Llewellyn King: Ireland -- an island of glorious contradictions that charms the world, especially on March 17

The Humbert Monument on Humbert Street in Ballina, County Mayo, Ireland. It honors Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, who was sent by Napoleon to assist the Irish with the uprising against the English in 1798.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Where I live things are beginning to turn green with a hint of spring. But it isn’t just the flora here that has an intimation of green. The whole country, indeed, the whole world, is greening for St. Patrick’s Day.

The most extraordinary thing happens on that day: People around the world shed their ethnic identities to take on an Irish one. On March 17, the world decides that it is Irish and that it must, as the Irish do, take a drink.

No other country commandeers the world as does that small island nation set in the North Atlantic. On the day when an otherwise obscure saint is celebrated, the world wears some item of green and quaffs something fermented or distilled.

For me, Ireland has always been a place of glorious contradictions and great writers – Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Swift, O’Brien, Beckett and Lewis, come to mind in no order, and there are hundreds more.

It isn’t just that its writers are among the greatest, but also that the Irish speak poetically, eschewing the simple answer, embroidering the boring cloth of fact, and sometimes confusing those who don’t have the gift of deciphering eloquence.

An Irish friend, John McCaughey, and I were walking with our wives in Kinsale, on the southwest coast of Ireland, when we came upon a tempting pub and were tempted. It wasn’t open, but an old man – and the old men of Ireland are a breed apart -- was patiently waiting.

“When will he be open?” John asked.

“He’d hardly be open now,” said the old man.

“Well, when will he be open?”

“Oh, he’ll be open in good time.”

I asked John what he meant by “in good time.”

It means, said John, that he didn’t have a clue, but he wouldn’t like to say something so bald and down-letting.

In Ireland, the facts are often delivered in fine gift-wrapping.

In a restaurant, my wife asked whether the fish was fresh. The waiter replied, “If it were any fresher, it would be swimming, and you wouldn’t want that now, would you?”

I spent two decades visiting Ireland as the American organizer of the Humbert Summer School in Ballina, County Mayo. Summer schools in Ireland are study groups that meet once a year and can focus on literature, like the Yeats school, or politics like the Parnell school. They are akin to Bill Clinton’s Renaissance weekends.

The Humbert Summer School, created by John Cooney, the eminent historian and journalist, and sadly no longer operating, was named for Gen. Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, who was sent by Napoleon to assist the Irish with the uprising against the English in 1798, remembered in The Year of the French, by Thomas Flanagan. The uprising failed, but Humbert became an Irish hero. (He fought gallantly in the Battle of New Orleans and ended his days in the city as French teacher.)

Our summer school examined the position of Ireland in the world, especially its role in Europe. Every year I would try and bring a few Americans to the northwest of Ireland to enjoy the discussions, the great lamb, salmon and potatoes, and, of course, the free flow of Guinness, Murphy’s (another stout), Smithwick’s (the dominant beer), and Bushmills and Jameson whiskeys, refreshments we found conducive to good talk.

That part of Ireland historically had been hard used by the English, from the time of William of Orange in the 17th Century to the Black and Tans in 1920, who were ill-trained and equipped English policemen, many teenagers, raised in England and inserted into the Royal Irish Constabulary, to oppose the Irish fight to overthrow English rule. They wore surplus green tunics and khaki trousers. Their conduct was brutal and thuggish.

I had told this dreadful history of English oppression in some detail to one of my American guests, Ray Connolly, who was from Boston. Driving back to Dublin, after the summer school session, we stopped at a pub. When the publican heard my English accent, he asked me about the weather “over there.” I knew that he meant England. I told him that I used to live in England, but I had lived in the United States for many years and had become an American citizen. Rather than curling his lip at me, he threw his arms around my neck and said, “God bless you. You haven’t lost your accent.”

My friend looked surprised. I explained to Ray that the Irish love to denounce the English, but they are especially proud when their children have homes and careers in London.

In Ireland, your enemy can also be your friend. That is why I shall wear the green on the great day and sip something stronger than usual and celebrate a Frenchman who fought with the Irish against my ancestors. Slainte!

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Embellishing Irishness far from Ireland

The Irish are an accommodating people. Well, not in everything but in some things. They share their culture with the world. Then they incorporate into Irish life modifications that other nations, especially the United States, have made.

Take St. Patrick’s Day. It was traditionally a dour day of religious observance in Ireland. Then Irish Americans turned it into the festival that we celebrate here. And now St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated in Ireland much the way it is here: joyously.

Likewise, corned beef and cabbage. That was a cheap dish that got its Irish identification among the poor immigrants in New York. It wasn’t a tradition in Ireland, where thick bacon, lamb and salmon, served with an astonishing array of potato options, is standard fare along with battered cod -- fish and chips the rest of the world. But in an accommodation to visitors, corned beef and cabbage can now be had in the big hotels.

A word about those potatoes: If you can think of preparation for potatoes, you might find them offered. Never, in my experience, are less than three varieties available in a restaurant. At a banquet once, I was offered a choice of chips (French fries) duchess, sautéed, boiled, croquette, mashed, and scalloped.

What isn’t seen in Irish restaurants are baked potatoes –although, to please visitors, they may be sneaking into the hotels. In my nearly four decades of annual travels in Ireland, I learned that baked potatoes, known as jacket potatoes, are street food -- to bought with all sorts of great fillings from stalls, food trucks and the like, not in restaurants and pubs.

Irish stew is also less common than you would expect.

The Irish do drink, but in their own way. As Ireland has become a modern, competitive country, people are drinking less. But drinking is part of the fabric of daily life, just as drinking coffee, tea (hot or iced) and soft drinks might be elsewhere. You do business in Ireland over a drink, celebrate with a drink, mourn with a drink and, well, just have a drink because that’s what you do between what you just did and what you’re going to do. A breather, you might say.

For 20 years, I was the American organizer for an Irish summer school. Summer schools -- there are more than two dozen -- are more like themed think tanks which meet only in the summer, often just for a long weekend. They cover literature, music, politics and are named accordingly, like the Yeats International Summer School and the Parnell Summer School.

The one my wife and I were affiliated with was the Humbert International Summer School, named for the French general sent to Ireland in 1798 to help with the uprising against the British, which was put down brutally by Gen. Cornwallis, fresh from his American defeat. Humbert was sent back to France -- the English not having a beef with the French at that moment. He had an affair with Napoleon’s sister and was ordered to New Orleans, where he passed his days drinking with Jean Lafitte, the French pirate and privateer, teaching French and living his exiled life in style. He did fight bravely in the Battle of New Orleans and helped the American forces with his military skill. He died in New Orleans and is buried there.

Back to the welcoming of American embellishments to Irish traditions. These are not resented in Ireland because of the great affinity of the Irish have with their 35 million or so kinsmen in the United States. The Irish enjoy the American stage and screen songs of Ireland, like “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” The Little People of Ireland’s folklore are beginning to look like Disney’s Seven Dwarfs.

That doesn’t mean that the Little People are not alive and well, it’s just that their presence has been enhanced by legends that came from Hollywood as much as from the Auld Sod. A friend of mine built a wall around his mother’s retirement house in Cork. But her neighbors insisted that it have a gap for the Little People to go through -- so it has a gap.

As for the fairies, my wife and I were riding in northwest Ireland and our guide told us it was all right to ride through a copse, but we shouldn’t the horses disturb the fairy circle there. He rode around the copse to be sure he didn’t upset the fairies.

Despite the drink, the Little People and the fairies, Ireland is the computing capital of Europe and hopes to take over as a financial center after Britain loses many banking houses due to Brexit.

Sláinte! That’s the equivalent of cheers as you raise a glass. Do that Sunday or the Little People, or the fairies, or your Irish friends may be upset. You’ve been warned.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

David Haworth: Awaiting the booms on the Ulster-Republic of Ireland border

Anti "hard-border'' demonstration along the Ulster-Republic of Ireland border.

The convoluted border.

BRUSSELS

There’s a joke about a tourist in Ireland asking a local for directions, getting the response: “Well, if that’s your destination I wouldn’t start from here.”

It’s politically true of the island of Ireland just now as Britain extricates itself from the 28-member European Union  after 45 years – the border between Northern Ireland (British) and the Republic (Irish) has become a make or break negotiation issue.

The E.U. has melted European borders so that one travels seamlessly across nations and cultures these days. There are no peaked caps to delay the surface traveler with inquiries, even searches.

On a ragged frontier there are lumps of Belgian land found in next-door Netherlands – and vice versa – which are curiosities, not causes for a fight.  

Nowhere is free and easy transit more celebrated than in Ireland. The 310-mile border between the six counties of Ulster and the rest of the Irish landmass sees an estimated flow of up to 30,000 commuters every day.

The Center for Cross Border Studies (Yes!) reckons there are 30 million vehicle crossings annually -- and that’s counted traffic. But, imagine if you will, the rolling, verdant landscape whose hedgerows conceal hundreds of “unapproved roads” and pathways where the green line often slices farms and parishes.

“Frontierland” is not a sinister vacuum between two nations but the name of an amusement arcade on one of the main roads.

“We live in the shadow and the shelter of one another,” says the Irish Republic’s president, Michael D. Higgins.

For 95 years the border has been freely open for people.

And for goods since 1993.

Folklore about the misty days of smuggling is still relished on the Emerald Isle. As a child post World War II I traveled on the “Flying Enterprise” express between Belfast and Dublin; going north on this mere 87-mile route, Mom stuffed my rucksack with illegal silk stockings, Sweet Afton cigarettes and candy (my reward).

Customs officers never thought to examine a kid’s luggage – unlike international trains on the European continent. Back then, frontiers meant opening suitcases, showing tickets, passports, buying sandwiches, waiting for the locomotive change and the train car wheels to be tapped – all denying that the night train was a “Sleeper.”

With the prospect of the United Kingdom leaving the E.U., there are many Irish fears of what it will do to their current, diaphanous border.

Northern Ireland will be broken off like a biscuit from the rest of the island and two different customs regimes are likely.

“We have seen no evidence to suggest that, right now, an invisible border is possible,” barked the House of Commons committee on Northern Ireland Affairs, adding they had failed to find an electronic, rather than an infrastructural customs system, “anywhere in the world”.

But the political cost of red and white booms across roads, plus inevitable sheds and carparks for lorry inspection and customs officers, would be toxic: that’s for sure on the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to bloodied Northern Ireland.

The Center for Border Studies warns commuters and traders “will inevitably experience significant change in the environment for cooperation and mobility due to customs controls, and the potential for an increase in both smuggling and other forms of organized crime.”

A European Commission official involved in the “Brexit” negotiations comments: “Frozen pizza without cheese will cross the border more easily; otherwise there will be rigorous checks.  Every consignment that is animal-based will need to be examined.”

Bristling with negotiation “red lines”, British Prime Minister Theresa May is the Queen of Wishful Thinking; few others are upbeat about what will happen to the Northern Island border after Britain quits the E.U.

Will a fractious frontier return?

A “backstop” arrangement for Ireland and Northern Ireland to maintain the status quo even after Britain’s E.U. departure has been agreed if no other solution is found.

But an aide to former Prime Minister Tony Blair doesn’t think much of that.  “Huge concrete slabs and checkpoints on the main roads could force Northern Island back into identity politics,” Ireland expert Jonathan Powell hints ominously. “The border issue could bring the entire Brexit negotiation crashing down.”

Brussels-based David Haworth writes for Inside Sources, where this piece first appeared. A seasoned reporter on European subjects, he has worked for the International Herald Tribune, the Irish Independent, the Irish Daily Mail & The Observer.

Llewellyn King: Many shades of green, including the morning after

One of the O'Donoghue's pubs in Dublin on the author's 2012 pub crawl.

People who are no more Irish than the King of Siam or the Paramount Chief of the Bumangwato will, come March 17, celebrate an island nation famous for its skill with words and its fondness for drink.

It all began, of course, in the 5th Century with a Romano Christian missionary from Britain, Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland. As a bonus, he chased the snakes off the island. Where the fondness for something brewed, distilled or fermented came from is not recorded, but it is an intrinsic part of Irish life.

Life in Ireland often revolves around having a drink. It is treated much as we would treat having a cup of coffee. In Dublin once, I ran into a friend whom I had not seen in a year: a serious man with a big job in government. He thought, in the Irish way, that we should catch up over a glass of something, although it was just after 10 in the morning. “I think Murphy's is open,” he said as naturally as someone in an American city would have said, “There is a Starbucks on the next corner.”

In Ireland St. Patrick's Day was, until recent years, a somber religious festival. It was in America where the idea that the Irish could have a huge craic, as the Irish call a party, took hold.

Even so, the biggest celebrations, to my mind, are in Boston, Chicago and New York. But there are celebrations everywhere the Irish have set foot from Hanoi, Vietnam, to Ushuaia, Argentina, off the tip of South America.

But if you are very lucky, you will celebrate in Dublin. And what better way than with an authentic pub crawl.

I know just a bit about pub crawling in Ireland because I was lucky enough to be involved in a wonderful Dublin pub crawl in 2012. It was not a bunch of celebrants struggling from one pub to another, but rather a work of planning art.

I was in Dublin for an engineering conference  that coincided with the 60th birthday of one of our number, Sean O'Neill -- by birth an American, but otherwise through and through Irish.
A pub crawl was organized by the engineers with precision: times, distances, and safety procedures.

There was a map and the 12 pubs were selected with fiendish skill. The early ones were fairly far apart. But as the crawl went on, they grew closer together, and the last two were next to each other -- in consideration of possible loss of mobility.

We were urged to go with a buddy, eat something about halfway and, in case of pub fatigue, to call a taxi.

If you get to Dublin and want to try the engineers’ crawl, here are the pubs in order: Toner's, O’Donoghue's and Doheny & Nesbitt's on Baggot Street; Dawson Lounge on Dawson Street; Kehoe's on St. Anne Street; Davy Byrnes on Duke Street; O’Neill's and another O’Donoghue's on Suffolk Street; The International Bar and Stags Head on Wicklow Street; The Long Hall on Georges Street; McDaid's and Bruxelles on Harry Street.

I think I made it as far as The Long Hall, one of Dublin's most famous bars, before I cried uncle, refused a last drink and hailed a taxi. Others persevered and, amazingly, lived to tell the tale.
You probably know that Ireland is so lush that its flora is supposed to support 40 shades of green.

Well, there is another shade of green not mentioned in the tourist brochures. It is the 41st shade and you see it in the bathroom mirror the day after a pub crawl. Surely, some of you will see it on March 18.
 

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Postcard postmarked 1912 in the United States.

Llewellyn King: Ireland's pain was America's gain

There will be the “wearing of the green” all over the world come St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Nowhere more so than in Boston, Chicago and New York. That’s right, not even in Ireland; although they’ve gotten the hang of their own saint’s festival in recent years.

For centuries, until the Americans showed their cousins in Ireland how to party on St. Patrick’s Day, it was a somber, religious feast day.

St. Patrick was what was known as a “Romano-British” missionary, who went to Ireland in the 5th century, probably in the latter half of the century. We know this from fragments of his own writing. He settled around Armagh, in the north of Ireland, and became the first bishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland. He described the Irish as “heathen men.”

Myth tells of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. But myth has many faces in Ireland, and is part of the charm of the Irish – a charm that has affected the whole world, and stirs people far removed from that small and at times very troubled island to wear something green, drink and pay homage.

Not the least of the celebrations this year, as in recent years, will be in London, where so many of the agonies of Ireland had their genesis. The English — and I was born into the British Empire — have treated Ireland savagely down through the centuries. Oliver Cromwell, the English reformer, wrote of his incursion into Ireland, “God made them as stubble to our swords.” At the battle of Drogheda in 1641, about which Cromwell was writing, the English killed some 3,500 Irish patriots. Hard work with broad swords.

William of Orange, the Dutch Protestant ruler who became William III of England, Scotland and Ireland, invaded Ireland on July 1, 1690 to fight massed Catholic forces, led by James II, the deposed Catholic king of England. The two armies faced each other across the River Boyne, just to the north of Dublin. William won the battle, but his victory left a divide between Irish Protestants and Catholics which exists in modified form to this day.

The “wearing of the green” most likely dates from the uprising of 1798, when the Irish tried to throw off the English yoke with French help, and were soundly defeated by Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who was seething from his defeat in the American Revolution. The Irish, who were rounded up and hanged in groups of 20 a day by some of the English general’s officers, showed their defiance by wearing something green — often a shamrock in their hats. The English considered that an offense: sedition.

Cornwallis also oversaw the formal incorporation of Ireland into Britain. But to his credit, he fought with George III (remember him?) over Catholic emancipation, and for a while resigned his commission.

More horror from England was on the way — and persisted essentially until Irish independence in 1922. During the potato famine (1845-49), England refused to let relief ships with grain land in the belief that the famine was part of a natural order, as laid out by the philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus. One million people died as potatoes were their only sustenance.

In this case Ireland’s pain was America’s gain. Hundreds of thousands of Irish fled starvation for a new life in America. This diaspora changed Ireland and America, forever. It is how 50 million Americans claim Irish ancestry.

The Irish in America began to celebrate the national saint of their motherland in their new land — and so was born the St. Patrick’s Day joyous celebration.

To my mind, the final Irish reprisal against England is not the world recognition but that Irish writers, writing in English, not the Irish language, have had such an incalculable impact on English literature. To take a few names at random Beckett, Behan, Goldsmith, Joyce, Shaw, Synge, Swift, Wilde and Yeats.

In Ireland, there is an endless flow of wonderful language. The Irish will never say “yes” or “no” when they can give you a sentence with a flourish, which makes the mundane poetic.

Once in Dingle, my wife asked a waiter: “Is the fish fresh?”

He answered, “If it were any fresher, it would be swimming, and you wouldn’t want that would you?”

Also in Dingle, when I asked an elderly man whether the pub he was sitting outside of was open, he replied, “He would hardly be open now.”

The English occupied their land, but the Irish occupied their language and added to it with their genius. Erin go bragh!

Llewellyn King is a long-time publisher, columnist and international business consultant. This first ran on InsideSources.