The Real Ireland

AN August night in the sea-scented village of Kinvara finds us at Connolly’s, a pub so permanent that if some codger were to tell you it was here before Galway Bay, lapping now just outside the door, you’d nod and buy him a pint. My wife and I are hunched at a small table with friends when a smiling woman in a peasant skirt sits beside us, carrying a perfectly appropriate accessory in this corner of Ireland — a button accordion.


She is Mary Staunton, a musician known throughout the Irish west. When the inevitable call goes out, she obliges, her fingers skipping across the buttons like children playing frantic but sure-footed hopscotch. Then a white-haired man mentions an old song from his childhood. Does she know it? Why yes, she does, and when her fingers finish their dance, leaving the man smiling, there suddenly rises from across the room the hesitant but clear voice of a young woman who has summoned the nerve to sing. (“And I said let grief be a fallen leaf/At the dawning of the day.”) As she sings, all talking stops: an entire pub, transported. And I think to myself, now this would never happen where I’m from.

Was this the real Ireland? Or was it a rare dash of magic, sprinkled into Connolly’s to validate an antiquated sense of Ireland — a sense rooted in the days when economic inequity between two countries allowed American tourists to spend as though Ireland were one sprawling duty-free shop? Though the country is now experiencing some economic uneasiness, you still cannot help but think: How times have changed.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the western counties of Galway and Clare, and if nothing else, this is what I have gleaned: Ireland can be that place you missed as you traveled around Ireland, looking for Ireland.

Yes, you can find a thatched cottage here and there, if you try. Yes, you may even encounter a white clot of sheep blocking your rented car’s path, raising from musty memory some postcard caption about Irish Rush Hour. But to wander about, looking to bag with a digital camera some approximation of a time-faded Irish postcard, is to miss the complexities of a country that is thoroughly enjoying its wealth and adapting to its European Union membership while at the same time trying to preserve its dreamlike landscape and proud cultural heritage.

You may indeed hear a young Irish woman suddenly break into song in Kinvara. But you may also walk around the corner and be served dinner by a young man with an Eastern European accent instead of a brogue. Travel 10 miles up the road to Gort and you might wade into a celebration of Brazilian culture, staged by a transplanted community that is now an integral part of that old market town.

There you have it: delightful, post-millennial Ireland.

Well versed by now in the lesson that to search for Ireland is to miss it, my family and I once again settled into a self-catered apartment in Kinvara, a village cleaved to Galway Bay near the Clare-Galway border. A generation ago, even a decade ago, you might have called it an unhurried place; now Kinvara captures the transformation of Ireland in so many ways.

The village has a few narrow streets, some shops and pubs, and a stone-walled pier more than 200 years old, from which the distant lights of Galway City can be seen at night and the inhalations and exhalations of the sea can be measured. Across from the pier there looms Dunguaire Castle, which for nearly five centuries has stood on grounds near the ancient fort of Guaire, seventh-century King of Connaught.

The castle’s topmost open windows offer a panoramic view of a Kinvara in flux. Much of the surrounding farmland is being subdivided for new homes, some of them being offered for the equivalent of $1 million and more; they appeal to young professionals looking for an easy commute into Galway, and to affluent Dubliners seeking a second-home getaway. It all leaves one wondering whether the village’s aesthetics are at risk; whether these new developments, and the taxing of the fragile infrastructure they represent, will make Kinvara less — Kinvara-like.

But for now, Kinvara presents curious juxtapositions of the old and the new. Here, for example, an inviting place called the Burren Beo Café occupies an old stone storefront where wireless access is available and where tombstones from a long-gone churchyard adorn the patio. You can sip your caffè latte and imagine the life led by one Bryan Daly, who departed this life at the age of 33, in 1816, and whose headstone lies flat at your feet.

THOUGH Kinvara is perfectly situated for day trips to other points of the Irish west, I often struggle with whether to stay or to go, lulled as I am by the mundane daily rhythms of a village I have come to know in all seasons.

In the mornings, I watch the same white-bearded fisherman — said to be Kinvara’s last — park his old black bicycle by the pier, row a skiff to his rusty-green vessel, and disappear into the bay. Sometime later I see him rowing back to shore, where he mounts his bicycle and vanishes down a narrow lane, leaving me to wonder whether I had actually seen him or simply imagined him.

Tis My Home!

DUBLIN, Ireland

DUBLIN, Ireland:
Britain has fulfilled its promise to reduce its troops and military bases in Northern Ireland to peacetime levels, an expert report on the cutback program concluded Monday.

The report from the Independent Monitoring Commission said Britain had more than honored its two-year cutback plan, which was launched in August 2005 in response to peacemaking moves from the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

The commission — a four-man panel tasked with assessing the activities of British security forces and outlawed paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland — was appointed jointly by the governments of Britain and Ireland. Its members include a former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and an ex-commander of Scotland Yard's anti-terror branch.

Britain in August 2005 published a detailed plan promising to cut its military strength in Northern Ireland to a maximum of 5,000 troops operating from no more than 14 bases by the end of July 2007.

But the troop reductions have run "consistently ahead of schedule," the report said. The number of troops at the end of July had fallen to 4,275 and all but 13 bases were shut down or demolished.

The panel said British authorities needed to concentrate on two remaining areas: reducing the use of non-jury trials in Northern Ireland in cases involving crimes committed by paramilitary members, and the failure to remodel police stations to make them look less like frontier forts.

"In our view the pace of defortification needs to be increased," the report said, referring to the elimination of car bomb barriers, anti-rocket netting, bulletproof sentry posts and other security measures designed to protect police from IRA attacks.

Britain's cuts have been dependent on good behavior from the IRA, which killed nearly 1,800 people from 1970 to 1997 but renounced violence in July 2005 and disarmed the following September.

The experts repeated their view that the IRA, though still in existence, posed no threat to troops or police because its leaders were instructing members to get involved in politics and community work. They said IRA dissidents continued to pose a sporadic threat to police and politicians but do not "have the capacity to mount a sustained campaign."

From July 2005 to July 2007, the report found, the number of troops fell from 10,028 to 4,275; army bases from 24 to 13; and border watchtowers from 10 to zero.

Those troops that remain in Northern Ireland are training exclusively for deployment overseas, such as Iraq or Afghanistan, the same status as anywhere else in the United Kingdom. Britain's Justice and Security Act 2007 permits soldiers to be used to support the police — the army's original mission in Northern Ireland in 1969 — only if ordered into action by Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward, the senior British government official in the province.


On the Net:

Independent Monitoring Commission report,