A Son of Ireland

March 17, 2014

It’s said that travel is transformative.

In June of 2006, I stepped for the first time onto Irish soil, the country from which my maternal great-great-grandmother, Mary Keoughan Delahanty, had left more than 150 years earlier, sailing to Canada with five of her six children. It’s also the country of my father’s ancestors – Kelly being the second most popular Irish name after Murphy.

I had met Ireland long before I went there. We had a long-distance relationship – 4,000 kilometers and four generations, to be more exact. But in many ways, Ireland was a very real presence in the world I grew up in.

There were the LPs stacked in my parents’ console stereo. Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers. The Irish Rovers. Tenors whose names I can’t recall.

There was the way my mother would call my dad a “stubborn Irishman” even though he’d never been to Ireland.

When my father was a boy in Charlottetown, he ran on streets whose names hold echoes from that faraway land: Grafton, Pownal, Fitzroy. He rode his bike to places called Emerald and Kelly’s Cross and Belfast.

Charlottetown’s Province House, the seat of the provincial legislature, and the building that hosted the conference of confederation in 1864, was built from stone quarried in Ireland and ferried across the ocean, its shape and very presence a tactile memory for these new Canadians.

And there are many ways Irish heritage and culture is woven into the strands of everyday life on Prince Edward Island. The music. The storytelling. The jokes. The natural insularity of the Island helped to preserve through generations these inherited ways of being and interacting.

Not to mention the physical reminders: the rolling hills, the emerald green pastures for cattle and horses, the red soil perfect for potatoes, and the nearness of the sea.

 —–

My first real introduction to Ireland was from a few hundred feet in the air, having flown from London in a regional airline’s turbo-prop plane. Approaching Dublin from the north, I gazed out the oval window to see the coastal fields, roads and rural laneways growing closer and more distinct with our gradual descent; the lines and shapes and patterns and colours of the place loosening themselves from stories and representations and becoming manifest in front of my eyes.

The first inhabitants I spotted were not Irish people at all, but rather flocks of sheep moving en masse through the meadows as the shadow of the plane sheared across their backs.

I had my first substantive encounter with an Irishman after I had landed and ridden the bus into the core of Dublin. I was making my way on foot through the afternoon’s soft drizzle to my hotel in the Temple Bar district. Waiting to cross O’Connell Street, I took out the compact travel umbrella I had bought back home in Toronto, prepared for Irish weather.

The elderly man stood waiting beside me, whittled lean but only slightly stooped in a grey overcoat, wire glasses and tweed cap. He had watched as I deployed my pint-sized umbrella with one press of a button.

“And where d’ya get one of those?” he asked me.

“Oh, I got this in Toronto, in Canada,” I replied.

Just then the walk signal shifted green and I started across the zebra. I was half-way across when the old gent, still rooted on the curb, presumably mulling this new information, quietly registered his opinion, shared as much with the stones in the sidewalk or for the benefit of the familiar rain as aimed at me.

“That’s too far,” said he.

—–

Dublin’s Temple Bar district is a tourist magnet. Young people from the UK and the continent fly there for bachelor and bachelorette party weekend package deals. As I had arrived on a Monday and left on Thursday, I suspect I missed the best/worst of the weekend partiers.

Still, there was no shortage of young revellers. After my first night exploring the area, I traipsed back to my hotel through the cobblestoned Temple Bar streets, drifting past clutches of partying 20-somethings. Sip-happy, semi-drunk or fully loaded, they lurched and sang and shouted in pairs or floated from pub to pub in mixed-gender groups, their boisterous banter bouncing off the old storefronts, ricocheting off the stones, gurgling down the street-centre gutters.

On Tuesday, my first full day in Dublin, the drizzle had lifted, though the sky was still a patchy grey. I found a nice little coffee shop on the north side of the River Liffey, almost directly across the Ha’penny Bridge from my hotel. There I nestled in to plan the rest of my four-day stay. Every now and then, I would look up from my maps and brochures, take a gulp of coffee, and a wondrous reality would hit me like a strong jolt of caffeine: “I’m in fucking Dublin!”

I figured out when I would take my day trip to Galway, and then set off to find the tourism centre near Trinity College to book it. Wandering in the area, I turned up a little rising side street crowned by a church atop a small hill.

The church, it turned out, is the tourism centre. I also learned that the hill upon which the church stands (on Suffolk Street) is where the Viking founders of Dublin had held their “Thingmote,” the gathering where they made public pronouncements of their laws. In fact, there is a pub called Thing Mote just around the corner, but I didn’t go there. I make it a point never to drink with Vikings.

Instead, I planned that night to go on a literary pub crawl. It began at the Duke, a big old charming pub on Duke Street, where my fellow crawlers and I gathered and were met by our guides, a couple who were also actors.

After introducing themselves and explaining how the night would proceed, they performed a scene from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” (Beckett being one of four Dubliners awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature). The excerpt they performed included this passage:

VLADIMIR: “Calm yourself.”

ESTRAGON: (voluptuously.) “Calm… calm…The English say cawm.”

Of course, they pronounced calm the Irish way – more like “cam.”

And at that moment, I had a revelation that almost knocked me off my barstool. My father had always pronounced it the Irish way – “cam”! I had never made the connection before! Four generations removed from Ireland, and my father, born and raised in Charlottetown, P.E.I., still said “cam down”! I could hear his voice. A span of four generations collapsed to a single moment. The ocean between these two islands became not a barrier but a connective tissue.

From that moment on I was not just a tourist to Ireland. I was more than a mere visitor. Suddenly I was, in a word, a son.