Two weeks back marked my fourth visit to Ireland — 1973, 2007, 2019, and 2025 — and likely not my last. In 2007, my son met his future wife on our tour, and I have two red-headed grand-leprechauns now to show for it. This time, my travel partner, a first-timer, and I focused on the three D’s, Dublin on the east, Dingle and Doolin in the west, connected by the country’s fine iron road of rails.
Over the past 52 years of my acquaintance, this once-isolated outlier in the North Atlantic, has become a vibrant, forward-thinking nation, first in the world to ban smoking in public places in 2004 and the first nation to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote (2015). After centuries of moral repression by a scandal-ridden Catholic Church, the Irish rebelled, voting to approve abortion and sanction divorce. Following England’s seven-century oppression, Ireland finally secured its long-sought independence in the 1920s, then spent most of the past century saddled with a depressed economy.
Finally freed from the throes of poverty in this millennium, they now seem determined to keep it that way on their brisk daily walks to work. The Irish are infectiously outgoing, accented by their lilting “brogue,” which I never tire of listening to. It’s a stylish speech that lifts ordinary English to the brink of lyric poetry. Ask for directions whenever possible, then sit back and enjoy for it will be well worth your while.
I supplemented our visit by reading Ray Bradbury’s Green Shadows, White Whale, a fictionalized memoir of his six months working on a screenplay (Moby Dick) in 1950’s Ireland:
“Before you go,” said Finn. “On the Irish now. … How would you best describe …?”
“Imagination,” I said quietly. … “What wealth is there? None! What natural resources? Only one: the resourceful genius, the golden mind, of everyone I’ve met! … The Church puts her on her knees, the weather drowns her, politics all but buries her … but Ireland still sprints for that far exit. And do you know, by God, I think she’ll make it!”
By God, Ireland did make it. Set on a “pool table” divided into rectangles by rain-sucking hedgerows, it is the greenest land on Earth. It rained every day we were there — and sunny every day, too, in equal measure. That old cliché, “if you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes,” is the daily forecast here, or would be if they bothered to issue one. In the vast open sky on the West Coast, cloud masses engage in a great cosmic ballet, battling sun and wind on the Wild Atlantic Way, accompanied by enough rainbows as to seem commonplace, rain lashing the windows while the far hills are beaming, or itinerant clouds generously strafing distant slopes as you watch from a warm oasis of temporary sunshine. Locals never blink an eye about it all. Ever at the mercy of powerful, shifting natural elements, it’s no wonder the Irish developed a mystical bent.
Freed from their heavy societal anchors and historical straitjackets, they are at long last coming into their own, their mindset reflected in three favored descriptors: “grand,” “lovely,” and “brilliant.” The national symbol is a musical instrument (the harp). Several of Dublin’s artful bridges across the River Liffey (not the Liffey River, mind you, the “River Liffey” because it falls more comfortably from the mouth) were named to honor three of their greatest wordsmiths: Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce.
This is a land where the arts and education come first, where the government subsidizes schools through college, including many where instruction is entirely in the “Irish” language. On every traffic sign, Gaelic precedes English because they are determined not to let their native tongue die from neglect.
Ireland is a more egalitarian culture than ours. In Dublin, an enormous banner hangs from a high-rise proclaiming “Ceasefire Now” because they know what it means to be oppressed and they sympathize with underdogs everywhere. It’s a country where citizens say, “We all have to pay our taxes” — not with bitter resentment like us, but sincerely because of the many things the government is trying to do for people. And they’re willing to pay a much higher percentage in taxes than we do.
In Ireland, “the drink” refers either to the pub or the Atlantic Ocean. The pub is the one with quotes on the cluttered walls that range from Brendan Behan (“I only drink when I’m thirsty and when I’m not thirsty”) to W.B. Yeats (“The problem with some people is when they’re not drunk, they’re sober”).
Ireland’s superpowers, storytelling and music, are each cross-fertilized by the other. People laugh easily where stories are told, and the pubs reverberate with a feeling akin to home.
It was a very, very long road to get where the Irish are today. This country seems to know where it’s going. And it’s no longer going elsewhere — proud of the outsized influence some 70 million people of Irish descent have exerted worldwide, prouder still that they no longer have to leave.
A folklorist, speaking on Ireland’s rich mythical legacy of faeries, banshees and leprechauns, said they were used to “explain the unknown, back when they had nothing to work with but their mind.” A nation of imagination.
When people talk about the changeable weather here, they excuse it with a shrug, saying, “Green is good for the mind.”
And by God it is green here.