FOR the first time in many years, I had the opportunity to bring a guest around Ireland last week, travelling from the warmth of Hollywood to the bitter cold and dark of an Irish January.
The timing had more to do with circumstance. It was a business trip that involved some teaching and a masterclass in Dublin.
You mightn’t choose to bring someone from Los Angeles on a magical mystery tour of West Cork and Kerry in the middle of January, but that’s what we found ourselves doing.
It’s amazing bringing someone who has never been to Ireland before on such a trip. You see your own country again through someone else’s eyes, and you also have to break everything down into its simplest forms.
Suddenly, the idea that there is a bitter rivalry between Cork and Kerry (not to mention Castlehaven and Skibb!) seems so very silly in the grand scheme. It shows how parochial and tribal we all still are, which isn’t a criticism, you just see it more glaringly when you have to put it into words for a visitor who has very few cultural touchstones to work with.
West Cork still does well in the dark and cold of January.
We had some amazing food in Clonakilty, the best Indian our friend has ever eaten apparently, and there was still much life and energy in Fisher’s Cross for the Thursday night music session.
We didn’t have to travel far to show our guest some amazing stuff – the beaches spoke for themselves, the Drombeg Stone Circle still blows the mind and Three Castle Head was as mysterious and majestic as ever (although it will be closed until April by the time this goes to print).
After our journey in West Cork, we went west further to Dingle and experienced one of the best walking tours I’ve ever done – the Dingle Film Walks Tour – led by Maurice Galway, who has been running film and animation festivals there for many years.
He is an absolute wealth of knowledge on the history of film on the peninsula and on the history of Dingle itself. The walk takes place near The Blasket Centre and all along to cliffs and seafront in Dún Chaoin, with spectacular views of The Three Sisters, the Sleeping Giant and Skellig Michael beyond.
The story of how tourism began in Ireland, starting with Ryan’s Daughter on that peninsula, is eloquently told on the tour, and Maurice puts into context the real isolation and poverty of the peninsula before David Lean’s location manager arrives in a helicopter on the hillside and changes everything.
This ignites an economic miracle for the local people. Before then, there was literally no money in the area and people would often try to barter eggs and chickens at the hardware store if they needed goods.
Of course, this isn’t all that long ago, and we all know the story well, but there is something about retelling it to someone from the US that brings it all to life again in dramatic new ways. If you find yourself veering further west any time soon, I highly recommend it.
Monks kept evil at bay
OF course, we all have images of the monks out on Skellig going there to be quiet, to find a deeper connection with God.
Another angle, and one which is encapsulated in the Luke Skywalker storyline in the Star Wars scenes that were shot there, is that the monks went out there instead to hold evil at bay – to go out to the edge of the world almost like a battalion line to keep spirits out and protect the people on the land behind them through prayer.
What an amazing idea. We can all relate to this at the moment, I think.
2024 has started in what often feels like an unrelenting wave of unsettling news and events, much of it from abroad but also a sense that it is breaking through the line of defences.
There is the nasty proliferation of far-right violence in Ireland, led by a small group of lowlifes but easily transferred to worried and easily swayed local communities.
There are hints of what AI might do to our sense of reality, with reports that the UK election is already undergoing the first co-ordinated onslaught of deepfake videos, with hundreds of false Rishi Sunak clips circulating on Facebook, a cesspool of misinformation that I would urge you all to take with a pinch of salt.
Then there is Trump, with his language from a fascist playbook, careering ahead to what seems like a certain victory in the US elections, unless they can find some sort of elixir of youth for Joe Biden and the flailing Democrats.
It would be easy to be overwhelmed by it all and to become discouraged. But the trip around the south west last week did remind me of how lucky we are to be where we are at this time in history.
There were times in the past when things were outrageously difficult on this island, the chieftains trying to hack an existence out on Three Castle Head, or the people on the Blaskets who were trying to carve some life out of the very rock. And then of course, there were the coffin ships that lined up along the Western shore when hope ran out, waiting to cart our most vulnerable off to some land beyond the horizon, never to be seen or heard from again.
We’ve taken in over 100,000 of these vulnerable people in Ireland this year, fleeing a war waged by a monster and we have held firm.
We have shown immense compassion, even if our systems have been utterly stretched in the effort. Things are beginning to fray at the edges now and this is the time to show our true colours, by not succumbing to those terrible ideas blowing in like bad spirits from out beyond the Skelligs.
There has never been a more important time to remember who we truly are.
