man. He had always embodied for me so much of the stern, dogmatic side of Catholicism. Now, in the face of death, all that was stripped away, and the inter core of spirituality was revealed. His passion for his God was the heart of his life. How could I have never seen it before? So many of us build a shell around who we really are; our inner world is as untouchable as the heart of an oyster, till forces greater that we are pry us apart. Now, all was exposed. “I never showed you the face of Christ when you were small,” he told my brother James. Well, he showed it to us then. It’s as if he had been turned inside out, and all the love and spiritual longing that had been hidden by his shyness and his formality were shining out like the sun.

Three weeks later, the time he had asked for was up. He had another attack, and this time he went for good.

We had taken him back to Ireland to bury him. It was a magical day, early April but beautiful as only a spring day in Ireland can be beautiful, a day of radiance stolen from the gloom. The funeral mass in the cathedral was concelebrated by thirty or forty priests: his town brothers, his childhood friends, and many others come to honor the life of one of Killarney’s dear sons now coming home for good. (He had himself studied for the priesthood before deciding to pursue family life instead; his brothers Frank and Seumas had become senior in two of Ireland’s great orders of priests, the Franciscans and the Columbans.)

He was buried in a Franciscan robe. He had long been a member of “the little order of Saint Francis,” a lay organization devoted to Franciscan ideals. We learned then of small penances he would do, like tying rough twine around his waist under his clothes. As if it were still the Middle Ages! I would have scoffed, but I’d seen the light shining through him when impending death had pried all his coverings away!

Afterwards, the four sons, Sean, James, Frank, and I, walked behind the hearse up the main street of the town. As the funeral procession passed, those walking in the opposite direction turned and took “the three steps of mercy,” walking with the procession. The depths of Ireland’s Catholic legacy was never so clear as when a group of loutish youths, who might have been a street gang anywhere else, bowed their heads and turned to take the three steps with us.

As we turned up the road to Aghadoe cemetery, a breeze blew, and the blossoms fell from the trees onto the coffin. If it had been a movie, I would have laughed. It’s never that perfect! Except it was.

The cemetery, crowned with the ruins of a sixth century chapel, looks down on the lakes of Killarney. Hamhanded farmers (my father’s schoolmates) helped us carry the coffin over rough ground to the family plot. Normally, after the service, we would have all left, and “the lads” would have filled in the grave. But we wanted a last farewell, so we sent the lads on their way, and Sean, James, Frank, and I filled in the grave.

Now, twenty-five years later, I was back in Ireland. My tiredness fell away. I was at the heart of my father’s mystery, the place where he had turned his passionate heart to God, and the place where he had wrapped it round with rituals that had kept me from seeing its purity and its strength.

Somehow, Frank had seen through the ritual, had shared in it and sunk his roots to the same deep place. I was honored that he was opening the door for me as well. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee”

There are a thousand ways to God. Let us all honor the ways that others have found.

The next few days we wore our legs off, as the paths became wilder. The worst of it was the aptly named Lack Road, which our guidebook insisted had been used to drive cattle to market “within living memory.” We couldn’t see how you could drive a mountain goat herd across it now, as we picked our way down an impossible steep slope. We understood why our aunt, who had worked in Kerry Mountain Rescue, had insisted we pack so many extra clothes. Turn an ankle out here, and you’re many hours from help, with changeable weather bringing freezing rain at any moment. At one point, the trail, which had us up to our knees in mud at many a point, vanished beneath ten feet of water, only to reappear tantalizingly on the other side, with no apparent way across. Ireland is a wilder country than many people realize.

On the fourth day, we came round the crest of a hill and saw the ocean spread out below us. Thirty or forty miles back the other way, we could see the gleaming lakes of Killarney, and amazingly enough, the green below Aghadoe. We could see many of the passes we’d picked our way through the last few days, the miles that had lent soreness to our feet.

Along the way, we had talked through much of the old pain of the lost years, we’d shared dreams of the present and the future, but as we went on, we’d mostly fallen into a friendly silence. The old magic of Ireland was driving our reflections inward, recreating in us the unique Irish temper—passion and wildness and boggy depths alternating with conviviality, and ending up in quietness—a mirror of the landscape and the changing weather.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly & Associates, a technical information company involved in publishing, conferences, and open source software. He is a co-founder of Travelers’ Tales and is a contributing editor when his brothers hold his feet to the fire.

James O’Reilly and Larry Habegger have worked as series editors on over thirty Travelers’ Tales titles, winning eight awards for excellence. James and Larry have a syndicated newspaper column, “World Travel Watch,” which has appeared since 1985 in major newspapers in five countries. They each live with their families in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Sean O’Reilly has co-edited numerous books in the Travelers’ Tales series, includingDanger!, Testosterone Planet, The Road Within, France, Paris, Hong Kong, and San Francisco. He lives in Arizona with his family.