Ireland: The Emerald Isle — A Complete Travel Guide

Introduction

There is a moment that arrives for almost every traveler who visits Ireland for the first time. It happens somewhere along a rain-dampened road, perhaps as a curtain of mist rises off a green hillside to reveal a ruined abbey standing alone in a field, or when a stranger in a country pub leans over and begins talking to you as though you are an old friend, or when you stand at the edge of the Cliffs of Moher and stare out into the wild grey expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and feel, quite suddenly and without being able to explain it, that you are standing at the very edge of the ancient world. That moment is Ireland. It is real, and it is waiting for you.

Ireland occupies a singular place in the imagination of the world. For an island of just over five million people in the Republic, with another 1.9 million in Northern Ireland, its cultural footprint is extraordinary, its influence on global literature, music, politics, and popular imagination entirely disproportionate to its size. A diaspora of roughly 70 million people worldwide claim Irish descent — a figure that dwarfs the island's own population many times over — and those millions carry within them some residue of the island's history, its sorrows, its humor, and its remarkable gift for language. The Irish have been scattered across the earth by famine, by poverty, by political violence, and by economic necessity, and wherever they went they brought their stories with them.

Those stories are what give Ireland its peculiar gravity. No other country of comparable size has produced four Nobel Prize winners in literature. No other island has bequeathed to the world mythological traditions as rich as the Ulster Cycle, as haunting as the stories of the Tuatha De Danann, or as enduring as the tales of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna. The Ireland of ancient Celtic mythology — a world of druids and warrior-kings, of sacred hills and enchanted lakes, of heroes whose exploits bordered on the divine — never entirely disappeared. It persists in the landscape, in the names of places, in the music that drifts from pub windows on winter evenings, in the character of a people who have been tested by history in ways that would have broken most nations and emerged with their wit and their warmth intact.

The emerald color of the landscape is the first thing most visitors notice, and it is genuinely striking. Ireland receives more rainfall than almost anywhere else in northwestern Europe, and the result is a greenness so intense and so pervasive that it seems almost theatrical, as though someone has applied paint to the hillsides with a brush. The grass is green in January. The hedgerows are green in November. In summer, when the light holds until ten o'clock in the evening and the fields along the Wild Atlantic Way glow in the low golden sun, the island takes on the quality of a place in a dream — familiar somehow, even to those who have never been, because it has been described so many times by so many gifted writers.

And then there is the craic. This Irish concept, borrowed into English long ago but still untranslatable in its full dimensions, encompasses something like the pleasure of good company, lively conversation, music, laughter, and the indefinable quality that makes a gathering feel charged with life. The Irish have an almost religious commitment to craic, and their pubs — which are not merely places to drink but social institutions of the deepest importance — are its natural habitat. A good Irish pub on a Friday night, with a session going in the corner and the pints being pulled and the conversation flowing easily between strangers, is one of the finest social experiences available anywhere in the world, and no amount of international imitation has ever quite captured the original.

Ireland's relationship with Britain is long, complex, and shot through with violence, dispossession, and resilience. The English presence in Ireland began with the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 and deepened over the following centuries through conquest, plantation, and eventually the imposition of colonial rule that stripped Catholic Irish people of their land, their political rights, their language, and their dignity. The Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, which killed a million people and drove another two million from their homes while food exports continued under British protection, is the defining trauma of Irish history, and its effects — demographic, psychological, political — have never fully healed. The independence struggle of the early twentieth century, the partition of the island in 1921, the decades of violence in Northern Ireland known simply as the Troubles, and the hard-won peace of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 are all chapters in an ongoing story whose final pages have not yet been written.