Seventeen years ago, I started going to Ireland’s Four Provinces with the old gang. We drank what our Irishman called “the best pint you can get outside Ireland” and sang all the old songs and carried on into the wee small hours. It quickly became home, and everything important either happened there or was celebrated there. And more than once, it was only the lateness of the hour and my inability to walk a straight line that prevented me taking my passport straight to the Aer Lingus counter at Dulles and climbing onto a bird for “the Holy Land.”
About three weeks ago, it finally began.
The notion that you can take a direct flight from San Jose to London is like something out of science fiction, made more so by the comfort of business class and the fact that Heathrow is the closest thing I’ve ever visited to a legitimate space port. It’s like the crossroads of the world (at least until I visit Dubai or something). There’s also a certain futuristic vibe to having my iPhone SE work everywhere with just a change of SIM, bought prepaid at the WH Smith, and the seamless nature of international business class making it possible to stroll into the lounge and mix yourself a whiskey ginger, gratis. Less futuristic is the fact that “European business class” just consists of bodging a sort of tray into the center seat on an A320 and nothing else (which is actually worse than normal if you’re traveling as a romantic couple). But despite being wired and tired after the voyage, we still had enough juice to go out with our family for those first-night drinks in a pub with a sofa and a perfect milk stout microbrew (yes, the craft beer movement has hit Ireland with a vengeance, of which more later).
Dublin is a city of 1.3 million. So a little bigger than San Jose or San Francisco, depending on how many of the suburbs you want to count, and includes the benefits of being a world capital and a thousand years old. My cousin compared it to Nashville, and by comparison to Dublin you can see the Nashville vs LA relation. It’s smaller, the transit is far more bus-based (there’s one light rail and it’s slow as balls, and one commute train system that isn’t bad), but it’s also more accessible – nearly everything we wanted to see was within a few miles and anything was either on the tour bus loop or easily walkable from same.
It also has a lot of the history. You can still put a finger in the bullet holes at the GPO and walk into the cells at Kilmainham Gaol. The Easter Rising was in 1916, the Irish Civil War in 1922 and the Free State not fully transformed into the Republic until after the Second World War, so while it’s been a while since the British yoke was (mostly) thrown off, it’s still not appreciably more distant than, say, unchallenged Jim Crow in the American South. (Of which more later.) Eastenders still comes on the telly at 6 PM, though.
Dublin was a great place for pubs. I made it into Kehoe’s, last year’s Dublin Pub of the Year, and half a dozen others besides, all with two taps for Guinness at a minimum and frequently three varieties of Smithwicks (in addition to the red ale that comes to the US, there’s a pale ale and an Atlantic Blond as well) to go alongside the Carlsberg and Hop House 13 lager options and the Bulmer’s cider in its own mushroom-shaped glass to hold the ice for those who use it. But the standout establishment was a place in the foothills of the mountains outside town, called – of all things – the Merry Ploughboy. It was dinner and a show, with the musicians playing all the same sorts of things I heard in that pub in DC all those years ago. And I was prepared, and I belted out the Fields to the amazement of our whole traveling party (including the woman who I was specifically told NOT to try to keep pace with. Of which.)
Here’s the thing about Dublin, though: it’s an anomaly. The second city in the Republic of Ireland is Cork, the rebel city, which has a population around 200K. No other city in the south of Ireland, aside from those two, is larger than Sunnyvale, California. Ireland was never meaningfully urban – the ecclesiastical framework was built around the abbeys and monasteries rather than cities, and despite the first Norman invasion coming before Magna Carta, England’s control of the country barely extended past Dublin until the 1600s. It’s hard not to shake the sense that there’s Dublin and there’s everything else (and Cork, the Texas of Ireland, does nothing to dissuade you from that opinion). So when we picked up the rental car on Sunday, it was to plunge headlong into the real thing. And that is when the real story begins.