Slán A Fhágáil Ag Duine

We leave today. It's always difficult; days like yesterday make it especially so this year. 

Our neighbor Ian and his daughter took us to our first Gaelic football match, the All-Connacht finals between Mayo and Galway at McHale field in Castlebar. Nearly 32,000 fans attended, mostly male. (Although the mix was more even among young people.) Gaelic football is a field sport that can be conveniently -- if not totally accurately -- thought of as a cross between soccer and rugby. It's fast moving, high scoring, and the most popular spectator sport in Ireland. It's an amateur sport that at the county level demands a major time commitment, so the players are generally in their early- to mid-twenties. The principles are easy to pick by the new fan, who can watch without bewilderment while the experienced fan appreciates the subtleties and nuances. Galway jumped out to a big early lead. ("Mayo are playin' for shite," said a fan behind me.) Mayo chipped away in the second half, caught up and went ahead briefly, but two late scores by Galway sealed the deal for them. It was the 74th time the two counties have played for the provincial championship, going back to 1901. That's two years before the first World Series!

We went to Ian and Meena's for dinner, where we were joined by their college friend Tom and his two sons, who had driven down from Belfast. Another neighbor, Ann, joined us for dessert. Wine and conversation and laughter flowed freely. Book recommendations were made and movies discussed. (A digression about the Irish sense of humor: They always pick up on the witticism, no matter what age they are or how dry the comment. I'm talking eight-year olds. It's wonderful.) We finally pulled ourselves away and would have walked home except that the owners of the holiday home next door (Declan and Mary) were outside and invited us in for tea and a chat. We don't know them that well, which didn't stop us from spending another hour there and having to pull ourselves away yet again, with more book, travel, and movie recommendations. 

So, today -- in a few hours -- we pack up the car and head south to Shannon. We'll spend the night near the airport and fly out tomorrow. We change planes at JFK, so it's possible that we'll never be heard from again. Optimist that I am, though, we should be back in Seattle late Tuesday night. Just like that. 

Back Roads

Yesterday, we explored some back roads in an area that a neighbor informed us was the Bermuda Triangle of Mayo. According to him, he found a stone circle in that area but has never been able to locate it since. What the fairies giveth, the fairies taketh away. Anyway, Premium T. expertly navigated from an ordnance survey map, directing me up hill and down dale, across rivers and around lakes until we arrived safely at the Healy Hotel. Located in Pontoon on an isthmus separating the upper and lower parts of Lough Conn, the Healy's pub looks out over the lake and is -- IMHO -- the finest place in Ireland to take a pint.

I will say that people live in some pretty remote places. Nonetheless, we noticed plenty of new construction -- supporting the Irish view that people prefer to build a new house to buying an existing one. And why not? Despite the influx of immigrants, Ireland remains underpopulated and has no shortage of land and landowners ready and willing to subdivide.

Ireland's official view of immigration differs markedly from America's. For one thing, they have an official view, which is to attract and retain skilled workers. Unskilled workers abound as well -- the server in a Westport restaurant is as likely to be Polish or Italian as Irish. As long ago as 1997, I picked up a brochure called "A Part Of Ireland Now: Ten Refugee Stories" published as the European Year Against Racism. The town of Portloaise (Port-LEASH) recently elected Nigerian-born Rotimi Adebari as mayor. (Adebari's qualifications are obvious: He's described as being "as clever and as ingenious as any Irish politician.")

But I digress. Yesterday was actually pretty devoid of people, Irish or otherwise. We read for awhile in Healy's bar while the locals watched the Cork-Kerry Gaelic football match, cheering enthusiastically as Cork upset the defending All-Ireland champions. After a while, we left for home. I finally got lost, ironically on some roads that I'm actually familiar with. Here, that means seeing that much more of the countryside.

Mayo turf harvest:

The Healy Hotel:

The view from the Healy:

The view in the Healy:

Out in the real world, Barack Obama refines the use of Facebook as a campaign tool while Johnny Wattles struggles with the teleprompter...

What does Obama want? "If I haven’t gotten combat troops out of Iraq, passed universal health care and created a new energy policy that speaks to our dependence on foreign oil and deals seriously with global warming, then we’ve missed the boat. Those are three big jobs, so it’s going to require a lot of attention and imagination, and it’s going to require the American people feeling inspired enough that they’re prepared to take on these big challenges." More here. Anyone whose favorite Rolling Stones song is "Gimme Shelter" is down with me...

Ruby My Dear and Brother Thelonious. No word yet on whether you can get it in the pubs here...

Knock

Sometime on the evening of August 21, 1979, upwards of fifteen residents of the town of Knock in County Mayo, Ireland, reportedly witnessed an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary (upright, a few feet off the ground), St. Joseph, and St. John the Evangelist. On St. John's left appeared an altar; on the altar was a cross and a lamb. The group stood in the pouring rain for over two hours, reciting the Rosary. At one point, 75-year Bridget Trench approached the Blessed Mother with idea of kissing her feet, but -- as she later reported -- "...felt nothing in the embrace but the wall and I wondered why I could not feel with hands the figures which I had so plainly and so distinctly seen." A church Commission of Inquiry determined that the witnesses were credible, a finding upheld in 1936 by a second commission.

Since then, the Knock Shrine has become one of the most visited religious sites in Europe, visited annually by over 1.5 million people including Pope John Paul II in 1979 and Mother Teresa in 1993. The facility has swollen into a great sow of a place that includes a shop, a chapel, a church, a counseling center, a rest and care center, and such amenities as an endless row of holy water fonts.

Nestled against the facility like so many suckling piglets is a plethora of shops and kiosks offering religious kitsch such as wall rosaries and the holy water containers shown above. A crass mixture of capitalism and Christianity, the shops have the spiritual presence of small city of convenience stores. Honestly, I find it harder and harder with each visit to get a kick out of the kitsch, feeling more the cynic each time. Nonetheless, there have been some real finds. My favorite remains a plastic hand of God with the infant Jesus glued onto the palm, all fastened securely by a rubber band onto a prayer card. I look for a really good (bad) snow globe, but haven't had any real luck so far. We went today because Premium T. needed some illustrated holy cards for the postcards she 's making. (She had no trouble finding them.)

Luckily, we got lost on the way. Getting lost is one of the many pleasures of driving in Ireland. It's inevitable, so you might as well enjoy the countryside and learn a few new roads. In this case, I missed a left turn in the town of Kiltimagh, a turn that turned out to be unmarked. Well, it wasn't like we didn't have the time.