“To be Irish…”

Once upon a distant midnight, Karen and I and our eldest, then-toddler son, Declan, then one-and-a-half, shared a bed — no apologies, we were then (not surprisingly — five home births, 50 kid-years of homeschooling) of the family-bed persuasion, a persuasion, which, given that we eventually had those five children, most of whom are now in their 20s, we eventually and successfully got over.

But at the time, back in 1983, that family bed occupied one corner of an upper bedroom in the hillside farmhouse in which we lived, some eight miles west of then-undiscovered Dingle, far out on the tattered western edge of Ireland, within sight, on any rare clear day, of the ever-roiling Atlantic. In fact, we lived close enough to the ocean, that any gale commanded notice, that night as on any night in coastal Ireland.

But the gales that night really did mean business. So much so that on this particular night — the night after the day our landlady’s son-in-law had replaced several of the window panes in our bedroom, the putty still not yet set — we three cocooned in the bed in the room, Karen and I listening to the wind test the newly repaired windows, Declan, a good baby, snug and snoozing between us.

But I’m talking gales, as in winds shrieking and unstopped by any speed bump of an island anywhere between Nova Scotia and Ireland. Gales that could, and did, strip leaves overnight from otherwise verdant trees, that soaked to the fibers rooftops long wetted by storms long spewed by that very same ocean. Gales that pummeled windows, like those that aired that Irish bedroom of ours. Gales which, that same night, would memorably blow out those newly replaced window panes.

Now, almost 26 years later, all this still makes for a good story.

But to Karen and me, to recall this story is to again hear wind screaming through that old farmhouse’s unsealed cracks and uninsulated walls, to hear rain lashing against the windows and against the wet putty of those window panes, to hear those panes shattering on the bedroom floor and then to hear rain stitching the very floor, the wind all at once funneling through the emptied mullions and firing rain like bullets. And all the while, all three of us — mother, father, son — huddled against the wind, against the cold, against all that anyone ever born Irish always knew an ocean could do.

And, the next morning, calm, a beautiful, beautiful calm.

And I would again have lit the cooker, that morning, as on many morning in Ireland, a cooker stoked with coal, the better to warm the kitchen, not to mention heat any needed water. And Karen might again have done a wash, that day, as she did on so many days, with that same heated water, in that kitchen’s sink, the laundry scrubbed against an old-fashioned washboard, then rinsed and dried afterwards on a line outside, in a wind by then soothed to a breeze and hardly a wind at all.

And all of us, Karen, me, Declan, youngest brother Patrick, would have then made our way through another day in Ireland, me scribbling for clients back in the States; Karen doing the more important work of mom-ing baby Declan; Patrick, then a ninth-grader, off at the local Christian Brothers school in Dingle, his own day made more difficult by the fact that his classes were all taught in Irish Gaelic, with no accommodation whatsoever for the English-speaking Yank, and his own Irish limited to that taught him, of romantic necessity, by his Irish girlfriend.

Had any one of us needed to go somewhere near, we would have walked, since we’d no car, and we’d have used the stroller to haul whatever needed lugging (you’d be surprised how many bags you can sling on one of the umbrella models of those days). And if we’d had to go farther? We’d have joined the regulars, of course, on the twice-a-week bus to Dingle, among those regulars the nonagenarian, his thumb thumbing the near end of his walking-stick, who, that summer, lamented that wet summer, and who later made his way into a poem I wrote (see below).

There, in Dingle, we’d buy whatever we couldn’t buy — including Wellies at a pub along Green Street, a pub that doubled as a hardware store, and socks at a clothing store that doubled as a pub — at the one-room, one-counter grocery in Murreagh nearer our home. And, memorably, on one of those days, as we walked from home in Kilcooley to the bus-stop at Murreagh, maybe half a mile away, the gales again nail-gunning a horizontal rain, we passed a couple of soaked-to-the-skin road workers digging a ditch at the edge of the church at Ardamór, their work overseen, for lack of anything else to do, by a long-retired mailman known locally, and famously, as Paddy the Post.

Glancing up at us as we approached, Paddy pinched the brim of his cap, the better to hold it against the wind and rain, smiled into the weather and bellowed over the howl of the gale, “It’s a wild one, isn’t it?”

That night Patrick would have struggled through his homework in his own bedroom, no doubt spending much of his time trying to decipher the gibberish of the Irish he heard against the little Irish he knew. Karen and me would likely have sat in the sitting room, with no television to entertain us, only a radio, the room itself warmed only by a turf-and-coal fire, the air alit by the various voices of Radió Telefís Éireann, or RTE, the government-run radio station, some of those voices in Ireland’s assimilated English, the rest in the native Irish.

But back to where I began…

“To be Irish…”

Is something I have known since I was a child.

My name alone a kind of tribal tattoo. Dónal. The name, when said by anyone Irish, mellifluent, the first syllable drum-struck by its long “o” and spilling into the musical second, lesser note. Dó-nal, “world-mighty,” in its Anglicized translation, even if the name pre-dates anything any later tribe, whether Scots or English, ever better embellished. It is, therefore, what it is and always was, before the Scots ever tacked a “d” to the end or the English determined some Anglicized translation: Dónal, plain and simple, Dónal.

And, were there any doubt of my lineage, my father was another Dónal and his two brothers were Kevin and Seán; my great-grandparents, on both sides of my family, had called Mayo, Sligo, Tipperary, Longford and Cavan home; my own children bear the names of Declan, Brendan, Siobhán, Tiernán and Dónal, the last one Dónal Óg, or “young Dónal,” the better to distinguish him from me, Dónal Mór, or “Dónal the greater (or, more to the point, older).” And I, after those intervening generations, had been the one, the only one, albeit briefly, to again bring my name to ground, to very green ground, by moving back to Ireland.

“To be Irish…”

If you know history, is to know suppression, if not outright oppression. Is to understand the loss of language, culture, faith, history. Is to till the earth, but not own it. Is to raise crops and livestock, but to die, horribly and by the hundreds of thousands, for the lack of those very things. Is to suffer the insufferable, until finally some voices became a chorus, became a crowd, became an insurrection, became history.

“To be Irish…”

Is also to know that there is nothing in life that is to be taken for granted. That what you have today, you may not have tomorrow. That anything lived or loved can also be lost — and eventually will.

“To be Irish…”

Is, in the words of the late Irish-American politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” And, the part Moynihan left out, to know that the very same world will, in the end, also make make your heart.


*Once again, the vagaries of Blogspot, at least insofar as I can fathom them, do not allow me to preserve the architecture of a poem. Suffice it to say, that there are some missing indents in the following lines, but you, proverbially, will get my drift:


Language Lessons
(Ceachtanna Teanga)


“Never, he breathed,
his smoker’s thumb burninshing
a blackthorn pinched between the knobs
of ancient knees.
“Never a summer like this. Not
in my ninety-five years.


Rain curtained the windows
as he spoke, purling
in the bus’s slipstream, as one white hand,
flushed from its perch, fluttered briefly
with regret, then settled again
on its blackthorn roost, and blue eyes,
swimming in a century of memories,
slid slowly from mine to the floor.


In air electric with Irish, his English
seemed all squawk and sputter, though
his wool coat, peaty with rain, held
its own in the lingua franca of the nose.
What little I knew of the old words
I understood. That a bus
was not simply a bus.
That the stopped burr of Donald
was not the liquid lilt of Dónal.
That no round-voweled potahto plucked
from Kentish loam would weigh so heavy
on the page as any tongue-tripped práta.
That there was, in fact,
a lunacy in Lúnasa that mere August,
in all its English augustness,
would never quite convey.