Past Posts
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...
41 Not Just a Postbox
When Ron and I were in Cork a few weeks ago, we stopped on one of the city’s main streets to take a photograph of a postbox—what we call a mailbox in the US—when a couple about our age, laden with shopping bags and obviously walking home with their groceries, stopped to talk to us. As I moved around to get just the right angle on the postbox, their bemused expressions pretty much told me what they were thinking. “Excuse me,” said the man kindly, as one might talk...
40 Bursting Fetters, Striking Off Chains
Though I didn’t realize it until later, earlier this year I stood on the spot where two of the world’s greatest human rights leaders, Daniel O’Connell and Frederick Douglass—one an Irishman at the end of his career, the other an American at the beginning of his—met and conversed for the first and only time on September 29, 1845. In an earlier post, “38 Waiting in Line To Be Legal,” I wrote about the day Ron and I spent at the Irish Immigration and Naturalization Service (IINS) office on Burgh Quay...
39 The Gray House with the Yellow Door
Spring has come to Dublin, first with the bevy of tour buses appearing in Nassau Street alongside Trinity College and the school groups from Italy and Japan gathering around the steps of the museums and encircling monuments like the Molly Malone statue in Suffolk Street or the Fusiliers Arch at Stephen’s Green. November and January are really the only months in the year when Dublin isn’t mobbed with tourists. Though the cold has by no means gone away, when I call up the “10 day” outlook for Dublin on...
38 Divided by a Common Language IV, PG-13 Edition
I have to confess that I am suffering from “language creep,” a term I invented that probably has an equivalent in the science of linguistics. I’ve been living in Ireland long enough that the line between American English and Irish English is starting to blur: expressions, usages, and pronunciations that sounded strange to me at the beginning of my stay are starting to seem normal and are even creeping into my vocabulary. People who spend a lot of time in both North America and Britain are sometimes accused of...
37 Cows in the Library
Those are Yeatsian cows in the picture above. They graze on the plain “Under Ben Bulben,” the same plain where St. Columba fought “the Battle of the Book,” on the other side of the stone wall from Drumcliff Churchyard, where the poet William Butler Yeats is buried (see “33 Under Ben Bulben”). On a brilliant sunny day last August, I found them there unwittingly adding to the peacefulness of the scene. When cows are not grazing, they do something else that’s important to their health and digestion: they chew their...
36 The Cabbage Gardens
Since researching the history of cabbage in Ireland for “33 Bacon and Cabbage,” I’ve been haunted by a place I visited for the story, a little grassy park near St. Patrick’s Cathedral here in Dublin known as The Cabbage Gardens or The Cabbage Gardens Cemetery. It was on this site that starting in 1649, soldiers serving under Oliver Cromwell grew cabbages, or so the story goes. Eventually the land was used for an overflow cemetery for the nearby parish of St. Nicholas Without (meaning outside the city walls), a...
35 Legend That She Is
TradFest 2015 (January 28 to February 1) here in Dublin was filled with live music, music from the present of the Irish traditional or folk scene as well as from its past, and by design and by luck, music from my past. At the three concerts Ron and I attended, I got to hear from some of the musicians who hooked me on this genre back in the days of vinyl records, when I had only been to Ireland once and didn’t know anything about the sources of the...
34 Bacon and Cabbage
For tourists, the most readily identifiable “Irish” food is Irish stew, a concoction of lamb, potatoes, carrots, and onions that is available in most food pubs, many restaurants, and also served at home. A less well-known but even more homey dish is bacon and cabbage, always accompanied by “floury” potatoes (boiled, mashed, or both), and topped off with parsley sauce, the final touch that gives this ubiquitous plateful its most irresistible quality. Simple to make, inexpensive, durable in the fridge if you can’t eat all of it in one...
33 Under Ben Bulben
One of my favorite photos of Ireland is a lucky shot I took of William Butler Yeats’s grave at Drumcliff Churchyard with Ben Bulben, an iconic mountain just north of Sligo town, looming in the background. The photograph was made with a nothing little point-and-shoot in January 2010 on the sixth Agnes Scott student trip to Ireland. The mountain, shown in the top half of the photo featured above, is beautiful enough on its own and has a thousand faces, changing its look and mystery with every shift in...