ESSAY: What Ireland Means to Me
This is the first of a series of essays about the countries I have called home, and how each has contributed to my understanding of place and connection.
Prologue to the Series: Finding Home
I was born in Northern Ireland. We moved to Canada when I was three months old, and I grew up there, not becoming a citizen until I was 13. I travelled on a British passport as a child. When I was 38, I moved with my husband to the United States and lived there the next 20 years, becoming a citizen partway through. At the end of my paid career, we left the United States for an early retirement in Portugal, and part of why we chose Europe is that I obtained my Irish passport.
So … what am I?
Am I Irish? Birth, blood, and heritage would suggest that I am. Am I Canadian? All my formative years were in Canada, I was educated there, married there, my family still lives there, all my oldest friends. I understand Canadian politics and speak with a Canadian accent. Am I American? I certainly took their money for 20 years, which is funding my retirement. I learned more about American politics than I ever wanted to, am subject to American-based double taxation which no U.S. citizen can get away from, and I have friends for life there. Does a citizenship make me a nationality, or is that just a legal category? I am not Portuguese, but am I European? I’ve preferred the European way of life for decades, have visited many of its countries, and specifically obtained my Irish passport so I could live here.
What makes me what I am? Where I was born? Who my family is, and was? Where I’ve lived the longest? My legal status? The languages I speak?
What am I?
And where is “home?”
Part 1: WHAT IRELAND MEANS TO ME
In 1994 I took a three-week trip to the Republic of Ireland with my husband Marty. We’d been to Ireland before, but this time we were driving away from Dublin to the west coast, to see Connemara and Galway City and the Dingle Peninsula. These places are in the “gaeltacht,” the region of Ireland where signs are in Irish Gaelic and people still speak Irish as a first language. Surely here I would find the real Ireland.
I may have. On St. John’s Eve, June 23rd, I stood in the Aran Islands off the west coast, looking up at the full moon after a night at the pub, during our walk back to our hostel. There were bright bonfires all over the island, creating shining dots of flickering gold that mimicked stars, which you couldn’t see because of the moon. Interspersed between the fires were white cotton balls of sheep, more than the human population of the island. I wondered where they found all the wood for so many fires, since the Isle of Inishmaan is 3/4 stone and so craggy your knees feel bruised just looking at it. During the day it was almost desolate. But that night there was laughter and singing (in Gaelic) from the pub we’d just left, and a cool breeze that made the fires even more inviting. You could almost feel the Tuatha Dé Danann, the ancient faery people, hiding in the dark until we left so they could dance around the fire some more. And for once, the Ireland that I witnessed matched the psychic landscape in my mind.
I never saw it again. But this glimpse satisfied something in me afterwards.
Any exploration of how I understand “home” needs to begin with the place I was born, Northern Ireland.
Sense Memories
The first understanding I built around this country came from sights and smells. Coal and toast at my grandparents’ house, that’s the earliest glimpse. I was five, my sister was three, and my brother was about nine months old. We were on a visit to introduce the family to the newest kid, and my parents left us girls with Granny and Granddad while they took the only son on a family tour for a few days. The living room was dark and cramped, I remember that. It was hard to move around, but that’s okay, since they wanted us sitting still anyway. They had a fireplace, which was new to me. And they burned coal. They had a coal scuttle. I learned very quickly not to touch the coal because it was dark and slimy and just would not come off your fingers. The fire was smoky and unpleasant at first, but then I could smell my grandfather’s pipe over it. I remember thinking that it was BAD that Granddad smoked, but the pipe smelled wonderful, so I was very confused.
In contrast, the kitchen was bright and sunny. They had this funny looking metal rack on the table where they put the toast after it popped up, to cool it down, they said. Why the heck do you need a toast rack? Why are they COOLING the toast before they eat it? Don’t they know that the butter won’t melt if you don’t butter it straight from the toaster? ARE THESE PEOPLE INSANE? I remember trying to explain hot-buttered toast to my clearly uninformed grandmother, but I don’t think I persuaded her. She shut me up with marmalade.
Coal and toast. Those are the most distinct early memories I have of this place across the sea that my parents constantly referred to as “home.”
I have other sense memories. Colours … The intense greens of Irish fields. The white fluffiness of sheep everywhere. And grey … a road next to the sea, waves crashing up against the stone wall between us and the water. The sky and the sea were the same color, the color of the grey stone forming the wall. I had to travel all the way to Ireland from landlocked Alberta, all golden-yellow and brown, to experience the sea for the first time. Ireland is forever grey and green to me.
Other sense memories only crop up when I encounter particular smells. A quality tobacco and I’m back in my grandfather’s living room, watching him pack and light his pipe. A certain kind of musty smell and I’m back in Irish houses. Every time I visit Ireland now, that smell drowns me in memory for the first little while.
The sounds are mainly voices. My aunts on my mother’s side and my father’s side both had different accents, that started out strange and became less so. One accent became associated with warmth and friendliness, the other with reserve and restrained criticism, and hearing similar accents now brings up those old feelings. And then there was the music. My mother was already singing me Irish lullabies, so I knew some of the songs, but I heard many more and internalized that the Irish are all bards under the skin. Many decades later I came full circle when my mother was in dementia care, unable to recognize me. I sang “Galway Bay” to her while stroking her hair, the same way she did to me as a child, and she always grew silent, listening. It never failed to still her agitation in those last years.
My sense memories are of the different and the exotic. Ireland looked different and smelled different from Canada. And because it was strange and exotic, and because of the longing way my mother spoke of it, it became a kind of mythic land in my mind. Surely it was out there somewhere, just waiting for me to find it.
Legends
Back in Canada my parents always referred to Ireland as “home.” The way my mother spoke about it in particular had this magical quality … Life was better there, her people understood her, and she spoke about everything longingly. My father never sounded quite so longing, but he also casually referred to it as home. Much later I realized just how homesick my mother must have been, a young woman with an infant, then two, then three, with no family support, and a husband who worked 16 hours a day in this new land. How could this exhausting and strange place possibly feel like home?
So Ireland became associated with home for me, almost as soon as I could hold the idea. And if anyone asked, Canada was also home, but not in the same way. I never felt confused as a kid. Ireland was where I was from, Canada was where I lived. I hyphenated early, I referred to myself as Irish-Canadian, because neither alone felt right.
We weren’t a religious family, so when I picked up an interest in Greek gods, myths, and legends, I saw them as an extension of the superhero comics I read. And it was a short jump from tales of the Greeks and Romans to the Irish stories, and soon I was reading everything I could. I revelled in the exploits of Cuchulain and Queen Maeve, wondering why they couldn’t be on the same side. Cuchulain was a bit of a boring lunkhead, to be honest, and Maeve was intelligent and fascinating. I still think she was the hero. I learned about Tír na nÓg, the Irish Isles of the Blessed, and built more of my psychic landscape. Folklore helped reinforce that I was from a legendary place. Ireland was different and special, which meant that I was different and special, and this idea helped me through a difficult childhood. Today I would probably have been diagnosed with extreme social anxiety, back then I was just shy. Thinking about my Irish ancestors conducting legendary battles and capers helped me cope.
Ireland was so far away it might as well have been the moon. We could call people, sure, but only on Sunday nights when long distance was cheapest. We had to calculate the time zone differences, and they heightened the feeling of separation. And the horrible lags when speaking over the phone gave me lots of practice for today’s video call tech issues. Yep, this place was not entirely on Earth. And this reinforced its legendary quality.
Even that most Canadian of girls, “Anne of Green Gables,” was filtered through Ireland for me. My grandmother learned of a Canadian heroine with red hair and thought of my bright red hair, and so my first Anne book arrived in a Christmas package with British stamps on it. She gradually sent me all the sequels from overseas, this was her gift to give. My primary relationship with my absentee grandmother was through gifts, and literature … she also sent me Enid Blyton books. And a Bible. And almost always a five-pound note, which my father took a lot of trouble to convert. So, I learned early about different currencies. THAT’S how far away Ireland was, they even had different money!
Visiting
I was different from my brother and sister; they were born in Canada. And yet Ireland was still somehow home for them too, such that when my brother was born, we had to make the trek back there to show him to the family.
Visiting was a true adventure, not without hazards. I threw up on the plane on our first flight there (tidily! thank the stars for airplane bags!), and the sour tang of vomit always takes me back to flights. Plane travel was fun after that, when you had real service and seats weren’t cramped and uncomfortable (certainly not to a five-year-old).
But repeated exposure revealed the shortcomings, over time. Somehow the rules around family were different. “You’ll get the wooden spoon!” was the threat my parents used to make us behave, back when parents still spanked their kids. I can’t remember them ever using that implement on us, except when we went to Ireland. I had stolen a fancy chocolate from a box, took one bite and didn’t like it, then left it behind a couch. Somehow, they found out, since I wasn’t a criminal mastermind, and my mom ended up giving me the wooden spoon in front of my aunt. I guess they needed to impress the relatives with their uncompromising discipline? It was surreal more than painful, and they never did it again. I don’t think I behaved any better, it was just that I had one set of parents in Ireland and a different set in Canada.
And then there were their visits to us, countable on one hand with fingers to spare. My grandparents did visit us, just once, and now we were apparently a church-going family. My mother really lit into my father for his hypocrisy, and I was just confused. Wasn’t religion a problem there? My maternal aunt came several times; my mom and her sister were close and she was quite used to international travel. She was the most frequent visitor, my dad’s younger sister never came, until my brother’s wedding. That was another marker about how great and special Ireland was, as the people we had there never seemed to leave it. It was the center of the universe. Dad’s older sister had emigrated to New York, and she came once with her family. It was always assumed that the best way to see people was for us to go there, and more often this meant my father, or my mother, going by themselves while the growing and increasingly-expensive kids remained in Canada.
We were lucky enough to visit a few times when I was a child. At the age of 12 I became a full-fare passenger on the airlines and we stopped going, up until then kids under 12 were half price. I’d seen my grandparents a couple of times there, and just the one time they came to visit us. My grandfather died in my teens, and I saw my grandmother one more time, and then they were gone. I felt the absence of extended family, when in school all my classmates talked about aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. This hole in my being heightened my attachment to a country that was clearly very important to stay in.
Politics
I got older and understood more things, like there are zones in the middle of town where you weren’t allowed to leave a car unattended. It took me asking once or twice before I got a clear explanation of car bombs. I asked why the police stations were surrounded by barbed wire. I asked about the vaguely frightening murals and graffiti. To my family’s credit, they explained the Troubles fairly well: that it was oversimplified into a struggle between Catholics and Protestants but was also a class struggle. I’ll never forget my uncle telling me “If anyone ever tells you they understand the Troubles, then they’ve just revealed their ignorance. Nobody really understands all that it’s about.”
The family story was that my father left Northern Ireland because he couldn’t get work there in his chosen field of civil engineering. My mother’s variant was that they didn’t want to raise their children in violence. It was about “a better life,” but that didn’t really hold up whenever I saw how much happier she was, at least initially, whenever she returned “home.” Turns out that sometimes political violence doesn’t change your definition of home. Or maybe, the power of rose-coloured glasses defeats all comers. Or maybe … home is complicated, it’s where your heart is, and it can often defy logic.
And complicating my own story, I didn’t become a Canadian citizen until I was 13. Mum and Dad and I were just landed immigrants until that time, a perfectly good status that changed nothing about my childhood. And it seemed like that’s all we ever needed to be. But then Dad got incredibly pissed off at Pierre Trudeau and the money he was siphoning from Alberta under the National Energy Program. (Canadians of a certain age will remember this as “stealing our oil,” but just know it’s one of the main reasons why Alberta went Conservative for decades.) So, Dad needed to become a citizen so he could vote against his political nemesis, and thus I became a citizen, too. I remember staring at my Certificate of Canadian Citizenship and wondering what had changed. I still felt the way I did before I got this piece of paper, so legal status didn’t mean much. And what was I before the piece of paper? I was Irish-Canadian then, and I still felt Irish-Canadian. Only now I could vote when I turned 18.
An Opportunity
Junior high was my nadir, socially and emotionally. I was being bullied in school, suffering from undiagnosed depression, and my parents’ marriage was crumbling. These things were inter-related, but at 15 I couldn’t know that. Someone floated the idea that finishing up my schooling in Northern Ireland could fix things, and I jumped at the chance. Over spring break, I went to stay with my mom’s sister and visit the school they attended as girls, and just generally check out the whole idea. The possibility was that I’d go to school there instead, and ease into my parents’ old life, living with my aunt, boarding at school, and somehow adopting “Irish” as a way of protection.
I finally looked hard at the idea of living in this place that had been held up as the ideal of home, and found the devil I didn’t know. It was too unfamiliar. The people I’d be living with had their own problems, and I couldn’t find the myth anywhere in their daily lives. The opposite, actually … they seemed insular, judgmental, and narrow-minded, which was understandable given the political climate they lived in. Given that my identified problems at home were caused in part by teenage girls, I really resisted the idea at suddenly living with a strange group of them, with no adult family to run to for protection, however problematic THAT was. My mother’s family had a genius for making me feel inferior, I heard my aunt sniff at least once about “provincials” which I thought only happened in Victorian novels. I really didn’t want to live permanently where I felt second-class.
And just like that, the dream was gone. I’d spent my childhood thinking of it as a place to get back to, someday. But when I had the chance to go, I rejected it. I didn’t have the words for it then, but what I learned is that even if a magic place exists, it slips away from you in time. Places move on, just as people do. My parents’ Ireland was gone for me, forever.
So, I ended up returning to Edmonton, deciding against school in Belfast, and instead resolving to become independent. I applied myself to high school studies at an academic school with University as the only goal, and moved out after starting college, to get away from the chaos at home. I was determined to build a high-skills career, live on my own, and never depend on anyone for anything. Then I met Marty, and suddenly I didn’t want independence anymore. I did want partnership and was lucky enough to get it. (and that’s another story).
The Heritage Trip
But my fascination with my Irish heritage didn’t diminish. After my last year of high school, my parents wanted to give me something special to mark my graduation. They offered to help with the down payment on a car, or to pay my way to the British Isles if I wanted to travel. I took the trip and never regretted the choice. The summer I turned 18, I spent five weeks travelling from London up to Edinburgh, over to Wales, into Dublin (where I fell HARD for the city), and finally to Belfast, staying with friends of the family and relatives the entire time. It was the adventure of my short lifetime. I also shudder now when I think how young 18 really is. But I gained experience with lugging around two suitcases, understanding train and ferry schedules, booking my own tours, wandering on my own, getting lost and then getting un-lost, taking local buses, and trying to call people to get a pickup at the ferry terminal when I’d missed the first boat. Good LORD, foreign dialling was complex.
I met so many people. My second cousin in London. My mum’s old school friend and her sons. My Granny’s sisters in Edinburgh. Another family friend in Dublin whose name I’ve completely forgotten, but I remember vividly how kind they were. My mom’s cousin in Wicklow, and his daughter, my second cousin who’d previously visited Canada. The usual family up in Belfast. I’m glad now that I left Northern Ireland until the end, because by then I’d met a lot of people who treated me like an adult, and I learned what kindness and hospitality felt like when not paired with familial judgment and mythmaking. It was warm. These people were happy with their lives in the places they were, and they extended a helping hand to a very immature and sheltered 18-year-old and made me feel welcome. They did more to make me feel at home than all those prior family trips did, and that’s when I first started to understand REALLY that home is as much about community as place.
The Aran Islands
After that summer, I didn’t visit again for quite a while, and when I did, I brought Marty, now my husband. It was different, showing this place to someone vitally important to me, and hearing his unbiased view of the place and the people. We took an important step by travelling in the Republic of Ireland for three weeks, away from family and northern concerns. It was different enough to be eye-opening, how the people there were less concerned with tension and sectarian violence. They were a poorer country at the time, but generally happier. And so beautiful. I stood in the Aran Islands on St. John’s Eve, watching bonfires all over the island and wondering where they found the wood on this craggy slab dotted with sheep, under a full moon and hearing people speak Gaelic as a first language. Here it was, FINALLY, the mythic landscape in my head. And looking at it, I had the same understanding as when I hiked in the Canadian Rockies and felt the elusiveness of nature: there are some worlds you can only look at from the outside because they don’t contain you. You can marvel at them and appreciate them but you cannot hold them. If you’ve ever stared at a waterfall or mountain peak and felt an urge to grasp it, somehow, and then felt the separation and loneliness when you realize you can’t, then you know this feeling. I glimpsed it, and I am forever grateful. Then I left it alone, the only thing I could do.
Ireland is part of me down to my bones, but it is not my home. It is both beautiful and sad that my history with the place has left a longing, home-shaped hole in me. But beautiful and sad is so wonderfully, typically Irish! That longing has shaped the person I am, driving me to travel and experience the world, while also giving me unusually good skills in settling down and connecting once I’ve moved to a new place. I seek to define and understand the concept of “home,” and as I search for a home to call my own, I know that the solution for me will be gentle with these early feelings. Ireland is the first piece of my mosaic, and Tír na nÓg still sings to me.
Coming soon: Canada
