Warming Up to an Irish Welcome

My wife Joyce and I rode the bus from the ferry into Dublin with a very excited young man. “Lord, it’s so good to be home again.”

“You’re from Dublin?”

“I’m English, but then I’m really not, you see. My parents brought me here when I was just a boy. Now, I never feel at home anywhere else. Look. . . . There, do you see that? That’s the home of the Irish Sweepstakes, the Hospital Fund. Didn’t they used to sell sweepstakes tickets in the States?”

Joyce started to respond but he didn’t give her time.

“It was said that when the Sweeps were going, if an Irishman got sick they’d just build a hospital around him. I’d not be after believing it, of course.”

The young Englishman jumped to his feet and pointed at a nondescript shop front. “It’s me pub. Me favorite place in all the world. Saints be praised, it’s open. I’m after getting off. Well, Godspeed and God bless.”

Suitcase and raincoat trailing, he jumped off as soon as the bus slowed. “Did you notice?” Joyce asked. “The farther into Dublin we got the more Irish he sounded. Another mile and we wouldn’t have been able to understand him at all.”

It happened to us, too. The farther into Ireland we went, the harder it was not to “put on the brogue.” English, especially American English, just seems to lean into it.

Irish Hospitality

Seventeen minutes by taxi from Shannonside and a mile from the village of Ennis was the Clare Inn, where we were scheduled to meet our tour the following day. When we inquired at the desk about public transportation into Ennis, the hotel manager came out of her office.

“It’s company you are. What kind of a person would I be, having a fine car and not taking you to Ennis and it about to rain?” She drove us to Ennis and wouldn’t listen when we tried to thank her.

“There’ll be none of that. When your Mr. Reagan told everyone to stay home and not travel a year or so ago, it almost destroyed us. It’s our thanks to you for coming home to Ireland. The Good Lord knows we need you.” She let us out of the car in Ennis. I closed the door and leaned on it.

“Ma’am,” I said. “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. It’s not really a homecoming for us. We’re just a little Irish. Mostly just a kind of mix. Most of us Americans are like that.”

“Is that a fact?” She leaned across the seat to look up at us. “You’re after telling me that every year the whole of America isn’t wearing the green on St. Paddy’s Day and then painting a green line down the middle of the road and parading for hours? That the people I see coming back here year after year are just strangers or that I don’t know an Irishman when I see one?

“Nobody’s just a little Irish.” She gave us a smile and a quick nod of the head that seemed to say, “There, chew on that,” and pulled away from the curb. We watched her drive away.

“When that lady says, ‘Welcome home,’ ” Joyce said, “you’d better listen.”

Guided Tour

The next morning we met our tour group in the hotel lobby. There were some people from Boston accompanied by their parish priest, a Swedish-looking family from Wisconsin, the Hanleys from California, people from New Jersey, New York, Chicago and Toronto. But the most interesting person we met that morning was an Irishman from Kerry, Peter Bourke, the tour director.

“I only hope you like me,” he said. “But if you don’t, please don’t tell anyone because of me poor sweet wife and me 14 little ones at home.”

In his opening remarks he also apologized for his appearance, which he said wasn’t so good because of some recent reconstructive surgery, namely having his ears sewed back on. A few of the ladies gasped.

“Unfortunately,” Peter said, “I was involved in a dispute in a pub. Lost both me ears and as a consequence I went blind.”

There were a few groans.

Peter held up his hands. “Stone blind, I swear it. When me ears went, me hat fell down over me eyes and I couldn’t see a thing. Not a thing.”

There was some laughter and someone in the back said: “So it’s going to be that kind of a tour, is it?”

It was that kind of a tour.

Ireland is full of beauty, and Peter made sure we saw it. And he told us about the history and the legends.

He showed us some houses, now little more than stone ruins, the wood and thatch long since rotted away, that our ancestors left at the time of the potato famine.

He introduced us to the faerie-rings and the theories and warnings attached to them. But when the scenery thinned a little, he did the entertaining.

“Did you hear about the two Kerrymen walking along the beach?” he asked. “One says to the other, ‘Oh, look at the dead sea gull.’ The other looks up into the sky and says, ‘Where? Where?’ ”

Peter admitted that little boys in Ireland are never told about things such as sex. On his wedding night, he said, he had not wanted to go to bed because his father had told him it would probably be the most exciting night of his life. He was afraid if he went to bed he’d miss it.

Nonstop Humor

He never seemed to run out of jokes, some so funny that he’d start laughing long before he’d get to the punch line, and all of us, along with Pat Kirby, the driver, would laugh at Peter’s laughing till the tears ran down our cheeks. He kept us and himself howling for a considerable part of our 14 days in Ireland.

Peter’s whole tour suggested that he subscribed to a sentiment I’d heard expressed by another Irishman, a traveling companion named Jack Shaugnessy many years before.

“Me boy,” he’d said, “if it isn’t any fun, it isn’t any good.”

“What?” I had asked.

“Everything,” he said. I agree.

The curse of the Irish isn’t drink. It’s not the faerie-rings. It isn’t even the English. The curse of the Irish is that every Irishman thinks he can sing.

Peter was no exception. The first time he did it he picked up the mike, ran the scales quickly, cleared his throat and said: “Sure, I sing like a bird.”

There was some muttering from Pat.

“Well, a buzzard’s a bird.” Peter was better than a buzzard. Not a whole lot, but some, and he could sing any Irish song any of us had ever heard of and a lot we hadn’t.

One night toward the end Peter announced that we were all going to a neighborhood pub near the hotel, “where the singing was always good.”

Neighborly Pub

It really wasn’t much of a pub but it had a fine personality and there were a few friendly regulars clustered around the bar who were more than willing to help with the song and the drinking.

We’d been singing for about an hour when an old man with a proprietary air about him came in, leaned on the bar and waited. He was served a pint but he still waited, smiling benevolently. After a nod from Peter, Pat stepped to the center of the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Before you you see Paddy Flynn, gifted by God with the finest voice that ever blessed this land. Perhaps, if we gave him a hand. . . .”

We all applauded and Flynn cleared his throat, sipped his ale, held his cap over his heart and began to sing. All of us sat open-mouthed. One woman asked, “Is he singing in the old tongue?”

He wasn’t. It was just his brogue, the fact that he had only a few teeth left and that his voice had not aged well. After a few minutes some lyric only he understood moved him to tears and he just stopped. We gave him a standing ovation as he put on his cap, finished his ale and left.

Peter watched, then stood and looked at us for a moment. “You’re not a bad group. As your after guessing, Paddy doesn’t know his voice is gone.”

A few days later, near Rosepenna, Patrick parked the bus on the side of a hill so that some of the group could go down to a cove to watch a man tarring a carrack, one of the canvas-frame fishing boats used in Ireland for a thousand years.

Peter was sitting on the grass, watching. Joyce and I sat next to him. “That was a fine songfest we had the other night,” I said.

Peter nodded. “Did you ever see such a people for singing? It’s one of the things that helped us conquer the world.”

“Ireland conquered the world?”

“Oh, yes, indeed she has. There’s never been a successful invasion of Ireland, you know, and it has nothing to do with force of arms. The invaders come, they eat with us, they sing with us and pretty soon they forget they were ever anything else. We gobble them up. We assimilate them. Armies, armadas, visitors. The only enemy an Irishman’s got is another Irishman.”

Sad Moments

Joyce touched his arm. “But there seems something so sad about Ireland.”

“Sad, is it, missis?” Peter said. “Well, she has her sad moments, as you might say. But this certainly isn’t one of them.”

“It’s not?”

“No, missis. It’s the summertime. She’s happy and it’s because of you.”

Peter stood and brushed the grass from his trousers. “How could she be otherwise when so many of her children have come to visit?”

Our Irish tour was really more of an emotional experience than any trip Joyce and I have ever taken.

I think we’ve come to believe that old saying that if you put your ear to the ground, close against the sod, you can hear Ireland’s heartbeat. I wonder if maybe it doesn’t beat a little faster when her children come home to visit.

The woman at the Clare Inn was right. No one’s just a little Irish.

For our trip to Ireland we chose CIE Tours International. It offers packages ranging from three days to two weeks. You can write to them at 19634 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana 91356, or call toll-free (800) 331-3824 or (818) 345-0148.