Processing Ireland

I knew it would be intense, coming to terms with the Irish part of me. Visiting Ireland had always been something I intended to do. I put it off for one reason or another, for years. My twenties, thirties and forties passed by, I didn’t go. Finally I did. I have been changed in ways I’ll be discovering for years.

The pain of Ireland is inescapable, never far below the surface. Within minutes of meeting our cousin in Roscommon, he’d taken us on a walk through a hedge and a gate to the ruin of an abbey, its monks killed centuries ago by the English. The next day he took us to Strokestown, a museum of the Irish “ascendancy”—protestant landlords whose children had elaborate tea parties while their Irish tenants starved to death. The famine museum there was in great contrast to the cheery meal of Irish stew and tea we had next to the gift shop after the arduousness of our trek through the manse.

These images haunted me. I didn’t want to go there bearing grudges. If you put your ear to the ground, listen carefully, in this country you hear the screams of your ancestors, you wonder what that has done to your own psyche, played out in 1950s America, a land of abundance, far from places like this.

~