Shamrocks for a savvy shipmate

Casey often spoke of Ireland's glory -- and he was right

Author: By Paul Langner, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, November 15, 1998

Page: M19

Section: Travel

This encounter came through the agency of Bernard T. Casey, late of the Bronx, my friend and shipmate on the diesel submarine Carbonero. We were on paint-chipping detail. That tattoo on his shoulder, he informed me patiently, was not a clover leaf but a shamrock. And you pronounced it ``bra,'' not `brag' when you read the legend under it. ``Erin go Bragh'' meant ``Ireland forever'' Casey said, and counseled me to take that to heart.

Sometime later, Casey returned to the subject of Ireland. He was in a mellow mood after a few beers on a moonlit beach with some shipmates and after we had driven off some local toughs with the teak club I always carried under the car seat. It was no shillelagh, Casey said, but it had done nicely.

``I love that country,'' he suddenly said. ``Some day I hope to go there.'' He meant Ireland. But when I last saw him 33 years ago, there had been a marriage, a child, a job, night school to further his career, and what with one thing and another, he still hadn't gotten to Ireland.

But I got there this year and, old friend and shipmate, wherever you are, here is my report:

If you would go to Ireland, go in the spring. Not only will you avoid wading hip deep in tourists, but you will be there when the countryside does its wearin' of the green. Go to the west if you can or the southwest or the northwest. Save Dublin for another trip entirely. It will be worth a separate trip, but for now go to where the west wind, the poet's ``Zephyrus with its sweete breathe,'' brings in the warm rain from the Gulf Stream that makes the thin soil over the basalt and the limestone sprout with the green that has become the country's national color for good reason.

Don't complain about the rain. The Irish don't complain, and joke about it instead. Besides, May and June are the sunniest months in Ireland, climatologists will tell you with a straight face.

Even if you were never to meet any of the people -- and it would be a tragedy -- you should find yourself a hillside or two and gaze out over the lushly green meadows bordered in walls of Ireland's plentiful stone and old hedges.

You should rent a car and drive, especially on those narrow country roads and up and down the steep mountain roads that will take you to the real Ireland. Driving in Ireland on the left side and through those narrow lanes bordered by stone walls or hedges or both will test your skill and nerve to get past a big semi or a tour bus. But the Irish drive with seeming unconcern, and I don't want you to let on that an American's nerves are less steely than that of an Irish driver.

When you stand on a city street, it will be unnerving to see all the cars glide by with no one in the driver's seat. But don't fret: Cars in Ireland are equipped with controls on the right-hand side and can be driven from the front passenger seat.

So drive into County Clare and drive up to the Burren, a region of that county that travel books and tourist brochures don't always mention, for some reason. It is a near desert of limestone flats and mountains, with a little grass growing in the cracks that somehow sustains a few sheep and cows.

If you weren't Irish already, contemplating that desert and then reflecting on how thin the soil is elsewhere and how close disaster and tragedy always have been, you would learn here why the Irish always seem so resigned to misfortune.

Maybe they absorb that into their bones, but it has also made them great poets. Just pull out the map and scan the sonorous place names that speak of the poetic impulse of a people who also have had 5,000 years in which to devise and polish those names. There is music in the Tullamores, the Dundalks, the Kinsales, in Kilkenny and Kildare, in Connemara, in Limerick, and in Drogheda. They sound even more sonorous when spoken in Gaelic, the official language of Ireland, but which is the daily speech of only about 50,000 people, most of them in Connemara. That's 1 percent of Ireland's 5 million people.

So pervasive is that poetic sense that the lyricist for the musical ``Finian's Rainbow'' could write ``How are things in Glockamorra'' and to this day few people know that there is no such place.

Poetry, and writing in general, is very important in Ireland. Even before you get to Ireland, if you take an Aer Lingus flight, you will come upon the Irish preoccupation with the written word. You will find that the seat covers are imprinted with handwritten lines in Gaelic and English from many of Ireland's great literary works.

You might even come upon as startling a scene as we did in a pub near Bantry Bay. Two truck drivers sitting at the bar were deep in conversation. Were they speaking of the price of diesel fuel? Or the prospects for peace in Northern Ireland? They were not. They were examining the proposition of whether Oscar Wilde was a writer in the Irish tradition or whether he should more properly be ranked among English writers.

I did not stick around to hear the conclusion. One thing I was convinced of sight unseen is that the argument was resolved peacefully. Forget that canard about Irish pugnaciousness. The people know when to use it and when not.

Manners are as important as prose and poetry. Take the following scene in the hotel restaurant here: At a table full of yuppies -- Ireland has them, too, alas -- one young man was loudly talking on his cellular telephone about some business that interested no one.

We all bore his bad behavior in silence, but as soon as he was off the phone, a man at a neighboring table stood up and approached the yuppie table. With his gray hair, military posture, and authoritative bearing, he could have been a Gaelic chieftain, and with a voice that was both thunder and gentleness, he admonished the young man that if he should get another call on his portable phone, he should be kind enough to answer it outside the dining room because the rest of the patrons wished to eat their dinner in peace and have conversations of their own.

The man then had to endure a procession of fellow diners who stopped by his table to voice their hearty approval.

Speaking of dining, forget the jokes about Irish cuisine being an oxymoron. The Irish can cook quite well, and they do it at reasonable prices. And there is great beer, stout, and wine. And I hope I don't have to instruct you about the merits of Irish whiskey. We gained weight scandalously, both from sumptuous dinners in elegant restaurants and from lunches in neighborhood pubs.

And, for God's sake, if you come across some real Irish music in one of those pubs, don't go all mushy and sentimental on me when listening to the real thing. Forget about the Irish-American staples like ``Mother McCree'' or ``When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.'' Here you will find the real thing, Kerry slides, reels, and such heart-tugging favorites as ``Galway Bay,'' and ``Maggie.''

If you should find yourself sitting pensively at a bar, listening to those fine songs, pay for your drink with a 20-punt note. (It's pronounced pound. It's spelled p-u-n-t, but don't pronounce it that way unless you are speaking in Gaelic). Your change will contain a 10-punt note.

On one side, you will see James Joyce, smiling enigmatically like the Mona Lisa. Flip the note over. You will be startled because what you will read is this: ``riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.''

It is, of course, the opening paragraph from ``Finnegans Wake,'' Joyce's masterpiece with which he said he was trying to fathom the linguistic memory of the race. Where but in Ireland would you find literature on a bank note? Did you know that writers and poets pay no income taxes in Ireland?

We don't know what will be on the bills of the Euro currency once it displaces the punt. The designers could do worse than putting such a literary quotation on at least one of the bills. Perhaps they could use the end of Part I of ``Finnegans Wake,'' or better yet, the last dozen lines or so from Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of ``Ulysses.''

After all, Europe owes Ireland an ineradicable debt of gratitude. It was Irish monks who in their isolation and precarious existence kept the embers of civilization glowing for the more than 300 years between the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476 and the rebirth of culture at the Carolingian court of Charlemagne about AD 800.

When that long night, ended, it was the Irish monks who stood ready to Christianize Europe and who were ready with the books they had so laboriously copied in their stone huts on windy coasts all these years.

For details, you might want to read Thomas Cahill's book ``How the Irish Saved Civilization.'' Incidentally, when my wife, Barbara, asked a young historian in Tralee's Ashe Memorial Hall museum and research center whether she had read that book, the young woman smiled and said, ``I always assumed it was a joke.''

Indeed it is not. And I think the designers of the Euro currency should put Molly Bloom's soliloquy on one of them. So what if that soliloquy is about Molly's sexual fantasies. How many non-Irish would know? And if they do, so what. As the Irish would say, have a bit of wit.