Days 46, 47, and 48

Day 46: I woke up and went next door to the Café Shannon for breakfast. I had porridge (cooked with milk, which makes it so much better than instant oatmeal) with honey and further milk, then met up with Kemper. We wandered around looking for a church known as Saint Michin’s, which is famed for the mummies in its crypts. We ended up in far north Dublin in a very working-class area before we realized that we were in the entirely wrong area, as the church was near the Liffey. So we walked back to the Liffey, passing the General Post Office where the 1916 Easter Rising happened (more or less the Irish Valley Forge or Boston Tea Party), and found Saint Michin’s.

The crypts of Saint Michin’s create mummies due to the limestone walls leeching moisture, the constant temperature, and the ground leaking methane gas which destroys bacteria. I got to touch the mummy of the Crusader: an eight-hundred-year-old warrior who was six-and-a-half feet tall in life, a giant in his time. They had to break his legs to fit him in the coffin. The mummy felt hard, cool, and smooth, like touching wood.

We then went to a part of the National Museum, housed in the old Collins Barracks where Wolfe Toanes, Irish revolutionary leader, slit his own throat before his execution. Kemper needed to see the exhibit on the Easter Rising for her thesis, which is on the Troubles. It was the design and crafts museum, so I wandered around contemplating examples of Irish silver and furniture that left me utterly bored. We had lunch (French toast, mediocre hot chocolate, and fries), then walked downstream, passing by the Milkshake Bar. I had the best Oreo milkshake in my life there, and nearly made myself sick with eating.

Our stomachs protesting the sugar atomic bombs we’d dropped, we went to the archaeology and history museum. They had some very cool bog bodies, but the rest of the museum consisted of innumerable piles of gold dress and sleeve fasteners. After we left, we confronted the dilemma of those in European cities; it was five o’ clock, so everything was closing. The only thing open were food shops, but we weren’t hungry. We also weren’t interested in drinking, and so we were thus consigned to boredom. So we went to Kemper’s hostel for a bit before walking down the Liffey towards the sea, then turned around and had dinner. Kemper got to experience what the Irish think a fajita is: stir-fried vegetables, like broccoli and snap peas, inside a tortilla. Gross.

Dublin has an incredible population of homeless, far more than Rome. For those of you who remember the economics of the 1990s, the Republic of Ireland had an incredible economic resurgence that took it from one of the poorest countries in Western Europe to a powerful service-based economy, earning it the name the ‘Celtic Tiger.’ However, I can assure you with authority that the Celtic Tiger is as dead as a parrot in a Monty Python sketch. Dublin seems run-down; homeless young people clog its bridges and alleyways; and as Dr. King (an eminently reputable source) told me, the current Irish national debt is equal to thirty-two percent of its GDP.

No wonder the Irish seem unfriendly.

Day 47: I had planned to do a giant all-day ride on a tour bus to the Cliffs of Moher, Hill of Tara, and other historical sites, but when I woke at six A.M. my bed was so warm and comfy and the outside was so cold that I turned right back over to sleep and don’t regret it at all. After breakfast, I went downstairs to sign up for another tour, but was the only one interested, so that didn’t go forward. The hostel gave me directions to the nearby seaside town of Bray with a three-mile cliff walk to the next town, Greystone. The train ride was uneventful, but the scenery beautiful: blue-black waves crashing against the stone coast, flocks of white birds peppering flat glittering salt marshes, and off to my right hills merging into mountains that climbed upwards to the sky.

I got off at Bray and walked towards the beach. Stones rolled beneath my feet, and an acrid stench rose from the red-brown seaweed draped across the rocks. Houses fanned out around the bay, the right side of the bay marked by a massive hill topped with a stone cross and covered in wild grasses and flowers. There was a ruined building on the side of the hill, and I tramped upwards to inspect it. Alas, my quest for knowledge was foiled, as there was a marker proclaiming the site to be of historical significance, but giving no sign whatsoever as to why. So I turned away and walked out along the cliffs. My breath fogged and the wind tore at my clothes, but I was alone with the sea to my left and the bleak hills of Ireland to my right, and I was far happier by myself in the wilderness than by myself in the city.

After an hour I reached Greystone, but was forced to take a detour through an unlovely construction site in order to reach the town proper. There wasn’t much to see or do in Greystone, so I had a quiet lunch/dinner in a pub and caught the train back to Dublin.

I haven’t written anything about the rest of the night in my journal, so I can only assume that it was boring. And to assuage my pretentious nature and offer some idea of the joys of a ramble, I give you the sentimental poetry of Robert Service:

They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,
They have soaked you in convention through and through;
They have put you in a showcase; you're a credit to their teaching --
But can't you hear the Wild? -- it's calling you.
Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling . . . let us go.

Day 48: I left the hostel in the morning and walked across Dublin to visit Kilmainham Gaol. The Gaol, known as the Irish Bastille, held both political prisoners and criminals in some of the most appalling conditions known to man. In the earliest days of the prison, prisoners (mostly male) were admitted, weighed, and given a suit of clothes and a candle. They were also not allowed to speak to each other at all, and when allowed to exercise in the yard had to do so by shuffling in a circle and silently staring at the feet of the man in front of them. Prisoners slept on straw in unheated stone rooms, and were fed only one small meal a day. Furthermore, the jail became overcrowded with astonishing speed, and cells that were meant to hold one held ten or more. This meant that disease ran rampant among the prisoners. Also, there was no age limit; the youngest prisoner at Kilmainham was a five-year-old boy, incarcerated for several months for stealing a length of chain.

Kilmainham also houses a wing that is the best-preserved example of a panopticon prison. The panopticon, or 'all-seeing eye,' was an idea created and popularized by Jeremy Bentham, creator of the Utilitarian philosophy. During the Victorian era Bentham inhabited, people began to believe that prisoners were not incurable, but in fact could be rehabilitated with proper moral education. Morals in this case, of course, meant religion. To facilitate this, prisoners would be locked in their cells twenty-four hours a day with nothing inside but a bed, a bucket, a table, a chair, a candle, and a Bible, therefore leaving them with nothing to do but study the Bible and come to an understanding of their own crimes. Communication of any sort was strictly forbidden. In the door of each cell was a peephole, through which a guard could peer in at any moment to make sure you weren't misbehaving. The panopticon bit meant that the prison was designed in such a way that any guard, at any time, could look into any cell. Of course, the Victorians quickly figured out that this was unfeasible; no human, kept in twenty-four hour silence and isolation with the paranoia-inducing peepholes, could stay sane, and so the Victorians kindly added on two hours of group exercise, also done in silence, to the daily regimen. While small, this did help to preserve the prisoners' sanity.

Kilmainham's main claim to fame, of course, is that the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed here. The Easter Rising is what most Irish consider to be the birth of the Irish nation, although at the time the Rising was a failure, its ringleaders half-remembered even by their own people, and achieved nothing but to martyr the revolutionaries. However, their martyrdom brought the idea of revolution back to the forefront of the Irish consciousness, and so in 1918 the Irish people elected 73 republicans under the Sinn Fein Party (many of them survivors of the Rising) to 73 seats out of 105 in the British Parliament. In 1919, the elected members of Sinn Fein not in jail convened the first Dail, or Irish parliament, and declared the Irish Republic, kicking off the Irish War of Independence.

The leaders of the Rising all met their ends by firing squad in the courtyard of Kilmainham. One of them, James Connolly, had been wounded in the Rising and had been kept in Dublin Castle while his leg contracted gangrene and rotted. However, British justice had to be carried out, and so the soldiers carried him on a stretcher in agony through the streets of Dublin to Kilmainham. However, the firing squad, when they saw his condition, thought it inhumane to force him to walk to the wall where his compatriots had died, and so ordered a chair to be brought for him to sit on. Then they shot him where he sat.

Another, Joseph Plunkett, married his sweetheart in the chapel of the gaol in the small hours of the morning of May 4th. They were allowed ten minutes as married couple before Plunkett was marched from the room and executed less than five hours later. Patrick Pearse, who wrote the proclamation creating the Irish nation, wasn't spared the firing squad either. His younger brother, Willie, had been granted permission to visit his brother one last time on May 4th, but arrived just as Patrick was executed. Willie was arrested and executed the following day.

Perhaps the greatest story of Kilmainham is that of Anne Devlin. She served as second-in-command to Robert Emmett, leader of the failed 1803 rebellion against British rule. She and Emmett were both arrested, and Devlin knew the names of all their financial backers: the financial heart of republicanism. The commandant of Kilmainham, Dr. Trevor, could not use physical torture on her to extract their names because of her gender, and so arrested her entire family. When even that did not break her will, he put her in the dungeon. This was a solitary, windowless, lightless cell, so small that she could not even lie down. To make matters worse, it was down the hall from the two holding cells for drunkards, and so feces, urine, and vomit flooded her cell to a depth of six inches at all times.

She was there for two years, and never once gave a name. Anne Devlin died in the Irish Famine, and today has been largely forgotten, even in the nation she helped to save for the future.

To finish my thoughts on Irish nationalism, an excerpt from William Butler Yeat's 'Easter, 1916':

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.