Brian Boru’s multicultural region - an evening to still the soul and warm the eyeballs
By: Cormac MacConnell | Published Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 2:41 PM | Updated Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 2:41 PM
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| Illustration by Caty Bartholomew |
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An incredible evening to still the soul and warm the eyeballs. I'm sitting on the harbor wall in Mountshannon, the great river whispering secrets to the clustered boats at their moorings, and both the sun and the moon are suspended in the heavens above.
The sun is a huge golden ball close to the horizon, reluctant to go asleep after a mighty day, and the young moon is a silver sliver, bursting with life, riding high over a luminous sky.
There are gulls and coots calling from the waters stretching into the faraway, mooring lights are bobbing from the yachts and cruisers that could not find space at the crowded Pier, and there is a human buzz and vibrancy growing behind me in Mountshannon itself. An arts festival has just been launched, and they are always special around here.
This is the kind of place where one does not want to hear or see the news bulletins from home and abroad. This is a place of great gentle beauty far divorced from bulletins which largely deal in these times with the detail of man's incredible inhumanity to man, with social and economic stresses and strains, with tragedies and troubles.
Maybe it is one of the drawbacks of modernity that it is so hard to escape. If there is an earthquake in any corner of the world, a new war, an erupting volcano, another Syrian atrocity, another kink in the American election campaign, it is crackling on the airwaves inside minutes; flickering on the TV screens just a little later.
Not for me on a night like this in a place like this. Give me birdsong and lapping waters and the moon and the sun co-existing serenely in the wonderland of space.
Actually, as the sounds of a developing jazz session in some pub in town come drifting down, the thought occurs to me that some of you might be interested in the matter of ethnic integration in rural areas of modern Ireland.
This Dergside region around the capital heritage town of Killaloe down the road was once the heartland of the Celtic monoculture which lasted so strongly down so many centuries since the time of the great King Brian Boru. This was his territory.
Now this entire region, without any effort or disruption at all, has become multicultural in a fashion which has enriched and invigorated the entire social fabric.
Five minutes ago I had a casual pierside chat with a man called Slattery from Limerick. He was raving about the quality of a pub session in Killaloe the previous night.
The range of the music and song in the small pub was as wide as that of the audience. There were Americans and Germans and Japanese, Greeks and Germans, English and Dutch.
If some of the music was traditional then much of it also came from these and other cultures as the merriment lasted into the small hours.
Killaloe is a cosmopolitan town by Irish standards nowadays. It has always had a vibrant British community, totally integrated into the social and business life, largely, I think, attracted there by the boating and angling attractions on the first place.
Now about every European nation is also represented by the folk in business and the services. And the Orient is well represented too in a way that adds spice and new life to what was once Brian Boru's sole territory. There is a buzz which is quite unique through the entire region.
Behind Mountshannon, back towards Ennis, there is a hamlet with an enchanting name called Ogonnelloe. It was just another hamlet for generations.
About 25 years ago, however, in a development which I cannot explain, Ogonnelloe began to attract a colony of imaginative creative folk from Europe and beyond. Soon they were hundreds strong.
Many of them, I think, were young people who wanted to drop out of the rat races in the huge European cities where they were raised and make a new life for themselves and their families in green and peaceful Ireland.
They brought a new injection of artistry, creativity, boldness, imagination and life into an ageing and conservative monoculture. They brought skills like sculpture and weaving and pottery and self-sufficient lifestyles with them.
In time they generated a wide range of crafts and services to East Clare. It is a different area now in a good and healthy way.
There is, for example, a Steiner school there at Raheen, attracting both local children and those of the New Irish. When we needed thatchers for Maisie's Cottage a decade ago it was from that community they came.
They were beautiful and honorable people. And they were great craic.
Clare has benefited hugely from the incoming settlers. The Burren and the West have similar colonies of New Irish, totally and gently integrated in a process nobody noticed was happening for the most part.
Today nobody from anywhere in the world, regardless of class, creed, or color, will feel a stranger for too long. That is the rural reality, I believe, for about all of rural Ireland, and perhaps it is not sufficiently documented.
The sun eventually disappears. The sliver of moon rules supreme.
The jazz session behind me sounds so seductively compelling that I am going to leave ye now.
8 Comments
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Switch to the desktop site to post a comment.johnshiel | Jun 14, 2012, 08:55 AM EDT
nice to se positive featuring of east Clare. A little ways north of Killaloe and west of Mountshannon is the burgeoning metropolis of Tuamgraney. With its ancient and small church where Brian Boru himself passed thru the doorway. And that doorway requires six footers to duck carefully to pass. Brian and his kin must have been around your height, Cormac. Small stature does not connote small ambitions or small talents... Judging a book by the cover can be so delightully wrongheaded, as you hint with your piece this morning...
GeorgeDillon | Jun 09, 2012, 09:47 AM EDT
IrishandProud: I don't claim to be an expert, but I think I heard a lot of those Brazilians just moved to Dublin. The rest went on welfare in Gort. None of them went home, because being on welfare in Ireland is a lot better than working in Brazil.
IrishAndProud | Jun 08, 2012, 03:24 AM EDT
Also, George...perhaps you know more about this, but as a microcosmical example of this topic, in Gort (Connemara) there was once a large and growing Brazilian population (which nearly made me sick to think about). Last I heard, that was shrinking rapidly due to the closing of the meat plant that originally drew them and the subsequent bad economy. While it shouldn't take that to expel such non-assimilatable foreigners, at least it was happening. Any further word from Gort? I'm thinking the Brazilian presence could be next to nothing, by now...(hopefully!)...
IrishAndProud | Jun 08, 2012, 03:05 AM EDT
George: thank you for your post. There must be something that the Irish people can do about this Mass immigration of foreigners who don't care about Ireland. The Irish need to FORCE a national vote, if necessary, on expelling them at once -- and be sure to exclude the foreigners themselves from voting on this. I'm rather confident that if this is done, the vote will be a resounding and unapologetic 'GET...OUT...NOW!' Then the Irish (and the rest of us around the world, as well) can experience the joy of seeing tens of thousands of blacks, Mideasterners, Muslims, Eastern Europeans and Asians packing up and going back home...and it would indeed by joy (I've little doubt there'd be literal dancing in the streets of Ireland, if this happened). Sure, the p.c. folks in government and elsewhere would howl, but so what? There'd be nothing they could do about it. Why can't this happen? I see no reason on earth that it can't. As is said, where there's a will, there's a way...
GeorgeDillon | Jun 08, 2012, 02:57 AM EDT
IrishandProud: It's good for a country to have some Immigration. I remember parts of the West of Ireland in the 1990s when there was a scattered population of Dutch, Germans, English, US etc in places like Connemara. They contributed to the community and were interested in the culture. Quite a few played Irish music and tried to learn Irish. But that is a totally different phenomenon to the pathologically vast wave of Mass Immigration that Ireland has experienced in the past decade or so. Almost none of these hundreds of thousands seem to have an interest in Irish history, music or language. No Irish person voted to implement this policy--none--and most Irish people oppose it. Here's a quote from an Irish discussion site from today: "Our kids are leaving home to go to work abroad without any working experience behind them. I feel very bitter towards the employers of Ireland who do not care, and have no loyalty to their community. They now employ strangers who do not know or care about the community. The new employees will not spend any more than they need in their adopted home. They will send as much as they can to their home countries. They are here just to make money at the expense of local people and employers do not care. Meanwhile, Irish kids are relying on the ever shrinking funds of their parents. They do not get summer work, mostly, It might become awful next September.. There are loads of kids now doing their leaving cert who expect to go to college, There is no work for them during the summer... a few might be lucky.. Come September, I am afraid there is awful disappointment ahead... I do blame employers for not doing their bit to hire Irish young people... I think it is an absolute shame that they prefer to hire strangers before Irish people. Let them not blame Irish people when their business fails. Those that prefer foreign workers to Irish workers have themselves to blame for that."....
IrishAndProud | Jun 07, 2012, 05:08 PM EDT
I'm rather curious, here. How can Ireland -- the ancient land of Brian Boru, Eoghain the Lion and others remain Irish if it's full of Germans, Poles and even worse non-whites? That is oxymoronic. I guess I'm rather disappointed, since this article was no dobut designed to come across as romantic, peaceful and relaxed but instead comes across as stoned, oblivious and politically correct -- celebrating Ireland by embracing those trends that are disintegrating it.
GeorgeDillon | Jun 07, 2012, 11:20 AM EDT
" New Irish". What the hell does that mean? Did MacConnell ever have the courtesy to ask these Dutch, Germans etc. if they considered themselves Irish, New or Old? Dumbass.
jamieLM | Jun 07, 2012, 09:54 AM EDT
Lovely. Thank you for taking us with you on your travels in rural Ireland.