The art of tour guiding (click the green text to read my blog post on this topic) is finely honed in Ireland, and over the years I’ve been fortunate to work with the best. In addition to Dave Yeates, our driver-guide for the upcoming ten day trip, you are going to meet two other wonderful Irish tour guides who have worked with Agnes Scott since 1998. One of the reasons I like to plan the tours well in advance is to make sure that Michael O’Brien and Ronan McNamara are going to be available when we need them.
Michael O’Brien will be joining us for our second day in Dublin as we tour sites related to Easter 1916. Michael was the driver-guide for the first five Agnes Scott student trips. For those trips, he was the heart and soul of our daily experience, opening his country to us and making us feel welcome. I learned a lot about Ireland from him, but I also learned a lot about how to do a group trip, how to maximize the experience for the group and for individuals, how to deal with the problems that inevitably come up, and how to remain patient and philosophical all the while. Now retired, he still does a lot of guiding, and whenever I lead a group, I insist on having him as our “city guide.”
Michael is a legend among tour guides for his deep and broad knowledge of Ireland, his storytelling ability, and his uncanny way of quoting poetry at length. On my first trip with him in 1998, I made a list of the poets he quoted from memory–whole poems, that is, not just lines: William Wordsworth, W. B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh (his favorite), Robert Service, Seamus Heaney, Francis Ledwidge, Patrick Pearse, to name only a few. You’ll notice the richness of his speech, too, along with his mastery of dates and other facts. Ask him anything, and he’ll have an answer and a story for you. On each one of our trips, he regularly made friends with all the students but kept an eye out for those who might be feeling lonely or homesick, and he always learned everyone’s name.
I almost gave up leading trips to Ireland when Michael retired, thinking I would “never see his like again” (to paraphrase The Islandman), but I was fortunate enough to be paired with Dave. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have worked with two of the most knowledgeable, kindest, and most helpful driver-guides imaginable.
When tourists first started coming to Northern Ireland in the 1990s, the tourism business was not well developed, and sometimes you would encounter guides with strong sectarian leanings they didn’t bother to hide. On the first Agnes Scott trip in 1998, I was apprehensive about our guided “wall walk” in Derry, thinking we might be stuck with a rabid Republican or Loyalist, the extremes on the two sides of the conflict. Once again, my luck held, and I met Ronan McNamara of McNamara Tours. Ronan hails from the Republic, born and raised in a town in the middle of the country called Banagher. He went to university in Northern Ireland, fell in love with Derry, and started giving tours of a city that was only beginning to recover from The Troubles. Ronan is credited with launching tourism in that city. He has a deep and encyclopedic understanding of NI and its troubled history, and like Michael is a consummate storyteller. He has brought tears to my eyes more than once with his stories of the tentative steps towards peace and reconciliation in Derry.
Our students love Ronan and can’t get enough of him on our tours. They always develop a real connection with him for many reasons, but especially because, as you might have guessed from the photos, Ronan is biracial, like many of them. His mother is Chinese, his father Irish, and Ronan has spent a lifetime navigating Ireland’s gradual recognition and acceptance of diversity, which continues to be a defining factor on both sides of the border. When he speaks of the percentages of Catholics and protestants in Derry, he always adds “and one Buddhist.” His knowledge of such issues and his openness about discussing them resonates well with our multiracial, multiethnic, socially conscious students.
Michael, and Ronan, and Dave will add immeasurably to our group and your individual experience. For me, each of them is synonymous with Ireland, and I count time in their company as my best times in their country. I am also grateful that all of them are willing to put up with my whims and crazes, my insistence on taking the bus down windy country roads to remote locations like the Lake Isle of Innsifree, and my tendency to hold the group up with poetry recitations and other literary digressions.
