Travel Diary by Dave Abbott: Hospitality Gene Imbedded in Irish DNA
“D’yeh see that bridge back there and the turn right after it?” I nodded. “Well don’t take that one,” he said, as I asked directions for Belfast. His face, a picture of sincere concern, seemed blissfully unaware his response is a popular Irish joke. A reminder that asking directions in Ireland invites social interchange and hospitable chat – a gene imbedded in the Irish DNA.
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DAVE ABBOTT shares a few jars with his friend Maeve Binchey at her favourite local. Maeve had just completed sitting for her portrait painting which will hang in the National Art Gallery.
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Ask a question and four hours later you’re likely talking about the world being in a state of “chassis.” Most Irish are fond of strangers and they love a laugh, often unintended, like the window sign that said “ears pierced while you wait” and “Irish lasagna served here!”
This recent visit should have included my producer-daughter but didn’t because of a serious illness in her family. It reinforced the belief that the real attraction for visitors to Ireland is not the 40 shades of green, the music in the pubs, the soft hills of Donegal or moonlight on Galway Bay but the people.
The lasting memory tourists take away with them is of the warmth and wit of the natives that seems as natural as breathing. Having “the gift of the gab” or slagging, the swift riposte remains a Dublin characteristic revered by Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Brendan Behan and many others.
Tourists need to stay alert when engaging a Dub in conversation. They may appear to be a bit slow for they'll spend a half-a-day talking to you and stand ready to entertain you for hours.
A recent Irish Times column referred to the “plastered matriarchs of Dalkey,” the upscale city suburb which includes residents Bono, the Edge and Enya, and that other national treasure, Maeve Binchey – the quintessential Dub, a storyteller in the true Irish tradition.
Warm, witty, talented and generous, I spent a few hours with Binchey at her local pub Finnegans. Over a generous lunch with lashings of wine, she confided in her inimitable fashion that she’d just completed “sitting” for her portrait that will hang in the National Art Gallery of Ireland, alongside distinguished literary giants like Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, and Seamus Heaney. Author, husband and love of her life, Gordon Snell, allowed that his feet and arms are permitted at the corner of the picture frame.
Also, good news for Maeve fans, her next novel is already written and due for release shortly after Christmas. Meanwhile, Tara Road, starring Andie McDowell (under Noel Pearson’s direction), has completed filming in which Maeve and Gordon were extras in a scene.
And Radio Telefis Eireann is about to air a four-part Binchy radio play about the lives and loves of two 20 year olds who fall out and meet again at 40. Ordinary people about whom she has extraordinary empathy.
In Dublin there is an incredible energy level in this city of over one million that is usually found only in Hong Kong or New York. It’s partly due to the fact that over 50 percent of the population is under 21 with a “buzz” and adrenalin rush that’s infectious.
On fashionable Grafton Street, at the 400 year old Trinity College, or across the river Liffey in Temple Bar and the Quays, the talk is incessant. Text messaging and mobile phone use has exploded. Hundreds of coffee shops frequented by many of the 56 different resident nationalities, including 80,000 Polish economic refugees, percolate the city.
Dublin is so crowded that for all its undeniable charms, it is an increasingly challenging place to have an intimate encounter with true Ireland. So leave it and explore the west and north of Ireland.
Belfast, Sligo and Galway remain places where travelers can still feel a genuine sense of discovery and quiet pleasures and meander back roads and walk on cobblestones not yet been polished by the soles of millions of tourists.
This is what Ireland felt like 10 or 20 years ago before being discovered by tour groups and their omnipresent buses – carrying thousands upon thousands of travelers who flock there each year. This is where the early Gaelic rulers arrived in a magical land of good woodland soils, blessed with game and a fish-full sea. Theirs was a culture of art and creativity, music and dance, rich in learning, song and sculpture.
In Sligo, W.B. Yeats country between beach and border, is a land that is almost 80 percent hills and mountains, much of it pleasant hill-and-dale agricultural land where church steeples crown every high point.
Sheep paths crease its ancient face and shepherds’ cottages brace their shoulders against the wind. Slowly, I begin to see what it’s all about. All around are little farms, an impression reinforced by the tightly sheep-cropped fields dotted with lambing ewes.
On the coastal road from Galway to Spiddle the land is austere and wind-scoured, old in the way that you know nothing much has changed in centuries. Unsightly bed and breakfast signs disfigure the landscape, but on the horizon the evening sun seems to dance provocatively on the darkening shapes of the Aran Islands which appear as outlines of soft blue-gray whales. And as the gloaming slowly stalks the land and the sea, the old magic begins to tug.
They had it right, those old Gaelic kings, this land inspires the creative raising dreams of greater things.
For more information, visit: www.irelandnorthwest.ie; www.dublinpass.com; www.discoversligo.com; www.discovernorthernireland.com; www.visitdublin.com; www.airtransatvacations.com.
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Dave Abbott’s Travel Diary can be heard three times daily on Jim Pattison’s Radio Network 600 A.M.
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