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Strangers at Home
- University of Notre Dame Press
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C H A P T E R 3 Strangers at Home The day was never long enough for all we wanted to do . . . anywhere and anytime we could find some pleasant occupation or other. . . . Our chosen playground was outdoors and our playthings the things we found there. Looking back I find myself being sorry for the city children of today who are so much cut off from that world of adventure. (Danaher 1966) Flanagan 03 6/5/07 1:39 PM Page 64 65 In Ireland today, individual biographies intersect with a national history that has taken a sharp turn, as people everywhere in the world grope toward a dimly seen future driven by globalism. People make plans, place bets, engage in acts of faith that somehow, eventually, the future will all make sense, and everyone will live a better life. But there is much at stake in the changes that are here and those that are coming. Just as there is the hope that some of the hard edge of living day to day and the political rancor that was of the past can be left behind, there is worry. Among the many new things the Irish are not used to are happy endings . While there is a general sense that much is good in the prosperity of the present, people are uncertain about how, exactly, the continuing changes rooted in distant places in the world economy will affect their personal lives and are sometimes concerned about what is about to be swept away. On Malin Head in Donegal, at Ireland’s northern point, one family has for several generations operated Farren’s Bar, the most northerly pub on the island, a stewardship spanning well over a century of colonial rule and independence. When I spoke to the youngest son of the family a few years ago, he was preparing for a career in software, reckoning that one or another of his brothers and sisters would take over from their parents when the time came. In Donegal, Republican nationalism remains a strong element of the local world view. The plastic and rubber bullets that adorned the shelves behind the bar at Farren’s—with dates and places written on them in felt marker telling where they were fired at Flanagan 03 6/5/07 1:39 PM Page 65 [3.236.147.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:12 GMT) civilians in neighboring Ulster—were only recent artifacts of the longstanding conflict, part of a history that remains to be unmade by today’s generations. There are feats of forgetting yet to be performed by many still living. Nevertheless, the prospering economies, North and South, are a major distraction from the legacy of sectarian violence, perhaps making it appear distant, even anachronistic, to ever more people, especially the young. Already the old enemies in Ulster seem to be turning together to face a new “other” conjured up by prosperity itself and common to both sides, as attacks increase on immigrants and people of color. A short way down the narrow and winding road from Farren’s, at Ireland’s northernmost rocky outcropping of land, Banba’s Crown, people have arranged large stones on the green grass to form messages they want God or some other airborne viewers to read. Some are the names of lovers enclosed in hearts, others the names of martyrs killed in the political strife next door; still others name themselves just to say that they had passed the place. The stone writers pilfer stones from each other’s messages to write of loves and deaths and passing by. The constant , limited stock of stones is dragged into place to renew the same messages about different people, with the gaps in the works of earlier writers gradually making their messages illegible, more and more like the random scattering of stones. What do we say about change and constancy in this place? Halfway between Farren’s and the Crown, Teddy, having returned to his native Malin Head after a life away earning a retirement in a U.S. paper factory, tended his ancient family home. It was a thatched house standing by the narrow road, no indoor plumbing, only two rooms and a small kitchen. At his invitation I followed him inside as he stirred the banked fire in the old solid-fuel stove. Old pictures in frames hung on the ancient papered and painted walls, everything yellowing with time and yielding little by...