How to get to Ireland via SFO, BOS, JFK and DUB - An American understanding Ireland

Getting to grips with my knowledge of Ireland and the idea of identity

By

LAURA BRYN SISSON,

IrishCentral Staff Writer

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Laura Bryn Sisson rocking out in a field in County Sligo

Photo by Laura Bryn Sisson

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To fill you in briefly, I’m a summer intern here at IrishCentral, which is based in New York City. I have no Irish heritage, but after long nights at my college newspaper, a study abroad term in Dublin last year, and a persistent love for Irish culture as I perceive it, somehow I ended up at this desk.

I could write something about how I better understand “Ireland” the idea, from my summer working at IrishCentral, but that’s not true. I better understand some specific issues and structures within Ireland - say, Irish politics. I am better informed as to what’s going on in Ireland that I was even when I was living in Dublin. As another journalist (not at IrishCentral) recently remarked to me, “I get paid to know what’s going on."

What I don’t get paid to do is to live in Ireland. That, of course, would be a sweet - and unrealistic - deal. But writing about Irish-related news and working in an office full of Irish accents does not an Irishwoman make. Not that I particularly expected it to. But especially now, I take my knowledge of Ireland with a grain of salt - I can know as many facts as possible, but regardless, I think an intuitive understanding of a country can only come from living there for longer than I did last year.

My interest in Ireland does have an intellectual component, which perhaps can be answered from afar. But the intuitive, emotional component cannot without returning to Ireland.

I wonder about my own ability to live abroad for a longer period than I did last year. Most of my coworkers at the IrishCentral office are living an Atlantic away from the country of their birth. As I listen to them plan visits home for Christmas - visits that are logistically and financially burdensome, although absolutely worth it - I wonder if I could manage that, year after year.

Logistically, I probably could. It takes hours longer to travel from my home in California to my small college town in New Hampshire than it does to travel from New York to Dublin. I’ve been doing flights like this, transporting my life and possessions between coasts, every few months for the past three years.

Though California and New England, or New York, shouldn’t seem all that different, the divisions that persist in the United States continue to surprise me. I’m descended from a long line of New England-based former Puritans, and in my biased opinion of my family culture, the stereotype of Puritanism as the “lingering fear that someone somewhere might be having fun” is all too accurate. I also enjoy joking with my college friends that back in my home in Northern California, our lives consist of biking between different locally-sourced vegan restaurants, farmers’ markets, and artisanal taco stands, passing the Facebook and Google headquarters on the way. (But actually, it’s ‘hella’ like that!) It makes us feel special to pretend that even the northern half of our state would be, in Europe, a country unto itself - strictly in terms of geographic area.

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