First Day in Belfast

Dave and Saul with Alan McBride at WAVE

Dave on the Falls Road, with the mural for hunger striker Bobby Sands

Saul tagging the Peace Line in Belfast

We were filled with nervous excitement as we headed down to Belfast for the first time. Our first stop was the Wave Trauma Centre, where we were going to meet one of our heroes, Alan McBride. Alan's wife was killed when the IRA bombed the Protestant Unionist stronghold Shankill Road in 1993. He lived in complete rage for two or three years after. Then he decided it was time for peace. Formerly a butcher, Alan became a youth worker for young people affected by trauma caused by the Troubles on both sides. He has continued that work, although now he mainly works with adults. His Wave Trauma Centre is a remarkably full service organization, providing psychotherapy, art classes, massage, naturopathic medicine and many other services all centered around healing from Sectarian trauma. New entrants start with a hour to hour and a half session, in which they are asked, "What do you need?" The Centre also produces very high quality publications, such as a glossy monthly newsletter and books based on art and writing projects they have done.

According to Alan, Wave was started at least five years before he got involved. This was 1991, and it was a very small operation at first. At that time, a Catholic woman whose husband had died in the Troubles was looking for a therapeutic experience in Belfast and not finding anything. She found a nun named Sister Mary McNeise, and they began a morning coffee support group. In 1993, looking to soothe his own trauma, Alan spent time up at Corrymeela Peace Community, which we had just driven from in the morning. That was the beginning of his own healing.

Over twenty years later, Wave has partnered with Queens University in Belfast to provide a Masters in Trauma Studies. They also have a partnership with a similar program at the University of Harrisburg in America.

Some of Alan's own books include The Troubles and Other Losses (which tells twenty-five stories of deaths by heart attacks caused by the Troubles, as well as deaths from drugs and drink in Troubles-affected families) and The Disappeared (which details the cases of disappeared individuals during the Troubles). Fourteen of the seventeen disappeared bodies have been found at this point. The most famous of these cases was Jean McConville, a mother of ten who was tortured, killed and buried in a secret grave for the "crime" of offering comfort to a dying British soldier on the Falls Road. A tree and plaque in her honor hold a featured place in the tranquil gardens at the Wave. Trauma followed her family, as her children became wards of the state and her son Billy was repeatedly sexually abused by a Priest in his orphanage.

The pivotal moment in Alan's own journey came when an IRA man finally apologized to him without equivocation. His earlier letters to Gerry Adams got responses that always had a "but you must understand" after the apology. "Whenever someone tries to justify what they do," Alan says. "That puts up a barrier. It wasn't until I got that apology, that I started to do things differently."

Alan isn't an overly effusive person, but I think he was moved that we see him as such a big star in our teaching of the Troubles. He gave us about twenty or more books and periodicals related to the Wave's work to take back to our classrooms, and he arranged for us to meet with the woman who runs the Healing Through Remembering program affiliated with the Queens University education department and Facing History in Northern Ireland. He also recommended other books and movies to us, and invited us out to the pub with him for Thursday, to meet his friend Tim McGarry, a comedian who used satire to talk about the Troubles with the comedy troupe "Hole in the Wall Gang."

After we got settled into our flat and had lunch, Padraig O Tuama met us at a lovely spacious coffee shop filled with long brown picnic tables in the Queens University neighborhood of Belfast. Padraig is a poet and holds the position of "leader" at Corrymeela Peace Community. He wanted to talk to us about the Troubles from a new angle, that of the colonization and destruction of language. He began with the gaelic sayings "a land without a language is a land without a soul" (Tir gan teanga tir gan anam) and "broken Irish is better than perfect English" (Is fearr Gaeilge brote na bearla cliste). 

He picked out codes hidden from English ears within Irish song, agricultural metaphors having to do with the distribution of land (I thought of the song "Four Green Fields"). He also spoke of "aisling," a word meaning "dream" that is used in a genre of poem where the poet awakens to lament his lost lover at sea, but the lover stands as a metaphor for Ireland. He mentioned the field of study of Hiberno-English, that looks at the syntactical and structural influence of Irish on English language and culture in Ireland. He emphasized that the Troubles are more than bombs and the narrow time frame; the Troubles started from a destruction of language, but the language has persisted.

"In Irish, there is no word for yes or no, so you must repeat the phrase to answer in the affirmative or negative," he said. "We see this when the Irish speak English as well."

"Can you give me an example of that?"

"I can."

"So can you give me an example?"

"I can."

"Oh, you are giving me the example?"

"I am." 

Padraig recommended Lisa Goldenberg's 2002 book The Symbolic Significance of the Irish Language in the Northern Ireland Conflict. He then described his role at Corrymeela: he is the lead "vision caster." What he is working on right now is a cross-border examination of the Book of Ruth with Christian faith leaders, so that they can say to politicians, "Within the context of our traditions, this is what borders mean." He has also worked on making Corrymeela the public voice of faith-based LGBTQI inclusion in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and he has recently invited Judaic scholar Aviva Zornberg (author of Moses: A Human Life) to teach at Corrymeela about trauma in the biblical story of Moses.

Padraig insisted on buying our coffees, despite my protests. "It's culturally appropriate," he said, with a twinkle in his eye. 

"If you are buying our coffees, then I will buy a copy of one of your books," I bargained. He agreed that this was a fair deal and led us to the nearby independent bookstore No Alibis. 

"Get Sorry for your Troubles," he advised. "It's my one about the Troubles."

In the evening, we reconnected with Sean Pettis (mentioned in the blog post about Corymeela, "Where All Suffering is Honored") one last time before he leaves for Spain on holiday. His wife Sharon also joined us. We went to a lovely restaurant right near our flat in City Centre and then to a famous pub called the Crown, that features large cozy booths around most of the tables.

Sharon Pettis works with children on the Autism spectrum who have multiple diagnoses. Daily breakthroughs are small, but she is very attentive to them. She inspired me with what she said about bucking the curriculum when she can see a better way: "I do listening moreso than teaching. I didn't want to be a 'teacher.' I wanted to work with these kids." I like that sentiment.

As we departed on the street, a group of tipsy young Scotsmen came around to ask us where the craic was. We pointed out that we had heard some Irish music playing boisterously at a nearby pub, and we gave them directions. "Irish music... that's just what we're looking for," one of them said, and they moved on.

"That could go really well, or really poorly," Sean said, with a bemused smile, as he watched them pass along.

We went home soon after leaving Mr. and Mrs. Pettis. It was Monday night, after midnight. From our balcony, we could hear the sounds of Belfast partying on.

"Life is Holy, and Every Moment Precious": Playground at WAVE

WAVE Trauma Centre

The Crown in Belfast, with an open booth door in the background.

Link to Instagram photograph of Dave with Sean and Sharon Pettis in a booth at the Crown:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BX0S9UHDCd_/?taken-by=fuzyner

"Where All Suffering is Honored"

Looking across the Irish Sea from Corrymeela to Scotland

Derick Wilson, a retired Professor and member of the Corrymeela Peace Community, was trying to describe what this community is all about. He and Sean Pettis (Corrymeela's Development Worker for Education) were walking us through the gardens between the buildings, which are arranged on a campus by the cliffside above the town of Ballycastle, just 17 miles of Irish Sea from Scotland. The Mull of Kintyre was a tall dark shadow above the skyline behind us.

"We are trying to create a space where there is no hierarchy of suffering," Derick explained. "A place where all people feel that their suffering is being honored."

Sean is half the age of Derick, but the two men ambled along together like high school friends, which immediately exemplified for me the easy communal and collaborative vibe of the place.

Here is a link to a short video made for the 50th anniversary of Corrymeela in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7rKlzuC8OU

Though called a Christian community, Corrymeela is nonsectarian and nondenominational and it feels more like a Buddhist ashram than anything else. Sean wears many hats here, but he seems to especially be a teacher of professional development for teachers and a documentary filmmaker with a special interest in "upstanders"--people who took the risk of standing up for moral goodness despite sectarian pressures--during the Troubles and after. 

We met Sean at Dunluce Castle after a few hours of healing beauty and meditation among the magical octagonal stones of the Giants Causeway. Sean is one of the reasons we applied for the grant in the first place, so seeing him again was very special. We bought tickets to the castle and then Sean asked the ticket-taker if he could first take us into the gated pasture next door to start his unofficial tour. "You can if the bull isn't in there," he said. "He ran over the farmer just yesterday."

"We'll stay close to the gate," Sean promised, and we walked up to a place beside some grazing sheep to hear a lesson that started in the nine years war period (1594-1603) and continued through the 1600's as the castle-owning McDonnells came down from Scotland and cut sophisticated deals to always align themselves with power. It was a tale that took us through the town that once stood there and then into the castle right down to the cliffs. The story included much archaeology and history, disproven myths, sexual rumors, at least one trap door and some ostentatious displays of wealth, all along the cliffside above the Irish Sea. It also is a story that undermines some of the mythology of Irish Nationalism, as Scotland would be as close a place to here for trade or interaction as Donegal, and the rise of Nationhood had not yet occurred, so the cultures of each place intersected freely. Sean pointed to the sea. "To us, that might look like a border, but to them it was a highway."

Sean, in his tour, had an easygoing inquiry-based teaching style that would work equally well with small children or with adult learners: "Look out here and tell me what you see.... What do you suppose this stone promontory was used for.... Can you guess what this is.... Why do you suppose they did that?"

Beside Dunluce, archaeologists have unearthed Polish coins and the now buried cobblestones of a town once dominated by the McDonnell's and now buried just a few inches below the surface of the farmland here today.

Dave and I had some healing to do up here. We both loved Derry, but you can feel the sectarianism under the surface of everything in your bones and in your shoulders. The lovely, well thought out campus in Corrymeela provides a respite from such things. "Which is the idea," Sean says. "When you come up here, you get rid of all that stuff."

Corrymeela welcomes families fleeing abusive relationships or countries, faith leaders of all sorts, academics working in Peace Studies, school groups, people experiencing any kind of trauma, programs helping children with autism and dozens of other populations into a wide campus full of gardens and meditative spaces. It is a very intentional community, where everyone does their own dishes and makes their own bed for the next guest. Wifi is disabled in all the bedrooms, so that those staying here are forced out onto the couches of the common areas if they want to get on the internet.

We ate with Sean in the nearby town of Ballycastle, which was packed with summer visitors, and then returned for a quiet night around the couches.

Today's theme was the 1600's, as we went from Gleann Doherty's morning tour of the Derry walls to Sean's tour of Dunluce and the excavated village.

We met Gleann (for the second day in a row) as we checked out of our Derry Hotel and he walked us back into the walled city to begin the tour. At the top, Gleann explained that the walls were only built around the end of the Nine Years War in the early 1600's, making Derry the last walled city in Europe. 

Early in the tour, an eighty-five year old man stopped us to promote his book on Christian spirituality. He first asked us facetiously if we thought he might get mugged in the city. Referring to Gleann, Dave and I, he cited the Derry expression, "You canna walk a block in this town without running across three rascals." He then asked Gleann for his family name and gently teased him about his background. Finally, he spoke of his travels in Mexico. "We had tremendous craic down there," he enthused. Then he let us go on our way up the steep walls. It was one of those random moments of human connection that come and go so easily in Ireland.

We came to an area of wall composed of soft sandstone, and wondered why this would have been used for a fortress. "They ran out of building materials," Gleann explained. "but down the hill they found a pile of rocks known as a Catholic Cathedral, so they put them to good use."

A big theme for Gleann today was the distortion of history by the British. He made the point that Wolfe Tone, the leader of the first Irish Nationalist rebellion (in 1798) was a Protestant, as were so many other important Nationalists. He also told us more about the circumstances of his father's death at Bloody Sunday (he was a steward--a Civil Rights worker who had the job of making sure people stayed on the prescribed parade route--but his signifier arm band had fallen off in the melee). He told us that the British paratrooper battalions who did the killing were only in Derry that one day; they didn't know the place. They had come down from Ballymurphy, a lesser known massacre that month whose families resent the attention heaped on Bloody Sunday, because they feel their own suffering has never been substantially recognized.

Which leads me back to Derick's words: "A place where all people feel that their suffering is recognized."

For Gleann, "the Troubles" is a hurtful phrase, in that it obscures a hard truth. "It was a conflict; it was an actual war. Troubles is understating it too much." We both hugged Gleann when we left. He had let us into his family, and into the other Bloody Sunday families of the people he introduced us to in the Bogside. Now Gleann was family to us. He left himself wide open to us, and--as he had promised in my earliest emails with him--he hadn't made it all about the suffering. As he would say, there was a bit of craic in it as well.

The unusual rock formations at the Giants Causeway

Visitors explore the Causeway

Dave and Saul at the Causeway

Beside the entrance door at Corrymeela

The playground at Corrymeela

Derry seen from the castle walls, with the Rossville Flats in the foreground, where the worst of Bloody Sunday took place

Corrymeela kitchen

Derry Walls

Dave and Saul in the Bogside

Looking out at a Protestant neighborhood from within the Derry Walls

Our experience of Derry (a town called "Derry" by the Catholic Nationalist majority and "Londonderry" by the more historically powerful Protestant Unionist minority) was most epitomized by two contrasting celebrations this evening after a full day of planned activities, when we wandered the length of the walls of the old city, where the apprentice boy defenders of the Protestant William of Orange held out against a siege of the armies of the Catholic James II in 1689. The annual Apprentice Boy parade, which celebrates the event with a march of well-dressed Unionists, had taken place earlier in the day, and a helicopter still circled in the air above us to make sure everything was alright.

As we came down from the walls and strolled the fortified medieval streets, we passed a building beside the Siege Museum, where a lively party was taking place. A group of skinheads and smaller men in beefeater-like uniforms stood guard outside, casting a wary eye on us as we walked by. We had come inside the walled-in old city to talk to the Apprentice Boy Parade celebrants, but the message of "Strangers, go away" rang out clearly, so we wandered outside the gates and into the Catholic streets to Paedar O'Donnell's, a pub just outside that was recommended by Gleann Doherty, our Bloody Sunday tour guide from earlier in the day.

As we opened the doors of the pub, a woman jumped up and danced a jig with each of us--and with those who came in just after us--as a traditional music duo played from the corner. The jig seemed to be the price of admission, a way of saying, "Are you down for the craic tonight?"

I saw these contrasting experiences as a warning: those who build walls to keep others out live only fearfully and stiffly even after the high walls are in place, while those who are walled out can relax, and are still capable of great fun. Though, to be fair, the Apprentice Boys celebrants do come here from all over the world, while the crowd at Paedar O'Donnell's is mostly fairly local.

Gleann Doherty was ready for us at our hotel when we arrived in Derry. He is the youngest son of Patrick Doherty, who was murdered at age 31 by British paratroopers on the 30th of January in 1972 during the event remembered as "Bloody Sunday." Patrick was only seven months old at the time, but being the child of a civilian murdered in one of the pivotal events in his country's history has informed his identity and his love of history. He runs a small business called Derry Guided Tours and almost everyone in the Bogside Catholic neighborhood seems to know him. He was frequently greeted as he took us to the key sites of both Bloody Sunday and the Battle of the Bogside (a three day riot that began on today's date in 1969 and led to a long-term occupying force of British troops in the city).

What was mostly an easygoing and friendly tour of the Bloody Sunday streets became tense just once, as we digressed from the path at William Street, where water cannons once pelted marchers in 1972, toward the Rossville Flats where marchers were shot at that time. A group of four skinhead-like fellows were standing guard outside an extremist Nationalist society among tremendous wall murals. Dave instinctually knew to ask Gleann permission if he should take photos at this spot. "Maybe not here," Gleann said in his understated manner, as his eyes told us he was a bit worried about the situation.

While large crowds of Protestant Apprentice Boys beat drums and paraded loudly within the nearby castle-like walls, we took a short break from our tour to meet Gleann's sister and other Catholic women who were setting up tea and jam and scones in tents for their own multi-day celebration, the Feile, within the outdoor area of the housing estates of the Bogside. Two young red-headed girls step-danced joyfully while we had our snack and were interviewed by the ladies about our perceptions of the Bogside as a place.

Gleann did a great job fielding Saul's constant questions and digressions

Palettes stacked for a Catholic bonfire under an overpass in the Bogside

Tires and other debris stacked for a Catholic bonfire 

Gleann went above and beyond the initial hour and a half tour, bringing us to a bank in City Centre to buy British Pounds and then giving us a short preview of tomorrow's tour--the inside of the city walls--to satisfy my curiosity about the Apprentice Boys. 

I insisted that we go see the parade, so Gleann zipped up his bomber jacket to hide a shirt that he thought might give him away as a Catholic (it was his company's shirt and it included the word "Derry" instead of "Londonderry"). We walked together to the square at the center of the walls neighborhood and watched as various marching bands of the Apprentice Boys societies paraded past us, looking serious and purposeful and quite martinet. 

As Gleann walked us out of the walls and down the hill back into the Bogside, he confessed that he had never stood so close to the Apprentice Boys parade in his life. It took two teachers from thousands of miles away and from an entirely different culture to finally bring him to a parade that happens every year within a kilometer of the neighborhood that has been his lifelong home.

Gleann dropped us off at the Museum of Free Derry, an incredible collection of artifacts related to the Civil Rights movement in Derry that thrived between 1968 and 1974, and was indelibly marked by the violence of Bloody Sunday. In the lobby, Dave apologized--as an American--for Trump. I pointed out that the North had a very similar figure in Ian Paisley. "But Paisley was never plannin' on blowin' up the world, was he?" the counter woman replied. I had to give her that one.

I went through the one-floor museum relatively fast the first time, planning to sweep through a second time, until the power of a short documentary (about the families of the Bloody Sunday victims getting acknowledgement that their departed were innocent thirty-odd years later) rendered me incapable of taking in any more. I locked myself in the Museum restroom in order to catch my breath, until I could get my bearings again.

In the late afternoon, before the incidents at the Siege Museum and at Paedar O'Donnell's, Dave and I walked back into the Bogside by ourselves and talked to some young boys stacking palettes under a highway bridge for a bonfire. A boy with a heavy blister on his lip pointed up the hill toward the walls, "They are Protestant and we are Catholic," he said as a way of explaining, "and we're gonna make a big bonfire." He politely answered our questions until an older boy of maybe sixteen (who seemed to be the make-shift foreman of the operation) came over and pulled him away from us, scolding him for slacking on the job. We said our goodbyes to them, and the younger boys were quiet while the older boy gave us a barely perceptible tough guy nod as if he spoke for the whole group.

We walked on to the nearby Gasyard Centre, a beautifully designed building that serves as a sort of a YMCA or a community center dedicated to improving the life of the citizens of the Bogside. An entire family was manning the main office and front desk--wife, husband and daughter. The husband explained to me that the wife was the boss of the place and he was the hired hand. "That's the way it goes in my house too," I explained. "The sooner ya' learn it, the better it'll go for ya'," said the wife who's the Director of the Center. 

The family then sent us into the next room to see an exhibit of photographs detailing the life of the recently deceased former IRA man and Peace Agreement hero Martin McGuinness. The photographs were lovely, but there were no captions posted to explain anything. One had only the image to go on, and you either knew the supporting characters around McGuinness or you didn't. The man watching the room wasn't of much help in this area.

As we walked home along the overpass, a group of male Bogsider teenagers passed us. We said hello, but they all pretended we were invisible. And maybe, as middle-aged foreigners, we truly were.

Apprentice Boys clubs march past the central square within the Derry walls

Loyalist Territory

Old preserved wall by Museum of Free Derry, showing impact of 7.62 mm rounds fired by the paras on Bloody Sunday

Area of the new Museum of Free Derry in the Bogside on 30th January 1972 (Bloody Sunday)

That same area this afternoon

Hunger Strikers Memorial in the Bogside (detail)

Hunger Strikers Memorial in the Bogside (detail)

The old gasyard wall at the Gasyard Centre

The Derry Walls as seen from down below in the Bogside

Some IRA graffiti that has breached the fortified walls

A Day of Human Connections

Saul becomes fast friends with an Amnesty International volunteer in Limerick

An "I am from" poem from the office wall at Narrative 4

A wall plaque on O'Connell Street in Limerick

James Lawlor and Amee O'Connor Berkery of Narrative 4 set the context for our day as we interviewed them in the morning. Their deep belief in the ability of human beings to make connections across barriers of country, class, gender and race served as an inspiration that Dave and I kept coming back to as we made our way up the Galway Road from Limerick to Galway City.

A twenty year old Amnesty International volunteer stopped us on the street to talk about the subject of pro-choice in Ireland and the conversation instead turned into considerations of what it is to be Irish or American or British in the contemporary world before we exchanged email addresses so that he will be able to do social action work with our students in America; a Virginia Eisenhower Republican (American Republican, not Irish Republican) and First Lieutenant from the Vietnam Period engaged this lifelong Yankee Democrat (Saul) in conversation at St. Mary's Cathedral in Limerick, about his disenchantment with militarism and the odd moments of camaraderie among strangers (as an engineer, he was once embraced by a factory worker when an invention of his allowed this man to see the person working next to him for the first time in twenty years); I detected my own deceased father's sort of brushstrokes in the work of the Irishman Jack Yeats at the Hunt Museum; international social justice advocate Anna Visser took time away from her family vacation to meet us in her childhood hometown in the Burren to have coffee under the blue sky outside a hilltop cafe and talk about Irish education, the psychology of a formerly colonized state and the way in which our mutual friend--the United Nations Human Rights advocate Claude Cahn--has a knack for connecting us to good people all over the world.

Once arrived in Galway, a middle eastern immigrant pizza counter man opened up to us about his medical studies and his dream of being the one to find recognition and a cure for fibromyalgia in Ireland. 

After mixed results with the music pubs on the Latin Quarter in Galway, we stumbled upon an excellent traditional music pub on the Salthill side of the Quay, where an audience member made us all smile and laugh with an impromptu a cappella song that was the highlight of our evening adventure.

Please enjoy the song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a06zeGp86Rg

As I type this, the owner of the Eyre Square cafe where I am working--in reference to the passing of a good friend--tells a customer, "You know what they say, don'tcha? We're not here for a long time; we're here for a good time." Indeed we are.

Anna Visser's beautiful hometown, Kinvara

Galway Quay at Night

Dave posing in the Latin Quarter

Saul posing in the Latin Quarter

The marvelous Crane Bar

Dublin to Limerick

Easter 1916. It was one of several themes on day two. On day three, it was everything.

We started day three at the impressive GPO Museum at the General Post Office on O'Connell Street in Dublin (formerly Sackville Street, under British rule). The museum uses a mix of multi-media technologies and three dimensional displays to tell the story of the 1916 Easter Rising, especially as it relates to the GPO itself, the command center of the whole operation. When you first enter, you are greeted by a series of almost life-size posters, depicting the several "types" involved in the time period around the Rising. As you go deeper into the museum, you go deeper into the specifics.

Loyalist character type at the GPO Museum

Life-size displays depict both slum life and wealthy life in 1916 Dublin; video screens present scholars hashing out what it must have been like; a sort of dramatic re-enactor narrates certain events using the gathered ephemera for illustrations in his narrative; wall displays take you through the major players and certain artifacts from their lives; touch screens let you turn a map of O'Connell Street into images of the bombed-out looking destruction created by Dublin's six day guerrilla war; a film made of four or five giant panels envelopes you in the action of 1916 in a mix of reenactment and computer simulations. The various factions are very well handled, which built on the details that David Joyce had elucidated for us on the previous day. 

After some excellent refreshment at the Museum Cafe (I've noticed that museum cafes have especially good food in this country), we headed over the O'Connell Street Bridge to the trendy and way-too-crowded Temple Bar neighborhood near Trinity College (it was a bank holiday Monday, and everyone and their sister were there). When that exhausted us, we returned to a favorite coffee shop at St. Stephen's Green and then wandered the Green itself. It is an extremely well landscaped park, where new surprises lurk just behind stands of trees that always obscure the next bit of park, and each little park inside the park seems to be more stunning than the last one. A grand arch leads to a green full of lounging young people, then to an ornate flower garden, then to a playground, then to two duck ponds, bandshells, more flower gardens and back around. One side of the green faces the luxury hotel, the Shelbourne--partially obscured by tall trees--where in 1916 British soldiers fired down upon the Irish volunteers inside the park except for the one hour of the day when all violence paused so the ducks could be fed.

We were in the mood for a long walk, so we miscalculated and decided to walk back to our hotel rather than hop on the tram. We got rained on something awful. We have been rained on quite a bit all week, so we are used to it, but this downpour was particularly hard. We got cleaned up and headed out for some live music that was alright, but not at the same level as the Cobblestone the night before.

This morning, I drove the 200 plus kilometers down to Limerick, a trip that started with me swearing I would never drive in this country again and ended with me feeling new confidence in the roundabout system, 120 km speed limits and left-side driving.

Limerick is a beautiful old city of stone and brick and lovely pedestrian only streets filled with cafes and pubs. The broad majestic Shannon River runs right through the center of town.

We came here to meet with James Lawlor, the Ireland regional director of Narrative 4, the storytelling and empathy organization founded by writing conference director Lisa Consiglio and novelist Colum McCann and helped along by poet and former Newtown high school teacher Lee Keylock, who became Director of International Programs after meeting McCann in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy.

N4 is doing excellent work all over the world by bringing together people from unlike communities to build empathy with one another through the sharing of stories. The Limerick branch has been especially successful in bringing the elderly community together with young people for story exchanges. James is a busy man. He has just completed his PhD in Irish Literature at the University of Limerick and, at 31, has become one of the most important leaders in the literary and cultural scene in this city (he would never agree with that, he's too humble), having edited a notable book of poetry in praise of Limerick poet Michael Hartnett and having caused a stir in the media through the attention N4 has been bringing to Limerick. Today, he had to squeeze several appointments at Narrative 4 in between bringing us to lunch at a local museum, having dinner with us at our hotel, and finally bringing us to Lough Gur to have a look around at the ancient ruins of a church, an ancient pagan stone structure, newer faerie villages, picturesque hills and a particularly peaceful graveyard. We instantly fell in love with Limerick; James' affection for the place is contagious.

Tomorrow, we will interview James about how he became involved with Narrative 4 and what his work looks like today.

Saul and Dave rest outside an old pub near Lough Gur

Holy light near the Faerie Village (painted stones) at Lough Gur

Lough Gur Sunset

"Where we once watched the rowboats landing, on the broad majestic Shannon"

Hill and Lough

"What's the Craic?"

David Joyce explains the history of discrimination against the Irish Travellers

Daibheid (David) Joyce is a human rights advocate and lawyer based in Dublin's Drumcondra neighborhood. He comes from an Irish Traveller background and grew up in Westmeath, which is the hapless hurling team he still supports. Hurling is the Irish national sport often called the fastest game on grass.

When we first contacted David through my friend Claude Cahn--who works in human rights at the UN and has a long history in the area of Roma rights in Eastern Europe--he offered to give us a walking tour of the Easter Rising. But we became fast friends, and he gave us much more than that.

The Travelers are Ireland's "gypsies" if such a word can be used anymore, and they are also known both matter-of-factly and pejoratively as "tinkers" due to their tradition as traveling workers. Unlike the Roma, they have no known links to India or any foreign place and they were long not considered a specific ethnic class. David says he comes from a Traveler "tradition" or "background." They are Irish Catholic, but they don't fit in with the mainstream Irish Catholics. They are outsiders in their own country. Discrimination against them has taken the form of legislation against their lifestyle (criminalization of vagrancy, tent-living and some of their traditional trades). They only achieved recognized ethnic status on March 1st of this year, and David was involved with those negotiations.

One of the issues around the Easter Rising was who really owns this history. Sinn Fein claims it, but it was really the work of several other groups: the Irish Republican Brotherhood; the Irish Volunteers; Connolly's Irish Citizen Army. David wondered aloud if he would have had the courage and the foolishness to join in the doomed uprising if he were around in 1916 and, if so, which of these groups he would have taken part in. "I would have been a Citizen Army," he decided. "Not a Fenian (Irish Republican Brotherhood). The Fenians were too romantic about it all." The Citizen Army were trade unionists, and socialist in orientation.

We made our way through the streets of the rebellion, and finally found ourselves at the National Museum of Ireland: Decorative Arts and History Branch at the old Collins military barracks. We walked around, but everything seemed to be locked up except the Cafe. David asked the counter-woman "What's the craic?" She replied that the museum would not be open until 2 PM today. 

"Craic" is a frequently used expression of dubious origin. It's not truly gaelic, but has been adopted by the Irish as if it was. A web search reveals multiple hits that list its origin in the English word "crack" as in the expression "crackin' good time." Its spelling as craic is an affectation to make it seem as if it comes from traditional Irish Gaelic. Despite all this, it's a great word, used to both mean, "What's going on?" and to refer to the tradition of staying up late with good friends and music and, generally, some libations. Some sites will tell you its closest English equivalent is the word "fun," but I don't think "fun" is specific enough.

We left the Collins barracks and found our way to the Jameson distillery, the Easter Uprising monument, a monument to the Miami show band incident of the Troubles and other points of interest.

In the afternoon, we headed over to Croke Park to buy tickets for the Hurling semifinal match between Galway and Tipperary. Right near the stadium, we saw Brendan Behan's childhood home, Roddy Doyle's Fighting Words (a creative writing program for teens), and the Royal Canal (immortalized in Behan's song "The Auld Triangle"). We then had a few hours to kill, so we stopped by David's house near the stadium and he made us coffee and treated us to a restroom and good wifi. 

The old Croke Park is famous for the 1920 Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers and Royal Irish Constabulary policemen opened fire on the crowd in retaliation for Michael Collins's Irish Republican Army's killing of British undercover agents earlier in the day. David showed how the British army had blocked off each side of the long narrow street outside.

Hurling is a fantastic spectator sport. balls in the goal count as three points, but most points scored are one-pointers achieved by hurling the ball, off your stick, between the uprights--at any height--above the crossbar. One pointers are relatively easily achieved by skilled players, so part of the strategy is deciding whether you want to risk firing a shot by the goalkeeper for a handful of points, or just going for the easier though smaller score above his head.

This particular game was close throughout. The teams were two of the best in the world, and very evenly matched. Galway pulled off a last minute 22-21 victory after never enjoying a truly comfortable lead throughout the entire 70+ minutes. My daughter's school color is also maroon so I had chosen Galway as my side, and all three of us decided to cheer for them. David Joyce happened to be wearing a maroon shirt, so a fan in blue shook his hand in a gesture of sportsmanship at the end of the contest. David smiled, and didn't bother to explain that he's a Westmeath man himself.

In the evening, David Senderoff and I headed out to the Cobblestone, a pub referenced by Patti Smith in her recent eulogy for Sam Shepard. I daresay we experienced a fair bit of the craic in that establishment. A constantly changing group of musicians played traditional music around a booth in the front corner while the crowd drank and talked freely about their lives with both friends and strangers. David Joyce joined us about an hour in, and he pointed out the owner to me, Tom. I went over to this big fellow and asked if he had seen Patti Smith's mention of the place. "Oh, yes," he said nonchalantly. "Nice lady. She hasn't been here for a few years. But Sam Shepard, he was great friends with a few of the musicians here tonight. They played music for one of his shows down at the Abbey Theatre." He was fairly blase about the whole thing, and was more interested in telling me about this strange theory that Oliver Cromwell was the father of Irish Republicanism and about the local author who had convinced him of it.

The bar was packed with Galway fans in maroon jerseys. We probably congratulated them all at some point before we got in a taxi and headed back home to our hotel. Good craic it was.

Saul and Dave at the Hurling Semifinals

Signs in the musician's corner at the Cobblestone

Saul with David Joyce at the Miami Show Band Memorial

The Miami Show Band Memorial

"The auld triangle went jingle jangle, all along the banks of the Royal canal"

"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.

One of the duck ponds at St. Stephen's Green.

Sinn Fein Broadsheet from the War for Independence period, from the museum's collection.

Red Eye Jet Lag at 5 o'clock Dublin time this morning

A rare remnant of old Dublin in the swiftly changing area on the non-Trinity side of the Liffey.