Life in Ireland: A "grand" adventure
Last week, Michele and I had the great good fortune of visiting the Irish Republic for the first time and getting a taste of life in Ireland. Our daughter lives there with her husband, sharing a fair-sized house with his kind and welcoming mother just outside of Trim in Co. Meath. Ireland is as beautiful and charming as everyone told us it would be, even in November, when some of the famous green of the countryside had already started to give way to multi-coloured fall foliage. Fall comes around later in Ireland than it does here on the East Coast of Canada, but it was just nippy enough on some days (including inside our daughter’s home, since central heating is not really a thing there) to remind us that the summer outerwear we brought was simply not going to cut it.
In no particular order (and sometimes with tongue in cheek), here are some of the things I noticed in our travels about life in Ireland.
Driving in Ireland
As is the case in many other countries, the Irish drive on the opposite side of the road from us. At first, this really confused me (as a passenger) but, by the time we left, I made some sense of it. Doesn’t mean I was eager to get behind the wheel, but the hair on the back of my neck did stop standing up every time a vehicle came around a blind corner in what would be “my” lane on a Canadian road.
The roads we travelled were in good condition, but the secondary roads are quite curvy, have no shoulders, and hedges line almost all of them. Nonetheless, some of them still had a 100 km/h speed limit, which no one who drove us around was afraid to travel!
At about €1.80/litre, gasoline is expensive in Ireland; converting Euros (€) to Canadian dollars renders this at approximately $2.70/litre. Looking at this the other way, our price here in New Brunswick of about $1.60/litre would be about €1.07/litre in Ireland. No surprise that we did not see a pick-up truck anywhere…
All road signs in Ireland are bilingual: English and Irish. I fancy myself as being fairly adept with languages, but when “Dublin” translates as “baile átha Cliath,” I just kind of bow my head in abject defeat…
Dublin
With a metro area population of 1,270,000, Dublin is a major city. We overnighted in downtown Dublin and saw a wonderful dinner show with Irish dancers and music with songs that would be familiar to many.
Dublin is busy, expensive (awfully expensive – it can be over €7 for a tea and muffin!), and run down in places. However, it is also diverse, interesting, and ancient (Trinity College was founded in 1592, for instance). As we discovered when listening to Dubliners, it seems that they have a propensity to call down their own city – not sure why, other than life in Ireland being as expensive as it is. With above-ground light-rail transit and a vast number of double-decker busses, public transit is a critical aspect of quotidian existence in Dublin. Can’t imagine the amount of trafic there would be if public transit weren’t as ubiquitous as it is!
Daily life in Ireland: hedges and pubs
Speaking of hedges, owners who live on a property trim their hedges immaculately (and not just in Trim, regardless of what the name suggests…). As we discovered, they do this twice a year and are mandated not to trim them March 1 to August 31 as a way of protecting nesting habitat. It was not long before we arrived there that people had completed one of the semi-annual trimmings, which quashed my thought that they had spruced up the Irish countryside just for our visit.
As our daughter explained to us before we went to visit, life in Ireland does not tend to include people socializing in their own homes – that’s what pubs are for. In Trim, which has a population of just over 9,000, there are no fewer than nine pubs, so we naturally took the opportunity to visit several. No need to clean your living room in preparation for guests. Just walk out your door, turn in one direction or the other, and there will be a pub with Guinness on tap, just waiting to welcome you and your friends! Note: if you’re a man, prepare to share a long trough with other men when it’s time to relieve yourself…
First-time home buyer program
Not sure about the rest of Ireland, but Co. Meath has an interesting program that enables first-time home buyers to purchase a new home more easily. I’m not conversant with the details (nor are they critical to this post), but the essence is that the County will take an equity position on a house in a specified new development equal to the difference between the down payment that the purchasers have and the amount of mortgage for which they qualify. Later, if the house sells for more (or less), the County participates in the gain (or loss). For the record, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has something similar, but the Co. Meath program made me think about how local governments here could be more involved and innovative in addressing this one aspect of housing affordability.
Ireland: more "history" than North America?
Finally, I’ve had a couple of people remark that there is so much more “history” in countries like Ireland than what we have here in North America. This is supposedly evident in both the ruins that we find everywhere and in ancient buildings that people still very much use. They are correct in terms of the visible manifestations of ancient history there but incorrect in terms of there being more “history” per se. Just because we tend to consider our “history” here in North America as starting only 500-600 years ago (i.e., from the time Europeans showed up here and started writing things down) doesn’t mean that there is no ancient “history” here.
Indigenous people have been on this continent since time immemorial: just because their story has been passed down through the ages orally rather than in written form and, just because they did not build stone castles that would last for hundreds of years, doesn’t mean that the original inhabitants of this land have less “history” than a country like Ireland. We would do well to remember that.
Sláinte!
I enjoyed this read so much!!!
It was so amazing to share our life here with you- I feel very lucky to have such an adventurous and observant family.
Love you!!!
You, Conor, and Conor’s family made our visit there so much more than it would have been if we were just there as typical tourists. Love you too!
Interesting blog. Much enjoyed. Enjoy your well deserved holiday.
I do so appreciate your reading this, Betty.
Jerry…I smiled at your comment about “hair standing…” as I recalled our driving adventures in Ireland. Our driver, a fellow Albertan, did a marvelous job – most of the time. However, a couple momentary (and understandable) lapses nearly sent us to eternity. Thankfully, it was not our turn! Also, we were intrigued with all the traffic circles which seemed to be everywhere.
The pubs were wonderful and we felt at home in every one we visited. And, yes, the men’s room eavestrough system was normal everywhere…..
Ireland was a magical place for us.
Love seeing the place through your eyes, Don. Your “fellow Albertan” is a brave person – I think I’d have to practice a bit before giving the left-hand-side-of-the-road driving thing a go…
Jerry, I might argue a bit about our native history. It seems to me that, sadly, oral narratives passed down over generations tend to lose accuracy….
There’s no arguing that written accounts give us a clearer view of certain specific things, but don’t forget that any written history is also the writer’s interpretation of what he or she sees, so is that any more “accurate” or objective than oral history? Either way, there’s no denying that “history” on the North American continent is just as ancient and valid as any history in Ireland and as any “history” that the Europeans have documented since their (our) arrival here. “History” here did not start with white Europeans.
You are quite correct about “history” in North America not starting with European arrival.
One of my favorite quotations is from a book on glaciation in the Rockies by Robert Sandford who said ” history, it appears, is recorded by those who write.” (And he was talking about arguments over who saw a mountain first!)
Indeed, my friend!