Teaching the Troubles at NHA: "Let's Stop Murdering; Let's Start Arguing."

Ronan doing his thing at the Little Museum of Dublin.

We arrived in Dublin in the wee hours of this morning. The Hartford to Dublin flight feels communal, because everyone tends to be from somewhere in Connecticut or Western Massachusetts. Dave sat next to a graduate of Cooperative Arts High School. I sat next to K, a woman from South Windsor who has a big Irish family that she frequently visits over here. She was traveling with her teenage daughter and meeting her mother, siblings and cousins over there because her mother "wanted to see the Killarney Fair at least one more time before she dies." We got to talking, and K had two distinct memories of the times she spent as a teenager at Newry, in the North. She remembers leaving church with a group of girls, and how the boys hanging out on the street would ask them if they were Protestant or Catholic, and then ignore them after they said they were Catholic. She also remembers going to a sort of a disco that was later destroyed in a bombing.

Dave and I picked up our rented Nissan compact and he co-piloted me along the roundabouts, kamikaze turns and "wrong-side-of-the-road" highways until we found our way to our hotel at the southern end of the city on the Post Office side of the River Liffey. I bumped the curb two or three times on the way in.

Money seems to be pouring into this area, as a massive amount of hotels and other high rises are being constructed all around it and the area is surrounded on all sides by work sites and mechanical cranes. Were it not for the Bank Holiday Weekend, I think we would hear nothing but construction sounds all day long. Some of the few remaining traditional brown brick buildings of the area are adorned with banners protesting the noise of these proceedings. If one only ever stayed in this area, one would think that Dublin had become nothing but ultra-modern glass and steel buildings and had drowned out all its traditional Irishness entirely. At our hotel, most of the workers' accents are Eastern European or Russian (but the food is still bangers and mash and black and white puddings).

On the other hand, the area on both sides of the O'Connell Street bridge is mostly how I remember it from the '80's, though more commercial now and much more crowded around Trinity College and St. Stephen's Green.

Our great find of the day was The Little Museum of Dublin at 15 St. Stephen's Green. The museum collection was created entirely out of citizen donations and our docent Ronan was engaging, knowledgable, playful and--as Dave pointed out--very even-handed in his presentation of the city's (and the country's) history. Everyone on the tour said their name and where they were from at the start, and Ronan had something to say to each person. As we said we were from Connecticut, he stated that the new flight to Dublin from Hartford was a great thing.

During Ronan's spiel, I won a licorice for knowing that Pearce was the leader of the Easter Rising, and then another for identifying de Valera in a painting. Ronan did a great job setting up the idea of Home Rule as it existed between 1900 and 1916, the events and consequences of the Easter Rising, the movement from Rising to War of Independence to Partition to Civil War, and de Valera's Catholicizing of Ireland.

He also explained the Irish terminology for the Second World War as the "emergency" and about how no one remembered to officially end that state of emergency until 1978. He spoke of Flann O'Brien, Brendan Behan, Nell McCafferty and other cultural figures, and ended by noting that, while Ireland has been conservative by nature and slow to come around to many new ideas in the past, it proudly became the first country to legalize gay marriage in recent years.

He had a lot to say about the "Celtic Tiger" period of sudden wealth in Ireland that lasted from 1995 to 2008 (and seems as if it may be making a resurgence in Dublin now, by the looks of it). 1995 was the last time I was here, so this partially explains the different place that I now find. I do remember they were building a lot of new roads then, and a lot of people were mentioning German investment over here. But that was September of 1995, and many more hours of media airtime were being devoted to the Blur and Oasis war than to the first stirrings of a major economic boom.

Two new things that Ronan taught me today were this 1921 quote from Winston Churchill, "Let's stop murdering; let's start arguing"--that could just as easily have been said by George Mitchell or many of the other major players in the Peace Agreement of 1998--and the fact that the six days of fighting in the Easter Rising were each punctuated by an hour long ceasefire so that the ducks could be fed in St. Stephen's Green.

We checked our bags upon entry to the museum, and Dave's bag was assigned number 98 while mine was assigned 72. We noted that these were the dates of the two main events we teach in our course: the 1998 Peace Agreement and Bloody Sunday in 1972. The woman at the main desk enjoyed this coincidence.

All photographs by David Senderoff.