Arriving into Dublin I found nothing I recognised but then I hadn't seen the place for more than two decades. Time passing has wrought changes in us both, in the case of the city for the better. No longer a grimy, slightly down at heel, poor poetical relation of a place but a modern metropolis possessing every good aspect of the 21st century and every bad aspect too, of course.
There is no room in this short piece to list all of the changes the Republic has witnessed so I have chosen one to represent all of them. Tragedy is a bred in the bone part of the Irish psyche. But when I was young the way in which historical tragedies were remembered in Ireland disgusted me even though I hadn't the words or the wit to say why it did so. Now, I would describe some, a lot, of what I saw and heard then as ersatz sentimentality, an almost cosy wallowing in the tragic past. But on this recent visit to Dublin I found, in a park, this memorial to the victims of the famine. It is an honest work, stark, unsentimental and profoundly moving.
The changes in Northern Ireland are even more profound. Although the peace now reigning there is precarious and although there are still occasional, deadly terrorist outrages; life in the North seems, to this infrequent visitor, to have become blessedly almost normal.
My images of Cushendun and the area around show it to be what it is, an idyl. To experience the very essence of tranquillity, walk on the shore there or hike into the hills.
No picture of Northern Ireland would be complete without a memorial to those murdered or injured during the decades long 'Troubles' but I have been unable to find a single, unifying memorial to all of the victims of the conflict; perhaps it is too soon for that.
These trips to Ireland woke a feeling in me, a feeling too long submerged by the habit of existance. The Germans have a word for it, Heimat, a word which to German ears means more than just 'homeland.' Heimat evokes a feeling as well as a place, an identity as well as a location, a physical, spiritual and poetical reality. Ireland's gravity pull on her separated children, is like that.
