45 Divided by a Common Language V

The phrases “No problem!” and “No Bother!” (sometimes “bother” is pronounced “bodder”) come up a lot in Ireland. In addition to meaning “Don’t worry, you are not causing a problem,” these phrases can also mean “Yes, I’ll do it,” as in “May we have a jug of tap water?” “No bother.” To me, such responses exemplify an accommodating attitude that I encounter everywhere here, in public and in private. I don’t like to characterize groups of people—it’s a dangerous road to go down, and you often find yourself face to face with a stereotype and a raft of exceptions. But for what it’s worth, many people who come to Ireland observe this friendly, easygoing demeanor, and I’ve heard Irish people note it as a distinctive quality. While visiting the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary a few weeks ago, we had a particularly knowledgeable and eloquent guide named Jane tell us lots of great stories about the thousand-year-old monument, a fortified set of ecclesiastical buildings atop a large limestone hill overlooking broad green valleys on all sides. Jane told us about the astonishing exploits of Myler McGrath, a sixteenth-century priest associated with Cashel who somehow managed to rise in both the Anglican and Catholic churches–even though they were competing for believers at the time–as well as serve in parliament, raise eight children with two wives, and occupy over seventy different clerical positions. He was both a Catholic bishop and an Anglican archbishop and no stranger to corruption. In telling us how much fun the locals have with this story in conversation today, Jane said, “We make a dog’s dinner of it, I can tell you.” Imagine how most dogs eat their dinner, enthusiastically and wrecklessly gobbling up every morsel as fast as they possibly can, and you’ll easily grasp the meaning of this wonderful expression. Overheard while standing outside of a crowded lecture hall: “There’s not a seat left in there! It’s absolutely jammers!” Enough said. A phrase I hear all the time comes at the beginning of a statement: “To be honest with you….” I’m not sure why it’s used so frequently in Ireland, but like “Great stuff!” (see “32 Divided by a Common Language, the Third”), the phrase serves as a verbal filler, a bridge between thoughts, a way to fill a gap as the speaker revs up for the meaty part of the sentence forming in her...
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44 Graveyards, Graveyards, and More Graveyards

During a Christmas trip to Dublin I hosted for my brothers and their families in 2001, they all accused me of only taking them to see “prisons and graveyards, prisons and graveyards.” I must confess that they were right. On that trip family members flew in from all over the US to meet for the first time at Kilmainham Gaol, a grim and very cold prison built in the 1790s that housed many political prisoners and that in 1916 saw fourteen of the infamous executions of the Easter Rising. Over the next five days, we visited a magnificent five thousand year old ceremonial tomb, several tumbledown graveyards at ruined monasteries, a pet cemetery at Powerscourt Estate, and a few miscellaneous graves and graveyards along the way. Since we actually visited only one prison on that trip, albeit a very daunting one, it would have been more accurate to sum up our itinerary as “graveyards, graveyards, and more graveyards.” Not counting churches, most of which have people buried inside them, but including Megalithic tombs and ruined monasteries, there are at least eight or nine graveyards on the itinerary for the student trips to Ireland I lead every two years. During this sabbatical year spent in Ireland, our visitors will no doubt confirm that graveyards have figured in our sightseeing with them to an abnormal degree. And without my intending to go in this direction, four of my blogs have been exclusively about graveyards: Jerpoint Abbey (“10 In our arts we find our bliss”), remembering the dead of World War I (“21 Remembrance”); Yeats’s famous grave at Drumcliff Churchyard (“33 Under Ben Bulben”); and Cromwell’s cabbage garden turned cemetery turned city park (“36 The Cabbage Gardens”). I freely admit to having an obsession, but the accidents of history and geography have also played a part in making cemeteries an important theme in the Emerald Isle. This is a country of graves. Ireland’s long history of human habitation (since at least 8000 BCE), small size (Ireland is smaller than the state of Georgia), preponderance of rocky and boggy land unsuitable for burials, and island status mean that here the dead compete for space with the living. And in addition to the regular graveyards, everywhere you go you see monuments and inscriptions commemorating those who “died for Ireland”–at their birthplaces, their schools, their places of work, the places where they died, and so on. Ireland’s perpetual “underdog” or as some...
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43 Ladies Who Sweat

As we move into the last three months of our stay in Ireland, I am conscious of the stories I particularly want to tell in this blog, as I only have eight or ten weeks or posts remaining. I’ve known since last summer that at some point I wanted to write about the remarkable women I’ve met in my water aerobics class “Aquafit” and in my exercise class “Active for Life” at the gym across the street from our apartment, SportsCo. You will have perhaps noticed that I mention these women often in my blog as sources of information, anecdotes, and insights about life in Ireland. They have also been valuable exercise buddies and great company for me three times a week whenever I’m not traveling. I’m really going to miss them when I leave in June. When we were apartment hunting in Dublin in June 2014, I had my eye out for swimming pools I would be able to join and was delighted when our new landlord told us of a gym literally across the street from the Gasworks. SportsCo is highly rated in this city, where there lots of gyms. I like everything about it—the people, the rooms and equipment, the hours, the variety of options. The instructors–Warren, Kelly, and Seán–are patient, creative, and inspiring; I especially like it when Kelly, who is from Brazil, teaches us samba routines in the pool. And the gym has a wonderful swimming pool, a twenty-five metre ozone treated facility that is ideal for lap swimming and has repeatedly been rated the best in Dublin. I don’t want to make this an advertisement for the place, but let me just say that my SportsCo membership, which includes unlimited use of the facilities and all classes, costs me significantly less than my YMCA membership in Atlanta. Since it takes me less than five minutes to get there, I really have no excuse for missing my workout, even on cold and blustery days. Last summer I started my gym membership with a plan to swim three or four times a week, but I also decided to try a couple of the classes offered. I have to confess to being a water aerobics snob before this sabbatical. As someone who has swum laps regularly for years, I thought such classes were nothing more than water playtime, fine for old people or nonswimmers, but not for me....
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42 Alice M. Cashel–A Fenian at Heart

To the Fans and Relatives of Alice Cashel,  Thank you for your interest in Alice Cashel’s story. I am giving a talk on her during RTE’s “Reflecting the Rising” event on Easter Monday, 28 March 2016. Following that. I will post a revised version here with new information and resources. Please get in touch with me if you have memories or information about her you would like to share. Thank you! Christine Cozzens Ireland is in the midst of a “decade of centenaries” commemorating an array of historical events that left a mark on the country from the Home Rule crisis of 1912, to the Dublin Lockout of 1913, the Great War from 1914 to 1918, the Easter Rising in 1916, and the struggle for independence that culminated in 1922. Almost every week there’s another anniversary, another shadowy corner of history opened to the light of modern scholarship and debate. I’ve encountered these commemorations everywhere this year as lectures, exhibitions, renovations, conferences, ceremonies, new books and films, and more. It’s exciting to be here at this time as the Irish confront the past and try to understand not only what actually happened, but also why it’s important to today. One strand of this era of commemorating and revisiting the past is bringing to light some of the lesser known participants in the independence movement, the women, whose stories are only now getting the attention they deserve. Alice M. Cashel (1878-1958) was one of these revolutionary women. A committed and energetic supporter of rebellion in Ireland from the moment she joined the Sinn Féin party in 1907, she gave her whole life to the cause of Irish independence. To name just a few of her roles, she served as a political organizer, a spy, an educator, a Sinn Féin judge, a finance specialist, vice-chairwoman of the Galway County Council, and author of a pro-rebellion young people’s novel The Lights of Leaca Bán that was taught in schools in the early years of the fledgling Irish Free State. In the course of supporting an independent Ireland, Alice worked beside many of the leaders and notables of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence including Eamon De Valera, Constance Markievicz, Terrence MacSwiney, Arthur Griffith, Erskine Childers, Bulmer Hobson, George Nobel Plunkett, Sean Heggarty, Alice Stopford Green, Ada English, Kevin O’Higgins, Seán MacEntee, and W. T. Cosgrave. Given the times, she was remarkably mobile. Her activities took her all around both southern and northern Ireland, often...
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